This Week's Sermon: "Babylon Comes, but God Still Remains"

I will rescue you;
    you won’t be handed over to those you dread.
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I will defend you;
    you won’t die in battle.
You will escape with your life,
    because you have trusted in me,
        declares the Lord.

“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week Five

The civil war and genocide that took place in Bosnia was a part of the backdrop of my coming of age in the mid-to-late 1990s. I was too young to fully grasp either the scope or nuance of what was going on, but hundreds of thousands of people died in an ethnic cleansing that continues to be litigated in The Hague.

Others, however, were able to escape the genocide of Muslims at the hands of nationalist Serbs. One such family, Sara Pecanac, her mother, Zejneba, and her daughter who was not much younger than me at the time, found salvation in their family’s history.

In so happened that after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War, Zejneba and her family took in a Jewish family called the Kabiljos—a father, mother, and daughter, successfully hiding them from the Gestapo during two different stints in the war. This feat came at a great cost—Zejneba’s father, Ahmed Salik, was executed by the Nazis for forging documents for Jewish refugees to escape the Holocaust.

The Kabiljos eventually settled in Jerusalem, and, fifty years later, as the genocide began to break out in Bosnia, they worried about the Muslim family that had saved them so long ago, and I’ll let the Toronto Star pick it up from here:

They (the Kabiljos) contacted an Israeli journalist who was heading to cover the war. The journalist passed on a message to a local community organization in Sarajevo that the Kabiljo family was searching for Zejneba.

A message was sent back to Israel that Zejneba, then 76, and her youngest daughter Sara were still in Sarajevo.

Pecanac was stunned to hear the Kabiljos were trying to help. She had heard the full family story only in 1984, when the Kabiljo family asked Yad Vashem to recognize the Hardagas and Ahmed Sadik as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. “My dad had died and my mother didn’t talk about it very much,” Pecanac said of the family’s heroism.

After learning that Zejneba was still alive, the Kabiljos again contacted Yad Vashem, and officials agreed to help organize a rescue.

In early 1994, Pecanac, Branimir, Sacha, and Zejneba joined 300 other refugees on a convoy of six buses that streaked through the shattered streets of Sarajevo.

The ways in which we are looked out for even when the worst comes can be remarkable, especially when so many others are lost to the exact same violence that could just as easily claim us at one point or another. Yet we must find God in such moments of desperation, as Jeremiah shows here.

This is both a Lenten sermon series and my last sermon series for you here in Longview. With my last few weeks as your pastor, I want to speak to you in spirit and in truth about the nature of our transition into new roles in one another’s lives, and what my own hopes are for this mighty family of Jesus followers when I am no longer here.

To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We began this series with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.

Haran is located in what is now southern Turkey (and is now called Harran, with the extra ‘r’), and its name comes from ancient Akkadian to mean “road” or “crossroads,” which is an appropriate name for both a waystation for a traveling couple and this series as we approach a crossroads in the life of our congregation. So, this series derives its name from it and from the ending of that passage from Genesis 12, which says that Abram and his household continued on toward the Negev.

From Abraham, we talked about the story of Moses at the burning bush. The voice of God has just told Moses that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and is sending Moses to right this historic wrong, but there is still more: Moses needs to know who it is that is sending him to undertake this monumental task. God simply replies, “Say to the Israelites, “I AM” has sent you.”

Then, God sent another Biblical hero—the prophet Elijah, whose defining trait is the passion with which he opposes the worship of the false deities in the Old Testament such as Ba’al. It so determines Elijah’s sense of faith and public ministry that his name, Elijah, means, roughly, “My Lord is my God.” (From the Hebrew words “Elohim,” for “Lord,” and “Yah,” for “God.”)

Last week, we arrived at the calling of the prophet Isaiah by God in a very famous passage from Isaiah’s book, in chapter six. Isaiah sees God high and lifted up, surrounded by angels and with just the hems of God’s robes—never mind the rest of God—filling the entirety of the temple. It is an image of sheer grandeur and divine majesty, one that takes place in a difficult time: Jerusalem has just lots its king.

Today, we hear from another of the Hebrew Bible’s major prophets—Jeremiah. For Jeremiah, the primary external threat was not Assyria, as it was for Isaiah, but Babylon, and the looming exile that Israelites would experience at the hands of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II.

Jerusalem finds itself in this predicament after a pair of genuinely disastrous kings following the death in battle of the last righteous king of Judah, Josiah. Josiah’s son Jehoiakim tries to make an ill-advised alliance with Egypt, leading Nebuchadnezzar to invade Judah for a first time and eventually install Jehoiakim’s relative Zedekiah as a puppet king. Then, Zedekiah repeats the error and also eventually tries to ally himself with Egypt, prompting the Babylonian king to invade a second time, brutally sack the capital city, and take Israel’s ruling class into exile in Babylon.

The exile in Babylon represents one of the most traumatic collective memories of the Hebrew Bible. Hundreds of years later, that memory of exile in Babylon is used by John of Patmos to illustrate his belief that the Roman Empire had become a similarly urgent existential threat to the nascent church.

For now, though, Jeremiah finds himself the prisoner of Nebuchadnezzar, at least until the Babylonian monarch’s chief guard orders Jeremiah freed after his king is done sacking Jerusalem, slaughtering all the Israelite royal officials and family, and having the Israelite puppet king Zedekiah’s eyes gouged out as punishment for Zedekiah—who had been installed as king of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar—revolting against Babylon and making an alliance with Egypt instead.

Such are the ways of war and violence in ancient empires. Such remain the ways of war and violence today. Which is why the lessons of God’s reassurance to Jeremiah remain as topical as ever. Even in the wake of Babylon coming for Jerusalem, God makes sure that Jeremiah knows that the pain and loss that Babylon leaves in its wake will not be the final word, and that, as always, God will have the final word. I will rescue you, says the Lord, I will defend you, you will not fall, and you will escape with your life.

In amazing stories like those of the Kabiljos, who were both saved and saviors during two separate genocides, we can see that truth lived out. But we also know that not every story of strife has so happy an ending.

So as we consider what the next chapter of our congregation’s story might be, I hope to spend these last few weeks with you to convey what I hope can make it as good a next chapter as possible:

I spoke of this last week, but a great deal of surrender will be needed from all of us. Expecting your preferences to be catered to is no way to do church, but especially so in a congregation with some very big decisions to make. There can be no pulling rank, no “me first” mentalities.

This does not need to remain the community—we are entering transition, not exile. We can, and should, continue to try to grow, and that will involve embracing and being genuinely hospitable towards the future church, not just the present church of those of us assembled here today.

And even as we may worry or even fear of what might come, may such feelings and trepidations never eclipse the faith that God has instilled in you.

Because Babylon may come, but God still remains. God always remains.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 18, 2018