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Blooming Where You’re Planted: The Discipline of Staying Put
Jeremiah 29: 1 – 7

Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, March 11, 2007

David Goetz in his book Death by Suburb writes:

For almost fifteen years, I’ve stayed in one church, thanks to family ties that bind (and certainly not because of my deep spirituality), while observing the migration patterns of my highly mobile religious community. . . .

Within my Protestant family, many churchgoing folk change churches as if they were changing drycleaners. If they come across a coupon for a dime less per laundered shirt, they’re off to another store. Actually, I think it may be less like shopping and more like casual sex.

It’s certainly not about ongoing relationships. It’s about the immediate experience, the brief sensation of feeling like I have finally found a home, a place where I deeply resonate with the worship and theology (at least for a time).

With this Goetz introduces us to spiritual consumerism. Some people are constantly searching for the church that best meets their needs at the time – as if meeting our needs rather than worshiping God were what the church is all about.

Around 586 B.C. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon prepared to attack the nation of Judah. The prophet Jeremiah preached an unexpected message to the people of Judah and Jerusalem. While other prophets were predicting a great victory for Judah, Jeremiah predicted defeat. He claimed it was God’s will that Babylon should defeat Judah. Because of that he urged the king and his court along with the citizens of the land not to resist. Instead they should surrender. As you can imagine, such an unpatriotic message did not earn him friends in the corridors of power. But that didn’t keep him from proclaiming God’s word. Jeremiah even went so far as to write a letter to those Jews who had already been hauled off into exile to Babylon. That is the substance of today’s lesson. He told them to get on with their lives. Build houses. Plant gardens and eat the produce from them. Get married and have lots of kids. Make sure their sons and daughters got married, too. Multiply there and do not decrease. Then he added these words: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray for to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah, the prophet of God Almighty, told the people that the God who had sent them into exile wanted them to live normally. More than that, instead of trying to subvert life in Babylon, instead of trying to overthrow it or even escape, they should pray for the safety and the well-being of the people there. By seeking the well-being of those who held them captive they could insure their own well-being.

You can imagine some people’s response, “Yeah right, Jeremiah. What have you been smokin’?” How could they pray for the city that destroyed their homeland?  How could they seek the welfare of a people that had been their enemy?  But that was what the Lord was calling them to do. The Lord was calling them to bloom where they had been planted. God was telling them to learn the discipline of staying put.

I don’t know about you but one of the first impulses I have when I am in a church meeting with someone I don’t like or who doesn’t like me is to cut and run. I think things like: “I’ll wait to serve when that person’s not there.” Or if the person seems to hang around forever, then you - it would be a little tough for me - might say, “I’ll move to another church. Surely, the people are nicer there.” The same holds in a Bible study when someone expresses an opinion we either don’t understand or don’t like. This person obviously is in error or maybe even is an “unbeliever” and I must separate myself from him or her lest I become an “unbeliever”, too – as if it were catching. The solution is to find a church in which everyone believes just like I do.

Jesus told a parable about the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13: 24 – 30) in which servants sowed good seed in a farmer’s field. But while everyone was asleep some bad people came in and sowed weeds. When the man’s workers took a look at the field later in the growing season, they told the owner, “Sir, there are weeds all mixed in with the crops. Should we pull all the weeds?” The master replied, “No, if you gather the weeds now then you will pull up the good crops. Let both grow along together and when the time for harvest comes we will sort out the weeds from the good crops then.” The point of Jesus’ parable is that in the kingdom of heaven there are good crops and weeds, the faithful and the unfaithful. Weeds are not just on one region of the kingdom and not in another. Weeds are all over. They are spread throughout the kingdom. Only at the harvest – the last judgment – will God sort them out.

This is true for a congregation or even an entire denomination. We can search far and wide for the perfect church, and in the end there will be someone in it that is far from perfect. There always will be “weeds” along with the “crops.”

Does that mean we have to put up with someone no matter how badly they behave?

Jesus did say (Matthew 18: 15 – 17) that if someone has offended you and you have followed the steps of going to that person privately, then with another person and then bringing him before the congregation, and he refuses to apologize or repent or make restitution, then you should treat him as a tax collector or a Gentile. And Paul did say that the church in Corinth (1^st Corinthians 5: 1 - 13) should kick out a man who had begun living with his stepmother. There is some basis for separation in the church. But remember how Jesus himself treated tax collectors and Gentiles. When they came to him he welcomed them; he healed their sick children; he healed them. And though Paul did instruct the Corinthians to throw the bum out – so to speak – he told them to do so with the purpose of getting him to change his mind. In his second letter (2^nd Corinthians 2: 5 - 11) to that church he instructed them to welcome the man back so that his sorrow wouldn’t overwhelm him. Separation can be appropriate, but it has a gracious purpose and ideally it is for a limited time.

But what if it’s a congregation or an entire denomination that’s misbehaving?  Like the PCUSA, for example?  Some have contended that our denomination has lost its focus – that it is majoring in minors, that some have fallen into doctrinal and moral error, that some has stopped doing one of the main things Jesus taught us to do: e.g. make disciples of all nations. Personally, I think those criticisms are reasonably accurate. Not for every pastor; not for every congregation, but certainly for some. In short, we Presbyterians have problems. Because of that, many have felt justified in leaving for spiritually greener pastures. In fact, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been losing members since 1960. Some individual congregations have grown, but the denomination as a whole has lost 50% of its membership since 1960. Many have concluded that it was time to look elsewhere. Technically they can; we can’t force them to stay. We wouldn’t want to. But it always sad to see people leave.

As Reformed Christians, however, we believe that God has chosen us – not the other way around, and that God has called us into a covenanted community. What that means is that while on the surface the church seems like another voluntary organization like the Kiwanis Club, at another level it is very different. You see God is involved and that changes the nature of the relationship. If God has chosen us in Christ and has called us into a covenant community, then we cannot easily walk away from one another.

Having said all that, in my judgment, there are churches that may be left. They are churches that consistently fail to tell the Good News of God’s saving love in Jesus Christ, churches that ignore the plain truth of Scripture, churches that openly deny the long-standing moral standards of the faith. But no congregation, no denomination is beyond redemption. Because of that, leaving is not a decision to be made lightly.  

Aside from living out our Reformed theology – no small thing in itself, what’s the point of blooming where we’re planted?  What’s behind the discipline of staying put?  Or to put it in terms we suburban Christians might understand better: What’s in it for me?  Goetz writes:

For all its foibles – lousy preaching, political infighting, self-centered focus, stagnation – the pokey little church in suburbia is still one of the most fertile environments for spiritual development. All churches, for that matter, are pokey, even the large corporate churches, because they are led by pokey leaders and attended by pokey members. Pokiness always breeds trouble. And relational trouble is the stuff of the deeper life.

It’s in the context of other pokey Christians – some we agree with and some we don’t, some we feel comfortable with and others we don’t, some who are like us and some who are not – that we grow spiritually. C. S. Lewis wrote about his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves:

He was not a clever buy, he was even a dull boy; I was a scholar. He had no “ideas.” I bubble over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him and that he had nothing to give me. But that is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings that most mysteriously – for he was always very inarticulate – he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him but failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return.

The point here is that we can learn quite a lot from people who are different from us. We can even learn from people who may be a little difficult.

I realize that the comments I am about to make could be seen as self-serving, but I don’t mean them that way. I intend them to highlight how God can use difficult circumstances to help us grow.  In the fall of 1993 I hauled my son off to St. Petersburg, Florida to begin college at a little Presbyterian school called Eckerd College. We probably chose Eckerd for many of the wrong reasons: they offered him a ton of money, and it was about five miles from St. Petersburg beach. Before I left to come home it began to dawn on me that Eckerd was Presbyterian in name only. I began to wonder what I had gotten my son into. I spoke with the chaplain and asked about opportunities for Christian fellowship and service. He told me about some. Then he told me about a church in St. Petersburg. I took Ben there one Sunday before I headed home. What he did after I left was purely up to him. I prayed that I hadn’t made a wrong decision. While it wasn’t what you would call a religious friendly environment, it was the place where Ben began to blossom spiritually. After Eckerd he headed off to seminary in Austin, Texas. I wanted him to go to grad school, become an engineer, make a lot of money and support me in my old age. He now is on the staff of a church in western Colorado. He had bloomed where he was planted.

In the fall of 1997 I took my daughter Susan to the other side of Lake Michigan to Hope College in Holland, Michigan. It is a Reformed Church of America school. We picked Hope over another college because I thought the other college was too ethnically pure. She would likely do better in a more diverse setting. What sold me on Hope was certainly not the money – though Susan did get some of it. Nor was it the beach. Michigan is nice, but it’s not Florida!  What sold us was the chapel program. It was led by Presbyterian pastor Ben Patterson. He had taken a chapel program that averaged 12 students in attendance and turned it into one that attracted over 1,200 students three times a week. Hope College, while not as ethnically and religiously diverse as Eckerd, it wasn’t Christian through and through. Yet it was there that Susan grew spiritually. Upon graduation she went to California as a Young Adult Mission Volunteer. She, too, had bloomed where she was planted.

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Church of the Cross
475 Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois
 (847)885-1199