October 13, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

Feeling Enlarged

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 67
Luke 17:11–19
Jeremiah 29:1, 4–7

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, . . . for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah 29:7 (NRSV)

“My father liked them separate, one there,
one here (alla y aqui), as if aware
that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart
(el Corazon) and lock the alien part. . .

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”
. . . But who can divide

the world, the word from any child?
. . .

I hoarded secret syllables I read
until my tongue learned to run
where his stumbled. And still the heart was one. . . .”

Rhina Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingue”

Not long after the United States had bombed Baghdad, I remember unfolding the New York Times and seeing the stunning photo of a newly wedded couple, dressed in wedding garments, holding hands, looking small, surrounded and dwarfed by the debris and wreckage of a city. I looked for an accompanying article but found none. The photo, I realized, spoke for itself: it spoke of the power of hope for a future not constrained by current reality.

So basic to humanity is hope—hope for a future in which plans can be made, love can be celebrated, a home can be built, a family can be started. So basic is such hope that it is universal. It is as though, no matter what and no matter where, hope will arise and it will resonate with people, even people on the other side of the world or on the other side of a war.

In the passage we read today, the prophet Jeremiah spoke of such a hope. In his letter to all the Israelites exiled from Jerusalem and deported to the foreign and hostile city of Babylon, Jeremiah wrote words of hope from the Lord: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.” Get married; have children; let them be married and have children too. In other words, plan for a future.

This advice was really no different from advice that God had traditionally given the Israelites when they lived in their homeland. No matter the circumstances, God’s will for their well-being was the same as it had always been: “For surely I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

But for the Israelites, deported to a foreign land, the Lord’s advice was stunning. We can imagine that, wanting so much to return home, the Israelites were tempted to listen to those who spoke of a short stay and a quick return. We can imagine that no advice could have been more radical for the Israelites than God’s word to them through Jeremiah. To have children and grandchildren would mean three generations. God was calling them not to return but to make a new life for themselves despite their dislocation.

War dislocates people. Sometimes it results in the drawing of lines that makes it impossible for people to return home. As a fourteen-year-old, it would have been hard for my father to fathom that there would be a point of no return for him. At the time, my father was living in his older cousin’s home in the city of Pyongyang so that he could go to a better school than the one in the rural village where his parents lived. When residents of Pyongyang were told that they should evacuate the city and move south, my father told his cousin’s wife, who was pregnant at the time and therefore couldn’t risk the journey south herself, “When you see my parents, tell them I’ll be back in a few days.” How could he have known that he would never return to his parents’ home? How could he, at the age of fourteen, have known that not only would he never return home, but that in time he would marry a woman they had never met, make a home, and raise a family in a country an ocean away?

But even more radical than having to reorient one’s mindset from the short- to the long-term is, I think, the advice that followed. To the dislocated Israelites, God said, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you in exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” On the face of it, this seems like common sense. Of course your welfare is tied up with the welfare of the society in which you live, so of course by working for the welfare of all you would be ensuring your own welfare as well.

A week ago Friday, a fellowship group of this church, Cornerstones, gathered to hear a presentation by Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a Chicagoan originally from Syria who is serving as the current president of the Syrian American Medical Society. Dr. Sahloul spoke about the medical missions that this nonprofit organization, SAMS, undertakes to bring medical relief to civilians injured in the Syrian civil crisis. After Dr. Sahloul’s presentation, I overheard a congregant express her gratitude to him for accepting our invitation and for taking the time to speak with our church group. In response, Dr. Sahloul said, “Of course I would accept this invitation. This is my city. I will do all I can for it.”

As naturally as these words rolled off his tongue, they stuck a while in my heart, for I know, as the daughter of immigrants and as one who has a daughter of my own, that with each generation that passes, we are in danger of taking for granted how hard it can be for an outsider to become an active contributor to society. With the passing of time and the assimilation that inevitably takes place, I worry that my daughter will have even less of an awareness than I have about the tireless effort it takes for minority immigrants to be able to contribute to the welfare of the whole. It takes constant effort, because all people have a tendency to stick with people like themselves, and when people are in a strange and even hostile land, as were the Israelites in Babylon, they are tempted even more to withdraw into a sectarian existence, sometimes for the sake of survival, but often because it is more comfortable there.

In his book The Dignity of Difference, the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that “too often in today’s world, groups speak to themselves, not to one another: Jews to Jews, Christians to fellow Christians, Muslims to Muslims” (Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 2). Rabbi Sacks bemoans that somehow the proliferation of so many channels by which we can choose to communicate enables us so easily to target those who agree with us and screen out those who disagree with us (p. 2). We have lost a public arena in which everyone, in order to be heard by anyone, would have to participate. As a result, it has become hard to overcome the sectarianism of identity politics.

There is no doubt that religions have contributed to identity politics, because religions do play a role in creating a sense of identity. If religious people are going to help to overcome the sectarianism of identity politics, what we need, according to Rabbi Sacks, is a theology of difference in which we recognize that God is God of the whole world, that God is God of all these groups, as different as they are from one another. God’s voice can be heard, therefore, in a language other than our own, and God’s image can be perceived in the faces of people different from us.

Rabbi Sacks reminds us that in Jewish and Christian history the prophets of ancient Israel were the first to conceive of God as transcending place, language, and national boundaries (Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 12). The prophets were the first, he says, “to think globally.” The interesting thing about transcendence is this: usually the transcendence of boundaries, whether they are of place, politics, or ideology, signals the presence and resonance of something deep and enduring in humanity.

This past week, in anticipation of the announcement of the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, the world became reacquainted with Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani woman just sixteen years old, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban for speaking out against the Taliban for not allowing girls to go to school. As I am sure you have heard, she was the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In her interview with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, Malala was asked what she would do if she ever again encountered an assassin. She said that she had given this some thought. While at first she had imagined that in self-defense she would have to beat the assassin with her shoe, she corrected her thinking, realizing that to fight an assassin with violence would make herself no better than the assassin. So instead she would fight the assassin with her words, saying to the assassin that she would want his daughter also to be allowed to go to school.

Clearly Jon Stewart was impressed with her answer. I too was impressed, because at her still young age she already knows how to speak about human rights, such as the right to pursue an education, recognizing that, because it is so fundamental to humanity, it has the power to resonate even with her would-be assassin. Malala Yousafzai already knows the power that words have—when they resonate deeply and enduringly with our humanity—to transcend boundaries of place, politics, and ideology, perhaps even the ideology of her enemies.

To the Israelites who were in a foreign and hostile land, the prophet Jeremiah spoke of human aspirations so deep and enduring that, no matter what and no matter where, they would persist. God knew what it would take to secure these aspirations in a land in which the Israelites were the newcomers and strangers. So through the prophet Jeremiah God told the Israelites to enlarge their hearts and minds to include concern for the well-being of the whole city, to work for the common good, and to pray for the peace of the place to which they were exiled, for in its welfare would be their own.

Whether we are of the first-, second-, third-, or ninth-generation of immigrants to be in this country, the responsibilities we bear do not end at the threshold of our homes or of our business associations or of our ethnic group our religious denomination or our political party. No matter how long we have been resident here, we have work to do for the welfare of all. So when we hear the prophet’s words, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope,” we will know that the plans God has for us are inextricably tied to the plans God has for the welfare of all. For nothing less would be worthy of the God of all. Amen.