“Among the Exiles”
Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
October 12, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
I’ve tried to avoid preaching about wedding planning but we’re less than two weeks out now and we’re at the point where all of my “free time” is spent thinking about this detail or that detail, so this is what you get today.
Anyways, maybe a month or two ago, Jo asked me how we wanted to handle our gifts to each other, and, I confess, that was the first time I had considered that when you get married you’re supposed to get your spouse a gift, and that’s how I ended up planting a blueberry bush in a container out there by the pollinator garden this past week.
Let me explain.
See, Jo loves plants, so that part was easy. But there’s something that you should probably know about me. Growing up, I really, really did not like anything that has to do with taking care of yards or garden. I hated raking leaves. I hated weeding. I hated mulching. I hated getting my hands dirty. As a kid, I would tell my mom that when I grew up, I was going to live in an apartment so that I would never have to do yardwork again.
She’d tell me to go rake those leaves anyway.
But over the past couple of years, something strange happened. Little by little, my YouTube algorithm started to get the impression that I really wanted to become a gardener. I don’t know if it’s just a function of entering your 30s and the algorithm suddenly thinks “well, he’s a real adult now with real adult hobbies and needs, of course he wants to learn how to garden better” or something else entirely, but my YouTube discover page began to fill up with all sorts of videos from channels dedicated to teaching you how to become a better gardener.
Shoutout to Kevin and the team Epic Gardening. If you’re looking for gardening content, go check them out.
Suddenly, I’m watching people graft fruit trees. I’m learning about composting and fertilizer schedules. I’m researching tips and tricks for growing things in Zone 6a and using phrases like “over-winter” unironically.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe this is what maturing involves.
Anyways, this content rabbit hole led me to the conclusion that a blueberry bush would be a perfect wedding gift for Jo as we begin this new chapter in our lives together. As it happens, they do pretty well in containers—blueberries prefer a more acidic soil, which is easier to monitor and maintain in a container than the ground—and so we’ll be able to take the bush with us as we move throughout our lives together (kind of important when you’re a pastor subject to the appointment system).
We’re having a fall wedding and it turns out that if you plant them in the fall, blueberries get the chill hours they need over the winter to bear a bumper harvest the following summer.
And, if you take care of them right, they can last a long time. Twenty, thirty, even fifty years.
So that’s how I found myself on the out by the pollinator garden on Wednesday, armed with all my research and a desire to get it planted before the rain started. I had my 25-gallon grow bag. I had my soil and my fertilizer and my soil acidifier and I was ready to go.
And suddenly, I remembered why I hated gardening as a kid.
I was sweating something fierce. Muscles that I didn’t know I had were screaming. My lower back and I are still not on speaking terms.
Maybe gardening isn’t for me after all.
Which brings us to our passage for this morning.
See, Jeremiah 29 is written to a people who are discovering that planting in exile is hard work.
The Babylonians have taken these elites from Jerusalem—priests and scribes and leaders—and forced them to live in a foreign land. They’ve been ripped out of their home and forced to watch everything familiar collapse.
But when Jeremiah writes to them, they’re still staring back towards Jerusalem. They’re yearning for something that’s not coming back. They’re listening to false prophets who tell them that everything will go back to the way it was—all we have to do is sit back and trust in God and we’ll be back home before we know it.
But that’s not how exile works. Even if you do, eventually, get to go back home, exile changes you and home isn’t the same.
Jeremiah’s word from God is clear: this is where you are now. You are in Babylon. You are not going back to Jerusalem.
The very first thing God tells the exiles through the prophet isn’t “just hold on, I’ll fix this soon”.
It’s “Build houses and live in them”
It’s “Plant gardens and eat what they produce”.
It’s “Marry. Have children. Multiply. Live”.
This is not the word that the exiles expected, and it’s certainly not the word they wanted. They wanted a timeline for their return. Instead, God gave them a command to live.
These words land right in the middle of their longing for what used to be.
And honestly, it lands right in the middle of ours too.
We all long for those good old days. Back when the world felt simpler. And Lord knows that the Church isn’t immune from this.
It’s a bit of a cliché among church folk to talk about how we yearn for those glory days. Back when church was at the center of community life and the pews were packed. Back when there were 500 kids in Sunday school and King David himself was our pastor.
And look, I don’t mean to denigrate the past—these stories matter and shape core aspects of our identity as a congregation. Our history can and should inform our present, but Jeremiah warns us that if all we do is look backward, we will miss what God is doing right here and right now.
Jerusalem is not coming back, but God has not abandoned us. God is in Babylon too. God is here.
It it’s here, in the middle of the world as it is, that the weight starts to set in.
Because as I stood out there in the front yard on Wednesday, sweating and muttering and remembering just how much I do not like gardening, something else crept in.
The world is heavy right now.
We turn on the news and scroll through our newsfeeds and see pain in the faces of our neighbors.
We see families in Gaza, suspended in this moment between cautious relief and grief, as they try to piece their lives back together after a genocide. We see masked federal agents arresting and detaining men, women, and children here at home without any regard for their citizenship status.
And if it feels far away, it’s not. We see it here in our own community too if we know where to look.
We see people sleeping in their cars and in tents on the street while we hear our elected leaders use the language of criminalizing poverty. Not just up in Saratoga Springs, but right here in the town of Ballston—a public hearing this coming Tuesday evening on a proposed so-called “camping ban” that will only make the lives of some of our most vulnerable neighbors more difficult.
In the midst of all of this, I found myself asking: what business do I have planting blueberry bushes? What business do Jo and I have planning a wedding? What business do we have putting so much time, energy, and love into something beautiful when the world is so broken?
It’s a heavy question, but I suspect that I’m not alone in asking it.
It’s certainly the kind of question the exiled Jerusalemites were asking in Babylon—later on in the chapter, we find a fun response to Jeremiah’s letter that basically amounts to “can you believe that this Jeremiah guy is telling us to build houses and plant gardens?”
But Jeremiah persists. He tells his people to remember that God has always been closest to God’s people when they were in the wilderness. He tells them to not give into despair, because despair won’t put the world back together. He tells them to not be passive observers but active participants in the work that God is doing in their own midst.
He says, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, in and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare”.
It’s not passive waiting, but a call to act. It’s a call to invest and to build and to plant and to care and to hope, together.
And I think this is where my fatal gardening mistake lies.
I tried to do it alone.
I thought I could muscle my way through planting that blueberry bush. I thought that I didn’t need help, and now I’m paying for it in sore muscles and a lot of muttered words that I should probably not say from up here in the pulpit.
But planting a garden is a lot like living a life of faith. It’s not meant to be a solo project.
The work that Jeremiah calls the exiles to is communal work. God doesn’t tell them, “go and build your own little bunkers and try to survive on your own.” No. God says, “Build homes, together. Plant gardens, together. Seek the welfare of this city, together.”
It’s a call that ripples throughout time and space to this very day, if only we have ears to hear it.
Because I know it can feel overwhelming to live in this moment. I know that it can feel foolish to plant seeds when the world seems to be on fire. I know that it can feel like building and celebrating are luxuries when others are suffering.
But that’s an attitude that leads to despair, despair that we have to resist with every fiber of our being.
Because despair will not heal the world.
Despair will not stop the injustice that we see.
Despair will not change our community.
But planting a garden will.
Showing up will.
Bearing witness will.
That’s our calling, Church. We can either be the people stuck with our eyes fixed on the past, with our lives oriented towards Jerusalem, or we can look around and see how God is moving here and now, even in Babylon. We can be the people who seek the welfare of the most vulnerable in our own communities, bearing witness to their humanity when others would try to dehumanize them. We can be the people who plant and tend to our gardens here and now.
That little blueberry bush stands for something far more than what I hope will be years of tasty berries (assuming the birds don’t get them all first). It’s a sign that Jo and I are choosing to build a life together at this moment, meeting the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. It’s a reminder that even in unsettled times, something can grow.
And it’s a reminder that gardens do not grow themselves. They require sweat and community and faith that something will take root even when we can’t see it yet. Someone can plant and someone else can water, but God provides the growth.
Right now, it’s still sitting out in the pollinator garden out front. It will eventually make its way to the Round Lake parsonage, but for now, it's here, right out front. A visible sign that something has been planted here. It calls us as a church to imagine what new life might look like here in our own community.
Because God is here, friends, and God has work for us to do yet. This time that we’re in is the time that we have and God is here, with us in this time and in this place calling our attention to the gardens we can plant in the here and in the now.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues. Amen.
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