Well, I did it! Last Tuesday, I watched my first episode of Glee! Have you seen it? It’s a very popular TV show. It centers around the members of a show choir – you and I would say, “Glee Club” – at the fictional William McKinley High School in Ohio.

Wow! What a show!

The episode this past Tuesday was right up my alley, too, because it was about religion and how faith finds expression through different peoples’ lives and in many different ways. It started with one of those outrageously whacky religious experiences that we sometimes read about. The Glee club captain thinks he sees the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. So he asks “Grilled Cheesus” to grant him three very self-serving wishes, and one-by-one, they come true. So he keeps his sandwich carefully protected in plastic wrap, prays to it, and offers what I guess you’d call “worship” by getting the Glee club members to sing a series of classic songs that have something of a spiritual theme – “Only the Good Die Young,” “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and – at the end, “What If God Was One of Us?”

These songs all play out as the cast members struggle to deal with the reality of their lives – including one whose father has suffered a heart attack and brain damage as a result. Faced with losing his only living parent, he wrestles with how to receive spiritual help when offered by his friends. You see, he hates religion. He has been hurt by the Church. He doesn’t even believe in God anymore. Meanwhile, his friends, trying to help, struggle with how to express their concern for him through their own spiritual filters and his resistance.

And – by show’s end – somehow it all comes together, and faith is portrayed as very deep and multi-faceted love for neighbor that even shows the Glee club captain that his “Grilled Cheesus” religion is not only cheesy but false, and so he gently unwraps the sandwich…and eats it.

That’s when the whole cast comes together to sing Joan Osborne’s great song, “What If God Was One of Us?”

What if God was one of us?

Just a slob like one of us?

Just a stranger on the bus

Trying to make his way home?

I’ve been humming that haunting tune ever since Tuesday. And as I studied today’s reading from Jeremiah 29, it struck me that this is exactly the question the prophet wants the people of Israel to think about. “What if God was one of us?” And we need to think about it, too.

You see, as Tim pointed out last week, the world had fallen apart for God’s people. Tim used the words disintegration, disillusionment, discouragement and depression. It was a brilliant sermon, by the way, and if you weren’t here last Sunday let me encourage you to go to the web site and listen to it.

What had happened to God’s people was that their nation had been destroyed. The Babylonian army swept first through the northern kingdom of Israel, and then through the southern kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem was burnt to the ground. Their beloved Temple was destroyed. Many of the people were taken prisoner and carried off to Babylon. It was the time we call, “The Exile.”

Disintegration, disillusionment, discouragement and depression were the words Tim used to describe their life in exile. Can you see why?

And there are some people right here in the sanctuary today who are living in exile. Are you one of them?

The Babylonian army in your life might be called “cancer,” or “depression,” or “addiction,” or “loneliness,” or “old age.” It might be that you’re having family troubles, or financial difficulty. It could be that others have ostracized you and pushed you aside. Maybe you have some huge burden hanging around your neck today while everyone else seems fine and dandy, but you feel all alone in the middle of the crowd.  Perhaps you are like Mack, the father of the little girl who was murdered in the book, The Shack. He is described as living with The Great Sadness hanging over his life. Maybe there is a Great Sadness hanging over your life. You are in exile.

There are exiled people in the communities all around us – children who bear the wounds of sex abuse, soldiers coming back from war with traumatic brain injuries, workers who now have no work, people who don’t know where they’re going to get the money to pay next month’s rent. They are in exile.

There are whole regions where people live in exile – like people along the Gulf Coast who have faced devastating hurricanes and oil spills that have left their future in doubt. There are nations where whole populations dwell in the exile of poverty, hunger, violence, lack of clean water, genocide…

Exile. God’s children sometimes find themselves in places they don’t want to be and can’t get out of. And together with Israel, we cry out from our exile, “WHERE IS GOD?”

What I love about the 29^th chapter of Jeremiah is that God answers the cries of the exiles by sending them a letter! Actually, by inspiring the prophet to write them a letter! And in the letter, God says something amazing:

“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile.”

And then again, a few verses later:

“…seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I carried you into exile…”

Did you hear those words – repeated twice - about God carrying his people into exile?

Some people say that the tragedies we experience in life are God’s judgments upon us. I’ve known parents who’ve given birth to a Down’s Syndrome baby who wondered for a long time what sin they had committed to provoke God to do this to them. I’ve heard people facing serious illness wonder why God made them sick. And we all know that there are voices in religion – including our own – that insist our times of exile are God’s punishment caused by our disobedience. That’s what Fred Phelps and his fellow church members believe when they show up at the funerals of fallen soldiers with signs and chants that dead soldiers are God’s judgments against America for being tolerant toward gay people.

Well, I choose to not listen to Fred Phelps. But I’ll take God’s letter to the exiles at its word, and the word God speaks is not that God SENT Israel into exile. No, twice repeated, the letter says that God CARRIED his people into exile.

Yes, they had messed up as a nation. The Bible tells us that Israel had neglected her poor, the widows, the orphans – the “have-nots” of society. And with only a vision of “what’s in it for me?” and without a vision of “what’s in it for US?” the nation crumbled. You cannot defeat a unified enemy when you’re living as a nation of “its-all-about-me” individualists. I’ll leave to God whether the defeat by Babylon was God’s judgment against the nation for its sins, or simply the consequences that come to nations when they neglect the poor. But the end result was that the nation was destroyed. The people were taken captive.

And where was God?

God was right there – WITH THEM - carrying his people as they were taken off to exile.

What if we stopped thinking about God as being “out there somewhere?” What if we stopped thinking about God sitting in heaven, lightning bolts at the ready, just watching and waiting for us to mess up so he can send us into exile? What if we stopped thinking of God in those ways, and started thinking of God like the letter from Jeremiah expresses and like the song at the end of Glee?

What if God was one of us?

Just a slob like one of us?

Just a stranger on the bus

Trying to make his way home?

There have been times in all our lives when trouble came. Sometimes the result of our own doing. Sometimes because of what others have done. Sometimes just because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We can respond to these times of exile by blaming ourselves, blaming others, even blaming God – and giving up on life.

Or we can respond with a faith that knows God IS one of us, holding us, carrying us, promising us that the day will come when we’ll get home together.

We Christians claim Jesus as our “Emanuel” which – you know – means, “God with us.” And if God is REALLY with us as we experience times of exile, then a miracle can happen!

The life we lost to exile may be gone. But NEW LIFE can be found!

Here’s what God says through Jeremiah:

“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so they too can have sons and daughters. Increase in number, do not decrease. And seek the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile…because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

The two things you can do when living in exile.

Trust that God loves you and is with you, carrying you..

And go and live life!

Take care of your families. Raise your children. Plant things that grow. And make the community around you a better place.

Why?

Because the day will come when God will lead you out of exile. Here’s Jeremiah 29:11:

 “For I know the plans I have for you, “ declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Trust that God loves you and is with you.

Go, plant seeds of life, and live life to the fullest!