Rev. Matt Samson
Jeremiah 29.1, 4-7
Psalm 66.1-12
Luke 17.11-19
[2 Timothy 2:8-15]
October 12, 2025
Prayer for Illumination – Merciful and Gracious God of Creation, your ways are not our ways
and your thoughts are not our thoughts. Yet, in a broken and troubled world we look to you
for solace. Guide us in our encounter with your Eternal Word that we might find signs of
grace and light for all roads upon which we travel. Through Jesus the Christ who is the truth
and the life. Amen.
Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and Jesus Christ our Reconciler.
A Spacious Place
In deciding what to preach on this morning, I have been (and remain) in a quandary.
Perhaps the gospel is the easiest. These 10 people with a skin disease, usually translated as
leprosy, approach Jesus asking for mercy. He merely sends them to the priests to show
themselves, and they are healed en route. The one who returns to give thanks is a Samaritan
—Jesus Jesus rather gruffly refers to him as a foreigner, but one commentator notes that
Jesus, himself on his own fateful journey to Jerusalem, is in a “border setting” between
Galilee and Samaria.1 This Samaritan is now at Jesus’s very feet, and Jesus, according to the
same commentator, says, “Get up and journey on. Your faith has delivered you.” The
person who is doubly marginalized, as a foreigner and with a condition that threatens the
health of others, [for writing I would stick these commas in to clarify the flow] shows
gratitude, and, although we don’t know where he is going, we do know that he has received
both mercy and a blessing.
So what is it with these Hebrew prophets? The judgments are often clear; the call to
repentance, to turn, to go in another direction is there. And then sometimes they throw us a
curve (perhaps appropriately with the baseball playoffs in full swing). Our text can’t
completely be understood without noting that one of the great prophetic confrontations in
the scriptures has taken place in the preceding chapters 27 and 28, so perhaps it is fitting to
trace the outlines here. I won’t detain us long, and there is clearly more to say. But the
frame is that there is a prophetic encounter as the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezar have
entered Judah and taken some residents and the king into exile while putting a brother of
the king on the throne in Jerusalem. The court and advisors have to figure out what to do
1John T. Carroll, 2012, Luke: A commentary, Westminster John Knox Press, 342.
with what seems to be a permanent threat hanging over their heads.2 One prophet,
Hananiah, insists that the exile won’t last for many years, but the other, Jeremiah, insists that
the best course of action is to surrender and face the consequences. In chapter 27, Jeremiah
is even told to wear a yoke of “straps and bars” (27.2) as a symbol of the necessity to submit
in the meantime. His prophecy–and message to the king–is that the city could not escape
the impending invasion–and that God had ordained it. The people and leaders aren’t living
in the way they should, and a reckoning is at hand.
Let us “suspend our disbelief” here and take the narrative at face value. The prophet
who predicts a short time of exile claims that God has told him, “I have broken the yoke of
the king of Babylon” (28.2). Jeremiah thinks that would be great, but he issues a warning
about how prophets in the past had “prophesied war, famine, and pestilence” (28.8). The
scene closes with a further comment: “As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the
word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the LORD has truly sent the
prophet.” Hananiah proceeds to take Jeremiah’s yoke and break it. Jeremiah leaves but
eventually returns to tell Hananiah bluntly that he had not been sent by God, that he had
made the people believe in a lie, and that he would pay with his life (28.15-16). The last
verse in chapter 28 reports, “In that same year, in the seventh month Hananiah died”
(28.17).
So our passage for this morning picks up Jeremiah’s continued response to the
situation, and a letter to the exiles in Babylon. There is more to the story, but the gist is that
Jeremiah’s counsel to “build houses,” “plant gardens,” and marry off their children (29.5-6) is
encouragement for a long sojourn, one in which seeking the welfare (shalom) of the place
where they find themselves is tied up with the exiles’ own well-being. We can’t unpack the
whole chapter, but the idea is after 70 years, God will bring them out of exile. This says
something about the construction of the text because we do know that it was roughly that
length of time when exiles returned to rebuild in the time of the Persian emperor Cyrus.
And my quandary persists as I seek to reflect on what this text means for us today.
Jeremiah is simply fulfilling the calling he received at the beginning when God reaches out
and touches his mouth, saying:
“Now I have put my words in your
mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and
over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
2On some of this history, see William L. Holladay, 1989, Jeremiah 2: A commentary on the Book of
the Prophet Jeremiah, chapters 26-52, ed. Paul D. Hanson, Fortress Press, 31-33.
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to destroy and overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
This is the prophetic vocation, and it does come with a touch from the very hand of God.
But we may not see ourselves as prophets, and we may find ourselves wondering about
where God’s hand is in the these days in which we live. Where do we find the courage to
speak and hold the line without completely giving over to despair and hopelessness?
Jeremiah’s time may not be our own, but I wonder about how we are to speak and
live when we see so much unfaithfulness to the rule of law, abuse of power, and simply the
inability to speak the truth on the part of an administration that continues in word and deed
to pit so many of us against others. I wonder about yet another round of shootings in
Mississippi, about how militarizing our cities is going to bring peace and security when there
are so many weapons on our streets, and we can’t even seem to be able to talk about gun
control. I wonder what it means when a munitions plant explodes in the heart of the nation
that provides more weapons than any other, by far, on the global scale. These are the
outlines, although the task on Sunday morning is not to leave ourselves with despair. Still,
we have to be truthful about our state of affairs if we’re going to find shalom for our people
and those others who live beyond our hearth and kin. And this is also a call to consider our
own history on what used to be referred as Columbus Day but now on many calendars is
marked as Indigenous Peoples Day in recognition of the displacement that came in the wake
of European settlement of the Americas.
It is not always the job of the prophet to provide comfort or succor. Rather, there is
something there about reading the signs of the times and providing an alternative perspective
while daring to speak the truth. We can argue about dysfunctional government from any
number of angles, and we can be grateful if a lasting peace takes hold in Gaza and Israel, but
there are plenty of questions to ask about how we got here to this point. I am sure, at the
same time, that our task, in the words of the late Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, is
not one of simply affirming that Christianity is “the officially optimistic religion of the officially
optimistic empire.”3
Because I’m here only occasionally, I don’t want you to think this is a one-note song,
although I am often focused on migrants and immigration. Mostly this is because I think
migration and immigration are central to how the human community defines itself in the
twenty-first century–and that migration has been a central aspect of what it means to be
human since our species left Africa in the distant past. Simply put, there are more migrants
and refugees in the world than at any other point in human history, and how we respond to
that reality might say as much about who WE are as it does about the continual negative
3See, Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness, 1976, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, pp. 73-
106.
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focus on those who are perceived as “the other.” I’m reminded of a song Willie Nelson
made popular in about 1986, “Living in the Promiseland”:
Give us your tired and weak,
And we will make them strong.
Bring us your foreign songs,
And we will sing along.
Leave us your broken dreams,
We’ll give them time to mend.
There’s still a lot of love,
Living in the promiseland.
So they came from a distant isle,
Nameless woman, faithless child-like a bad dream.
‘Til there was no room at home,
No place to run and no place to fall.
Give us your daily bread,
We have no shoes to wear,
No place to call our own,
Only this cross to bear.
We are the multitude,
Lend us a helping hand.
Is there no love anymore?
Living in the promiseland.4
There was another song that came out about the same time, actually a few years
before, that spoke of the experience of living on borders (or between one place and
another). It was called “Across the Borderline.”
When you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands,
Then you’ll know that it’s too late to change your mind.
‘Cause you’ve paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are,
And you’re still just across the borderline.5
4The song was written by David Lynn Jones and recorded by Nelson. See “Living in the Promiseland,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_in_the_Promiseland. See lyrics at https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/willienelson/
living-in-the-promiseland. (Both accessed, 12 October 2025)
5The song was written by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, and James Dickinson. See lyrics at
https://www.lyricsfreak.com/r/ry+cooder/across+the+borderline_20120138.html. (Accessed, 12 October
2025)
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So do faith and mercy go hand in hand? I can’t get exile (or maybe displacement) out
of my mind. “Is there no love anymore . . . in the promised land?” Here it is worth recalling
the theme of reversal in approaching Jesus’s teaching and healing in Luke. Those who have
been marginalized in society are lifted up–the poor, the outcast, and women, in particular.
Jeremiah may prophesy judgement, but he also emphasizes survival in what is a strange land.
And I go back to the plea of the lepers: “Have mercy on us.”
So there we are in exile, and our options, along with the future itself, are bleak. The
word of the very God of life comes through these confounding prophets–build and plant,
create families, wait for the moment of deliverance, the time when you will indeed be led
out to a place sated with water in a dry universe. I watch the people stream into a desolate
Gaza in the wake of so much death and destruction, and I wonder about their future, and
ours, in times such as these when mercy seems in such short supply. I hear the worlds of the
psalm with the promise that those in exile would be lead out into “a spacious place,” the
words that led to the sermon title. Maybe it is only a place from which we can see the
horizon and imagine what might be over there. I remember the troubled young woman in
the first youth group I worked with in my first job in a church after seminary. Her definition
of faith went something like this: “Believing in something when all else tells you not to.”
So there you have it: Build houses, plant trees and gardens, love your enemies; for
our welfare is tied to the welfare of those around us. And we do believe that on our journey
we will be led out into a spacious place. Sometimes spaciousness is translated as freedom,
and one might think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words from a spiritual that ended his “I have
a Dream” speech: “‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!'”6 This
is an expansive freedom, a liberation that frees us to be for others, to be for the welfare,
deliverance, and healing of all.
Amen.
6Martin Luther King Jr., 1986 (1963), I have a dream, In A testament of hope: The essential writings of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington, 217-220, Harper and Row Publishers, 220.
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