Ghetto Isn’t Gospel
Dear Friends,
There’s a reason why we’ve been working through the book of Daniel on a Sunday morning.
In fact there’s a whole load of reasons why this book of the Bible has been before us at this time. All of them good. One reason in particular, however, has been central to our taking a look at the teaching of that book: and that has to do with the degree to which Daniel’s situation is increasingly mirrored in our own as believers here in the post-pandemic culture of the western world today.
The perspective which this man adopted (and, of course, his companions had clearly embraced the same perspective) was crucial. For it was that perspective as much as anything else which defined the way they lived out their faith and ensured their lives and their living were full of a lasting fruitfulness. It was a perspective which must have been learned very early in life – before they’d got into their teenage years and were carted off to Babylon: and there are reasons to think that they got that perspective from being students in their schoolboy years – at least in some sort of way – students of the prophet Jeremiah.
Jeremiah had seen the exile coming. And his concern had, therefore, increasingly been to equip that ‘next generation’ for the challenges they would face when exile came: he put his ‘money’ where his mouth was and prepared a rising generation for the very different context for the life of faith. No longer the comforting, ‘friendly’ culture of the land of Judah to which the former generations of their people had grown accustomed: but in its stead, the harsh and hostile, thoroughly pagan pressures of the Babylonian world.
How do you live out your faith in the LORD, when the ethos and values and worldview by which you’re surrounded run diametrically opposite to those which you espouse?
It’s a question which we’ve not really had to address for many hundreds of years. Not in the way that Daniel’s generation were obliged to do. And left to ourselves to figure this out, our instincts generally see us resort to one of two positions.
Hibernation; or assimilation.
That’s to say we either decide to retreat to a spiritual ‘bunker’, a ghetto-like existence in which we hunker down behind our Christian doors, aloof and apart from the rest of our wayward society, and wait it out until a promised better day arrives. Or we work on the basis that since we’re never going to beat them, we’d be as well meanwhile to join them – selling out to society’s norms and losing any real distinctiveness we might and should have had (while still of course embracing some small modicum of ‘faith’).
You pays your money and you takes your choice. Which way will you jump?
Before you’ve had time to jump either way, Jeremiah grabs a hold of you and grounds you in the gospel. The guy is good at his theology. He knows the LORD – that’s the only boast he’ll ever make. He knows the LORD: he knows who the LORD is and what the LORD does, and how the LORD works. So far as the gospel’s concerned, he gets it.
God doesn’t go for the ‘ghetto’ line. He won’t simply cut Himself off from His wayward and wearisome world, and remain in the sanitized safety of heaven. But nor will He casually turn a blessed blind eye to humanity’s careless corruption and pretend somehow that it doesn’t really matter. God neither hibernates nor assimilates. He comes into the world and He lives in the world, but He never oversteps the mark and becomes as well of the world.
Jeremiah clearly understood the gospel – and understood as well how a gospel way of thinking must be rigorously applied to how God’s people were to live in pagan Babylon and go against the flow. And so he came out with that great ‘one-liner’ in the letter he wrote to the exiles.
“Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you in exile,” he wrote as he brought (and taught) them the very word of God (Jer.29.7).
The ghetto was the constant, great temptation for any pious Israelite stuck out there in Babylon. Exile was never going to be God’s final word: they would one day be back in the land which God (who never breaks His promises) had long since promised to them. Babylon was only ever temporary.
And that being so, why not simply hunker down and wait the whole thing out? Let Babylon be Babylon. But us? We’re going home some day – why waste our time and energies on somewhere that will soon be simply history?
Jeremiah quickly knocked such ‘ghetto’ thinking on the head. Ghetto isn’t gospel.
But neither is its opposite. You are only passing through, he’d agree. You put down roots; but the roots you put down are the tent-pegs of the nomad. You are, and you remain, but foreigners, strangers, pilgrims. This isn’t home, it’s only home meanwhile.
It’s not the easiest balance to retain, but it’s good gospel guidance he gave them. You do the Jesus thing. You get involved. You dare to be in the world; but you’re careful not to be of the world. Passing through, but blessing as you go.
Jeremiah’s one-line exhortation affords to us a paradigm for what the church’s ministry will be like, especially when to walk with Jesus Christ as Lord means going against the flow.
Consider, as an instance of this thing, the great environmental issues which have bit by bit assumed a centre-stage significance across the globe. Which way do we jump on all the different facets of contemporary global warming? Involved, or disengaged? Deal, or no deal?
The ‘ghetto’ gang will not be all that fussed about what’s going on. After all, ‘Here we have no enduring city,’ as the writer to the Hebrews said (Heb.13.14). This world has no more permanence than Babylon: it’s on the way out. This world is not our final dwelling place, and sooner or later we’re going home. So let’s simply hunker down and wait for the storm to pass – we’ve been promised a whole new world, and that’s now where we’re headed.
But … we do meanwhile have a ‘city’, for all that it’s not enduring. It’s called planet earth. Not our permanent home, no. Not where we’re one day headed, no. And not our new Jerusalem, not the heavenly city, the city of God, no. But planet earth is our home meanwhile.
And the danger is that we jump the other way. Not ‘hibernating’ at all; not battening down the hatches; not sleeping through this ‘winter’ of a doomed and sin-stained world. But anchoring ourselves too firmly in the here and now, as if this planet earth were but the only world there is. ‘Doing a Demas’, as Paul would put it. Too much in love with this world. Too fully immersed in the life and the culture of Babylon. Too much invested in a realm that has no future.
Jeremiah’s great one-liner sets the record straight and gets the balance right. We’re to seek the peace and prosperity of the city where we’re meanwhile living in exile. We’re exiles, pilgrims, those who are merely passing through; that’s the point. This planet is our ‘meanwhile’ residence: our present but not our permanent home.
But for all that this world is doomed to destruction, and for all that we will one day be back in our truest home, just because this is our ‘meanwhile’ home, our calling is always to play our part in securing the truest ‘meanwhile’ peace, or ‘shalom’, and welfare of this earth and its inhabitants.
We acknowledge in our regular praise that “the earth belongs unto the LORD, and all that therein is”: and we seek to give expression to just that in all the different facets of our planet’s life. It may be doomed and lacking final permanence: but it is still His. He brought it into being. And this has been the stage on which the LORD has most supremely shown the glory of His grace in Jesus Christ.
For all that this earth is but a temporary home, therefore, Christ’s people more than any other will seek, with a view to honouring Him, to treat this planet with a reverent respect.
It’s this perspective of Jeremiah, Daniel and the latter’s friends which it’s important we embrace. Neither ‘hibernation’ nor assimilation, but – in effect – ‘incarnation’. Doing what Jesus has done. In the world but not of the world. Salt and light, to use the pictures Jesus used.
Daniel didn’t do this on his own. He had his friends. And we, too, have just such ‘friends’: Christ-centred and like-minded local fellowships who recognize the challenge of these days and seek to walk that narrow path, mapped out by Jeremiah long ago, right here in Aberdeen.
This is the city to which we’ve been ‘carried’ by the LORD. The city may be ‘Babylon’ in terms of all its worldview, wealth and wisdom: and we are certainly ‘exiles’ here, for this is but our present, not our permanent home. But we can’t duck out of the LORD’s great call upon our lives: we are to seek the peace and the prosperity of this city.
The truest peace, found ultimately in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ – for He (and He only in the end) is our peace. And the truest sort of prospering which sees a city learning to be rich towards God.
And that affects the whole expansive fabric of a city’s life, as Jeremiah clearly saw. Housing, employment, family life: the lot. We’re to “pray to the LORD for it” undoubtedly, “because if it prospers, you too will prosper”. And Daniel and his friends were plainly very diligent in doing just that: day after day: year after year: earnest, insistent, and urgent in their crying out to God.
But our calling doesn’t stop when the prayer meeting comes to a close. We’re to pray for the city, yes: but we’re also to serve in the city, as Daniel and his three great friends so very ably did.
How on earth do you do that, though, without being hopelessly compromised? For as often as not it’s the fear of just such compromise, the fear of a lack of reverence, which sees believers withdraw into the safe and sanitized surroundings of their ghetto life. Just as, of course, it’s the fear of a lack of relevance which often sees believers lose their real distinctiveness, and which blurs and blunts the cutting edge of genuine gospel ministry.
It’s a difficult, delicate middle path we’re called upon to tread. But we have our ‘friends’, as I say: and we’re seeking to learn with them here in Aberdeen just what it will mean in these coming challenging days for us as Christ’s people to seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which we’ve been carried (as exiles) by the LORD. We’ve been working at this informally over the past many months: and we’re taking it one stage further this month with an Evangelical Alliance hosted meeting at which the crucial implications of this call can be explored.
These are changed and changing days. The world in which we minister is very different now from what it’s been for many centuries past. ‘Exile’ is surely now the context where we exercise our faith.
We mustn’t become but a pious, spiritual ghetto. The Godhead won’t do ghetto; and ghetto isn’t gospel. Our physical location is not without significance. Not in any sense peripheral, stuck out on the margins of society. But right in the heart of the city. As Daniel and his three companions were. As Esther also was, of course.
Central. Involved. Serving. Bold enough to go against the flow. Wise enough to know what should be done. Kind enough to meet the many needs there are. Strong enough to stay the course, to persevere in preaching Jesus Christ, Christ our Saviour crucified. And full enough (full of the Spirit, I mean!) to set before society both the incarnation of our holy God and His great redemptive grace.
May God help us so to do in coming days, along with all the many ‘friends’ we have up here in Aberdeen.
Yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,
Jeremy Middleton