In the last few months as our campus renovation project has gotten up to speed various folks from the community who are not closely tied to the church have often asked me what we are doing here. Obviously, they’ve driven by and seen the activity and they want to know what we are building. But it’s a very good question to ask, and one that I’ve even asked myself a few times. What are we doing here?

All of you know at least the short answer to that question. We are enlarging and improving our church campus and facilities to provide better support for the ministries and activities of our church, both for the present and for the foreseeable future. For quite some time we have needed bigger and better worship space, more classrooms, increased parking, improved meeting facilities, upgraded nursery space, and adequate offices for our professional staff. For a decade we have been planning and strategizing and organizing and then finally actually building something together, and about a year from now we will be finished with this first and largest phase of our overall master plan. If it’s true that good things take time, then we are indeed doing a very, very good thing here at The Village Church! What are we doing here? One answer is that we are building a church, at least in a physical, bricks-and-mortar sense. And to do that you and I have to gather and give the resources God has first given to us in order to pay for what we believe we have been led to do. So let me say a word of thanks. Thank you to all who have answered the call to give over the past three years in our first capital stewardship drive, the Blessed to Be a Blessing campaign. And then let me thank everyone who has committed to give as part of this second drive, Building Together: Faith, Family, Future. And finally, let me thank any of you who have yet to give but who most certainly will give, as the Lord prospers you in the future!

What are we doing here? The obvious thing is that we are constructing a new and improved version of a church facility. But the obvious thing is not necessarily the most important thing. And we all know that. It is important to have adequate space simply to house and accommodate the people who want to come and worship and study and enjoy fellowship here, or else they will have to go elsewhere. And it is important to have a facility that is within modern standards of building and technical capability so that our facility does not become a hindrance but rather is a help in our communication and experience of the love of God. But the most important thing is not the buildings we are building. The best question we can ask is what is the most important thing we are doing here? And to answer that, we have focused during this campaign on the fact that we are building together. And we are building on the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ. And we are building our families and the family of the church. And we are building for the sake of the future.

I want to focus on the future today. The best way we can do that is to go back into the past, about two thousand six hundred years or so, into the life and times of the great prophet Jeremiah. The bulk of Jeremiah’s ministry occurred during the final decades of the southern kingdom of Israel, which was called Judah. Jeremiah witnessed firsthand the economic and military battles that Judah fought and that eventually the nation lost as it succumbed to the power of the Babylonians. Jeremiah watched his country fall apart, both from forces outside the nation and forces inside the nation itself, forces of corruption and decay and unfaithfulness to the God who had made the nation what it was in the first place. Jeremiah watched as cities crumbled, as people died of wounds and disease and starvation, as people were forced to leave their homes and deported to live in a foreign land. And through it all, Jeremiah listened to the voice of God and he spoke for God with his own voice. In a time when there seemed to be no hope, no way out, no future, Jeremiah talked about the future of a nation that was dying away. And what he had to say says something to you and me today.

The ancient Jews believed, as do many still believe today, that the surest sign of God’s favor and blessing upon them was the fact that they had been able to create a homeland for themselves and become a nation like all the other nations of the world. They believed that physical and material prosperity and peace was the main thing when it came to God’s presence in their lives. And so, when their homeland was destroyed and the nation wiped off the political map, a fundamental aspect of their faith was severely undermined. How could God really be God and how could God really love them if they no longer enjoyed the most important benefit of God’s favor? The citizens of Israel who had been carted off to Babylon were acutely interested in getting back home, but that would not be possible for nearly a century. Jeremiah’s word of prophecy and hope to them seemed very strange, therefore, because his word to them from God was that they should settle down in Babylon, build houses, plant gardens, and become fruitful citizens who contributed to the success of the nation that had destroyed them. What was going on here? Jeremiah was one of a minority of Jews who sensed that God was up to something much larger in scope than just creating a nation from out of like-minded relatives of Abraham. Jeremiah knew that God’s blessing and presence in life was about much more than just flying a flag and claiming a spot as one nation among many. Jeremiah knew that the heart of faithfulness to the one living God was something that could be practiced and enjoyed no matter where you lived and no matter in what circumstance you found yourself. Israel was always meant to be a different kind of nation. Israel was a people who could live anywhere and anytime and still belong to the God who made them a nation in the first place. If it was God’s plan that for a time the nation would have none of the rights and privileges of the other nations, then so be it. Who they were and what they were all about did not depend on where they lived. The blessing and love of God does not depend on your physical address. That was Jeremiah’s first point in the letter that he sent to the exiled Jews in Babylon.

The Jews no longer had a nation like the other nations. That was the first problem they had and Jeremiah had answered it. Their second problem was that it appeared that in addition to not having a nation, they also didn’t have a future. For the ancient Jews, all identity and purpose was determined by their status as a nation and their racial and ethnic purity as a people. For them, it was all about culture, customs, language, institutions, and all the trappings of life that made them unique among all the other nations. And so, when their Temple was demolished and their culture upended and their people dispersed and their lands and possessions stolen or given to someone else and their very essence as a nation dismantled they grieved the loss of any sense of a future. Those who were not killed outright would simply be erased or absorbed into some other reality, some other identity. To them, the future was always all about their posterity, their children, their heritage, the passing down of the stories and the culture and the singular status they believed they had as special people, special to the one and only God. But all of that was gone, including, it seemed, their special status before an all-powerful God.

Into that kind of total despair, Jeremiah had a message to speak from God. “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.” One of the great stories of the Bible that repeats itself over and over again is that no matter how hopeless the situation may seem to be, God always has a plan, and God’s plan always happens, because he is God! God plans a world, and when that world is threatened with total decay and corruption, God washes it all off and starts over, saving his plan by only the thinnest thread, as a handful of people and two of every kind of animal huddle together in a big boat waiting for dry land to reappear. God plans a nation, and when that nation is threatened with extinction by the hand of an enslaving Egyptian empire, God sends a man named Moses and a handful of plagues to back him up, and the people of God’s nation escape through a pathway in the sea. God plans for life, and when life is threatened by death, God sends his very own son, who himself dies, but who escapes the one prison that no one escapes, the prison of death, and comes back to life, to show us that God’s plan for life will not be stopped. The blessing and love of God does not depend on how well things are going right now, or how poorly, because God’s plan for your future is always secure. That was Jeremiah’s second point to a people who were losing hope.

And so if your present circumstances in life are absolutely terrible and can’t really get any worse, is it possible still to be blessed and loved by God? And if your future circumstances in life show absolutely zero chance of improving, is it possible still to be blessed and loved by God? The answer Jeremiah has from the Lord is simple. “Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you.” Eventually, the descendants of the exiles would return to their homeland and they would start over. They would become a nation again but they would never achieve the glory and power they once enjoyed. And a few hundred years later, again they would be wiped out, this time by the Roman Empire. And in the upheaval and despair of that season of Israel’s life, God would send another prophet whose life and death and resurrection would teach something that God had been trying to get across all along, that his blessing is not so much about power and wealth and success in the things of this world, but about something else entirely.

Jeremiah had a glimpse of what that something else was when he relayed God’s message to the people. Call, come, pray, search, and seek. When you do these things with all your heart, God says, you will find me. All the great prophets of Israel understood that Israel’s fundamental problem as a nation was not economic or military or political—it was spiritual. Israel’s history had indicated that when the people were spiritually right with God and with each other then all the other issues of life tended to fall into place. But when they had not sought after God with all their might, things went downhill. Israel only slowly and never completely learned the lesson that the blessing and presence of God is not so much about having it good in this life as it is about transcending both the good and the bad in this life as we learn to live in the reality of God’s life, which is the kingdom. Nations come and go. Fortunes come and go. Health comes and goes. Friends and family come and go. The blessing and love of God ultimately are all about the relationship we have with God himself when we open our hearts to him and he opens his heart to us. That was Jeremiah’s final point to people who thought that God had abandoned them.

What are we doing here at The Village Church? What are you doing here at The Village Church? Because of Jesus, we are convinced that God loves us and that God is with us to guide us and bless us through every single up and down of life. We are convinced that our relationship with God and our blessings from God do not depend on where we are or what we are going through at the moment. We are convinced that God is building something in our own hearts and God is also building something in our fellowship together. We are convinced that God is building his church here and we are confident that God’s plan will prevail. We are building some buildings so that God’s building can go forward in a more powerful and more productive way. You and I are giving a lot to this project of building, not only giving financial resources, but giving ourselves in so many personal, human, and spiritual ways, to the true church that lives in our hearts and lives in our fellowship together.

God guarantees a grand and glorious future for us, if we understand what kind of future it is. I am convinced that The Village Church is going to be here for a very long time, enjoying this place that is our church home. And I’m thankful for that. But I’m even more thankful for what God is doing and will do here. Our future is filled with those things that God’s church has always done: proclaiming the good news about Jesus’ love and Jesus’ victory over death that is our victory too, growing disciples of Jesus who become powerful agents of Jesus’ love in the world, worshipping the one and only true and living God and denying all the other things that would pretend to be God, preserving the truth about God and God’s world that the world so often tries to confuse and hide, promoting a healthy society where justice and equality and freedom and the common good of all people are the norm and not the exception, and exhibiting—through our words and deeds and presence—a piece of God’s very kingdom right here in our little corner of the world.ⁱ

If you want to be part of a future that looks like that, if you want God in your own future, if you want to give yourself to something that will outlast the ups and downs of life, if you want to know God in your own life, then be a part of what God is doing here in us. We are building something together, building faith, building family, and building the future. It’s happening right outside this door. It’s happening right inside your heart.

Amen.

ⁱ Adapted from The Great Ends of the Church, Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church, G-1.0200.