INSIGHTS (Exegetical)

The African diaspora has been displaced all over the world since the 9^th century. This displacement had ascended during the slave trade that placed millions of Africans away from home, forcefully. The late 19^th century and 20^th century have moved millions voluntarily to seek a safe and better life out of Africa. There are more than one million Ethiopians and Eritreans alone that entered the United State within the last fifty years. Professor Steed Davidson writes, “migration, forced or voluntary, consists of more than physical movement from one place to another but also involved psycho-social and political events that remake the respective parties involved (Empire and Exile p.130.)” The diaspora individuals are engaged in community building wherever they ended up landing. The diaspora community serves individuals to actuate the survival powers to deal with the past and hope to the future. In the gathering of the community, we find God’s promising hope to sustain and heal those who are impacted by the experience of relocation. Jeremiah 29:4-27 gives us this picture of surviving community. The voice of hope and healing located in these texts as they gather as one in Babylon.

Jeremiah 29 holds a letter from Jeremiah to the people who had been deported. The letter addresses the deportee in what one can say comforting words. The reader has to assume that the deportees had a way of passing this letter or had already formed a community in which they share information like this (a setting for a public reading.) In addition, we learn from chapter 36 Baruch takes down the scroll to record it all.  Whatever way they passed this letter or words in them is a sign that a community had been formed in Babylon.

            The book of Jeremiah is a complex and lengthy book. It presents us with no information in regard to what kind of community was formed in Babylon.   The book is full of different voices in regard to pre-exilic (Jer5:15-17; 16:22-23), exilic and post exilic experience.  Brueggemann introduces the book of Jeremiah as “exceedingly complicated and multi-layered, accomplished through a complex traditioning process. It is a multivoiced meditation of faith around the crisis of the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. and the ensuing crises of deportation and loss.”[1] The complexity of this book deepened due to the confusion between the person of Jeremiah (which we have no record of beside the book) and the book of Jeremiah that tells us about the person.  

            Chapter 29 “reports on three (some think two) letters of Jeremiah (and one of Shemaiah) that address issues that were raised in chapters 26-28, especially false hope among the exiles.”[2] The letters were addressed to the exiles after the fall. These letters were between the people in exile, the false prophet and Jeremiah. The text considered here is a continuation of chapters 27th and 28th. “The dispute between the prophetic visions of Jeremiah and Hananiah in chapter 28 is about the most urgent question of the day.”[3] One must consider the relationship between Jeremiah and Hananiah and the kind of prophets the book presents. This is not where I want to go rather in which community development occurred in Babylon.

Community building is one stage forward (for the diaspora community) from what O’Connor addresses as “escaping with your life” in a time of pain. As she described it, escaping with your life is to gain the life as “booty of war.” “To gain your life as booty of war means that your life is all you have at war’s end.” (p.75). Jenny Curran’s words on the movie Forrest Gump, “run Forrest, run!” paints the picture of “booty of war.” After all, Jenny is an expert survivor. The deportees in Jeremiah had passed this stage of running for their life, and now they are in a place that is not home but seems safe, and they are trying to make sense of it all.

The running in a sense has stopped. Community building is one of the many ways the deportees gave meaning to the chaos. By creating a strong sense of community they gather words of encouragement and hope. As it is today for the African community in diaspora, it was true back then, most run out of their home with nothing to hold on. Refugees run away from death. Mostly, without knowing where they will land. They run to start from scratch with nothing material.  “Yet having one’s life is no small thing; it is the first requirement for a future [hope.]” (p.74). The gathering of the community is to make sense of this tragedy. The community that has been established in Babylon is supported by the nature of diaspora life that “frighten with the trauma of the loss of home.”(STEED 135). The new community formed in diaspora eases the trauma of home. Like a pain killer it never fixes the problem but gives a short lived relief.

      

The opening remarks of the chapter 29 give the indication of order within the exile community. There are “elders of the exiles and priests.” The exiled community responded to the trauma they just experience with proactive engagement of forming community, or by reestablishing the orders of in Judea. As Brueggemann states the book is “’unreadable,’ it seems clear enough because it is a commentary on, a reflection about, and an engagement with an ‘unreadable’ lived experience (p.86 Like Fire in the Bones.) Reading this text thousands of years after the incident with the same emotional charges brings a new understanding to the text. This text is powered by the conflicting voices presented in the previous chapter. Jeremiah and Hananiah addressed the issue of life in Babylon differently. These conflicting voices added to the experience of pain and trauma to the people in exile. This is common in disaster. There is a hurry to make someone accountable for disaster. Voices are added to the narrative. We encounter this every-time there is a disaster. O’Connor writes, “holding someone accountable for disaster are an interpretive task, a necessary effort to find explanation, to discover cause and effect, and to enable understanding of the catastrophe to emerge.” (p.50). In Jeremiah 29,  the cause and effect is spelled out “I have carried you into exile (v.7.) This is not an experience most who are impacted by disaster easily get. In some sense, the people of Jeremiah 29 had it easy. Today, the African diaspora continues to question case and effect of the evil that has misplaced many black-Africans away from home. This text gives hope to the current readers to hope in God and to continue to hope as community, hoping together and finding the comforting words of God. Jeremiah letters were a continual struggle with other prophets who were giving a false hope. As a community organizers,  we have to identify the voice of hope and comfort.