The Letter to People Who Lost the Building

It was winter, the ninth month, and the king was sitting in his winter house with a fire burning on the hearth in front of him.

A man named Jehudi stood and read him a scroll. Every time Jehudi got through three or four columns, the king reached over with a penknife, cut them off, and dropped them in the fire. Then Jehudi read the next few, and the king cut those too. Three of his own officials begged him to stop. He didn’t listen. He kept cutting until the whole scroll was gone.

Nobody in the room was afraid, the text says. Nobody tore their clothes.

The man who wrote it wasn’t there. He wasn’t allowed in the building.

Anyone who has watched a life’s work handled by people who didn’t want it knows something about that room, even from the hallway. The fire looks like the last word. The work is ash, the author is locked out, and the man holding the knife is the king.

It wasn’t the last word. But the author had to decide that, and nobody else was going to decide it for him.

Jeremiah was born into the family business, and the family business was the temple.

That’s the first thing his book tells you. Son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth, a village a few miles north of Jerusalem. He didn’t come to religion from outside. He was raised inside the institution, by the people who ran it.

He was young when the call came, young enough to argue. I don’t know how to speak. I’m only a youth. He lost the argument. For the next forty years, from the reign of a good king named Josiah to the day the city burned and past it, he did one thing. He stood inside the religious establishment and told it the building could not save anybody.

The sermon that made him famous was preached at the temple gate. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” Three times, the way people said it, the way you repeat a thing that settles an argument. He told them the building had become a den of robbers. Six hundred years later a carpenter from Nazareth walked into the same building and quoted him.

The book doesn’t clean him up.

He told God, in writing, you deceived me. Some translations soften the word to persuaded, and the softening is understandable, but the man is furious and the book keeps it. He cursed the day he was born, a whole paragraph of it, down to wishing harm on the man who carried the news to his father. He prayed that his enemies’ children would starve. That’s chapter eighteen, and it doesn’t get read aloud much.

He never married. The text says God told him not to. He was told to stay away from the feasts and the funerals both, so for forty years he was inside his own community and outside it at the same time. I sat alone, he says. It’s a report, not a figure of speech.

A priest had him beaten and put in the stocks at the temple gate. The priests and the prophets put him on trial and told him to his face he would die for what he’d said, and he survived because the officials and the people took his side, and one of them, Ahikam, made it hold. He was lowered into a cistern and left standing in the mud. He was held in a prison courtyard while the city fell. And at the end, after everything he’d said came true, a group of survivors took him to Egypt against his will, and the book just stops. Tradition says he died there. Scripture doesn’t say.

There’s no scene where the room comes around. No vindication, no old age among people who finally understood. He never saw the outcome of a single thing he said.

That’s the man the king was burning.

He’d been shut out of the temple. I am banned from going to the house of the Lord. So he called a scribe named Baruch and dictated, everything from the whole forty years, and sent Baruch into the building he couldn’t enter to read it aloud. That’s the scroll that ended up on the king’s hearth. And when the king ordered both men arrested, the text says only that the Lord hid them.

He did some of his most lasting work from outside, and not only the scrolls.

The verse on the coffee mugs, I know the plans I have for you, comes from a letter. Jeremiah wrote it to people who had been carried off to Babylon. Their temple was gone. Their city was about to be. They were living somewhere they never chose, among people who shared nothing they believed, and prophets in Jerusalem and among the exiles were telling them it would all be over in a couple of years.

Jeremiah wrote and told them seventy.

Then he told them what to do with seventy years in a place that wasn’t home. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

There’s no temple in it. No priest, no altar, no instruction to build a smaller copy of what they’d lost. Build a house. Plant something. Make the city you’re stuck in better than you found it. And the promise everybody quotes without reading the envelope says God is in that place too.

The man who wrote that had every reason to say the opposite. His family line was the temple. His life had been spent at its gate. If anyone was entitled to tell exiles that real life was suspended until the building came back, it was him.

He told them to unpack.

Then the field.

The city is under siege, and Jeremiah is under guard in the court of the prison. His cousin Hanameel comes to him with an offer: buy the family field at Anathoth. Buy ground in a country weeks from being burned, from a jail yard, at full price.

He buys it. Seventeen shekels of silver, weighed in front of witnesses. He signs the deed and has it sealed in a clay jar so it will last. Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

And from the same years comes the passage about a new covenant. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. No more teaching each neighbor, for they shall all know me. A priest’s son, shut out of the temple, writing down that a day was coming when the arrangement would not run through a building at all. It would run through people.

God didn’t stay behind in the building. The most durable work of Jeremiah’s life, the book you can open tonight, was done after they took the building away from him.

I was inside for twenty-five years and I’ve been out for twenty. I say it once so you know where I’m standing, and I claim nothing by it. If I had one page of Scripture to hand somebody who’d just lost their building, whatever the building was, it would be that letter. Not because it’s comforting. Because it’s practical, and because the man who wrote it had lost his building too and still said build.

Where this meets your week

The letter was addressed to people who had lost their building, and it still reads that way.

Driving past it. The church you left is still on the road you take, and you still slow down and look at who’s parked there. That’s grief, and it’s allowed. But the exiles were told to seek the welfare of the city they were in, not the one they’d left. Take a different road for a month. Then, when you’re ready, drive past on purpose, once, pray for the people inside by name, and go home. That’s the letter in one drive.

The faith that came with the job. For a pastor or anyone who served on a staff, prayer had a schedule, a building and an audience, and when the role went the scaffolding went with it. It’s possible to go years without praying alone, for yourself. Jeremiah’s whole book is a man talking to God from outside the building, and not always politely. Start there. Ten minutes, a chair, no audience. It will feel clumsy for a while, and that’s all right.

The person running it now. A company sold, a role handed over, and the new person changed the hours, dropped the thing you started, hired somebody you wouldn’t have. Every instinct says call and fix it. Jeremiah bought a field he would never farm and had the deed sealed in a jar for people who came after him. The deed is already handed over. Make one call with no advice in it, ask how they’re doing, and let the field be theirs.

“So what do you do now?” Somebody asks it at a dinner, and out comes I used to. It happens after a retirement and it happens harder after being pushed out. The exiles were never asked what they used to be in Jerusalem. They were told what to do in Babylon. Practice a different answer out loud this week. Not a title. The thing you’re building or planting. I’m putting in a garden. I’m helping a friend get a shop straight. I’m reading through Jeremiah.

The letter itself is the place to start. Jeremiah twenty-nine, verses four through seven. It takes a minute to read.

Then write your own address on it. The actual place you’re in, the town, the street, the situation. The house you’d build, or the one you already live in. The thing you’d plant. One piece of the city’s welfare you could put a hand on this year, something plain: a neighbor, a shop, a kid who needs a ride, a road that floods. None of it needs a building.

And if what you build gets burned in front of you, the next verse is already written. After the king’s fire, Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch, and Baruch wrote it all again from his mouth, and there were added besides unto them many like words.