“For 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.” I have to be careful whenever I say anything about this
verse because my wife has it tattooed around her ankle, but she’s in Alexandria, so... here we
go! She’s not alone in liking this either. Jeremiah 29:11 has been called
the most popular biblical verse of my generation (I should probably explain at
this point that I’m going to refer to my generation as the “millennial”
generation because that’s become the cool thing to do; and I’m not
sure yet if this is a compliment or a derogatory term, so for now I’ll go with it).
Anyway, more than one stuffy commentator has noted with a kind of sweeping
generalization that members of the millennial generation claim Jeremiah 29:11 as
a personal motto because we are selfish and entitled, believing in a God who is
out to serve us, and because, you know, we’re snotty kids who haven’t figured
out what the real world is like. Basically, Jeremiah 29:11 has become the
rallying point for theologians who want to paint a negative picture of America’s
Christian youth.
Like most stereotypes there’s a
grain of truth in this. All of us pass the Bible through the lens of our own
life experience. So, when a person’s life experience to this point covers only
years in school, including perhaps bullying, struggling to find the right social
group, discovering who you are against the backdrop of who others expect you to
be, and never living up to the standards set by your parents, your friends,
your church… in other words when life basically looks like forces outside of
your control telling you what to do and be, it is awfully attractive to look for
a promise that another force outside of your control has good plans for your
life. If you want to understand why millennials love Jeremiah 29:11, you need to
start by understanding what it means to be a teenager. Mostly, it’s rough.
So,
the danger of ridiculing this verse from Jeremiah is that we take away the
aspect of God that makes the most sense to young people in desperate need of a
force directing their lives toward some good. This is no small thing. Youth and
young adults are looking for something to ground their lives, and many
have no idea how easily they have internalized the idea that God has perfect
plans for our lives. It’s what gets us through days where relationships are not
enough, where friends desert us, and where parents feel like an oppressive
enemy. The idea that God has a perfect plan for you is extremely comforting to
those who have had very few completely free choices in their lives.
My sixteen-year-old self loved verses
like Jeremiah 29:11, because even though I got by in high school, even though I
wasn’t seriously bullied and didn’t have significant behavior problem, I nevertheless
had a pretty terrible perspective on life. Everyday I felt out of control.
There is no handbook on how to fit in and, by the way, strangely enough being a
state chess champion does not make you popular (it’s just weird). The truth is
I was weird, and so are most young people. They do stupid things and don’t
understand why. They know all too well their imperfections, even as they know
it’s completely unacceptable to admit them. And all of them are in search of some
assurance, like we find at the core of this Jeremiah passage, that it will all
work out in the end, because on most days they have no idea how that could
possibly be true.
As young people mature into
adulthood their perspective widens, and they discover what the rest of us know: that the world is both good and bad; that life is filled with wonderful,
beautiful moments and terrible, horrible, no-good stories of hate and greed. And
therein lies the danger of Jeremiah 29:11 as the credo of a generation of
millennial Christians, because when we grow up we discover that any destiny for
our lives is full of collateral damage.
Nowadays, when I hear this verse from Jeremiah on its own I wonder what it
sounds like to somebody who is in the grips of senseless tragedy. I can see how
Jeremiah 29:11 could give hope to a person who is down and out, but I wonder
how it sounds to somebody who just suffered an incomprehensible loss from which
there is no return. If God has plans for me, what kind of plan did God have for
this other person who died young, or this person now living with Alzheimer’s? You
see, the danger of Jeremiah 29:11 as the overarching principle that guides our
lives is that it becomes that self-serving thing that the social commentators
mock. When things go wrong it means fitting terrible events into the idea that
it is all part of God’s plan.
I can understand why we do that—the words come so easily to us that I think we probably don’t even
consider their ramifications—but the effect of saying “It’s part of God’s plan”
is more often terrible than good. If everything we see in the world is part of
God’s plan it’s at the very least a terribly messy plan. If God’s plan is for six million Jews to die in the Holocaust, that’s more than enough to call the plan's goodness into question. If the plan is for terrorist attacks and school
shootings and mental illness, no, I think we can do without all that, thank you
very much. This idea that God snuffs out people now and again as a kind of
mechanism to make the world move in a certain direction is not only frightening;
it’s not the God who we find in the Bible.
The reason we feel the need to use Jeremiah
29:11 in this way is because we read it on its own, as if it were from a
collection of wise sayings about God. That’s actually how we read the Bible most of
the time, and it makes sense for a generation of people who have grown up with
Twitter—all wisdom must come in 140 characters or less. My generation, in our
rush to latch on to some pithy wisdom to guide our lives, simplified things to
a single verse when we needed the whole story, and this is a microcosm of how
we live our lives. The single verse was a comfort in those dark days of
adolescence when we were uncertain of how to fit in or who to be, but now in
adulthood the one verse just seems hopelessly naive. In adulthood, we are in need of something deeper and richer and more in line with
how those words sounded when they first came out of Jeremiah’s mouth. We need the whole story.
When we
read the whole story we discover that Jeremiah 29:11 is really about God’s plan
for Israel
in exilel. “For surely I know
the plans I have for you.” You—plural. Y’all (if I must). And—you know what?—Israel isn’t
always going to like the plan. The plan is going to mean a long time hanging
out in Babylon—touring the hanging gardens, getting along as best they can with
the natives—and only finally, after years and years, will they return to their
land. But this is a promise for the community; not the individual. During that
time in exile an entire generation of Israelites will die off. So when the people finally return to the land it is with an entirely new generation of descendents.
So, yes, God has a plan, but it is likely to outlive you and me. And—you
know what’s funny?—I think millenials would absolutely love this if they only knew about it!
We love the idea of a plan and order for this world, because those of us who’ve lived through middle school and high
school understand how terrible human systems can be. Somebody always gets left
out; somebody always falls through the cracks. People are hurting and it
doesn’t help to tell them that God has a plan for their life because they have been
taught that they are not remarkable, that they don’t fit in, and any sense of innate worthiness is crushed beneath self-hatred and a sensation of being trapped in a
fate from which there is no escape. What my generation needs
more than knowing it will be OK for you or me is to know that there is a fundamental
order to creation where good wins—that the old stories are true; that the hero comes
through in the end—because we have lived in a world that questions that ending.
We don’t know anymore whether good will win or evil—our lives have become No Country for Old Men; our lives have
become Don Quixote, or, for something
that the youth can relate to, our lives have become Grand Theft Auto. Good might win, or maybe evil. Heck, it’s hard to
tell which is which anymore. Those are the stories we're told.
But Jeremiah 29:11 calls bologna on
that—actually it calls it something else that I’m too chicken to say from the
pulpit. Jeremiah was speaking to a suffering people whose homes had been taken
by a marauding empire who worshiped a foreign god that Israel did not
know. He was speaking to a people who felt trapped, who could see no escape
from the world they were living, people who weren’t sure if good would win or
evil. To all rights these should be the people who turned in defeat to a kind
of nihilism that says, “Oh well, I guess this is all there is,” but they
weren’t. Jeremiah gives them something else: a future with hope.
We cannot underestimate how important that is. We need to know that there is always a future with hope, so we must say it again and again, but this future is also much bigger than you or me.
There
are no guarantees for you as an individual, but, frankly, most of us are tired of
trying to live up to impossible standards as individuals anyway. More to the
point, the history of faith we discover in our sacred texts has very little to
do with individuals. For all of our modern ideas that salvation is a thing
between me and Jesus, the reality is not even close. When Jesus goes to
Zaccheus’ house in that story made famous by the Sunday School song, Jesus does
not say “Salvation has come to you,
Zaccheus.” Instead he says, “Salvation has come to this house.” Not just to
Zaccheus but to the whole fabric of his home. This is the way that salvation
comes. It comes to communities where some are faithful and strong for the sake
of the ones who feel weak—not everyone has Jesus walk into their
house after all. In community, your faith is not measured against others but all
faith is measured together as one body of Christ; the ones with an abundance of faith
are there to lift up those who don’t currently have the strength to believe. You actually cannot understand Jeremiah 29:11 until you internalize it
in community with one another, because God’s plans are always bigger than you. Death
and destruction might come—they are, after all, a casualty of our
sinfulness—but God’s plan moves forward not by means of death but in spite of
it. God’s plan might outlive you; in fact, it almost certainly will. But—and
this is a very big “but”—God’s plan is that your life will matter because good
will win, evil will lose, and even if our lives sometimes feel without purpose,
every life is meaningful—in fact, every life is necessary—because it is part of
the body of Christ.
“For 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.” It’s true, but it’s plural. It’s always bigger than we
think; and it doesn’t negate our suffering; it just means that, in the end, we
will triumph over it.
Thanks for sharing this blog..
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