Hating Cities | Resistance Revival Chorus
Friends,
They are coming after our cities. But hating cities is not a new thing. But Jeremiah calls us to love where we land, including in the city.
I live almost in rural land (it can't really be rural, there is a mall). I love the woods and the farms. But that doesn't mean I should accept the call to be afraid of cities.
Try this one on this week!
-Liz
Love the City
Jeremiah 29 offers instructions (from God) for life in exile. Jerusalem has been overthrown and the leadership is sent to live in Babylon. When they arrive they are to build houses, plant gardens, take husbands and wives for their children. That is, essentially, instructions to make themselves at home. Do what is needed for ordinary life. Implicit in these directions is the fact that God is coming with them to this new city.
Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. Jeremiah 29:4 is explicit: love the city you are in. Care for it. Pray for it.
This city will be full of people who are different than you are, for they are Babylonians, and you are not, still, God's call is to care for the city.
There is a hidden trap in our U.S. language about what it means to be an American, and what it means to live in a city. When white people arrived here they saw a promised land--a wilderness that was wild, beautiful, clean, and very different from crowded and filthy European cities. And then in our westward expansion, we again moved from the crowded cities of the east into open expanses of land. And we developed a story about America as rural, farm, clean, with people mostly far from one another.
We are culturally opposed to cities. I mean, they are great places to drive into, places for dinner and a show, and places for a ballgame, although many stadiums have moved out of town. But idyllic, apple pie life seems to happen in a small New England town or in a rural farm community.
In contrast cities are crowded, dark, and dirty. We have a mythology of the best of the U.S. as rural. Our suburbs try to duplicate rural living with a plot of land for each person. In the U.S. we have subtly identified good living as outside of our cities.
This seems completely benign. A memory of a pleasant past, or an imagining of a slow-paced future.
It is not necessarily benign. The Pol Pot regime moved nearly everyone out of cities in an effort to return to a nostalgic farming past. This was part of the anti-intellectual movement--people were also punished for wearing glasses, and presumably, spending time reading. (What else would you do with glasses?)
And our present national government is building on that mythology to play up our hatred of cities.
Our biblical witness has an anti-city focus as well, at least early in the texts. The tower of babel is built where larger numbers of people gathered, and God's purported solution to that was to disperse the crowds by introducing language differences. Abraham leaves his hometown to be a nomad and finds different bad consequences at each city his household visits. It is possible that Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed for being unwelcoming to strangers, is not about the individuals but about cities where it is not safe for human life. Joseph is a rural farm-boy, sold into slavery, synonymous to being sold into city life.
Today cities are identified as places where crime happens, where immigrants live, where there is noise and dirt. Not incidentally our nation doesn't have blue states and red states, it has cities, which are blue, and rural areas which are red. Urban has long been used as code for places where black and brown people are a majority of the population. If you start listening for it, you will hear the anti-city rhetoric of our times.
Biblically, cities slowly gain acceptance over time. The city of Ninevah hears about God and repents. God relents and provides the people a King, situated in a city. Eventually God's home is moved out of the Ark and into a temple in the center of a city.
White churches have had their own uncomfortable relationship to cities, often finding their members have moved out, and sometimes moving along with them to the suburbs. It is not unusual for parishes to treat the city as the place to go to do mission, while home is outside the city limits.
This Jeremiah text is pro-city. It is a call to care for cities. Wherever we live, we must acknowledge the benefit of cities. They are efficient for housing near employment. They offer places to gather for schooling, for arts, and for socializing. They allow for intermixing of many different people, for finding love, and friendships across social barriers.
I usually want a call to action, but I don't have much of one today. Just that we pay attention. It is easy to create fear of cities. We must instead seek the welfare of the city, defend it, care for it's people.
Are you in a city? Near a city? What is needed to protect your city? Just reply to this email to let me know what's happening.
I don't know that the Boston Globe follows the lectionary, but they just had this article with a brief history how we have hated our cities.
Everyone Deserves to be Free by Deva Mahal and the Resistance Revival Chorus. A song on YouTube.
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