Faith & Exile

Sermon planned for Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

Please join me in reading a litany based on Psalm 137. The Psalm we just read was written by the prophet Jeremiah. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the scribes wrote that this psalm was written by Jeremiah in honor of King David. Jeremiah was a prophet of the Jewish exile into Babylon. He wrote this psalm in a time when the nation was being hauled off into enemy territory. Jeremiah gave words of judgment, but also words of hope to a people that were being torn from the land that God promised them.

The two themes we’re looking at this morning are the Jewish exile and also “World Communion Sunday”. On this Sunday there are many congregations, around the whole world, who are exploring how it is that we all make up Christ’s One Body. In other words, this morning Christians all over the world are asking: “how are we the One Church”? “How are we united, even in spite of all the ways in which we are scattered and divided?” “How is a fractured Church still the one and only Church of Jesus Christ?” Together with these Christians, we’re going to explore these questions, but we’re going to hold them up against the story of Israel’s exile into Babylon.

Israel’s exile was a nightmare. The exile was a disaster for Jewish understandings of God and the covenant. I’m not sure it’s possible for us to really understand what that nation went through, and how tragic this event was for their self-understanding. Sure, Mennonites have been exiled from their properties. There are Mennonites, even today, who are forced off their land in the Congo, by bandits and evil men and their violence. Many of our descendents were forced off their land in Russia – houses taken away, farmland stolen, men disappeared into the night, never to be seen again, and women abused and killed. Some of you would have a deeper understanding of what the Jews went through, being torn from your families and your homes.

But for the Jews, this exile was not just an exile from land that they owned legally. This exile was from land that they were promised by God. Jewish spiritual identity was, and still is, entirely bound-up with the promise of Canaan. God promised this land to Abraham and to the Israelites. When they were ripped out of their homeland, the Jews experienced a spiritual and theological disaster. How could the land be taken from them? How could they be thrown off of the Promised Land? Even though the prophets had warned the leaders repeatedly that this would happen, the exile had surprised the people of God. God wasn’t bluffing. Their disobedience had gone too far.

The question that this raised, for Israel, was how could God’s salvation continue, without he promised land? For the Israelites, salvation was understood not just as a right relationship with God, but a harmonious life in a peaceful land. But with Jeremiah, we learn that God can still establish his purposes with Israel, even while they are in exile. Nevertheless, being divorced from their land, the Israelites now lived only on faith. Their identity as God’s people was no longer clearly confirmed by their life in the land, it was now a matter of keeping faith that God was still their God, and that they were still His people. But faith is powerful.

The prophet Habakkuk, when lamenting the violence of the captors of Israel, writes that there was still a vision of hope. The exile was punishment, but God had not abandoned Israel entirely. Habakkuk told the people to keep faith. The proud conquerors didn’t have the spirit of God living in them – instead, the righteous live by faith. In the darkness of exile – in the wreckage of homelessness – Israel had the light of faith.

But how do you express faith in the ruins of defeat? How did Russian Mennonites express their faith amidst persecution? How do Christians, persecuted across the world today, keep the faith? We keep faith by being able to Lament. What is Lament? Our trusted online resource, Wikipedia, states that “a lament or lamentation is a song, a poem, or piece of music expressing grief, regret, or mourning.” This definition gets it almost right. A biblical definition of Lament would add that it is a part of our worship. Lament is something we do in front of God, because we recognize that He’s the only One left to turn to with our grief. Lament is part of what we do when we grieve at a funeral. We express sadness that a cherished life is now gone. We cry out, knowing that there’s something horribly wrong with a world where relationships are destroyed by death. In grief, we turn to the only One we know who has any power over death – the One who put death itself to death. In anguish, we Lament before God, knowing that He created us for so much more than decay and the tomb.

In the passage we heard earlier, we have a Lament over the empty city of Jerusalem. The words there are what you get when you keep faith in the face of disaster. “How lonely sits the city that once was full… how like a widow she has become… she weeps bitterly in the night… she has no one to comfort her – her friends have become her enemies.” My sermon, last week, tried to undo some of the myths of prosper theology, (aka “health-wealth gospel”) – that a person’s misfortunes are a direct result of God’s punishment. A poem of Lament recognizes the powerful logic of this kind of thinking. Has God abandoned Israel completely? Has God’s wrath thrown Israel into a final encounter with death? Are these the questions our ancestors asked when they were hunted down in Europe? Is our comfortable life in Canada a sign of God’s blessing? Or, are things more complicated than that? Is affluence, perhaps, a different kind of exile?

The Babylonian exile lasted until Cyrus, King of Persia, defeated the Assyrians. King Cyrus was a monotheist and he liked the Israelites. The scriptures tell us that King Cyrus saw himself as God’s heroic Savior for Israel. That’s also how he was viewed by many. He let Israel return to Jerusalem and to Canaan. But things were different. The Jews were allowed to return, but they were under the umbrella of a new power. They didn’t have political control over their land; at least not in the same way as before. The land that was promised to them was now under King Cyrus’ jurisdiction. The end of exile was a great thing for Israel, but it was a complicated blessing. Israel would never again have an extended rule over the territory of Canaan. Even today, Israeli-Jewish existence in Canaan is a complicated one at best.

From a Christian perspective, many of these issues of exile were settled in the life and work of Jesus, who we claim is the Messiah of God. Jesus is the Living Word, and his own body the Temple. The physical temple may be a heap of rubble, but the Living Temple sits at Gods right hand. Jerusalem is a spiritual city of God’s Kingdom, and in Jesus we have entrance into that city, no matter where we live. We also believe that, on the final day, God will establish this new Jerusalem and we shall be raised in the resurrection and that we will join God in that city. The Church is this group of misfits that Jesus called together to be His body. We see ourselves as those who are reconciled – Jew & Gentile, rich & poor, slave & free, man & woman. In other words, Christians understand that the exile was only fully abolished at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit formed the Church as a living Promised Land – where God’s gifts are experienced first-hand. In the Church, we participate in – and we get a foretaste of – the heavenly banquet of Jerusalem, whenever we join together to break bread and share the cup. We receive citizenship in this Kingdom when the Spirit leads us to confess Jesus as Lord, and we respond by clinging to Jesus in the waters of baptism.

The pain of the Jewish exile seems far removed from us for at least two reasons. First of all, we’re doing quite well, as Christians here in Canada. It’s the same reason that we’re having an increasingly difficult time understanding folks like the Amish. These faith cousins of ours are always cautious about they as Christians engage in the surrounding culture. They recognize that the culture we live in is not our home – we are in exile. We’re forgetting that, in the past, similar cultures turned on us Mennonites in ferocious ways. The second reason that we find it difficult to identify with the Jewish theme of exile is because our Christian theology seems to have erased all the tensions of exile. We no longer worry so much about not living on a piece of ‘Promised Land’, because that land has been spiritualized. We no longer lament our scattered existence, because we are joined together and knit into one family through baptism, and not through a sovereign government. In other words, we don’t relate to the Jewish exile because we’re in a good space physically and spiritually. Our spiritual well-being isn’t hung-up on being in charge of some territory, and our physical well-being is… well… it’s pretty good. The problems of exile are not problems we face, here in southern Manitoba where we are quite at home.

But that’s where we come to this morning’s other theme: World Communion Sunday. This morning, we’re asking: how is it that such a divided group of believers are still Jesus’ One Body. How can the City on the hill be governed by so many contradictory philosophies? Even as we are gathered here, this morning, the airways are filled with religious broadcasts; Christian preachers of different stripes condemning each other’s teachings. When I drive around southern Manitoba, I listen to one of two stations: CFAM or EWTN. One station is through and through conservative Protestant, the other conservative Catholic. Both stations frequently include programs where preachers condemn the other party of false teachings, and even accusing the liberal perspectives of their own group. You can count the different groups of Protestants by the different dress-codes you see in Winkler or Altona. How does such a conflicted group of disciples still teach and believe that there is only One Body of Christ – the Church? It’s kind of like preaching about the resurrection at a funeral – you can only do it by faith. But, like I said earlier, faith is powerful.

After the exile, Israel could only exist by faith. They had no land to base their self-understanding on. For years, the unity of the Church convinced its leaders that God’s fulfillment of time had already come. The Church flexed its muscles – it was the New Jerusalem, plain and simple. And things got messy. When you have that much confidence, you can get yourself into all kinds of fights. There’s something about exile that makes a people walk lightly, and with humility. In exile, Israel was forced to think carefully about the nature of God’s covenant. The people prayed more earnestly. God’s blessing was a gift to be received. It couldn’t be assumed or controlled. In exile, the Israelites studied God’s Word more diligently. It was the exile that occasioned the synagogues. The people gathered to read the books of Moses, because there was no temple in which to make sacrifice. Without the temple, people turned to the Word of God as the only place to meet God. And in this process, Israel came to know that it could still be God’s covenant people in exile. Sure, they awaited a time of return, when God’s Messiah would restore His people – but until then, Israel would continue and increase in its faithfulness to God’s law. Faith would continue, and faith was powerful. As the prophet Habakkuk said, “the righteous live by faith.” Jesus said that faith could uproot mountains and mulberry trees and throw them into the sea.

The Church may be divided, but this morning we are invited to a powerful faith. God is still doing amazing things among us and through us. MB’s and GC’s get married these days and that’s ok. Catholics and Mennonites are talking to one another again – painfully and prayerfully, but we’re doing it. Lutherans have begun to turn and repent from the ways they persecuted us Anabaptists in the 16th century; and we’re asking them to forgive us for how we demonized them for years. All kinds of disciples are gathered to study together at places like Providence, Briercrest, and Canadian Mennonite University – and we’re developing deeper and closer friendships all the time. And, although we offer up the lament of the psalmist, longing for a day when we can sing the songs of Zion, we also know that God has not abandoned the Church, even in its confusion and its exile. This morning, together with millions of Christians all over the world, we pray for Jesus to give us, once again, the gift of being His body in the world. This morning, on World Communion Sunday, we open ourselves to the Spirit of Pentecost, knowing that God can end our exile, trusting that Jesus can still unite this odd crew of disciples – who are just as divided as they’ve always been. This morning, I encourage you to go home and pray for our fellow brothers and sisters of faith – and pray for our Church. Get to know a Catholic; pray together with an Anglican; build a friendship with a Pentecostal, and join them this morning in trusting that God is still in control. Join God’s Church in proclaiming that He still has a wonderful plan for us. Pray that we will be drawn even closer to one another in our love for Jesus Christ – whom we confess as Lord.

Please pray with me,

Jesus Christ, Lord of the Church, we are excited this morning to know that many of your disciples, all over the world, are calling on you to draw us together – and we also joyfully ask you for this. We confess the many times we have been unwilling to recognize, as family, those many others who call you Lord. We open ourselves to Your Spirit, who draws us to the common confession – that you are both Lord and Christ. As with Israel in exile, we ask that you would comfort us as we grieve the deep divisions that still somehow remain in Your Body. We don’t understand how it is possible, but we trust you, in faith. We know you are Good and that you have reconciled us to the Father, and that you are reconciling us to one another. Teach us what our role is in the work of reconciliation. We ask these things in Your name – Risen Lord, come soon! Amen.