Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 10, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Do you think of yourself as living in exile? I imagine most of you don’t. I mean, we all know what an exile is, right? In our world, an exile is someone who has fled or been forced out of his or her homeland as a result of political or religious persecution. Those of you who lived through World War II may remember governments in exile, the Polish government in exile and the French under De Gaulle being notable examples. They were in exile because of the Nazi occupation and oppression of their homelands. A contemporary example would be opposition leaders from places like Iran and, until recently, Iraq living in exile, often it seems in Paris, which, I suppose, if you have to be in exile, is a better place to do it than most. In this modern sense of exile, we’re not exiles; but there’s another way of looking at exile, a Biblical way that may suggest a different answer to the question of whether or not we’re exiles.

The Bible begins, or very nearly begins, with a story of exile. The second of the two creation stories in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a story of exile. Coming at the very beginning of the Bible, it tells us that in some way the whole Bible is going to be a book about exile. You all know the story. Adam and Eve, the first people, stray from God’s way and are driven out of paradise into exile in a land "east of Eden." The story isn’t historical. We can’t understand it literally, but it is a powerful metaphor of the Bible’s take on the human condition. The story tells us that we live in exile from our Creator’s intention for us. We live in a world that is not the way God intends it to be. In other words, we live in exile from our true home, from the world as God created it.

There is one other big story of exile in the Hebrew Scriptures, the story of the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people in the 6th century BCE. First in 597 BCE, and then more completely in 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire conquered the Jewish kingdom of Judah and its capital Jerusalem. On each occasion the Babylonians forced the leaders and many of the people into exile in Babylon, far across the desert to the east in today’s Iraq. After the conquest and exile of 586, the kingdom of Judah was destroyed and the Jewish homeland existed no more. It was only when the Persians under Cyrus the Great crushed the Babylonians some fifty years later that some of the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to Judah and to establish a kind of Jewish state that was a mere shadow of its former self. The Babylonian exile ranks right up there with the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus some 1,000 years earlier as the most important events in Biblical history. It gives Hebrew Scripture one of its great, overarching themes, the theme of exile and return.

The story of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden is not historical. The story of Judah’s exile in Babylon is, but historical or not, they are both powerful myths, that is, powerful metaphors of the human condition. They tell us something powerfully true about ourselves and about our world. We live in exile. We live in exile from our true homeland, that is, from a human nature and a world as God intends them to be. We live east of Eden. We live in exile here in Babylon.

Throughout the history of the faith, Christians, or many of them anyway, have had this sense that somehow the world as it is is not our true home. They have had the sense that, metaphorically speaking, our true home is Eden, Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God, all of them ideal places where we most decidedly do not live but wish we did. Throughout the history of our faith that nagging sense of exile has begged the question of how people of faith should relate to that very real world in which we live in exile from our true homeland. Men and women of faith have given many different answers to that question over the centuries. One line of answers comes down basically to: Have nothing to do with it. This is the answer of separation. For example, this was the answer of the first Christian monastic movement. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE holy men and women known to history as the Desert Fathers and Mothers withdrew into the deserts of the Sinai and Egypt to live holy, pure lives in isolation from the sinful, corrupting influences of the world. That kind of monasticism remains an ideal in the Eastern Orthodox traditions to this day. More or less complete withdrawal from the world is one of the attractions of some of the Catholic monastic traditions in the West as well.

A second line of answers to the question of how people of faith are to relate to the world comes down to: Accommodate it. To accommodate means to make room for, or to bring into agreement or concord. We see the early church accommodating the culture of its time already in some of the New Testament writings, as when in the later Epistles the patriarchalism and misogyny of Greek culture displaces Jesus’ radical acceptance and inclusion of women. Accommodation became the Church’s primary way of relating to the world when Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Perhaps the clearest example is the way Augustine’s just war theory displaced Jesus’ radical teaching of non-violent resistance to evil. Most churches teach some form of accommodation to the world’s violent ways to this day, often being far less critical of those ways than Augustine was. And of course, both of these ways of relating to the world, separation and accommodation, often result in a one-sided emphasis on heaven as our true home, the place to which we all hope we are headed. In this way, even accommodation can be a kind of world rejection.

You might think that Jeremiah is urging accommodation on the Jewish exiles in Babylon in that passage we heard this morning. We are told that Jeremiah, who remained behind in Jerusalem after the city fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE and most of its inhabitants were marched off to exile in Babylon, has written a letter to those in exile. Claiming to speak for God, he tells the exiles basically to accept their exile and to build a life there in Babylon. He says: "Seek the welfare of the city where I [that is, God] have sent you into exile, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." Apparently, this advice was counter to advice other, presumably false, prophets were giving the exiles to rebel against Babylon.

Yet I don’t think Jeremiah was actually advising accommodation. A few verses farther on, Jeremiah promises the exiles that in due time God will bring them home out of exile. Jeremiah. 29:10 If they accommodated themselves to Babylonian culture, society, and religion, they would lose their identity; and there would be no one for God to bring back. So clearly Jeremiah is counseling neither separation nor accommodation as a way for the Jews to relate to the place where they were in exile.

What then was he counseling? He was, I think, counseling a third way that I believe is God’s way for all of us who live in exile from our true homeland. That third way is summed up by a phrase you may have heard before: "Be in the world but not of the world." Be in Babylon and do not seek to escape it. Pray for its welfare, for your welfare is tied up with its welfare. I would add: Pray for the Babylon’s welfare, for the Babylonians too are children God, although that prayer was probably beyond Jeremiah and the religious sensitivities of his time. Be in the world. Live as normal a life as you can there. Build houses and live in them. Raise your children and your children’s children. Be at peace and content (which does not mean be complacent) in the place where God has landed you.

But never forget who and whose you really are. Be in the world, but do not become worldly. Live in the world, for that is where God has put you; but do not be conformed to the ways and the values of the world. Be sure always to have your values shaped by your faith and not by the world in which you live. That, I think, is the faithful way to live in exile.

But why should we? What’s in it for us? Well, my answer to that question is simply that it is the only way to stay connected to God and faithful to God’s call to us. If we conform to the ways and the values of the world, we lose our connection to God. When we take our values from the world in which we live, we cannot avoid idolatry. Some worldly value will displace God as our ultimate concern. It might be the national security state that is so much on everyone’s minds these days, or wealth, or worldly success; but something other than God will become our god. When that happens, we lose all of the gifts that faith can bring us, those things we talked about last week--hope, strength, courage, and peace, among others. That’s the danger of accommodation. On the other hand, when we separate ourselves from the world, we turn our backs on God’s call to us to be transforming agents of peace and justice in the world, the leaven in the dough, the salt of the earth. That’s the danger of separation.

So, we live in exile. We live east of Eden in the kingdoms of the world and not the Kingdom of God. So be it. Let us live in exile, in the world but not of it. Let us be citizens of this land whose ultimate loyalty is to Jesus Christ our Lord and not to the demonic powers of this earth. Pray for the welfare of our land as Jeremiah says; but never forget that the one to whom we pray, and not that for which we pray, is Lord. Amen.