Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 25, 2008

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.

In the tenth century BCE the great Hebrew kings David and his son Solomon built a kingdom that was as large as Israel ever was or ever has been. It stretched farther north, east, and south than present day Israel and included land in present day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The kingdom of David and Solomon wasn’t exactly one of the mighty empires of the ancient Middle East, but by Israelite standards it was big and powerful. To the people of that time clearly God was showering favor and blessings upon Israel, its people, and God’s anointed ones as they were called, the kings themselves.

After Solomon died in the late 10th century BCE things began to fall apart. The great kingdom of David and Solomon split in two into a northern kingdom called Israel and a southern kingdom called Judah, with Jerusalem as the capital of the southern kingdom. The land outside the traditional Hebrew homeland was lost. Over time a succession of powerful empires arose in the east that threatened the very existence of the two little Hebrew states. Then, in 722 BCE, the first catastrophe struck. The Assyrian Empire, expanding westward out of Mesopotamia, conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. That kingdom disappeared from history, never to reappear. Judah to the south became an Assyrian vassal state but retained its nominal existence and independence. Later on, however, the mighty Assyrians were themselves conquered by the even mightier Babylonians. The Babylonian Empire was not content to leave Judah as a vassal state. In 586 BCE, after a prolonged war, the Babylonians finally conquered and sacked Jerusalem. They destroyed Solomon’s great temple, the seat of the Hebrew religion. Then they marched all of the political, military, economic, and religious elite of the Hebrew people off into exile in Babylon. The Babylonian exile, or the Babylonian Captivity as it is called, lasted for fifty years. Then the Babylonians were themselves conquered by the Persian Empire, falling as empires always do to the next vigorous, militant, and expansionist empire to arise. The Persians allowed the Jewish exiles (or their descendents, for few if any of the original exiles were left alive by that time) to return to Jerusalem. There they constructed a new temple and recreated a Jewish kingdom, if only as a vassal state of the Persians.

And I can hear you all sitting out there saying: “There goes Sorenson again with his stupid history lessons. What is any of that to us? That’s all ancient history! Boring!” Am I right? I know that at least some of you were thinking things like that. And you’re right, of course, in a way at least. Those facts I just gave you are literally ancient history, and as ancient history they have very little if anything to do with us.

Yet many of you have heard me say many times before that the great stories of the Bible aren’t just about things that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us, and this basic Biblical story of the rise, defeat, exile, and restoration of the Hebrew people is one of the great overarching stories of the Bible, what the great UCC Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls one of the Bible’s great “trajectories.” So unless I’m just plain wrong about the great Bible stories being about us as well as about them so long ago, there must be some way in which this story is about us. So let me take a crack at figuring out how the story of the exile and return of the Jewish people from captivity in Babylon may be about us as well as about them.

The story of the Babylonian exile is a story of people exiled from their home, of people estranged from everything they had known, from their true place in the world, and indeed from their God. In those days gods were strongly associated with particular places, and being driven out of Judah also meant being driven away from Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew people. One of the great Psalms of the Exile expresses this sense poignantly and powerfully. Referring to Judah and Jerusalem as “Zion” Psalm 137 says:

By the rivers of Babylon--
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
[2] On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
[3] For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
[4] How could we sing the Lord's song
in a foreign land? NRSV

In forced exile in Babylon the Hebrew captives were alienated from their God and from their true selves, for they could be their true selves only in their true home. They could worship their God only in God’s land, Judah. The story of the Babylonian Exile is a story of the human experience of alienation from self and from God.

And that, my friends, is something that I believe we can all identify with. Or at least I know I can, so let me speak about myself rather than about you. You can decide for yourselves if what I have to say applies to you. I know that most of the time I live alienated from my true self. St. Paul’s words resonate powerfully with me when he says “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Romans 7:19 NRSV For example, I do not live up to my capabilities. I know that. I am prone to laziness and idleness. I could do a lot more than I do, but I don’t do it. I could do a lot more to work for God’s justice and God’s peace, but I don’t. I know that that is not the true me, but it is the me that I know. I live in exile, in alienation from my true self. And I live in alienation from God. I know that God is always with me, but most of the time I live as though I were not with God. Most of the time God is far from my thoughts as I concern myself with worldly things rather than with divine things. Most of the time God seems distant from me, as distant as Jerusalem is from Babylon. I live in exile, in alienation from my God. So it’s not hard for me to see the story of the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews so many centuries ago as being not only about them but as being also about me. Their story is a metaphor for my story. Their story is a metaphor for the human story of alienation, of spiritual and psychological exile.

But remember: Their story did not end with exile. Some of the exiles knew that it wouldn’t end there. The author of chapters 40 through 56 of the book of Isaiah, known to scholars as Second Isaiah, writing during the Babylonian exile, knew that it would not end there. He wrote powerfully of God’s desire that the exiles should return home. Our reading from Isaiah this morning is one of the passages where he does that. In that reading God says to the exiles “Come out.” God promises to lead them back, to lead them home. God promises to provide for them: “They shall feed along the ways…, they shall not hunger or thirst…, by springs of water [I] will guide them.” Isaiah 49:9-10 NRSV Isaiah’s words here reflect God’s passionate desire that God’s people should return from exile, from alienation, should return to their homes and to their God. That is God’s passionate desire for us too. Isaiah’s words are about us, not just about them.

Yet Second Isaiah knew that some of his people would have trouble hearing his words. He wrote: “But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my LORD has forgotten me.’” Isaiah 49:14 That’s about us too, isn’t it? Many times it does feel like God has forsaken and forgotten us. In times of pain and grief it truly can feel like God has turned God’s back on us and walked away. But Isaiah knew that that wasn’t true. He had God say: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Isaiah 49:15 NRSV God does not forget us, ever. God does not forsake us, ever. The sense that God has done so is an illusion entirely of our own making. Our exile from God is an illusion entirely of our own making. God is always there calling us home to God just as surely and just as powerfully as God was calling the Jewish exiles back to Jerusalem from Babylon in that place so far away and that time so long ago.

And when we respond to God’s call and return to our home in God we find that we return to our own true selves as well. When we return to God we find that our true selves are ourselves with God, not apart from God. When we return to God we find the clarity of discernment, the peace, and the courage to be who we truly are. All alienation ends, alienation from God and from our true selves. We return to our true homes, our spiritual homes with the God who never forsakes us and who always calls us back from Babylon, back from exile, back from separation into unity and wholeness.

So now. Does that history lesson that I started this sermon with still seem irrelevant and boring? Maybe it still does, but it doesn’t to me—and not just because I have this pathologic fascination with history that drives some of you so nuts. It doesn’t to me because I know that that story is about me too. Not literally of course, but then we aren’t literalists around here. It is about us as metaphor. It is about us as myth, as a story that connects us to God and God to us. In that story we hear God calling us home. God is always calling us home, home to wholeness of life, home to God, home to ourselves. Are we ready to hear? Are we ready to go? Amen.