Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 10, 2010

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.

Napoleon. The Shah of Iran. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. What do they all have in common? They all spent part of their lives as exiles. Napoleon was sent into exile as a punishment after he was deposed. The Shah of Iran fled into exile after he was deposed. Solzhenitsyn was forced into exile by a government that couldn’t tolerate his truth telling. Cases like these are probably what we think of when we think of exile.

Exile actually plays a big role in the Bible. The UCC’s great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann names exile as one of the major “trajectories” or themes of the Hebrew Bible, but exile in the Bible has a somewhat different character than it does in the cases of those individuals we just named, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning. So to get at that character let’s look at the two Old Testament passages that we just heard.

The first recounts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. (Oddly the text says that only Adam was expelled, but as the story continues it quickly becomes clear that Eve was expelled with him.) Now, as long ago as the second century CE Christians knew that we are not to understand this story literally. They knew that this story is what they called allegory and what we would call myth. Myth here doesn’t mean something that isn’t true. It means a story that tells us something about God and about our relationship with God. In this story God drives the first people out of the earthly paradise that God had intended for them. They now must live a much harder life “east of Eden,” in a place that was not their true home. That is, they were forced into exile.

Our second passage is set at the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrew people. Jerusalem has been conquered by the Babylonian empire, and the elite of Jewish life have been marched off into exile in Babylon, in present day Iraq. A foreign conqueror has taken them away from their home and is forcing them to live in exile in an alien place.

Unlike the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the forced exile of her people describes an actual historical event. But actual historical events, especially really ancient ones like this one, don’t hold a lot of interest for us—well, not for most of us except for a few oddballs like me—if we see them only as historical events. Let me suggest that the story of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, in addition to recounting an actual historical event, also functions as myth. It too is a story that tells us something about God and our relationship to God. Indeed, I think that as myth the Babylonian exile of the Jews tells us much the same thing as the myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Both of these myths tell us that living in exile is a prominent characteristic of human life. Indeed, the myth of Adam and Eve says that living in exile is the defining characteristic of human life. In that myth human life as we know it begins with exile, with expulsion from the idyllic home God had created for humans. The Babylonian exile is the pivotal event in the life of the Hebrew people. In these stories the Bible is telling us, I think, that exile is a foundational feature of human existence. They suggest that we all live in exile of one kind or another.

So OK. We live in exile, but exile from what? In both the Adam and Eve story and the Babylonian exile story God’s people are removed from the place God had intended for them. God made the Garden of Eden for humans to live in, then drove them out of it. (Remember that this is mythic story not history.) In the Babylonian exile story a foreign empire forces God’s people the Jews out of Jerusalem and Judah, the promised land to which God had led the people when they escaped from Egypt. (Remember this is history that is important mostly for its mythic element.) In both cases the people were removed from the place where God had intended for them to be. As myths these stories call us into the question of how we too live in a place other than the place where God intends for us to be.

Let me suggest one way of looking at how we too live in a place other than the place where God intends for us to be. We don’t physically live in a place other than the place where God intends us to be. We live on earth, the physical world where God has put us. But I am convinced that we live in a place other than the place God intends for us spiritually. Spiritually we are in exile, not in the place God intends for us. The Christian tradition, in the west at least, has long expressed that truth through the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine I and I suspect most of us no longer accept in its traditional form. So let me suggest another way of understanding our spiritual exile, a way that comes from the scholar John Dominic Crossan, who Jane and I heard lecture for two days last Monday and Tuesday.

Crossan analyzes the current state of the world using the concept of empire. All of the New Testament was written in the Roman Empire, and Crossan sees the message of both Jesus and Paul as being a response to and a reaction against what he calls the Roman imperial theology. He sees the differences between the way of empire, the Roman Empire and all empires, and the way of Jesus and Paul, that is, the way of God, as being about different understandings of how we achieve peace in the world. The program of empire—all empires ancient and modern—is peace through victory. The way of empire starts with an imperial ideology or theology, on the basis of that ideology or theology wages war, wins military victory, and proclaims that the victory has brought peace. Ideology (or theology), war, victory, peace. That’s the way of empire.

The way of Jesus, the way of God, is different. That way begins with theology, with a proper understanding of God. On the basis of that theology it proclaims nonviolence because it knows that nonviolence is the way of God. Using nonviolent means of resisting evil it establishes justice for all people—economic, social, and political justice. That kind of justice brings peace. Theology, nonviolence, justice, peace. That’s the way of God.

Now, I suppose we can argue over whether the United States is an empire. Crossan is clear that it is. Indeed, he says that he sees no difference between Rome in Jesus’ time and the United States today. Be that as it may, what we cannot deny, I think, is that the way of empire—ideology, war, victory, peace—is the way of the world in which we live, including the United States. When we are attacked or think that we are threatened we don’t seek peace through nonviolence and justice. We go to war, and we think that victory in war will bring us peace. After 9-11, to cite the most recent obvious example, we started not one war but two, one in Afghanistan that at least had some connection with the 9-11 attack and one in Iraq that did not. Grounded in an ideology of America as the world’s good guys, an ideology often called American exceptionalism, we went to war, sought victory (a victory that still eludes by the way), and believed that victory would bring us peace. We did not undertake an in-depth analysis of the ways in which injustice in the world produces terrorists, and anyone who suggested that we do so was immediately shouted down with accusations of being soft on terrorists and un-American. We responded in the way of empire, not in the way of God.

The history of 9-11 and of our military response to it is an illustration of the fact that we live in empire. If you don’t like that term say that we live in the world according to the ways of the world. That means the same thing. That, in fact, is pretty much how Paul put it. And we live in empire as exiles, exiles from the kingdom of God, exiles from the way God intends the world to be, the way God intends for us to live. Which of course raises the question of how we are to live in our exile, of what we are supposed to do here in exile.

Jeremiah had an answer to that question for the exiles in Babylon. We heard it this morning. Settle there. Take up normal life there. Work for the good of the place where you live in exile. That may have sounded like strange advice to the Jewish exiles newly arrived under armed guard in a place they didn’t want to be. But Jeremiah’s advice is actually very practical. It says: Yes, we live in exile. There is no way to end that exile quickly. You’re going to be there for a while, probably for the foreseeable future. So live there, and do good work there. That was Jeremiah’s advice to the exiles in Babylon. It’s good advice for us too.

We are to do good work in the exile in which we live, but what is the good work that God calls us to do in our exile here in the world of empire? I believe that it is the work of building the kingdom of God here on earth. God is calling us out of our exile home to the kingdom of God. That means that God is calling us to work for the building up of the kingdom of God here on earth. Every act of compassion, every act of justice, every act of nonviolent resistance to evil, every act of defending the poor and the vulnerable is an act of building up the kingdom of God. Every time we resist war and call instead for nonviolence and justice we build up the kingdom of God. With every word and every act that is grounded in the way of God we bring the end of the human exile from the kingdom God a little bit closer. God is calling us home out of our exile. Do we hear the call? Are we ready to answer it? Amen.