Exile as the Christian Default
But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley https://unsplash.com/@birminghammuseumstrust
A frequent comment from participants in the Seven Stories course is that the theme of exile is unfamiliar ground. Too many have heard little taught – or even discussed -in their churches about God’s presence in places of loss. The most they’ve heard is that loss is hard, but if you hang in there it will soon be over and you can get back to the regular programming of abundance and praise. The reason this doesn’t hold true is that for most of us loss is not quickly over. Many of us live, in fact, with losses and limitations that are very much part of our ongoing, everyday experience – unwanted lodgers who have moved in and made themselves at home and show no sign of relocating anytime soon. Loss and limitation, you might say, are intrinsic to the human condition.
We struggle with this because it doesn’t fit with the narrative we’ve constructed around faith, or with the way we’ve read and received the scriptures. The fault though is ours, not God’s, because we have misread the biblical story and built for ourselves promises that the text itself simply doesn’t offer. Which is why exile is such an important theme in the overarching story the bible is telling. The question of how to respond to a season of exile in fact makes up a healthy 25% to 50% of the Old Testament’s words, and an equally significant part of the new. The vast majority of the Bible’s heroes:
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Are in trouble more often than they are in triumph.
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Spent a big part of their lives in physical, emotional or spiritual exile -think Abraham, Moses, David, Esther, Daniel, Ezekiel, Elijah, Jesus, Paul… the list is very long.
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Face the challenge of discerning the presence and purposes of God not in the relief from their losses but in their response to them.
None of this should come as news – we know these things to be true: yet still, in our own journey of discipleship, we so often forget. I remember stumbling across a book years ago with the title “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?” My immediate thought was, and is, “Why shouldn’t they?” What is this world we have imagined in which the ‘goodness’ of our behaviour can exempt us from the hard realities faced by others? Better, surely, to recognise that the human condition offers us both joy and trouble, and to work out in advance the best possible response to both…
How, then, should we respond to our exile experiences – to the places in our lives, and the places our lives take us to, that are hard for us to bear?
Firstly, we should know that in scripture, exile is the dance partner of exodus. There are times when we experience the exhilaration; the relief; the unbridled joy of being led from slavery into the promised land – and there are times when our journey puts Jerusalem behind us and carries us to Babylon. We can’t always know why this happens, but we can know for certain that both are within the presence, plans, purposes and protection of God. God is with us in our trials as he is with us in our triumphs. It may well be, in fact, that he lets us taste Babylon for that very reason: so that we know and prove that nothing – no thing – can separate us from his love. How can we know this to be true unless something tries?
Secondly, we can learn that there is a tried and tested, holy and wholly biblical response to times of exile. It is called Lament, and it gives voice to our distress whilst holding us back from despair. Consider these three examples from the Old Testament:
Psalm 13:1-2:
O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand?
Psalm 88:1-5:
O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day. I come to you at night. Now hear my prayer; listen to my cry. For my life is full of troubles, and death draws near. I am as good as dead, like a strong man with no strength left. They have left me among the dead, and I lie like a corpse in a grave. I am forgotten, cut off from your care.
Habakkuk 1:2-4:
How long, O Lord, must I call for help? But you do not listen! “Violence is everywhere!” I cry, but you do not come to save. Must I forever see these evil deeds? Why must I watch all this misery?
Wherever I look, I see destruction and violence. I am surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. The law has become paralysed, and there is no justice in the courts. The wicked far outnumber the righteous, so that justice has become perverted.
Or this plaintive cry, written by the Psalmist but wholly owned by Jesus at history’s most graphic and painful exile moment:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me Why are you so far away when I groan for help? Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer. Every night I lift my voice, but I find no relief. (Psalm 22:1-2)
A modern Psalm might read:
O Lord, our Lord, how can anyone read a book with these words in it and assume you have promised a trouble-free life?
“Give sorrow words”, Shakespeare wrote, “the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” Lament, in fact, is the dance partner of Joy. Just as all of mathematics – and the entire fabric of computer science – is built on the interplay of 1 and 0, effectively of something and nothing, so true christian spirituality is constructed from the juxtaposition of hardships and hallelujahs. God’s presence shadow-boxes with God’s absence; over-abundance alternates with under-supply; deliverance tangoes with duress.
True lament does not exclude praise, but neither does it indulge in denial. It says, yes, these things are happening to me, and yes, this pain is real: but I still have reasons for thankfulness. I can still taste the presence and perfections of God. Unlike the unhappy harpists of Babylon, I can sing the Lord’s song in a strange land: in fact this exile is the best and most adapted place to find the presence of God. This is where I find out how good he really is.
Thirdly, having set aside the false hope that the bible doesn’t underwrite – our imagined world of uninterrupted prosperity and circumstantial bliss – we can at last lean into the promise God does make. This is the astounding and unprecedented offer of joy in the midst of pain. This is praise in prison; worship in the waiting; the miracle of God’s presence and power made known to us in the very places of our exile. Here is the ‘hope and future’ of Jeremiah 29:11, the ‘fourth man in the fire’ of Daniel 3:25, the ´such a time’ of Esther 4:14. God promises us that he will meet us amidst the debris of our distress. The banquet he lays on for us is served in the presence of our enemies.
So it is that Jesus in Acts 1:8, commissioning his disciples to discover and delight in the coming of his kingdom, calls them not out of but into exile. The invitation is not to return to Jerusalem, but to leave the safety of her walls and head outwards, into foreign realms and unknown lands, even to the ends of the earth. Mission and exile, it turns out, are two ways of spelling the same word. And the promise? I will be with you. My spirit will empower you. ‘In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33).
Can you hear the invitation of God to meet him in the very centre of your loss? To discover that far from abandoning you, he has gone before you. That he is waiting for you, even now: standing at ground zero; in the place you have most feared to go; ready to breathe into you the peace of his presence? Might there be treasures for you in the depths that without loss you never would have found?
Healing and heaviness; delight and desperation; answered and unanswered prayers – these are exactly the threads that the life of faith is woven from, and it is our calling to learn to live with both and trust God in the mystery. More than just a calling, this is the promise of God to us. The day we discover that Jesus is all we need is the day he is all we have.
Help us, God, to seek you in the layers of lament in our lives.
This Grace This grace we have been given is enough.
When the mountains set before us
won’t move by faith
until by faith we start to climb,
it is enough.
When our cry for heaven’s miracles
rings hollow,
like a doorbell howling through an empty house,
it is enough.
When from our waiting rooms of weakness
we say yes
to pressing on,
it is enough.
When we have reached the end of our energies
and face the end of ourselves
but can’t yet see the end of our task,
it is enough.
Enough
to know that you have loved us.
Enough
that we are called before all time.
Enough
that every fingerprint is valued.
Enough
that you remember every name.
So we will embrace this grace
and turn our hearts to face grace.
Loosening the locks
on our personal space,
we’ll make each home a place of grace.
We’ll drink from your wells
’til we’re wasted on grace;
we’ll speak out your words
’til our tongues taste of grace.
And we’ll live to love your laws
until our lives are laced with grace.
Down dark and dingy alleys
we will chase grace.
We will hold as something precious every trace of grace.
We will celebrate and consecrate this grace,
because this grace we have been given
is enough.
From SPOKEN WORSHIP, Copyright ©2007 by Gerard Kelly, ZONDERVAN
(Text below video)
Where hope is lost you find us
In the grip of grief remind us
There is grace at the graveside
Of our dreams
And though it seems
That life has left us
These winter trees
Are bare not barren
Their brittle limbs
Though fruitless now
Are waiting only
For the rising sap of spring
So I will sing
Though my voice is strained
And though in pain
My heart will cling
To the hope you hold
And I will bring
As gifts of gold
My thirst and hunger
I will stand under
This love I cannot understand
For you are water to the thirsty
To the hungry you are bread
You are healing for the broken
Easter morning
Even for dead
Where hope is lost you find us
In the grip of grief remind us
There is grace at the graveside
Of our dreams
