So this is our 12th and final week reading from the books of kings. We have reached the end of the book. Although I would not call it a particularly “happy” ending.
The city of Jerusalem has been destroyed. The house of the Lord, the king’s house and all the great houses have been burned down and the people of Judah have been taken into exile in Babylon. Although not all the people. The story noted that the some of the poorest people of the land have been left.
This moment, 587 BCE, is a hugely significant moment in the Bible.
The Northern Kingdom of Israel had gone into exile in Assyria about 135 years earlier and they did not return. This essentially marked the end of the Northern Kingdom. Although as I said last week, deportees from other conquered territories were brought into Samaria to take the place of the exiles. They eventually married with the Israelites who had been able to remain and these people became known as the Samaritans.
But it is this exile of the Southern Kingdom of Judah to Babylon which seems to hold particular significance.
It is interesting why.
Solomon’s great temple has been burned to the ground and anything of value within it has been taken to Babylon along with the king and Jerusalem’s elites leaving others to fend for themselves in the destroyed land. Many other countries and kingdoms disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. But the people of Judah did not. Somehow it didn’t lead them to give up, to abandon their faith and be consumed by their captors. Rather somehow they were able to seek and even find God in their devastation.
The book of Lamentations expresses it like this,
I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “Gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.”
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
Much of what is called the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled during and after this national tragedy. It sparked the writing of entirely new Scriptures – Daniel, Esther, Lamentations, significant parts of the books of Ezekial, Jeremiah and Isaiah and many of the psalms are poetic and prayerful responses to it. But it also inspired religious leaders to ask new questions about God, creation, and history and revise parts of the earlier Scriptures that had been passed down to them. It is increasingly agreed upon that the Hebrew Scriptures in their final form are a product of and a response to the Babylonian Exile.
Walter Brueggemann suggests that we too are living in a period of exile. This is certainly the case for refugees, first nations people and those living in war torn countries who now doubt can relate deeply to the experience of the Judeans. However, I think to use it, as he does, to describe modern Christian Americans is a bit of an overstatement and also runs the risk of forgetting those who truly are.
None the less I think most people have probably had times of loss, grief, despair and darkness when we can relate to the words of Lamentations And I think most modern people can relate to a sense of dislocation so I think the ways the exile was responded to has something to teach us.
Now of course this next statement depends on personal circumstance but for a long time it seemed most people believed that the world was getting better, safer and fairer. And we need to acknowledge for many it really has.
But with a growing backlash against much of the progress the world has made this seems less of a reality. For a time parents enjoyed a sense that their children would have it better than they did but the cost of living is gnawing away at that and there is a growing awareness that the technology designed to make life bigger has actually made it smaller. It seems for many, many people, particularly the young, life just feels a bit meaningless and the future feels very bleak indeed.
Elizabeth Oldfied describes it, “today’s plural, secular, Western societies have gifted us many things, but reliable sources of communal meaning isn’t one of them. So many people I speak to crave places to belong and ways to settle their soul. Technology has freed us from drudgery and offers endless ways to increase our comfort and convenience. Product after product promises to boost our status and performance. In lots of ways, we’ve never had it better. But still there is a sense of impending threat, which many of us feel in our least defended moments and don’t know how to speak about. The news scrolls unendingly with stories of war, disease, deepening division, the rise of authoritarian governments and the unimaginable but rapidly approaching prospect of climate collapse. Accelerating advances in AI may turn the world upside down in ways no one can predict. Against this ominous global mood music, we have unlimited choices in framing our identity, but this freedom can sometimes induce vertigo rather than exhilaration. Many of us feel isolated and anxious, or too distracted and overworked to feel much at all.”
And for those of us still in the church our faith, our practises, our hopes and ideals for the world and the story we tell seem ever more in conflict with the dominant narrative.
Brueggemann describes our culture as a culture of restlessness, of endless desire and endless production. A market ideology in which the goal of life is to produce more and consume more so we can be richer and more powerful and more well thought of.
This consumer culture defines everyone around us as a threat or competitor for the same goods, as people who threaten our property, our way of life, our possessions, and our futures.
This culture wants us to believe that we cannot and should not rest. “Self care” on the other hand is marketed relentlessly but it does not involve rest, rather more consumption is required. To look after ourselves we must go shopping or spend more time on social media or go to the gym or get a facial. I am not saying these things are all bad but I am not convinced they are the rest our souls or our earth truly long for.
This culture wants us to believe that there are not, nor should there be any limits. No limits on wealth, sex, power. There is no right or wrong, sin and truth. You do you is the mantra of our times. It has its place. No doubt there was a time (and there still are places) when people had very little personal freedom and agency to be who are they, to seek the happiness we all desire. Thee was so much talk of sin people were weighed down with shame. But I think perhaps the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Now we have no way to talk about our propensity to seriously mess things up. We never commit to anything in case something better comes up or we just don’t feel like it. It can be hard to build community, to feel trust and safety, in an environment like that.
And finally, this culture wants us to believe that the world is profane. That the earth and everything in it, is for our consumption.
The Christian faith however proclaims that the world is in fact sacred and that we are to care for the earth and everything in it. Our value (and the earth’s) comes not from what we can produce and consume but because we are created in the image of God and loved by him.
That the goal of life is not to be wealthy and famous but to be generous, to live together in welcoming communities of hospitality and grace.
In God’s law boundaries matter, faithfulness matters, truth matters.
Other people are not our competitors but our neighbours and we are to love our neighbours as ourselves.
God’s law insists that economic life must be organized to ensure the well-being of widows, orphans and immigrants. God’s people are not to be hard-hearted or tight-fisted. Rather they shall be open handed, willingly giving to meet the need, whatever it may be.
The book of Deuteronomy instructs, “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts….” This is perhaps the most astonishing command in the Bible. It was the practice in the ancient world, as it is now, that anyone who owed money to another had to work it off. But ancient Israel set a limit to such debt-related work, in order to prevent the formation of a permanent underclass.
This all was and is in deep conflict with the culture in which we live.
And so like the exiles of Judah I agree with Brueggemann who says the church has three choices about how to live in these times.
Firstly, we can respond in assimilation. There were those in Babylon who found Jewishness too demanding, and who simply joined dominant Babylonian values and identity. It is possible too for the church to fully assimilate, to embrace the market ideology around us, to live so that the world does not notice our odd baptism or our odd identity.
Secondly, we can respond in despair, fear and anger. We can try to isolate ourselves from the others and world or simply pretend that everything with us and in the world is just fine. And even if it isn’t there is nothing we can do anyway.
Or like the people of Judah in exile we can recover the old theological traditions and recast them in terms appropriate to the new situation of faith.
We can be a voice of holiness that counters the trivial commodity-centered world by the practice of disciplines that make depth and communion possible. The disciplines of our faith like prayer, worship, bible reading, tithing, and of course Sabbath. These disciplines that keep us in tune with the sacred reality of God.
We can immerse ourselves in counter liturgies. I know many of you tune out during the communion liturgy, you’ve heard it before I know. But this is the narrative of our baptismal life. The open table of Christ is in profound tension to that of the dominant culture that is forming us with another liturgy that we are inhaling without noticing. And so we need to be intentional about surrounding ourselves with these other stories that remind of us of who and whose we are and the story we live out.
We can offer ways of speaking and acting that the dominant society regards as subversive, but without which we cannot for long stay human.
We can express sadness, rage and loss like the Psalms. We can lament but also be a voice of hope, of imaginative, neighbourly transformation, focused on those in need, expressing new social possibilities, rooted in the truth of God’s good news.
That we too might to proclaim,
“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
Let’s sing it.
