Hope for Exiles
A Meditation on Ezekiel 11
Sitting by the fire praying and reading from scripture has caused me to pause. It is dangerous to listen to God speak in a world that is so quick to seek comfort and ease. God reminds me of this as the windows shake. The God who sends the wind through the trees outside my home is not a wimp. God calls us out of our comfort zone into his kingdom adventure. Today that quest for those of us in the Western world is an experience of exile. As Christians we are no longer in the positions of power. We are being humbled and God is using this to lead us to a more cross-centered witness.
The ancient Jewish prophet Ezekiel lived in a time like our own. God had been domesticated and shrunken. Ezekiel’s job was to make him wild and holy again. How many of us today think that God looks like Morgan Freeman? I guess he is a big improvement over George Burns! The Living God rocked the ancient world and judged the nations so that people would awaken to his reality and have room for his Spirit. The real God, not the god of our imagination is doing the same today. Not, so much, as the angry judge but as the One who seeks us in the cross of Jesus. Holy yes; but so merciful.
Israel had enjoyed a very brief time in the sun under David and then under the early kings of the divided kingdom. David’s reign for many of us reminds us of the glory days following WW II. American’s were extremely popular from New Zealand to Italy. We put a man on the moon and for a very short time our form of democracy was the hope of a new world order. I dare say that this is not true today. Television beamed our luxury around the globe and billions of people began to long to have what we have. The average American was looked at by most of the world as a millionaire and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Guess what, they are buying their piece faster than we can imagine from Bangkok to New Delhi. Like Israel we are finding ourselves no longer on the top of the pile but somewhere in the pieces that are being cut up and sold.
Ezekiel’s message in the eleventh chapter of his prophecy is directed toward the kind of affluence and complacency that seems to be engulfing us. Their country was in shambles but they were living it up. Apparently these people (Jaaziniah and Pelatiah) felt that they were special, that their new homes and comfort were proof that God held them to be like choice meat in a pot. But the exact opposite was the case. The choice people of God had already been sold into exile. American Christians need to let go of the money and power so that in our exilic brokenness we too can know the blessing of being God’s chosen. I fear that our affluence and exposure to the media in America is hardening our heart and closing our minds to the reality of God in Jesus Christ. We have more than even the kings of ancient times but who do we thank? How are we sharing our wealth so that others also can be blessed. So many of us thank ourselves for what we have earned and accumulated with our own two hands. The sad reality is that religion is marketed and many of are consumers of religion not missionaries serving in God’s kingdom. Spirituality is packaged to be nice and comfortable. The result is not just the hardening of our secular categories so that God no longer has a place in our thinking but there is not even much room left for our humanity.
Our exilic experience offers a door of opportunity. There is a new hope that God has set before us. Most of us have lived without God and without hope in our world. May be we had retained some self concocted vision of God. But it was nothing more than an idol or image of our own making. Life lived on this level is dull at best and hopeless when confronted by a person who dares to live a self-examined life. The famous painting The Scream by Edvard Much, seems to capture the anxiety and ethos of what so many of us have lived. The spiritual detours we take seem to last only as long as the drugs we take or the newness of some self-help approach may offer. Disillusionment is upon us as we become more and more aware of a world in pain and face the reality of being what Mother Teresa of Calcutta called the affluent poor. “The one with the most toys wins.” Really? We can face our need and discover that God is there to meet us in it.
In the background of the comfort and affluence of the people who remained in Jerusalem there was the new reality of a people in exile. We can make the same discovery. They were no longer in their native culture, they had been taken captive. Our culture never was really Christian but it Judeo-Christian foundation has crumbled and the remains have been taken captive by the new hordes in blue jeans and carrying a lap top. The Babylonian captivity was an act of God’s discipline and in their captive they found that God was their sanctuary. Perhaps God is working to reawaken the Church to his bigger reality? Ezekiel put it this way: "Therefore say: Thus says the Lord God: Though I removed them far away among the nations, and though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a little while in the countries where they have gone." (Ezekiel 11:16, NRSV) Suffering exile seems to be one of the ways that God makes himself known to his people. It is not through material blessing but through the turmoil of history and the cultural upheaval of our time that God breaks the silence that so many of us feel in our postmodern secular time. Those who are cast out of the culture and live as exiles begin to know God is here. He really is. The more we join with the world’s poor and the more we face our own emptiness the more we realize that we are not the center of the universe. God is. When we make this self-discovery the kingdom of God can become our home not our national heritage, as blessed as it has been. As a Presbyterian pastor who believes in the unique Lordship of Jesus Christ I find myself in a denomination that was mainstream but has become increasingly politically correct in a mainstream culture that is repulsed by our one Lord, one Faith, one baptism and one God and Father of us all. So the basic orthodox belief in Jesus Christ as the only Savior and Lord given to humanity, drive me out of Wall Street, Washington and Hollywood. I won’t find life there though there is a remnant of God consciousness. More and more followers of Jesus are waking up to the reality that we have been cast out. We are exiles. People see us more and more often like straw chewing hillbillies and throwbacks to some era of the past. But it is in this humble setting that Jesus likes to work.
Here is the good news it is in our exile that we breathe the Spirit that speaks to us from the future kingdom God is building. Exile worked a transformation in the Jews that the Lord our God is one and that no idols were to be tolerated. We have believed in progress, IRAs, our careers and our general ability to manage our own lives including our own churches. But in exile we are discovering that we are not in control and that there is one dominating need in our life and that is our need for God. Radical trust opens us to a renewed vitality that can be very convincing and effective.
Perhaps we can awaken to how we have wrapped our Christianity in a form of cultural captivity not unlike Israel in Ezekiel’s day. Everything else is slowly being stripped away. Many of us have wanted to go back to the day when we were mainline, where we had the power but the road back is lined with arrogance and abuse. God has disciplined his people so that we could find that he is our sanctuary in exile. Living on the margins of our culture we find that we are returning to the center of all things: our sanctuary is God alone. It is in the waste land of our time that we may discover God doing what he promised: "I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh," (Ezekiel 11:19, NRSV) That is what Yahweh promised Israel in exile and it is what I am discovering in my own brokenness as a pastor. It is in this desert waste land that I am finding that I have so much in common with Lutherans, Catholics, Charismatics who also are finding their hearts breaking and the Spirit doing something new. God is choosing a new people who look to him alone as he continues to build his kingdom on the earth.
Exile comes in all forms today but the one common denominator is brokenness. Like the bread we share is broken and like the wine we drink is poured out but blessed. In that suffering the exiles by the river of Babylon sang the blues but found God was right there with them. Their spirituality took on a new vitality that rippled through the Jewish people and was alive and waiting when Jesus was born. His family was exiled and Jesus was an alien who was raised in Egypt until it was safe to return. Exile breaks your heart so that there is room for the Spirit and room for the Son. In the suffering I have faced, small as it is, I have found that God is my sanctuary too. The new heart is a daily result of the breaking and softening that takes place. Now it is time for us to arise and follow him on this new adventure.
