Some Thoughts on Exile

“By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”                   (Psalm 137:1)

 Some years ago I encountered a wonderful book by the Biblical scholar Marcus Borg called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. One of the lessons I took away from Dr. Borg was how our Christian Bible is divided into three major narratives—the Exodus Story (Moses and the Red Sea and all that happy jazz), the Exile Story (the children of Judea as hostages in Babylon), and the Priestly Story (the sacrificial atonement of Jesus.)

As a Christian, I’m obviously drawn to the story of Jesus. The other two stories don’t seem to figure too strongly into our theology. Granted, the Exodus story has always resonated with Americans, and not just because ABC-TV likes to run The Ten Commandments in prime time every Easter night. Our immigrant experience commiserates with that of the Hebrew children who crossed through the waters into the Promised Land of religious freedom, milk and honey, and all that. Our African American brothers and sisters also hear their own slavery experience resonating in this tale of escape from bondage.

But what about that other story, the Exile Story? I’m not sure we ever think too much about that one. That’s strange as this narrative takes up almost a third of our Bible. The Hebrew Scripture history books from First Samuel on through Esther tell the tales which involve or lead up to the Exile, and the prophetic books deal almost exclusively with this theme. So what is it?

Historically, this event took place in 587 BC (or thereabouts) when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire and the elite “brain trust” of the Hebrew people were rounded up and deported to Babylon. There they remained, lived, had children, and died until the Babylonians got creamed in a war by the Persians in 539 BC. (By the way, the Babylonians were the ancestors of the modern-day Iraqis, and the Persians were the early version of Iranians. Those guys just can’t ever seem to get along, can they?) The Persians allowed the displaced Jews to be repatriated, and so they returned to Zion to pick up the pieces from their defeat fifty years earlier.

But what does that have to do with you or me? Dr. Borg points out that God had mercy on the exiles, and never stopped loving them even when they were homeless and despairing. Today we are living in a world full of refugees, homelessness, and feelings of alienation. Perhaps this story of God’s mercy will inspire us to remember that God is God of the homeless and the stranger and will move us to compassion in our public policy. For us at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia, it is a call to solidarity with the homeless families who are sheltered in our basement during the month of August. As people in political discourse in a land of freedom and opportunity, it might encourage us to look with kindness towards the millions of Syrians who are fleeing an unending and barbaric civil war and searching for any kind of shelter they can find.

Marcus Borg points to another sort of Exile experience which never occurred to me. He suggests that many of us native-born Americans simply do not feel at home in our own lives. Our daily struggle can be a battle with alienation, feeling flat and estranged from that which gives us vitality and joy. We long to be reunited with the land of our youth—the time when we felt energized, excited, and optimistic. Perhaps our current experience is similar to that of the exiles in the scripture. We have run after false gods, and now we are paying the price. We are called to repentance, a “change of mind,” and a renewed search for the true God of our salvation.

What always struck me about the Exile Story as opposed to the Exodus Story is the fact that the exiles in Babylon, unlike the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, suffered through their own fault. The prophets warned that they had turned away from God by cheating and ignoring the poor, by worshiping idols, putting their faith in military strength rather than in God’s justice, and relying on purity rituals which honored the letter of the law but ignored its spirit. Their arrogance weakened the nation, and they refused to listen to the prophet’s warning to seek peace rather than war.

Yet God did not cease to be God even though His children went astray. True, God refused to protect them from the errors of their ways and the consequences of those errors. Nevertheless, God was always willing to rescue them and welcome them back home. Today things in America and the world seem to be going crazy. I don’t doubt that there are some who wish they could roll the clock back to a time when things seemed simpler than they do now. Politicians may promise us they can do that, but we know that only God’s will brings us home to ourselves. However our current political contest turns out, God will still be God, and God’s will is done either through us or in spite of us. This divine will supersedes our circumstances, and knowing this gives me peace.