Exile

People today often speak of a world that has changed dramatically. The
old pillars of morality, values and truth seem to have shifted.
Newspapers and other periodicals are disappearing. Technology has
changed our lives. There is an anger in the land. Many, worried about
jobs and the future, are scared, tired and frustrated. Singing the
Lord’s song in our time seems hard indeed.

In all of today’s texts we are dealing with a hard word: exile. In a splendid book called Exilic Preaching
(edited by Erskine Clarke), church leaders write about “a testimony for
Christian exiles in an increasingly hostile culture.” They point out
three ways that exile is a proper metaphor for our time:

• Leslie
  Newbigin says that Western culture is dominated by a modern scientific
  worldview. He says this understanding has created a dichotomy between
  facts and values. One only has to notice the spate of books proclaiming
  how irrelevant God is for our time—God cannot be proved, miracles are
  fantasy and modern folk have moved beyond this. What’s forgotten is that
  there are two ways of knowing: head and heart.
• The book
  states that the church finds itself a stranger in a strange land.
  Christians are, as Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon put it, “resident aliens.” Like the exiled Israelites we live in a culture foreign and strange to the gospel.
• The
  third metaphor was developed by Walter Brueggemann. In a therapeutic
  and narcissistic culture, exile offers the same opportunity Israel found
  in its hard time. This is a challenge to see that the ways of God are
  contrary to the ways of the world. The lion and the lamb really can lie
  down together. Learning from the prophets of the exile, we can respond
  to this time with hope and vision despite the difficulties that surround
  us.