Proper 23 (28) (2007): "The Church in Exile"

Proper 23 (28) (2007): "The Church in Exile"
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons

As I finish up this series on Jeremiah today, I thought it is a good a time as any to let you know why think that Jeremiah is so important to us, and why I’ve chosen to preach these last few of Sundays on Jeremiah.

Why Jeremiah is so important for us, in this parish and in the church more broadly, can be summed up in one word: exile. Jeremiah is important for us to read and listen to because Jeremiah speaks to a people making the transition between establishment and exile, a people making the shift away from security and into uncertainty. My hope is that by way of Jeremiah we will be able to make those same transitions, that we too will move from establishment and security, into uncertainty and exile.

Strange hope, isn’t it. Strange to hope that we might become less established, and less secure. But remember that Jeremiah hoped for the same thing – but not because he had any great desire to actually be in exile. Rather, Jeremiah’s desire was for the people to see the truth of their situation, and the truth was that the people were about to go into exile. Similarly, if we took a moment to look around us, we would also see that we act like the church is still a well established cultural force, that we are far more secure than we are, when whether we like it, want it, desire it or not, the church is well on her way into exile from the culture and the world around us. This is true here, locally at St. Mary Magdalene.

So, what do you think? Are you used to thinking this way about the church? Are you used to thinking that we are a people in exile? Is it safe to say that not that long ago, Christianity and the practices associated with Christianity, were much more common? That more people used to go to church? That most of our public institutions, like schools and places of government, wouldn't see much conflict between being a good citizen and being a Christian?

It’s fair to say that not that long ago it was respectable to be a Christian. The church could assume that people would come to worship, because that's what good citizens did. We came to church, and we prayed in school. And no civil servant, MP or MLA, would get publicly derided for getting together with other Christians to pray. You could baptize children with the assumption that they would absorb Christian values outside the church as well as in Sunday School. You could marry people assuming that the surrounding culture would support marriage as a fundamentally Christian institution.

But those days are gone. We may not be physically uprooted like the people of Judah; we may not be suffering violence at the hands of a foreign army; but if we were honest about the world around us, we would see that Christianity is far from established, and we are far from secure. We are in an exile from a world where being a Christian can no longer be taken for granted, where nominal Christian values can no longer be assumed, and where it no longer makes sense to most people to darken the door of a church come Sunday morning.

There is no longer much social advantage to being a Christian: going to church isn’t going to get you that promotion; going to church won’t get you elected shop steward; and to pray in public might mean getting sneered at.

***

A few of us are going into the neighborhood to meet with local leaders of places like schools and community clubs. It's hard to describe what its like when I call people up and say "Hello, I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene, a local Anglican parish. We'd love to come by and get to know you."

(And that is really what we're doing, too – simply hoping to get to know leaders in the neighbourhood, in order to build a sense of what the needs in St. Vital might be. They are meetings without agendas. We don't ask people to do anything, but to let us get to know them and to get a sense of their work.)

But whenever I call, and I say "I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene . . ." there is a very awkward silence. An anxious silence. It's like people are thinking "what in the world do the Christians want with me . . ." The first response is not trust. The first response is not warmth. The first response is anxiety.

Now, so far so good. We haven’t been turfed out and no one has said no to meeting, nor do I expect they will. Once people realize that we genuinely just want to get to know them, people warm up. But I am coming away confirmed in my suspicion that we are now somewhere in-between establishment and exile, and that we can no longer assume that Christianity and the church is a meaningful and positive part of most people’s lives.

***

Am I depressing you yet? Probably, at least a little. Exile does suck. As we lose standing in the culture around us, we can no longer assume that people will just come to church (because that's just what folks do, they go to church), and when Christians are no longer automatically trusted, it really does suck for us!

But can you see why I've been preaching about truthfulness? So long as we operate like we are well-established, so long as we aren't truthful about our exile, we won't survive the cultural shift around us. We are going into exile, and the sooner we realize that, the better. So long as we assume that there is significant continuity between the culture around us and the practice of the Christian life, when there isn’t, we will shift with the culture right out of Christian practice!

This is why Jeremiah asks us over and over to remember the God who saves. When Jeremiah encourages us to remember what makes us the people of God – that we are a people who owe our lives to the saving God – Jeremiah helps us see that to love God does not always mean taking the world on its own terms.

***

In our reading for today Jeremiah is writing a letter to people in exile. When you’re in exile there are a number of temptations, as Jeremiah knew: one of the big ones is to cower in the corner in hopelessness. The world might not be totally against us when we are in exile; but it certainly isn’t for us, either. The first intuition of the world around us is not to support us in being Christian. And when this happens, we become tempted to take care of our own, to disengage from the communities around us, and to care for our immediate church family, longing for how things once were and romanticizing the past.

Shall we withdraw? Shall we think small, caring only for ourselves? There’s something in your heart that chafes at that, isn’t there. But to act like we are secure and established, like the world is on our side waiting to do us favours, will mean this: we will think small and ending up caring for ourselves by default.

But God would not have it be so. What God gives to that other community in exile – the one that Jeremiah wrote to – was a charge to think big. To take care of one another in the community of faith, to be sure – but not only to care for the community of faith. God called that people out of a closed sectarianism and into great responsibility, a missional responsibility.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” says God to the Israelites in Babylon, “and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in [the] welfare [of Babylon] you will find your welfare." God asked that community of exiles not to despair, nor to think small, but to think big and to care for the strangers around them: because for Jeremiah and the prophets of the Old Testament, exile is where God promises a work of profound newness – exile is where we find a newness grounded in the retrieval of the past, in our memory of the God who saves. Even if we find ourselves in a strange place and in an unfamiliar time.

To put it simply: exile is where God is most powerfully at work.

***

This too is my hope for us, and why I find Jeremiah such an important voice. Let us be truthful: the world is changing around us; much of the world is pretty lukewarm towards us; much of the world doesn’t care too much about what we’re doing.

But it is also my hope that this doesn’t lead us into despair, or lead us to think small.

My hope is that we think big, that we engage the welfare of the people around us, and that we take on this great responsibility that God gives us precisely when we are in exile: the responsibility for mission, the responsibility to care in a big way.

My hope is that we embrace our exile, because it is exactly here, through his call to faithfulness in Him where God's great hope for us is most strong; it is exactly here where God's great hope for the world around us is most strong; it is in exile, where we are now, that God is most powerfully at work.