This is a chilling and sobering sermon from the collection I mentioned in the previous post. This guy has given up a lucrative medical practice to go and live and work amongst the poor in Washington DC, working in at leat a couple of different missions of the Church of the Saviour’s health ministries. He is a member of the 8th Day Faith Community of the Church of the Saviour

The Coming Exile

THE COMING EXILE
May 26, 2002
David Hilfiker

A portion of the sermon:

Jeremiah lived just before the Exile of Judah to Babylon in 587 BCE. The ten northern tribes had long since split off into the nation of Israel and had been dispersed, lost to history, leaving only the southern nation of Judah. The imagery that Jeremiah uses is raw: Judah has been a prostitute running after lovers, sullying herself, her land, and God, her spouse. Despite this promiscuity, God had been willing, even anxious to take Judah back. But eventually things progressed too far, things went on too long. Judah was no longer capable of returning to God.

There are consequences to breaking the covenant with God. Even if one doesn’t believe in a punishing, avenging God, there are nevertheless real-life consequences

· To abandoning the poor,

· To taking on other powers as one’s god,

· To forgetting that love and forgiveness, not self-aggrandizement, are the purpose of life, and

· To creating security through military power rather than the protection of God. (It’s important to remember, by the way, that the kind of security most of us yearn for is simply not available, ever. The security that God offers is real, but very different from what we usually want.)

What Jeremiah saw was the coming Exile. Long before anyone else even seemed to realize there was a problem in the country, Jeremiah saw that it was too late. While it’s always theoretically possible to repent and ask forgiveness, Jeremiah could see it was not going to happen. Things had gone too far. Jeremiah’s message was, “It’s over, folks. Prepare for exile.”

Jeremiah had it right. He saw the coming military and political crisis as a spiritual crisis, the result of disobedience and sin. The discussion, therefore, belongs here in the church because we will only have the resources to respond appropriately if we understand that the coming judgment is, in fact, judgment.

As a community we have begun to respond to this judgment. Let me identify four areas.

First, we are educating ourselves about what’s happening, recognizing that—despite the economic, political, and military power we see around us—America is in that stage of inevitable decline that happens to any Empire that forgets justice for the poor. Despite appearances, we’re already in Exile. We must begin to speak this harsh, prophetic word to the larger community. In the coming years there will be more events like September 11, further markers of our decline. As these happen, we must be ready to interpret them spiritually to the wider community as consequences of our sin and disobedience.

Second, we must convince ourselves and others that the love and forgiveness of the Gospel have become practical political necessities, not just spiritual niceties. The world has changed forever, and we don’t anymore have the luxury of leaving anyone out. Without justice, without love and forgiveness, we’ll simply not survive. This means, at the least, some kind of guaranteed economic equity around the world. We can no longer think just in terms of the United States.

Third, we must recognize how thoroughly the Empire contaminates each of us. We’ll need to go back to the Book of Revelation to discover how the early church lived through the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. We’ll have to read Bonhoeffer to see how the Confessing Church lived through Nazism. I mentioned at the beginning that the church has always been accomplice to Empire. But parts of the church—the black church in South Africa, the Confessing Church in Germany, the Quakers and slavery—have also been the leaders of the opposition. As we study Bishop Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bishop Woolman, and others, we’ll discover that our life in community becomes utterly essential if we’re not to be overwhelmed by the powers that surround us. Our disciplines become more important than ever: prayer, meditation, proportional giving, study, worship and liturgy, commitment to the poor, and simple living. Walter Brueggemann has pointed out that when the community is in exile, it needs to spend time and energy simply in preserving itself. When one lives in Exile, the need for celebration, for instance, becomes very real.

Finally, we must find ways to act. Walter Wink writes, “It is of the nature of the Powers that they wish to appear invincible. They do not want their great vulnerability revealed.”[2] One of the perverse effects of the torrent of media images that washes over us every day is to make our little efforts feel meaningless. But as Wink also suggests, “There is no such thing as objective powerlessness. Our belief that we are powerless is a sure sign that we have been duped by the Powers.”[3] We don’t need to do big, important things. It is, indeed, up to God to use our small, individual acts of faithfulness to achieve God’s purposes. But we must do something if for no other reason than to defy the propaganda of the Powers. And allow God responsibility for the results.

I am convinced that we will only have the strength and fortitude to do this within community. This little raggedy group is our only chance.

(the above represents the latter one fourth of the entire sermon. Highly recommended)

Whoa! Such preaching! Jeremiah would have such harsh words for our country today. I am finding it harder to cal it “my country”, even though there is a long way to go to truly separate myself from it where separation is needed. “Our county” for the people of God is a foreign county, foreign in so many ways; foreign in its allegiance to realities far exceeding the “values” we see espoused in our country.