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Marquand Chapel
The Life of Faith as Life in Exile “Live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.” (1 Peter 1: 1 7b)
The author of 1st Peter has a striking image for an answer: Where are you? You are in exile: “Live in reverent fear,” he writes, “in the time of your exile.” For some of us here exile may be a particularly poignant metaphor for the life of faith. The situation of an exile is made especially vivid for some of us in this space today by the prospect of the end of the academic year and the commencement of our exile from this place (granted that a few of us have hung around here longer than the rest of you). And perhaps it is also made vivid for others of us who contemplate the possibility of exile from their present lives into this place, or some place like it. 1st Peter is here to remind us that the personal exile we contemplate provides the best image for the life of faith. What it a striking about this text that it turns the image of exile upside down. The people to whom this letter was written may have been deeply formed by the synagogue. Or they may have been gentiles who had carefully read the Old Testament stories. It doesn’t matter. They would all have thought of exile as the image of bad news. Israel’s faithlessness had led to their long exile in Babylon. Exile was an image for punishment. Where are you? If the answer is, “In exile,” that was bad news. Good news would be that God is going to bring us home from exile. That is the whole point of Isaiah’s oracle: I will bring your
offspring from the east, But in 1st Peter exile is offered as the image for good news. “You know,” says the writer, “that you were ransomed from . . . futile ways . . . ,” and that only by God’s gracious act in what Jesus did and underwent. Where are you? You are reconciled with God. You are not separated from God, but at one. That’s the “where” of your life. That’s good news! The author goes on: “Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.” Where are you? You are in faith, not in faithlessness; in hope, not in hopelessness. That’s the “where” of your life. The author goes even further: “you have genuine mutual love.” Where are you? You are in love. That’s good news! Given that all that is true, the author says, given that you are in unity with God and are in faith, in hope and in love so that you can claim the same relation to God that Jesus had when he called God “Father,” then “live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.” Where are you? In exile. And that is supposed to be good news. Oh sure, Isaiah has voiced God’s promise that all exiles will be set free and brought home. But that’s still future. God will end our exile when the Lord returns at the last day. Meanwhile, where are we? We are in the meantime, between Jesus’ coming and his coming again, between his crucifixion and resurrection and the eschaton. In this meantime you are living at one with God, you are living the life of faith –- and the best image for that life of faith is life in exile. Exile is the “where” of our lives. That is a startling image for the life of faith. An exile, after all, is not an immigrant. People emigrate to find a better life; people flee or are sent into exile. Immigrants can become naturalized citizens in their new settings; exiles cease being exiles if they naturalize. Immigrants and exiles are both uprooted. And both have to have a life. In their new settings immigrants and exiles alike can get jobs, have a network of friends, have families, play roles in society, learn the local language, have recreations, laugh and joke and, if their aesthetic standards are sufficiently flexible, learn to enjoy the local music and local dance. They can both assimilate. By doing these things immigrants can put down roots; but exiles stop being exiles once they have put down roots. Immigrants try to settle in; exiles never can settle in. The thing that separates exiles from immigrants, the thing that makes it impossible for exiles to naturalize and settle in, is their whole-hearted commitment to some project they cannot accomplish while they are in exile. It is their single-minded commitment to the cause that got them exiled in the first place. It might be something so grand as the liberation of their people from oppression. It might be something so modest as the exercise of their personal right to worship as they choose or to criticize local authorities. For our letter writer it is the single-mindedness of faith that makes exile the best metaphor for the life of faith. Since where you are is -- reconciled with God; since where you are is -- living in hope, love and faith – then, says the text, “love one another deeply from the heart.” Love one another whole-heartedly and single-mindedly. All by itself that’s enough to make you an exile. The image of exile is in the background when Jesus warns us that the life of faith may involve exile from our families and conflict with society. The reason for such exile is explicit in the Sermon on the Mount: It is caused by the whole-hearted single-mindedness of the exile – “Seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.” Purity of heart, said Søren Kierkegaard, is to will one thing. Will one thing, says our text. That one thing is the whole-hearted mutual love that constitutes God’s reign and constitutes God’s righteousness. Seeking it is the life of faith. It will make you an exile anywhere you try to have a life. What kind of good news is that? How can a life reconciled to God and our neighbors, a life of hope for our neighbors and love to our neighbors and faith in God’s resources for us all be imagined as a life of exile, of rootlessness, unsettled and never at home? Alas, 1st Peter doesn’t help answer that; much less does Isaiah. But, at least this week, thank God for the Common Lectionary. For this week the Lectionary holds our two texts together with that wonderful story in Luke about two men on the first day of the week after Jesus’ Crucifixion walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They had known Jesus. They are trying to make sense of what had happened to Jesus over the weekend and to make sense of the reports that very morning that some women of their group had found his tomb empty and had had a vision of angels who said he was alive. Along the way a man they don’t recognize catches up with them and walks along with them. They explain to him what they are trying to understand. And in the process it becomes clear that they are exiles. They have left their deepest hopes and dreams behind, in Jerusalem. Everything they thought they understood about God’s purposes for the redemption of Israel and about God’s purposes for their own lives they have left behind, in Jerusalem. Gone into exile, they have left all that rooted and anchored their lives behind, in Jerusalem. They are whole-heartedly committed to the redemption of Israel, but in their exile they are unable to accomplish it. Part of the point of this story is that it is only when we are in exile that we may encounter God in the risen Christ. Those two were not unacquainted with Jesus. They had spent time with him and perhaps had eaten with him. They brought their memory of who he was with them into exile. Because they had that memory they finally could recognize him when they sat down to eat together in Emmaus and he broke bread. But it was only when they left everything by which they had defined their deepest hopes behind, and had gone into exile with nothing but with their single-minded passion for God’s rule of justice and righteousness –- it was only then in exile that they could recognize that it was just exactly that righteousness, exactly that divine love, that they were encountering in the unrecognized one who had been walking along with them. Where are you? If it is the single-mindedness of the life of faith that spells exile, rejoice. For only there can you hope to encounter God’s righteousness in Jesus of Nazareth. That is what makes the news that exile is the best image for the life of faith good news. May God in God’s fierce mercy send us all into exile for the rest of our lives. Amen. |
God’s first question to humankind was, “Adam, Where are you?”
And to its end “Where