Are We A Church In Exile?

Yesterday, the Moderator of the United Church (the Rt. Rev. Gary Paterson) issued what is essentially a pastoral letter to the United Church flock. He entitled the letter "Learning to Live in Babylon."

Obviously, Gary draws here on the familiar imagery of Israel in exile in Babylon, yearning for a return to their homeland. Although I basically liked the tone of Gary's message, there are a few things about "exile" language that don't really work for me. In the case of Israel, of course, the "exile" was a political one. Israel (& Judah of course) had been a nation state conquered by the Babylonian Empire. Their nation-hood taken away, many Jews, indeed, were carried away into exile in that far away empire. From that vantage point, their culture and their religion changed, while they yearned for a return to their homeland. I do wonder if that imagery really captures the reality of the church today, though. One question I would have is where - or what - are we in exile from? Christians don't constitute a "nation-state." We are, in New Testament terms, a "holy nation" - a nation beyond geographic limits and political status. We are a community of people called to love and serve God and neighbour by following the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. That can be done anywhere and at any time. So, given that we still have the opportunity to do what we're called by God to do, I still wonder how this is an exile. Have we been "exiled" - which implies by the action of some other power - or have we simply allowed ourselves to get off track, and have we been off track for so long, that this path we've been walking seems as though it's the right one? And what concerns me when I hear the "exile" language being used is that it seems to yearn for the return of the glory days of the church, when our power was immense, our pews were filled, our Sunday schools were bulging and our opinions were of importance in shaping the fate of the nation and the world. None of those things are the case anymore, so goes the thinking. Therefore, we are in exile, and we yearn to return to "the way things were." Usually meaning, within the memory of those who use the phrase, the glory days of the 1950's. 

I don't believe that's really what Gary meant in his message, but it does explain what I don't like about "exile" language: it's too easy to be understood as believing that it was normal for the church to possess the power and wealth and influence that it did, and then it's too easy to fall into the trap of simply yearning to return to those days. But is the 1950's (or the last 1500 years of christendom) really what we're in exile from, or has the church simply become so accustomed to having power that it's finding it difficult to let go of power? 

Perhaps the "exile" (the separation from what Jesus hoped for from his followers) has been going on for many centuries. Perhaps we've been exiled to the land of false gods, where we believed that our money and our property and our numbers and our power were what really counted, and sometimes God, Christ and gospel got shunted aside as an inconvenience. After all, we don't really want to be told to sell all our possessions and give them to the poor when it's us who have a lot of possessions. If anything is going to happen in the long run, perhaps it's a return to a pre-Constantinian church, where the church holds no secular power and little wealth and has no illusions that it ever will or even that it should. Perhaps the exile began the moment the church started to wield power over the Roman Empire, which to me seems to contradict what Jesus expected his church would be about. If we could learn to willingly let go of our "stuff" - all the baggage that's been accumulated over the centuries that serves only to draw our gaze away from the gospel and toward the "stuff" - that might free us to truly serve as Jesus hoped his followers would do without counting the cost of serving - because how much of a cost can there be when you have nothing to start with? And, when you have nothing, you can't simply serve by supporting worthy causes, you have to get down and dirty and with the people who are desperate for help - that's a hands-on mission as opposed to a wallet-out mission, just as Jesus served by being with desperate and outcast people. That's a relational gospel that makes connections with people. As it is, while we're in the exile, we still worry about how to keep buildings open and how to pay staff and how to be "influential" in the world. We're terrified of losing those things, we can't imagine how to be the church without those things, and too often our life as a church is dictated not by the will of God, but by the demands of the "stuff" that holds us in bondage, and by the fear created when we gaze into a future that we know won't include all the "stuff" that we're terrified of letting go of. Right now, the church is a bit like a person clinging to a railing by their fingers. They're not willing to let go and fall into the abyss, but they're gradually slipping, and as they do, the fear and panic (as ungodly a thing as that is and as contrary to the gospel as that is) slowly rises - because we know we can't avoid our ultimate fate; we can just put it off for as long as possible.

Earlier today, I came across someone else's reply to the Moderator's letter, in which he suggested that instead of the exile of the Jews to Babylon, the working scriptural image for the church today might be the call of Abram to an unknown land. That perhaps is a better analogy. Abram didn't know what he would find when he gave up all the familiar things that were around him and that had guided his life up to that point; he knew only that he had to give them up to truly follow God to whatever destiny God had appointed for him. Abram didn't have an easy time, according to the story in Genesis. There were a lot of hardships as he wandered and sought out God's will. Undoubtedly the church is going to face a lot of hardships as we go forward into the next few years - and this isn't just about the United Church. Challenges are everywhere, churches are suffering everywhere, and the tall tale (or even heresy) of evangelical triumphalism (the mistaken belief that the "evangelical churches" are doing just fine and that it's just we "mainliners" who are having trouble) is more and more being exposed as little more than a tall tale (because the decline has begun for them too according to the statistics) or a heresy (in that it places primacy on the denomination or doctrine ahead of God in Jesus Christ.)

To go back to "exile" imagery, the uncomfortable reality is that the church probably won't be truly "free" from its captivity until it's lost everything. That should frighten me as much or more than anyone, since I'm rather dependent on the church for my livelihood, being trained basically to be a pastor and getting to the point where my age works against me being trained for much else. But it doesn't. I'm no spiritual giant, but I have learned over the years to trust that somehow God works things out if we're faithful. As a church we may lose everything; but as Christians we'll never be abandoned. I hold on to that hope, and so I'm able to face the challenges of the coming years with a sense not of detachment (because I'll be deeply and personally affected by what's happening, as will my family) but with a sense of calmness and assurance, even as I watch churches all around me near and far scramble to hold on to the "stuff" they have for just a little while longer. 

Where the Old Testament analogy of "exile" works for me is that the Jews were ordered by Cyrus, King of Persia, to go back to their land (a devastated land) and, using both their sacred stories and what they had learned during their exile, re-invent something worthwhile and godly. Maybe, in a similar way, our  long "exile" (dating back 1500 years or so) is coming to an end, and we'll be forced to re-invent the church to look more like the church when it was at its most creative and dynamic, which was the first 2 or 3 centuries of its existence - when the church really had nothing much of material importance, but it had the word of God and it trusted the word of God. That will be a hard adjustment, but we better prepare for it, because I believe it's inevitable. Eventually we have to leave this long "exile" and start to rebuild virtually from nothing rather than simply try to hang on to as much as we can for as long as we can.