Yesterday, in our 10.00 am service we took another small step towards the wider re-opening of our church building, our services and our wider programme of activities on our site, when six of our Choir sang live in the service. At the same time that the steps we are taking on our re-opening journey are very welcome, they also serve to remind us of the changed circumstances we are still in and the challenges of worshipping without congregational singing and the receiving of bread and wine.
The pandemic is our equivalent to the Exile through which the Israelites lived. An event that has international impact and which changes our understanding and experience of all we previously held dear.
In Psalm 137 we hear a sense of desolation expressed, combined with a thirst for revenge. The Israelite Exile had several phases. In 721 BC the Assyrians conquered the Northern Israelite kingdom. Assyrian policy was to stamp out national identities by mixing up populations. Therefore the 10 tribes of that Kingdom disappeared. The Southern kingdom, Judah, was not conquered until 597. By this time the dominant power was Babylon, whose policy was deportation. So, when Jerusalem was captured, the leading citizens were taken to Babylon. Then, in 587, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed and all but the poorest were taken.
Walter Brueggemann writes that “Jerusalem was burned and its temple destroyed, the king was exiled, the leading citizens were deported and public life ended. For ancient Israel, it was the end of privilege, certitude, domination, viable public institutions and a sustaining social fabric. It was the end of life with God, which Israel had taken for granted.
In that wrenching time, ancient Israel faced the temptation of denial—the pretence that there had been no loss—and it faced the temptation of despair—the inability to see any way out.” This was a crisis of faith, not simply defeat in war and separation from homeland, but the loss of every reference point that explained who they were as a people and the failure of their God to protect them. They had believed they were a people chosen out of all the nations to be in a special relationship with the one true God who created, sustained and controlled the cosmos. This testimony developed as God made covenants about their land, city, and kings. All were lost and this normative testimony was fundamentally threatened.
The Exile was a crisis to which the Israelites responded initially with grief and anger, as in Psalm 137. But, as Exile continued, they reacted, or were asked by God to react, in terms of reflection and reinterpretation. David Sceats has noted that “all the evidence points to the fact that the Old Testament came into existence in substantially its present form in and immediately after this period of defeat, exile and religious disintegration.” The purpose of both collating and organising older material, and of writing new material, was reflection. Those who put together the Old Testament in this way were reflecting on Israel’s past to “remind the nation of its identity, to help it understand its place in God’s purposes, and its responsibility as the covenant people, and, above all, to remember the universal claims of Yahweh, and his authority over all nations, including Babylon.” Sceats argues that the act of reflection undertaken by the Israelites was also about reinterpretation. God was, through the exile, revealing himself in a new way and therefore, in organising the religious literature of Israel, it was also necessary to reinterpret that literature “in such a way as to make religious sense of the crisis of faith it had gone through.”
How should we respond to the pandemic? The writer of Psalm 137 was devastated by the Exile and sought revenge of those who perpetrated it. We can see some within our world responding to the pandemic in similar ways; seeing only deficit and seeking others to blame. The theologians of the exile give us a different way of responding; one that seeks to find God at work in the midst of disaster through the opportunity to rethink and reimagine what is most central and therefore most challenged by the experience.
Instead of responding to exile as did the writer of Psalm 137, the theologians of the exile can help us in hearing and responding to the call of God in our day and time. Their pattern of reflection and re-interpretation based on the tradition gives a biblical means of reviving our roots and re-claiming our disputed lineage. In this time of change and challenge, we need to dream up what Church is and can be for future generations all over again.
We should not expect to have all the answers to hand but should engage in a re-examination of our roots in order to imagine our future on a scale that is at least equal to that of the theologians of the exile. Our God is a God of new beginnings, of fresh starts. God is in the resurrection business and, therefore, is the one who gives hope that we can rise from the ruins.
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Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.
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