Time to Come Home - 2nd Advent, Isaiah 40:1-11

2nd Advent B
Isaiah 40:1-11
December 4, 2011

Time to Come Home

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Bible is a book that is grounded in a crisis that has left its trace on every verse. In the year 586 Before the Common Era, the city of Jerusalem fell to the armies of Babylon. The gates of the city were destroyed. The Temple was burned. The implements of the Temple were seized and melted down for their gold and silver. The social elite of the city was deported in chains. They were war trophies taken home to the city of Babylon to be put on display. This was also shrewd policy designed to deprive the people who remained behind of their leaders and to keep those leaders where the Empire could keep its eye on them.

For the exiles, the fall of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon that followed were a military, political, social and above all a religious and spiritual disaster. The God of the covenant who had brought the people of Israel out of Egypt and into a good land had not protected them when they most needed protection. God had failed the people of Judah. Could they go on? If so, how? And would they have to do it alone? Had God forsaken them forever? If not, how would the relationship with God be fashioned once more?

In some ways it was like a marriage after an affair: trust had been shattered. There was no way to wave a magic wand and to pretend that things were the way they had been. If there was a way to put the pain and rage and despair behind them, it could only be by going right through the heart of the disaster and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no going around it.

It was during the awful decades of exile that the Bible began to take its final shape. There were new writings. But there was also a great deal of reworking, editing and revising of old writings. Everything in the Bible, whether written before, during or after the exile, was filtered through this shattering experience. The Bible as a book is about a crisis, the particular crisis of exile. The Bible is a collection of testimonies from exile.

Exile happens anytime we are forced to live in a place that we cannot call home. For some exiles that experience is quite literal. One is an Iranian novelist who flees her country when a fundamentalist regime comes to power and decides that her work is subversive. Another is a Salvadoran campesino who flees with his family across the border into Honduras to escape the death squads who came in the night to massacre his village. A third is family chased out of the 9^th Ward in New Orleans by the rising waters of a storm surge that has breeched the levees.

Exiles begin as refugees. Some find a way to return to their homes and take up the tattered threads of their lives once more. Others cannot and are forced to settle permanently somewhere else. They find a way to earn a living. They learn the local language and customs. They may even become citizens of a new place. But for some part of the hearts it will never really be home. Home will always be somewhere else.

The United Nations keeps track of these refugees. It numbers them and tries to see to it that they have the material aid that they need for survival. But there are exiles whom the United Nations cannot track or count. How, for example, do we count the number of young people who grow up here, whose families live here, who cannot find employment that uses their God-given gifts and so must go somewhere else, perhaps in the Upper Midwest but perhaps not. They are a Decoran diaspora, seeds scattered across our region, nation and world. Their children will grow up at home in Madison or St. Paul or Oregon or New Zealand, but for the exiles themselves there will always be a part of their hearts for which home will always be Decorah.

Or maybe the grew up in Norway and when it was no longer possible to earn a decent living on the land they heard about a place in the United States, in northeast Iowa, where there was good land and enough Norwegian expatriates to make the transition easier. And they came here and life was good, but they missed the mountains and the fjords and the sea. Their children were Iowans, but a part of them never stopped calling Norway home.

But some exiles never move anywhere at all, so it’s harder to tell by looking just what they are. It’s not necessary for us to leave home to become an exile; sometimes home leaves us. Think of all the social changes that have happened in this country since the middle of the last century. The Civil Rights movement won all sorts of advances in the legal status of African Americans at the expense of white privilege. Feminism won entry for women into roles and jobs and freedom at the expense of male power. A promise of ever-increasing comfort and convenience has been replaced with forty years of stagnant wages and uncertain futures. Straight white men woke up one day and discovered that we were no longer privileged, no longer given a place just because of who we were, no longer economically secure. This has given birth to a variety of responses, some of which I disagree with vehemently. But the pain of exile is real, no matter to what politics it might give rise.

Or we grew up in a normal family living an outwardly normal childhood. We might have suspected that something in us was not quite in sync with the hopes and dreams that our families held for us. We start to figure it out in adolescence as we discover that we keep falling in love with others of our own gender. And then we have to figure out how to navigate in a straight world as a gay man or a lesbian. Nothing is changed but everything is different and it will be a very long time until we can be at home again.

Or our doctor tells us that he’s found a lump and that “we really ought to have it biopsied.” Suddenly the landscape of our own body becomes foreign territory and we find ourselves living as an exile in our own skin.

Or the person we’ve shared our lives with through a long and amazing pilgrimage dies and our half-filled bed becomes a place of exile. We find ourselves far from home even while living in the house that we had shared for half a century.

Or maybe we are all exiles simply by virtue of having been born out of a womb that was warm and close and safe into a world of harsh lights and sounds, cold air that we have to breathe for ourselves, and the isolation of a separate existence. Maybe the cries of the newborn are the laments of the exiled. Maybe so.

The Bible is a book born out of the pain and struggle of exile. It offers hope to exiles, but not the sort of hope that brushes aside the anger and the pain and the struggle. The Bible wasn’t written by polite people living quiet lives. It was written by people who have “been there,” by people who found out the hard way how to live in exile as God’s people.

Here is some of what they learned:

First, when the terror and the rage that are the first part of exile had passed, the people of Judah discovered that, although they were far from home, they were not alone. The God who had allowed them to be sent into exile (or perhaps had even done the sending) had gone with them. If the people of God must go into exile, God goes with them. The covenant may have been battered but God and God’s people are bound together with ties that neither can break.

Second, life in exile is both necessary and possible. Judah had lost its place in the world, its independence as a people, its Temple, and the rhythms of its life. Instead, it was forced to live at the center of the Empire that had conquered it. It was surrounded by shrines to gods it did not and would not worship. It lived according to someone else’s calendar. These were all painful things. Still, none of that meant that the exiles could simply stop living. They were not allowed to surrender to despair. They were not allowed to melt into the population. They were called to live, to maintain their identity as God’s people.

Third, without the institutions of national life to support them, they discovered that their main resources were memory and imagination. They remembered and told the stories of God’s way with them. They sang the songs they had brought with them. They composed more. They sang their grief and their anger and their hope. They imagined the world as God wanted it to be. They prayed for it. They told the future against the present. Between engaging the past in memory and engaging the future in imagination they opened a space for their life as God’s people to continue.

Finally, when they had endured longer than they could endure, when they had lasted longer than they could last, when they came to the end and kept going, incredibly and past all hoping, they heard God’s voice calling them to come home:

A voice is crying out:“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!”

It is time for God’s people to come home, home from Babylon, home from exile. But a strange thing has happened. The home to which they were returning was not the home that they had left. Memory and imagination had done their work. Memory was shaped by imagination to become in Walter Brueggemann’s words, “a subversive memory of the future.” Or to steal a phrase from John Denver, home had become “a place they’d never been before.”

They had been transformed by exile, transformed by memory, transformed by imagination. They had become a new people. They had sung the old songs they had brought with them until they had become a new song. They had recited the past until it became a map for the future.

Advent is a time for us exiles, a time for us exiles to remember that we are not at home. Advent is a time for singing the songs that remember the homes we have never had. Advent is a time for hearing the voice of God calling all of us to come home at last to the home we have never known but have longed for all along in the deepest part of our hearts. At last, it is time to come home. At last, at long last.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.