Packing for Exile (14th Sunday after Pentecost; 2 Kings 23:8-12, 21b; August 21, 2016)

Packing for Exile

14th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 23:8-12, 21b
August 21, 2016

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

What would you take with you if your house were on fire? What would you grab if you had seconds to get yourself and your family to safety?

This is an exercise in something called "values clarification." Only it's a trick question, because the answer is, You take nothing with you if your house is on fire. You get your family out; you get yourself out. And you stay out until or unless the fire department says that it's safe to go back in.

But what if you had some notice of a coming disaster that required you to evacuate your home with the assumption that you could not return and that everything you left behind would be lost? This doesn't happen much in Iowa. We don't have hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, or large brush fires. We have blizzards, but even if we are forced out of our homes, what we leave behind won't be destroyed. We have tornadoes, but they leave no time at all for last-minute decisions.

But it's an interesting exercise. Try it when you get home or think your way through it now. You have thirty minutes to pack a single suitcase small enough to fit in the overhead compartment. It can't weigh much because you're going to have to carry it. One small suitcase and a bag. That's all. What would you pack if you had to leave home and everything you have behind?

That's what the people of Jerusalem had to decide. The city was in ruins, the promise of God's protection shattered like the city walls. The Temple was burned, its sacred implements melted down for their metals: bronze, copper, and gold. After months of fear, after a season of hunger and then starvation, after the collapse of the defenses and the looting of the city, they found themselves still alive. The Babylonian army herded them together for the long walk to Babylon. They could take only what they could carry.

What did they take? What did they leave behind? There was no way to take any furniture, but they would need a blanket each. They needed a change of clothing. What about cooking utensils? They weren't even supposed to have them, but I'll bet many of them had to decide whether to take their household idols, their Baals and Astartes. Maybe not: those gods hadn't saved them either and what would be the point in taking the gods of their land to a distant city, a city that had its own gods?

The priests faced even more difficult choices. They had to decide not only about what their families would take, but about what holy things they could take with them. They couldn't take the Temple; it was in ruins. Everything of importance had been looted or destroyed. Everything except the scrolls. Now, these priests weren't just ritual specialists. Some of them were librarians. My sister is a librarian, so I know a little about them and the way they think. These librarian-priests would have taken as many of the scrolls as they could carry. Never mind extra clothing. Clothing could be replaced. Never mind cooking utensils, never mind photo albums, never mind family keepsakes, never mind their wife's wedding dress, never mind the children's toys. They took the scrolls.

Some of these scrolls were already considered sacred: there were scrolls that contained much of what would eventually become the Torah. But in addition to these there were some psalms, some annals of the kings of Israel and Judah, some of the writings of the prophets, some wisdom literature. It wasn't all compiled into one easily carried book like our Bible. What we call the Old Testament was far from finished--more on that in the next couple of weeks--and the scrolls were bulky. The priests packed all that they could into their suitcases and tucked extra clothing around them as padding and protection.

That was the physical baggage. We carry other sorts of baggage and so did they. They carried their memories, collective memories of slavery and deliverance, times of famine and plenty, and personal memories of life in Jerusalem with its rhythms of planting and harvest, of holy days and sacred seasons. Overlaid on their deep memories were the horrors of defeat and destruction and despair. What could they make out of all those memories? Was there any way to hang them all together, to make a unified story of all that had happened, a story with a past and, even more importantly and improbably, a story with a future?

In a way a culture is a kind of baggage. A culture is all that we have created or adapted in order to interact with our environment. Culture includes all of the ways that we look at the world and the patterns of how we think about ourselves and the world, our frames of reference and even our language. We don’t think about these things very much—we just use them. Could they keep these? Could they take them with them? Maybe. They would have to learn the language of their captors just to survive. Would it be worth the extra trouble to be a permanently bilingual people?

What about their unquestioned habits of thought? Every culture has some. We have some. When the disaster befell us in 2001 our first question was, Why do they hate us? That’s a question that might have led to real insight. But we didn't spend much time on it. The myth of American Exceptionalism quickly took over and gave us the answer: There is nothing wrong with us. We have done no wrong. We are innocent. They hate us because we are good and they are evil. The habit of blaming others for the things that happen to us is a heavy habit to carry, one that keeps us from learning and maturing as a people.

Ancient Jerusalemites had their habits, too. For centuries Jerusalemites had viewed the world through their certainty that Yahweh would protect the city of David, the city where "God's name lives", the city where the Temple of Yahweh stood. If the people found it hard to keep all the rules, especially the rules about economic and social justice, in the covenant, God would understand. The covenant would stand and it would withstand the armies of Babylon as it had withstood the armies of Egypt and Assyria. They were God's people no matter what. They were safe.

But this Judean Exceptionalism had proven to be a house built on sand. It had been swept away by the flood of soldiers from the North. And now what? Perhaps this bit of mental baggage was too heavy to carry with them, especially since it no longer seemed to serve any useful purpose.

Say whatever you will about the experience of exile; it has a remarkable ability to help us sort out what is vital, what is merely important, and what is more of a burden than a blessing. What do you really need to be a Judean or a Jerusalemite? If we had seen the people going into exile and observed their choices, we would have seen the beginnings of an answer to that question.

Other groups have had to answer that question for themselves. Sometimes it's because they have been driven from their homes by famine or force. Other times it's because they have been drawn to another place by opportunity. I think of the choices made by countless immigrants to this country. What could they fit in a steamer trunk? And what of their culture would be useful enough to bring with them? The Vesterheim Museum is a record in material culture of the answers to those questions. Looking back we see their choices as natural and inevitable, but I'm sure they were pretty hard for the people making them. Norwegian-Americans are indistinguishable from the rest of northern European folks among whom they settled. They speak the same language as the rest of us, follow the same fashion trends, live in the same kind of dwellings. Once a year they trot out their bunads and make piles of lefsa. Perhaps they point with pride to their ancient legends and myths. Perhaps they are a little embarrassed about their bad manners when they began to drop in on their neighbors in the ninth century. Along the way, they have answered the question of what it means to be an American of Norwegian descent, giving about as many answers to the question as there are individuals.

Another group that interests me very much are the Muslim immigrants from various Muslim-majority nations. Almost entirely, they have come for the same reason that our forebears did: opportunity. But along the way they have to decide what the essence of being Muslim really is. In their home countries the culture is so permeated by Islam that being Muslim is mostly a matter of going along with the mainstream. But here it is different. Ramadan comes and goes for most Americans without our even being aware of it. The public call to prayer is not a feature of American villages, towns and cities.

Some few Muslims I am sure have decided that the problem is that the United States is not a Muslim nation. Others have decided perhaps unconsciously that they will leave Islam behind as they melt into the American pot. But the vast majority, I suspect, are trying to figure out what the essence of Islam is and what being Muslim is in the American context. I suspect that, if we do not make them into an oppressed minority, the results of that struggle will be a great good for them, for our shared world, and for the ancient homeland of Islam.

We, too, struggle with the question of what baggage to take into a changed world. Our older people do that when they decide that it's time to "downsize." What goes with them? What is going to the children, or sold at a yard sale, or placed at the curbside? Our young people do that when they go to college and begin to work out what they can take with them of all they have learned at home and what will have to yield to a wider world of learning. What are they going to believe? When people decide to get married, they have to decide what can come with them and what cannot. Furniture is one question, but far more important is the mental baggage, the long habit of thinking like individuals.

The Church (with a capital C) in the United States is going through this. We know that our nation is undergoing a massive racial shift. Across our country white children are no longer a majority in public school kindergartens and first grade classrooms. By 2040 or so, there will be no racial majority in our country.

But one shift has already happened. When we factor in the large number of "nones" and "dones" in our younger generations, we have already passed a major milestone. White Christians are no longer a majority. Demographically, this is no longer a white Christian nation. That's not the future; that's our present reality.

I stayed in one place, but the world has changed around me. So I have gone into exile without ever having left home. So, I believe, has the United Methodist Church. Consciously or not, we are now deciding on the baggage we can and can't take into the new world. We can look at the struggles over the role and place of LGBTQ folks in our denomination through this lens. Can we carry our gender and sexuality baggage with us into the future? Or do we need to find other ways to define the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in our new world? What do we need to take with us?

This question will be with us for a long time. We'll have questions like: Does a congregation function best with or without a permanent building? Is a once a week classroom setting the best way of introducing our children (and adults) to this matter of following Jesus or are there ways that make more sense in the world that emerging around us? What do we do with denominational organizations? Do we need an ordained clergy? If so, for what?

We have gone a long way to preparing ourselves to make those kinds of decisions by distilling our shared experience into five statements that set out what we value. We'll be introducing them in the next few weeks and I'll be preaching about them after Labor Day. Buildings, programs, and structures may go with us or they may not, but our values are almost certain to go with us wherever we have to go.

When the survivors of the disaster at Jerusalem set off, they were grief-stricken and in shock. They made their choices about what to take with them in a daze. I imagine that their path was littered with the evidence of changed minds as they decided that this or that treasured item was too heavy after all. What was never visible were the discarded habits of thought. They were, as all exiles are, in mourning for their lost homes and the lives that they lived there. I'm sure they never imagined that they had a future. I'm sure they thought God had abandoned them forever.

They could not see that they would build new homes and live in them. They would plant gardens and eat what they produced. They would marry. They would have children. Their children would marry and have children. They would not die out. They would live. And they would discover that Yahweh had not abandoned them. They would discover that, if they had to go into exile, Yahweh would go with them. They would discover that God is the God of their future as well as their past.

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