Exile

 One more comment from Stefan Paas’s article “Pilgrims and Priests” and that is to note the relationship that he suggests with the experience of exile that plays such a strong role in what we call the Old Testament. It is a challenging place to be, and yet, in the end, it is also a rewarding place. Our life in a highly secular society has many parallels with that of the exiled Israelites. We are out of our comfort zone. We struggle to make sense of things. It can produce a crisis of faith. How can this be? How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

As Paas says – “much of the Bible is written in situations of displacement and uprooting. The narratives of exile and diaspora may help late–modern Christians in the West to reconnect their cultural experience with the experience of the ancient prophets who witnessed about God in situations where everything seemed lost. Let us not forget that the crisis of exile was for Israel a crisis of faith.”

We can and should be positive about exile, but never entirely so, and that does not mean that it is easy. But it does, and should, remind us of our reliance on the immense love of God, a reliance that is needed not just in the difficult moments, but always. God has the bigger picture.

Paas again – “Israel was to learn what the church may have to learn today: that being uprooted and becoming weak may be the key to understanding more about God and God’s world. God has not abandoned us, not at all. He has led us into a new environment, where we are far more vulnerable and thus far more dependent on him. Christian institutions have crumbled, Christian power has disappeared. Yet it might very well be that only by losing the “God of our ancestors” and the “God of our land” will we see how great and merciful God truly is.”

Quotes are from an article "Pilgrims and Priests: Missional Ecclesiology in a Secular Society" in ANVIL – Journal of Theology and Mission – Church Missionary Society  Vol. 35 Issue 3 - (2019)