09.18.08

faith in exile

Posted in culture, hermeneutics, leadership, mission, pluralism, theology, transition at 5:30 am by len

In the first chapter of Cadences of Home, Walter Brueggemann suggests six points of connection between the circumstance of exile and scriptural resources. I was particularly struck on this reading of the obvious connection points to the need for missional orders formed around a rule of life.

1. Exiles must grieve their loss and express their resentful sadness about what was and now is not and never will be again… Churches must be communities of honest sadness, naming the losses. The obvious resource.. is Lamentations.

2.  Exile is an act of being orphaned [where] there is no sure home. I suggest the term rootlessness. Exiles need to take with them old habits, old customs, old memories, old photographs. The scriptural resources .. are the genealogies that have seemed so boring. Two easy access points are (a) the Matthean genealogy… (b) the recital in Hebrews 11 of all our family “by faith.”

3. The most obvious reality and greatest threat to exiles is the power of despair. On the one hand, everything we have worked for is irretrievably lost. On the other hand, we are helpless in this circumstance and fated here forever. This despair is rooted in two “failures of faith.” First, doubting God’s fidelity. Second, doubting God’s power to save us. The scriptural resource is voiced especially in Isaiah 40-55.

4. Exile is an experience of profaned absence. The “absence of God” is not only a personal, emotional sense, but a public, institutional awareness that “the glory has departed.” Treasured symbols are now treated with contempt. Protestant scholarship has neglected the texts that pertain to the “crisis of presence” because of their connection to sacramentalism. There are three aspects to this recovery of sacramental life in the history of Israel. (a) the marking or setting apart of circumcision; (b) Sabbath as a protest against the production system of Babylon; (c) the tabernacle is an imaginative effort to form a special place where God’s holiness can be properly hosted. It is thoroughly biblical to attend to modes of presence that are not merely verbal.

5. Exile is an experience of moral incongruity. The displacement and destructiveness of exile make one aware that the terrible fate of displacement is more massive than can be explained in terms of moral symmetry. In the poem of Job the questions of failure, fault, blame and guilt simply evaporate. We are invited to a larger vista of mystery that contains wild and threatening dimensions of faith. If Job is understood as an intellectual enterprise, it may cut the nerve of faith. But if it is taken as a pastoral opportunity to explode petty, narcissistic categories for a larger field of mystery, it might enable exiles to embrace their self-concern then move beyond it to larger dimensions..

6.The danger in exile is to become so preoccupied with self that one cannot get outside one’s self to rethink, reimagine, and redescribe larger reality. One of the strategies for coping is the narratives of defiance and cunning that enjoin exiles not to confront their harsh overlords directly, but to negotiate knowingly between faith and the pressures of “reality.” (a) the story of Joseph concerns the capacity of an Israelite to cooperate with the established regime at the same time maintaining an edge of discernment; (b) the tale of Esther shows a courageous Jew willing to outflank established power; (c) the story of Daniel shows a young man pressed into civil service, but able to exercise authority because he maintained a sense of self rooted outside the Empire. This practice of narrative admits no easy “Christ against culture” model but rather requires risky negotiation..  (Cadences, p 4-11).

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