Exilic Faith

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please join me in a brief prayer of illumination. O Lord our God, as we gather for worship today, please open our eyes, our hearts and our minds that we may welcome, absorb and live your word. Guide us, Lord, to receive the Holy Spirit and share your message by expression and deed through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Today's reading is from First Peter, chapter one, verses 17 through 23, and you'll find that on page 983 of the Pew Bibles. Therefore, prepare your minds for action. Discipline yourselves. Set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy. Be holy yourselves in all your conduct, for it is written, you shall be holy. For I am holy. If you invoke as Father the One who judges all people impartially according to their deeds. Live in reverent fear. During the time of your exile, you know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God now that you have purified your souls by your obedience in the truth, so that you have genuine mutual love. Love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable, but of imperishable seed through the living and enduring word of God. This is the word of our Lord. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Two Sundays ago was Easter, and I recall very well driving down from our rental house in Altadena down New York Avenue and seeing to my right and my left some people riding bikes and the full bike, bike attire, bike shorts and shirts, others in exercise outfits going for runs, others out in shorts and T shirts walking their dogs. And I not only had a collared shirt as I often do for worship, but I even had a tie. And when I stopped at a light on the corner of Hill and Washington and I could be seen by other people around me, I wondered what they thought of this guy dressed in a shirt and tie. They might have wondered if I was going to church or. Or they might have wondered if I was going to work. And either way, they might have wondered, why would you do that on a beautiful Weekend morning. Well, then I got down closer to this campus, and when I got to Colorado Boulevard, I started to see people already parked and either bringing their wares or coming to buy goods at the flea market at Pasadena City College. You may know that there is this monthly ritual on the first Sunday of every month, there is a flea market hosted at Pasadena City College, even on Easter. And I thought of people going to buy and sell goods as I passed them. And then when I went to park on the structure at Holliston and walked over, I even walked alongside some of them, and I thought, how odd I must have looked at that point. I was wearing a coat as well as a tie, and I thought if they'd seen me as well, with my full black robe and stole on, what they might have thought how odd I might have seemed. Well, during the pancake breakfast after the worship service, I was late to get my pancakes. But when I finally got out there and filled up my plate, the woman right next to me, who was also getting a plate of food I didn't recognize. So I asked, oh, are you new to Knox? I don't think I've met you yet. And she said, oh, hi. I just came from the flea market. I saw this great picnic that was taking place, and I thought I would come and enjoy the picnic. And as we talked, it became clear to me she didn't even know there was necessarily a religious service that was taking place before that pancake lunch. And I thought, you know, what if I told her at this point, you know, what we just did before coming out here to eat pancakes and sausages, we celebrated our leader, Jesus Christ, by symbolically eating his body and drinking his blood and announcing that though he had died, he had in fact risen from the dead. And I imagined her looking at me and quoting a line from Monty Python's the Holy Grail. What a strange person. Last Sunday I was on vacation. That's why you didn't see me here at worship. I'd gone up to visit my brother and his wife in the Bay Area and got to see both a Richard Thompson concert and a Bruce Springsteen concert with him. And I have to confess, while you were in worship here last Sunday morning, at least many of you, my brother had invited me to attend a swap meet with two of his friends Sunday morning. So I thought, okay, I'll consider it a kind of a move a cultural anthropologist might make, and I'll see what this other ritual is like going to a swap meet on a Sunday morning rather than worship. And so we went early Sunday morning to the University of San Francisco campus at the Rock and Swap Record Fair, where vinyl records, CDs, cassettes and music memorabilia were all on display. It was a fascinating Sunday morning ritual to observe. It officially started right at 10, the time many were gathered here for worship. However, there was an early bird opportunity to get there as close as early as 7am so of course that's when my brother wanted to get there along with his two friends. And there we were. So this Rock and Swap Record Fair, like our worship service, as an area where you can get coffee and snacks, take a break from it, a little lounge area. So I went over there at some point. I've never been as big and into vinyl records as my brother. Digital medium is just fine by me. So I went over to this area. You could get coffee and a bagel. And as I was getting some coffee and a person next to me was putting cream cheese on a bagel, I thought again of that woman who had attended the pancake breakfast at Knox. And I wondered what somebody next to me getting coffee at that Rock and Swap event might have thought if I'd said, you know what I would ordinarily be doing at this time? I wouldn't be perusing vinyl records. I would be singing songs celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I would be reading ancient texts that tell me you were ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. And I pictured that person next to me in the required attire of such an event, of jeans or shorts and a black shirt with a rock band on it. And I thought of him saying to himself, or out loud, what a strange person. There are a number of ways that the Book of First Peter tries to name this strangeness, this difference, this distinction that in many ways serves as a kind of theme for the Book of First Peter, a strangeness I've been referring, reflecting on these last two Sundays. This letter is addressed to believers in first century Pontius Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. And the author describes the beliefs and practices of the Christian community and their very identity as Christians, not as something merely similar to, but quite distinct from the beliefs and practices of others in those places. And in trying to name that difference, that strangeness, some of the words First Peter employs in Greek are parokeia, peripedemos, and perakos. All those words imply a kind of dwelling in that place with a certain otherness or foreignness with regard to others also living in that place. Depending on your translation, you'll find those Greek words translated a host of different ways. Some Bibles translate those words as foreigner, others exile, alien, pilgrim, sojourner, or simply stranger, meaning someone who in that time and place is, well, literally strange. The new Revised Standard Version that Cheryl read from this morning, the Bible you have in your pews particularly likes the term exile. In translating those Greek words, like the one that shows up in today's passage parapetamos in. In the very first verse of today's passage from First Peter, we hear this charge, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. But another way to translate that verse is live in reverent fear as the strangers in that place where you are now. There's a certain poignancy to translating peripedemos as exile, for exile communicates a kind of people yearning for home, and yet who don't quite experience that sense of home in the time and place that they find themselves, at least not to the degree they yearn for. Jan Van Rusbrock once wrote, knowledge of ourselves teaches us where we come, where we are, and where we're going. We come from God and we are in exile. And because the force of our love seeks after God, we're conscious of this exile. That notion of exile articulates a kind of spiritual yearning for a sense of union with God and is something that we Christians believe we can know today, at least in part as a kind of foretaste of what's yet to come. That sense of relationship with God. And the term exile, as Van Rusbrouck notes, can help us get at that yearning that we have that's been partially met, but we look to have met in full when we know a kind of deeper, fuller relationship with God, when we see not simply through a glass, dimly, but in full. And there was a particular year in my life where that term exile had particular appeal to my life and faith. Jill and I had recently moved from Southern California, which had long been my home, to New Haven, Connecticut, so she could pursue a PhD in theology. We lived that year in the upper floor of a building owned by Christchurch New Haven, an Episcopal church. We were like the Marroquin family who. Who live in the top floor of the north side house. They're temporarily exiles off in Monte Vista Grove because we're doing repairs because of leaks in that house. We were living in the upper floor of this manse that belonged to Christchurch New Haven. And the song that spoke to Me most that particular year. This was 1999. Wasn't the song by Prince, 1999? Instead, it was a song that I'd heard on the radio, on a radio program that I would weekly record on cassette, if you remember those things called cassettes. And it was a song by a Scottish guitarist and songwriter named Ed Miller. Miller was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, but then in 1968, he moved to Austin, Texas, to pursue graduate work in folklore and in geography. He moved to Austin and he never left. And then he wrote a song about that sense of displacement, of being in exile. And it was entitled At Home with the Exiles. It went like this across the Atlantic I did fly Left old Scotland I know not why didn't think that I'd say goodbye didn't plan to be in exile Landed in America for just a year or so to stay But I'm still living here today happy among the exiles. I like the portrayal in that song of this country as a nation of exiles. That has appeal also. I was experiencing a sense of being far from home that year, and Jills and my best friends were a couple from Australia who were also longing in many ways for that home they had known before. This couple invited us to a soiree at their home. They were active at their Congregational church in New Haven and invited Jill and I and some others to a soiree where everyone was invited to bring a song or poem to share. I brought that song with my guitar at home with the exiles. It spoke to me of a kind of relationship I felt with this couple, with other Christians, and even with others who felt displaced at that particular time. I love the references in the New Testament standard version at that time. In First Peter to exile, I thought, that's me, that's us. We are all exiles. And it helps us identify the longing we have for God and for home, and that we trust God will one day fully answer. But appealing as that term exile still is to me, there are problems with translating Parakeia, Parapetamos or Pericos as exile. You see, if we aren't careful, the word exile can evoke in our imagination a kind of placelessness, a sense that my home is some other place beyond the blue, up in heaven or back in that land where I used to live. And we can fail to attend to God's work in this particular place, this bio region, this watershed in which we live right now and to the role we play where we are. I also fear my use of the term exile too quickly links my experience of feeling far from home with those who've suffered a far more agonizing loss than I have known. I think of people who've been driven off their land or out of their country by forces of oppression, war, economic calamity, drought or famine. According to UN statistics, one of every 70 people on Earth has been forced to flee their former nation state. I think of people this church has accompanied in their journey of seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries and the depth of loss that term exile holds for them. I think of those in Sudan who fled from the north to the south, Palestinians especially those living in Gaza. I think of people from Lebanon, people from states in Central America forced to flee north for their survival. Or I think of people like the Tongva or the Gabrielena Tongva band of Mission Indians. And their experience of being driven off ancestral land and their situation can't help but seem to me a different world. You know, from the spiritual longing or sense of cross country relocation I've known. And so that makes me less able than I have been in the past to refer to my life or faith with overtly exilic language. But also exile, particularly understood as a spiritual longing, doesn't seem to do full justice to the sense of materiality and place that describes God's work in the pages of First Peter. This letter of First Peter's address to the Christian community in specific places. Pontius Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. And they are certainly described, this Christian community, as different or distinct or strange people in these places. But they are in these places and connected to them. And when we read the contrast between gold and silver on one side and the precious blood of Jesus and the word of God on the other, the contrast is not so much between the material and the immaterial or ethereal or spiritual. It's instead between symbols of getting our identity and meaning through wealth and getting our identity and meaning through Christ's work by his life, death and resurrection, and the bond that forms the blood of Christ, being his very life and love poured out for us, how that unites us with God through Christ to God and to other believers, and creates in us a different way of relating to place. Believers are described in First Peter as a placed people with other flesh and blood, sisters and brothers under the authority, we read of a divine Father and ransomed from bondage by the work here on earth of a Savior who shed his blood and rose again. And yet this people described in these places different. The word used to describe Christians is at the beginning of the passage Cheryl, read Holy. A word tied to the very nature of God, who is wholly other, distinct and separate from everything God's made. And yet God is at work. We read in Scripture in what God has made. And so for believers, that sense of holiness we have by faith in Christ, it makes us both different from and connected to others in place and time. For we all depend on and are connected to the place where we live, even that place that can feel, well, not quite fully like home. See, the church is both set apart and set within, distinct from and connected to place and the people of that place, both of the world and connected to that people, and yet strangers too. There's a tension to that, isn't there? You surely felt it in your lives of being both connected to and estranged from both the same and other than. And it seems to me so tempting today as Christians to try to reduce the strange, the difference, the distinction. We can downplay it by merely assimilating to the beliefs and practices of others around us, to their rituals, to the culture or cultures of which we're a part, or to the nation or even empire in which we find ourselves. Or we can also try, in an effort to reduce that tension, to make the nation or empire or culture in which we live, quote, unquote, Christian. Many historians will trace that particular move of trying to Christianize empire in particular, back to the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine decreed that the Roman Empire was now Christian. Well, there were good things to that move. Certainly it meant there was a whole lot less persecution of Christians than there had been before. That's great. But there's a downside, too. Such a move failed to recognize that quality highlighted in the book of First Peter, that Christianity's relationship to empire, to nation, to culture is inherently that of strangeness, of otherness, of difference, distinction, exile. Lose that, you lose the secret sauce. You lose that set apartness, you lose that holiness that we believe is ours through faith by Christ and his holiness imputed to us. We're citizens. Scripture proclaims first and foremost of God's kingdom, and that will always put us in some degree of tension or distinction from the nation, state, empire, or broader people group with whom we live. So, friends, let me invite you with me. Embrace the strange, embrace the strange. If people say, what a strange person, or what a strange people, let's say, that's right, that's right. We are strange. After all, we've been born again through the work of a man called Jesus Christ, born into a new sense of identity and relationship with God, one Another creation. But our strangeness, we read in today's passage, reveals itself in love. So let's have people see not just our strangeness, but that love. It's a love that First Peter describes as coming straight from the heart. Mutual love. Love tied to the love of God, poured out for us in Christ and poured out for all the world. Maybe that woman who visited our pancake breakfast is here today. I don't see her, but she might be here. And if you are here, welcome. We're thrilled that you've come to join us not just for the pancake breakfast, but here for our time of worship as well. And I hope you will see in us a community that loves one another, that serves one another. Pancakes and pizza after church on Sunday. I hope you'll see a community that also prays together and prays for one another and for our world. I hope you'll see our love for immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and exiles. I hope you'll see our love and care for God's creation. I hope you'll see our deep love for God, a power that we believe is so much greater and more grounding in our lives than wealth or success. That's why we observe this time of worship, so that we can center ourselves on what's real and on God's rule, and not these false things luring us, promising us what they can't deliver. We believe we're saved by God's gracious work in Christ and not by our own deeds. I hope you discover in us a sense of Christ's spirit. And maybe you'll find what I found in Christ and the community who gathers in his name. Maybe you'll find here, among this strange people, a place you belong. A place the stranger can call home. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, amen.