Sermon Transcript
Lamentations 1:1-5. How deserted lies the city once so full of people. How like a widow is she who once was great among the nations! She who was a queen among the provinces has now become a slave. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks.
Among all her lovers there’s no one to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her, they’ve become her enemies. After affliction and harsh labor, Judah has gone into exile. She dwells among the nations, she finds no resting place. All who pursue her have overtaken her in the midst of her distress.
The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to her appointed festivals. All her gateways are desolate, her priests moan, her young women grieve, and she is bitter in anguish. Her foes have become her masters, her enemies are at ease. The Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe.
Jeremiah 29, verse 4 through 7. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carry into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters.
Increase in number there, do not decrease. Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. Jeremiah 31:10-17.
Hear the word of the Lord, you nations. Proclaim it in distant coastlands. He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd. For the Lord will deliver Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they. They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion.
They will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord, the grain, the new wine, and the olive oil, the young of the flock and herds. They will be like a well-watered garden, and they will sorrow no more. Then young women will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness. I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.
I will satisfy the priests with abundance, and my people will be filled with bounty, declares the Lord. This is what the Lord says: A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. This is what the Lord says: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded, declares the Lord. They will return from the land of the enemy, so there is hope for your descendants, declares the Lord. Your children will return to their own land.
Yeah, good morning everybody. I think I’m on. Am I on? Yeah, there we are. Thank you, Serena.
Good morning to all of you. Before I share today’s message from the texts that were just read by Serena there, I just want to once again reflect on how wonderful last night was. How many of you were here for the children’s musical? Wasn’t that just incredible?
I love our Christmas presentations by our children’s choirs because they just, I think, prepare our hearts for the season in a really unique way, and it’s wonderful to hear the gospel being sung by children. And part of what was special about last night is obviously, if you were here, celebrating Les Schneider and her If you haven’t yet said thank you to Les when you see her, please tell her thank you. When you see Bob, say thank you to Bob. We’re grateful to have had just such a good and faithful servant, good and faithful servants like them, and I’m so grateful for that. One of the things I often hear from people anytime there’s an event like that is people saying, that’s so wonderful.
This is a wonderful ministry outreach. We should do more ministry outreaches. And that’s exciting. Can I give you a little secret? Anything we do here at the church can be a ministry outreach.
One way is just through invitation. Your invitation matters. And so we try to do things from time to time that maybe a person wouldn’t come here on a Sunday morning, but they might come to a children’s musical, right? Or our Christmas Eve service. Maybe they wouldn’t come to a Sunday morning, but they would come to a Christmas Eve service.
Service, and you have an opportunity to do that. Also, your neighbors and your friends are also probably looking for opportunities to serve, and so they have opportunities to serve, and it doesn’t just have to be in Christmas, although I do want to remind you about our Salvation Army outreach. That’s a wonderful way for people to see and to participate in showing love for our community. We have something that is coming up that I want to just direct your attention to, and you’ll be hearing more about it in the coming weeks. Days.
It’s after Christmas, but on February the 10th, we have an event. I— it’s one of my favorite events of every year that we’ve been doing for the last couple years, and it’s called Night to Shine. Night to Shine is going to be a community-wide effort to show love to our community, to people who have disabilities or other kinds of special needs. It’s a special prom night experience that is put on by faith communities all around, and we get to host That’s an incredible outreach. You can invite your friends and your neighbors to be a part of that.
The reason why I direct your attention to that is not just because of the outreach and not just because my wife Shannon is in charge of this event, and so I wanted to put in a plug for that, but also because we’ve just started the process, right, Shannon, of signing up volunteers. This is gonna have to be an all-hands-on-deck situation. If it was somewhere else, maybe there’s some of us that couldn’t help. No, we’re gonna have to be all hands on deck. Like, we need to be ready for February the 10th, another wonderful outreach, Night to Shine.
You can go to bridges.info, the service opportunities page. You’ll see a link there to sign up. We need volunteers signing up right now in a variety of areas. It’s gonna be an incredible night. If you don’t know about Night to Shine, just Google it.
It’s gonna be unbelievable. So all of these are opportunities for us to show outreach and love to our neighbor. And I’m super excited that we get to be a part of these things. Now let’s talk about today’s message and these texts that were read for us. Quick, like, very, very awkward segue into talking about exile, right?
Yeah, because, you know, we just got to jump into it. But let me ask you this: what do the following films have in common? I’m gonna name some films for you. What do these have in common? The Wizard of Oz, North by Northwest, which is my favorite Hitchcock film, thank you for asking, Some Like It Hot, In the Heat of the Night.
Some of you are like, Steve, those are really, really, really old movies. Can you, like, get a little bit more recent? Okay, what about Pleasantville, Back to the Future 1, Back to the Future 2, Back to the Future 3, Big. I love Big. Tom Hanks.
Home Alone 2, that’s the one in New York. Some of you are like, okay, Steve, how about something from this century, please? Okay, how about The Matrix, Elf, The Terminal, 13 Going on 30, The Martian? For you MCU or DC people, I’ll throw in Thor, Doctor Strange, and Aquaman. What do all of those movies that I’ve just named have in common?
Before I answer that, let me add some TV shows to the mix. If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember The Beverly Hillbillies.
Swimming pools, movie stars. Black Gold, Texas Tea. Gilligan’s Island. Green Acres, if you don’t remember those. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Survivor. The Amazing Race. Naked and Afraid. And even more recently, Stranger Things. Ted Lasso.
What do all of these titles that I’ve just named have in common? I’ll tell you, each of them in their own way present what we would call a fish-out-of-water story. In the case of Aquaman, that’s a literal fish-out-of-water story. But each of these are based on the premise of let’s take a person, let’s take a group of people out of their familiar surroundings, and let’s throw them into a new environment. It’s probably gonna be a bit uncomfortable and awkward, and there’s gonna be some cultural things happening there, and let’s just see what happens.
That’s a fish-out-of-water story. These kinds of stories have been around for a long time, have they not? In the world of film, you go back to someone like Charlie Chaplin. The whole point of his character is, let’s take this guy and let’s throw him into the big city. Let’s throw him into the California Gold Rush.
Let’s throw him out on a farm. Let’s just see how he adapts and let’s have some fun at his expense. My favorite film of all time, thank you for asking, is a French film from 1967. It deals with the same thing. The fish-out-of-water story is a theme.
It’s all over the place. Now, I’m not sure all of the reasons why these stories appeal to us, but they do. We love fish-out-of-water stories as long as someone else is the fish out of water. We like to watch other people struggle in new surroundings, and let’s laugh at their expense. We tend to not like it when we are the fish.
I share all of this by way of introduction to help us think about one of the most prominent and recurring themes in all of Scripture, although we tend to overlook it as a prominent theme, but it’s there. It’s a theme that God’s people have faced for millennia. It’s something we face living today in the South Bay. What is it? It’s a theme of exile.
It’s the theme that for most of history, God’s people have lived in this fragmented culture, where there’s all these different competing visions of reality and competing visions of right and wrong and competing visions of what we are even here for in the first place. And when you live in a culture like that, there are particular challenges. And one of them is frequently feeling like a fish out of water because there’s this sense of exile and alienation, a sense of being estranged, the sense of feeling like we’re not at home in this world. And the reality as a Christian of living in a culture that is frequently at odds with our faith. In exile, everything’s turned upside down.
It’s disorienting. You are in the unknown, and it’s a real challenge. Now, I’ve used this illustration before, but if you’ve ever gone swimming in a river that has a bit of current to it, it doesn’t have to be roaring rapids for you to feel the pull of the current. If you jump in, you might be able to stay in the same spot for a little bit of time, But depending on the flow of the current, you’re probably going to eventually get tired and maybe even feel like giving up and just let the current take you, right? Some cases it takes lots of effort, lots of effort to swim against the tide, against the current, against the stream of the river.
It takes no effort whatsoever to hop in a tube, get your little umbrella drink, and just get carried along. If you’re trying to swim upriver, against the current, what you’re gonna see is despite your best efforts, you’re still gradually getting pulled down the river. And that’s the sort of dynamic that what we call the exilic literature in the Old Testament, the literature about exile in the Old Testament, it’s what that opens up for us. Like books like Daniel and Esther and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations, these are all part of the Bible’s exilic literature, and they addressed the time when the ancient Israelites were physically taken into exile, taken away from their homes, taken away from familiar surroundings, taken away from a culture that by and large believed in the God of the Bible, and they’re thrust into a new culture like a fish out of water. And in this new culture, it’s hostile to their faith.
Now, I should point out that the writers of the Exilic books were obviously addressing literal homelessness, physical exile, actual physical refugees. And so we shouldn’t presume to just compare all of our experience to theirs at each and every point along the way, or even to compare our experiences now with someone who’s an actual refugee or exile living in the world somewhere. Most of us will thankfully never experience that kind of persecution or displacement, thankfully. But there’s still just something about reading the exile literature that’s just really, really good for us. And the reason why it’s good for us to consider is because it helps us to think through the question, how do I live the life of a believer in an unbelieving world where I’m made to feel like a fish out of water?
How do I do that? How do I live in a world where many of our cultural institutions— government, The arts, academia aren’t neutral but are actually hostile to my faith and to the God that I profess. And what is going to motivate me? And what is going to motivate you and give us the energy for a lifetime of fighting against the currents of the culture? These are important questions, aren’t they?
Let’s start by taking the texts that were read just a moment ago because they have a lot to tell us about first the experience of exile, the common experience of exile. It’s more common than you realize. The Book of Lamentations contains 5 poems about what happened in the year 587 BC. Quick history lesson: that’s when the city of Jerusalem was attacked by the mighty Babylonian Empire under the leadership of King Nebuchadnezzar. And a year later, the city of Jerusalem and the temple were completely plundered and burned.
Thousands of Israelites Taken from their homes and all that is familiar. They become exiles. And as exiles, they’re now a minority surrounded by a new culture with new gods. And the fall of Jerusalem and the exile was just the most horrendous catastrophe in Israel’s history up to that point. So, remember, God had promised Abraham the land of Israel.
Let’s remember, God had brought the people out of slavery. Let’s remember, God had led them through the Red Sea, through the wilderness, He had provided the manna in the desert. Let’s remember, he gave them a covenant. He chose them. He gave them 10 Commandments and the law.
He led them to the Promised Land. Let’s remember what the temple meant to them in Jerusalem. It meant God’s presence dwelling with them. And that’s where the priests conducted their rituals of Israel’s worship. But now all of it’s taken away from them.
They’re lies. Their families, their community, their place of worship, all of it completely decimated in God. And so, the book of Lamentations is a sort of memorial to that acute pain and the confusion that the Israelites had to have felt following the destruction and now that they’re in exile. And Lamentations is just a sad, sad book. Yes, there are a few verses of hope in it, and that’s typically what we preach anytime we preach Lamentations.
Lamentations. Find the 1 or 2 verses of hope there in the middle of chapter 3. But it’s largely these mournfully sad poems, and they describe the painful reality of exile for us. The city of Jerusalem, Lamentations 1:1, it now lies deserted. The appointed festivals that were so eagerly attended and anticipated, drawing all these immense crowds from all over, those are now gone.
No one comes to them anymore. The city gates, they’re now desolate. The nation that used to be great and so admired from outsiders and respected is now enslaved. Their friends are now their foes, the people they used to count on. There’s no one to comfort Israel in this grief.
That’s what Lamentations 1:2 says. She feels betrayed. She’s in bitter anguish. She’s grieving and groaning, and it’s all just so miserable. Guys, that’s just the first 5 verses of Lamentations.
The bigger question that I’m sure that they were asking, and that anytime you’re in exile that you’re asking, is how in the world could this have happened? How is this possible? It’s a great question. It’s one that leads to another aspect related to the experience of exile that we read about in Scripture, and that is the utter predictability of it all.
We could have seen this coming a mile away, couldn’t we? I mean, it was painful enough to have to go through all of the anguish and the exile because God had repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly, over and over again, warned the people beforehand through the prophets that this very thing would happen to them. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to them. God had warned them from the very beginning about the consequences of rebellion against him.
If they were unfaithful. God had held up his end of the covenant. The people had not held up their end. And there’s another aspect related to all of this that is a painful pill for some to swallow. It’s not just that, yes, the people are in exile because of their own rebellion, but to add salt to the wound, God is the one who made all this happen.
Lamentations 1:5 says it’s not like God was completely uninvolved. Lamentations 1:5, tells us the Lord is the one who brought this grief their way. God’s the one who did it. Yes, because of their many sins, but he was in control. He was directly involved.
He was ultimately orchestrating all of this. God, why would you do that? He was the one who allowed it to happen. What does this have to do with us today? A lot.
Because what Lamentations and the prophets and and all the exilic literature in the Old Testament put in front of us in ways that we cannot deny is the horrible consequences of rebellion against God, the horrible consequences of acting like we know better, that our way is better, that we’re smarter than God, that it’s better to reject God’s law and then to try to write our own. And so the reason that this matters to us today please don’t miss this, is that Israel’s Babylonian experience 2,500 years ago is an image of something far more universal, is it not? And that is that exile is the human condition for all of us, even in 2022. You say, I’m not in exile. The exilic literature would beg to differ.
Go back to the first pages of the Bible. You see humanity living in this beautiful garden that served as our home, right? It’s the one place every need we had was met. But if you know the rest of the story, you know that we lost our home. Genesis 3 tells us we chose to be our own bosses and masters.
And so we went, what, into exile. That’s the first exile in Scripture. Genesis 3, we lost the garden. We lost home. And so in the Bible, exile is now the norm for us.
We all just keep repeating the same pattern of rebellion, of human corruption, leading to a Babylon that we can’t escape and to an exile we can’t resolve through our own efforts. We can’t cover it up by having a great family and a bank account that’s full. Exile is that feeling of alienation and longing for something more, where you’re aware that you’re living in a world that is scarred with pain and broken relationships and death and tragedy. Yes, that is done by others, but also by us.
So, it doesn’t matter where you live. While you and I are here in this world, we are all exiles longing for a better place, longing for a better home. And it’s just the universal experience of exile that we all have to come to grips with. So, what do we do about it? It’s where God says something in Scripture completely counterintuitive to anything you would ever expect God to say.
And the shocking thing about this message of God to those in exile is that he doesn’t encourage the people while they’re in exile to look for a way out. What? He doesn’t tell them to pray for a way out. He doesn’t tell them to try to discover a way out. He doesn’t tell them to live isolated and hidden lives until the exile is over.
He doesn’t tell them to resist Babylon. He doesn’t tell them to revolt in the capital city. He doesn’t tell them to withdraw. But he also doesn’t tell them to do the opposite and just go along with the current and accept these new gods as their own. What does he say instead?
God tells them something totally different and surprising, and Serena read it for us in Jeremiah 29:4-7. He tells them, while you are in exile, I want you to settle in.
I want you to build houses. I want you to plant gardens. I want you to grow your families. And most surprisingly, I want you to seek the well-being of Babylon. I want you to pray to the Lord on Babylon’s behalf.
What? Instead of saying, hang out until I relieve all your burdens, Instead of saying, sit tight until I answer your prayers, or, have nothing to do with these godless people, God tells the people to invest in their new circumstances, to lean into them, to bloom where they are newly planted. He’s essentially telling them, and this is the second point of the message, to embrace exile.
Embrace exile. No one could have seen that twist coming. God tells them, Jeremiah 29:4, guess what? I was the one who carried you into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon in the first place. Yes, because of your sin and your rebellion, but I did it.
In other words, God is saying, it is part of my plan that you are where you are right now, living as exiles in a pagan culture. It’s part of my plan to grow you. It’s part of my plan to change you. And it’s also part of my plan to grow and to change them.
I planned and designed this whole thing. So move into the city. Don’t stay away. Settle down. Plant gardens.
Eat what they produce. While you’re exiled in Babylon, I want you to raise your families there. I want you to be deeply engaged in the prosperity of the city. Make it a great place. Serve on the school board.
Go to school there. Serve your company. And at the same time, I want you to hold on to your monotheistic worldview. Don’t lose your distinctiveness as my people. So God’s message to them— and don’t miss this— God’s message to us living in exile in Babylon, in the world today, longing for a better home, is not just to assimilate into the culture, but God’s message is also not to separate from the culture either.
He’s saying become citizens of Babylon while remaining citizens of God at the same time. Don’t love God and hate the city. Don’t love the city and hate God. Love them both. Because you love God and you love the city, pray for this city.
False prophets were telling the exiles, don’t pray for the city, pray that it’s going to be judged so that we can be back in power again. Pray that it will be judged so that we can go back home again. But God’s word through Jeremiah was, embrace your exile. Love this city. Pray for it.
Live in Babylon while also living as a citizen of the city of God. What does this mean for us?
It means that we need to consider the example of someone like Daniel. In Scripture. The book in the Bible that is named after Daniel explores this very question. How do I do what God says in Jeremiah 29? What does it look like in action to live in exile in Babylon while maintaining my loyalty to God?
That’s Daniel. Daniel was one of the Israelites taken into exile, and because Daniel happened to have a royal heritage and education, he was recruited along with some friends to work in the highest levels of Babylon’s culture. He was a believer who mastered the culture, but he didn’t compromise his belief in the God of the Bible.
But he also didn’t revolt against the pagan structure into which he was newly immersed. Instead, he and his friends served the king of Babylon. Imagine that. Taking on new Babylonian names— they changed their names, for goodness’ sake— and even adopting the Babylonian style of clothing. They sought Babylon’s well-being at the same time.
Wasn’t he giving up his heritage and his loyalty to God in doing this? It might seem that way. But as you read about Daniel’s story, there were moments where he had to draw the line. And in those moments, he chose faithfulness to his God and to resist the influence of Babylon. He critiqued Babylon’s idolatry of power.
He critiqued its arrogance and its injustice.
Nonviolently by laying down their lives. And so God vindicated Daniel and his friends for their faithfulness. So they served Babylon and they sought its well-being. And this is what Jeremiah was envisioning for all of us today who live in exile in this world, who would rather say, I hate Babylon. I hate this world.
I hate this culture. I hate this society. I hate feeling like an exile, like a fish out of water. I want to go back to the way things used to be. Why can’t we do what Daniel did as well?
I’m not saying it’s easy to do. It’s challenging. Again, going against the current. It’s really challenging to spend time working through and wrestling with these kinds of questions. How do I live as an exile in Babylon?
And yet, that’s what God calls us to think about. And one of the implications, and this is so important for our lives today, of this principle of learning to embrace our exile, is to reconcile ourselves to the very real possibility that on occasion we may need God calling us to live in places where Christians are not the ones in power, that God may call us to have friends who are not believers and who don’t look like us, who don’t vote like us, who don’t behave like us. I realize that may make some of us a bit uncomfortable. I would simply suggest, if you look, friends, over the course of history, you’ll see that Christians have always shined the brightest and flourished the most when? When they are a minority culture, when they’re not in power.
It humbles us. It refines us. Christianity is a religion of the cross. And so, one of the things you see whenever Christianity has been a majority culture, is that it tends to lose its saltiness over time, its distinctiveness. And so the way that God revives us is often by putting us into exile and in places where we have to do what Jeremiah 29 calls us to do: live faithfully for God while living in exile in Babylon.
Live faithfully for God and live with hope while learning to actually embrace your status as as exiles in this world. And so God’s people, wherever they have been throughout history and wherever we will be in the future, always have to maintain this mindset of an exile. Always. As I pointed out in my intro, this is a real challenge because you’re going to be swimming against the current again. And so I’ll ask the same question I asked earlier: what is going to motivate you?
What is going to motivate me give us the energy for a lifetime of fighting against the currents of the culture. Maybe you and I, if we jumped into the Sacramento River, might be able to last for 20 to 30 minutes. But we’re trying to follow Jesus for a lifetime here, the rest of our lives. And so we try to grit our teeth and remind ourselves, this world is not our home, this world is not our home. And that might keep you going for a little bit, but there’s a bigger question here in all of this.
Are we ever going to get home?
And how do we get home? Those are some really big questions. And the answer to those questions is addressed in Jeremiah 31:11. Jeremiah 31:11 tells us we don’t return home through our own efforts. We don’t get to return home through our own goodness.
God has to be the one, it says, to deliver Jacob. God has to be the one to redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they. In other words, we’re never going to make it back home on our own. Why? Because there’s just something about sin that separates us and creates this greater distance between us and God.
And the wages of our sin, the penalty of our sin, all throughout the Bible is what? Is to be exiled, to be cast out without hope. It’s essential, friends, to our faith that we know and that we remember that all of us are born exiles, separated from God, outside of his kingdom of love and grace. And so, we need to be brought back home. And God is going to have to be the one to do it.
And he’s going to have to be the one to do it by delivering us and by redeeming us through the righteousness of another, and that is his Son Jesus. The reason that there is hope for us exiles in this world is because Jesus was willing to be exiled so that we could then be brought home again. Amen?
Jesus is, in fact, and this is the 3rd point, the epitome of exile. The epitome of exile. When Jesus came to earth, he left his home in heaven and he became an exile. Jesus knows what it’s like to live in a place that is not his own home.
There’s an interesting story that we often overlook at Christmastime, but it’s right there in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ early life. When Jesus was born, we’re told in Matthew chapter 2 that it wasn’t very long after Jesus was born— he’s just a little boy— when an angel of the Lord showed up to his father Joseph and told Joseph in a dream, take Mary, take baby Jesus, and escape to Egypt because King Herod intended to slaughter all of the baby boys in Bethlehem and in its vicinity who were 2 years old or younger. You may know that story. And that experience at Jesus’ very, very young age of being exiled to another country, we are told in Matthew 2, was actually a fulfillment of what we just read in Jeremiah 31:15. This is what the Lord says: A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted.
There are 3 places in the Bible where Rachel weeps for her children. First time is in Genesis 35. Jacob and his wife Rachel had been in exile, and now they’re bringing their family home. And we’re told that on the way home to wait, of all places, Bethlehem, Rachel died while giving birth. And in the midst of dying while giving birth, the midwife is trying to comfort her with the news that she’s going to have another child.
She’s having another son. So, in this way, Rachel’s child in Genesis 35 is both her cause of weeping but also her hope for the future. The second time we hear about Rachel’s weeping is right here in Jeremiah 31. And we see that Rachel weeps over her children once more, this time because they are being led into captivity and exile. And she is then comforted with the promise that her children will one day So once again, Rachel’s offspring are a cause of weeping and also her hope for the future.
The 3rd time we see Rachel weeping is in Matthew 2, that story of Jesus and his family going to Egypt. And the weeping comes over the slaughter of these innocent children by a pagan king.
No words of comfort are given Rachel in Matthew, but the very next verse in Matthew speaks of King Herod’s death. And the return of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus back to the land of Israel. And so, just as in Jeremiah’s day, the situation seems bleak, but the hope of salvation and of returning home lives on. Tim Keller talks about how the tears of Rachel, the weeping of Rachel, are symbolic of the tears of any one of us who has ever wept or grieved over the spiritual inhospitality of this world.
But they’re also the tears of one who looks with anticipation and hope to the day when we are brought back home from exile. And that hope was fulfilled in Jesus, the epitome of exile. Jesus lived as the first full citizen of heaven among citizens of this world, and the world hated him for it. He was always in exile. Jesus had no place to lay his head.
And even when he died on the cross as a payment for our sins, he died outside the city gates like an exile, Scripture tells us. Something miraculous happened on the cross, though, that rescued humanity, that rescued you and me from our spiritual exile from God. And it’s this: Jesus took our exile for us.
Because of our rejection of God, we would have remained exiled away from God forever. But Jesus, when he hung on the cross, the Father turned his face away from Jesus. And Jesus bore on himself everything that separates us from God, including our exile. Jesus was the true scapegoat. Our sins were placed upon Jesus’ head.
The Father cast him out. So that we could then be brought back in.
That’s how we get home.
We long for the place of permanence and rest and life, and Jesus is the one who opened up the door for us to have it. And so as Jesus’ followers today, we remain in exile in Babylon. Yes.
But we also wait with hope and with confidence for the day when Jesus will return again to rescue us from exile for good and to transform this world into our new forever home. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we are grateful that your Son Jesus came to free us from our exile.
Thank you that he took our exile for us, that he was willing to be cast out for us. He was willing for you to turn your face away from him so that you might turn your face towards us and bring us home.
I pray, God, that we would honor you by the way that we live in a culture that largely does not honor you. And that we would wrestle with these questions. How do I maintain faith in you while feeling out of my comfort zone and out of familiar surroundings? But Lord, I pray that you would just continue to remind us of the hope that we have and of the opportunity that we have, that your light might shine all the brighter through us.
Thank you for providing all that we’ve needed in Jesus. We pray all these things in his name. Amen.
