The Return Home from Exile

Nehemiah 8:1-4a, 9-12; Luke 15:11-32

A Sermon by Donald Mackenzie

October 24, 2004

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.” Nehemiah 8:9b

Last week in our first sermon, we talked about the need to integrate experiences of life’s substance, love, into the activities of daily living. The way to do that is to face the essential truths about ourselves and our world and to help each other live into those truths, truths such as the fact that we are all children of God, created in God’s image making every human life precious—it is good to be human; truths such as the world is a dangerous place with no guarantees but being faithful to our callings as people of faith can help overcome the uncertainty and the danger. Today I am going to suggest that when we live our lives so completely on the surface, that is when we create false certainties about ourselves and our world, we are in fact, in a kind of exile. We are estranged from our essential beings. Albert Camus’ important 20^th century novel, The Stranger, begins with these words: “Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before?” The words evoke a kind of detached numbness and illustrate the void that can develop between our living patterns and the things we treasure the most.

As I said last week, one of the ways in which we in our middle and upper middle class white culture seem to experience estrangement is to over-intellectualize our experience cutting ourselves off from the secrets of our hearts, the life of feeling and the life of being moved by love. I mentioned a French film called Intimate Strangers, about a man who begins to connect his heart, his feelings, to his mind. I am especially interested in this since I have discovered recently that there are at least two sides to my life that are rarely connected: My guitar playing and my pastoring and preaching. My country music band is called “Life’s Other Side” after a song by Hank Williams, but it is not coincidental since we are all ministers. Country music is, in fact, the other side of our lives. So, in some ways, the question is one for me too: without overdoing the guitar in worship, how might I integrate those two sides of my life to be better at both of them. In other words, as it says in the parable, how can I, “come to myself;” how can you “come to yourself?” What is this process of returning home from exile?

In the reading from Nehemiah, we hear the story of a people who have returned from 80 years of estrangement—the exile of the Hebrew people to Babylon. While in Babylon they had longed for home, for that place where they felt they belonged, that place where they could come into contact with God and those they loved, that place where they understood themselves. But coming home, they ask the scribe Ezra to read from the law, the Torah, probably from the Book of Deuteronomy. When they hear these important words for the first time in this familiar place, they weep. They weep because suddenly they are in touch with, they are moved by the continuity of God’s healing relationship with them. They are weeping because they realize, once again, that love is at the absolute center of what is meaningful about life. This is a true turning point in our religious and cultural history. The exile and the return home from exile redefined them as a people and our legacy from them is this: to speak the truth about ourselves and about our world, we must focus on love and permit and encourage love to define the activies of our daily living including our behavior as citizens of a faith community and of a city, state and nation and world. Love has to do with full access to all human and civil rights for all people. Love has to do with care for, having dominion and not domination over the earth. Love has to do with the end to violence. Love has to do with our concern for the future and the world our children will inherit. Love has to do with taking care of ourselves so that we can function effectively and happily as fulfilled human beings and love is the glue that holds our world together.

But that love has been weakened of late by actions and thoughts that don’t have to do with love. I’m speaking of actions such as wars, the lack of progress on poverty and the reasons why poverty exists, actions such as the suspension of some of our constitutional rights via the Patriotic Act. These and others like them are rooted not in love but in fear and fear is powerful. But fear appeals to self-interest and does not move us as love can move us. So, ultimately we cannot be overcome by fear and as people of faith we know the truth of that because of the repetition of these words of Jesus in the gospels, “do not be afraid.”

On the other hand, we should be afraid if we think that there is enough military force in the universe to keep us safe from terrorism. We should be afraid if we think that suspension of constitutional rights will contribute to anything but the destruction of our democracy. We should be afraid if we think that we have not been lied to by people in positions of leadership in this country. We should be afraid if we think that the suspension of environmental protection laws will do anything but hasten the demise of this planet. We should be afraid if we have forgotten that our individual lives are to serve the purpose of living together cooperatively and compassionately with other human beings. There is plenty to fear. But Jesus said do not be afraid.

He said that because he knew that fear is a product of exile, a product of something that happens when we are estranged from ourselves and from the critical thinking and feeling that help us to live together in love and respect. In other words, he said this because he knew that love can overcome fear and that because God is with us we have everything we need to overcome fear, to heal wounds and to find our way home.

He also said it in a number of different ways. Today we return to the parable of the prodigal son as a reminder of the providence of God. In our reading we hear that this wayward younger son, after he had wasted all his money and after his despair at working for the pig farmer, he “came to himself.” In his own way, this person returned home from a self-imposed exile. How and why did he “come to himself?”

He did so because of the providence and healing love of God. Every human being has the potential to be moved to do this, but each in our own unique ways. He must have had some sort of experience that mirrored the revelation of those people gathered in the public square in Jerusalem listening to Ezra read from Deuteronomy. The conscious awareness of the healing powers of love and truth came to him and he went home to find forgiveness and compassion. This is how our maker deals with us.

At this time I want to invite Loyce Mbewe to come forward and answer a couple of questions. Loyce is a native of Kenya in Africa and a citizen of the United States. Last Sunday she gave an eloquent picture of the suffering in Africa because of the AIDS epidemic. Loyce, from your unique perspective what do you see in our culture? Are we in exile as I am suggesting? LOYCE: “Africans have discovered something about the uniqueness of communal love outside the material world. We nurture each other, are present and available and make time to share what we have. We have time to care and to love through our caring actions. We intimately experience and walk with one another throughout our lives in times of joy and in times of sadness with every fiber of our beings. Even in the HIV/AIDS pandemic, African don’t count the dead in millions. We intensely mourn the loss of one dear soul. We call them by name, one loved person at a time. Not calling them by name, remembering them as precious individuals would signify a kind of estrangement, an exile.”

And, where do you find your hope especially when confronted personally by so many deaths from AIDS? LOYCE: “My hope comes from the knowledge that I can make a difference to one person or child at a time and from my faith that God will provide for me. Also, I have chosen not to have the luxury of putting it aside to pick it up when I feel like it or when the time is right. AIDS is about real people who are fighting for their dear lives as we speak. Then need me right now, and I know that I am lucky to have the gift of reasonably good health. In return, I give back through giving the dying hope, a name voice and possibly a better and a productive life as they fight the disease. That is what give me hope that I can use my life to make a difference to one person at a time.”

Thank you Loyce. It would be easy to be crushed by the human need we see around us. But we can’t be crushed if we begin to integrate life’s substance, love, into the activities of our daily living. How we do that will be the theme of next week’s sermon. Again, I thank you for struggling with these important themes. Amen.