Visions From Our Story: The Promise Held Captive

We began this series of weekly updates with a vision of a marvelous creation (Genesis 1 and 2) in which God was living in right relationship with all of God's creation (humans, animals and creation itself); and all of creation (humans, animals and creation itself) were living in right relationship with God and with one another. This good creation was disrupted by humanity's self-centeredness and refusal to listen to the will of a creating and loving God.

The story continued with a vision of God's efforts to restore the marvelous balance and relationships which were the intent of God's creative work. We watched God work with Abram (through which God promised to bring about the restoration of the good creation), with King David (from whose lineage God promised a new king would come) and ultimately with King Cyrus of Persia who restored Israel (after her exile) in order that the promise might be fulfilled.

What we might wish for at this moment in the story (the last 500 years before the birth of Jesus) was that the nation of Israel would realize its calling and set its mind and will to the task of working with God to restore the creation. Unfortunately this is not what happened. The trauma of loss (of its freedom and sense of invulnerability) made the people of Israel grow inward rather than reach outward. The leadership of the nation believed the only way to maintain its identity as a distinct people of God was to erect higher and higher walls in order to be separate from the peoples around them.

We see this in the two books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These twin books (they are in fact one story in two parts) tell of the amazing and heroic return of the God's people to the land. We can read of the bravery of ordinary men and women who stood against immense pressure to give up the quest to restore Israel. The dark side of this return however was that the leadership did everything it could to insulate the Jewish people from the people who loved around them. This even took the form of having Jewish men who had married foreign women during the exile divorce their wives and commit to never again marry outside the faith.

It was during this time as well that the party known as Pharisees had its beginnings (though it would only take final shape in the time of Jesus). The Pharisees were those who believed that one way to insure the separateness of the Jewish people was by keeping the laws of God in minute detail. They were not legalists as such, but they were determined to maintain the integrity of the Jewish people at all cost. This desire for separateness meant that the promise of God to restore creation was held captive because of the fear of outsiders. In fact even the vision of this restoration was lost and replaced with a vision of restoring Israel only…a fact with which Jesus would have to contend.

The challenge before us a renewed people of God in Christ, is to never hold the promise hostage. Our calling is to usher the promise into the world in order that the world might be slowly, but surely redeemed. Granted none of us can complete this task of restoration, only God can do that. None-the-less we are baptized into the body of Christ in order that we might be co-workers in Christ to restore what humanity rent apart. So any vision to which we ought to conform our lives should be one that sets the promise free, rather than one that holds it tightly for as if it is our possession and not God's promise for the world.

Visions From Our Story: The Promise Comes Home

The story of the people of God is a long and complicated one. Within this complicated story one of the great themes that emerges over and over again is that of exile and return. This is in fact the overarching framework of the entire Bible. Thinking back to the beginning of our story we remember that creation was the perfect home for Adam and Eve. Their unwillingness to listen to God had them "exiled" from paradise, thus causing all of creation to groan and long for the perfection of the original creation. The Promise given to Abraham, that through his family the world would be blessed, is the promise that God would work to bring all of creation (humanity and the physical creation) back to the condition in which God originally created it.

This theme of exile and return once again comes into focus when the people of Israel traveled down into Egypt and became captives. Through Moses the people were freed and after a forty year journey traveled home to the land "flowing with milk and honey." They came home to the land promised to Abraham.

The next exile episode is the one we read about last week in which the Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. E. (one of the great Middle Eastern empires) and the Jewish leadership was sent into exile in Babylon, which is modern day Iraq. The people of God struggled with this exile as much or more than with any of those that had preceded it. They struggled because they had believed that because they possessed the Temple (what they thought was the very throne of God) that God would not allow them to be destroyed. Fortunately the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel let the people know 1) that the nation fell because of its self-centered vanity and not because the gods of Babylon were greater than the God of Israel and 2) the fall was not the end. God would indeed, one day bring God's people back home.

This return began in 538 B.C.E. when the Persians under Cyrus obliterated the Babylonian Empire and instituted a new way of dealing with subject peoples. The Persians allowed each nation to worship and live as they pleased as long as they paid their taxes. In fact Cyrus not only allowed the Jews to return home but sent money to help them rebuild Jerusalem and its Temple. For this reason the scriptures refer to Cyrus as "messiah", the only time that such a term is used for a non-Jew. The story of this return and rebuilding can be found in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The story of exile and return is a reminder to us that the way of following God is not always a straight and easy path. The church, as with Israel, lives in a real world with real issues and real pressures to take paths that do not always conform to the way of Jesus (see our Revelation 2:12-17 as an example). The challenge before us as we seek our particular vision is to trust that even when we do get off track God in Christ is always ready to redirect us (to bring us home from exile). This means that we do not have to wait for the perfect vision for our church family. We can, as Martin Luther put it, "sin boldly", meaning we can do our best to serve God trusting that in God's grace even when we are not perfect God will still use us. The challenge is to find a vision, get going and trust the Spirit will use us to do great things. So as we progress in our vision casting process, realize this process will be ongoing as we travel together in the way of Jesus.