1.  We know there were three invasions of Israel over a period of two hundred years. The first was by the Assyrians who carried off the ten Northern tribes. We know very little of what happened to them. They just disappear from history. The second invasion is Babylonia’s first invasion and defeat of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar carries off 10,000 of the upper class leadership of Jerusalem as well as the military commanders, the craftsmen, artists and educated – the best of the Jewish society. Among these are Ezekiel and Daniel. He left the poorest. It is those who were left behind to whom Jeremiah is speaking in Jerusalem. It is the Jewish leadership in exile in Babylonia to whom he is writing and telling them to settle down and serve the king. They were not taken there as slaves. They were taken there to serve. Nebuchadnezzar was a great builder and appreciated talent. He had plenty of slaves but he needed what Israel had – talent. This was not Egypt and it was not the Assyrian exile. They were not taken to Babylonia as slaves. They were not being destroyed. It was more like being imported. This was not a holocaust. It was Babylonia’s way of increasing the talent pool of the Empire.

In a real sense God was protecting them from themselves. They were so corrupt and self-destructive they would not survive as they were. Only in a different place could they hope to make it. They had proved they were no good at revolution or insurrection. The purpose of the exile was not to drag them off to torture them out of anger or to break them. It was to remake them. Like the potter and the clay in Jeremiah 18. “So I went down to the potter’s house. And I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” God is not breaking Israel. He is reshaping them.

He “carries” them into exile. That’s important. He did not drive them like cattle or slaves. He carries them because he knows this is the only solution for their corruption. This is discipline from a loving Father. “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son…No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” That is the purpose of the exile.

2.  But there is another effect of the exile. They do not return years later as the same people who left. The exile changed them forever. In fact, you could say the exile re-invented them to the point of even renaming them. Prior to the exile they were Hebrews or Israelites but the term Judaism and Jew was first used to describe them by the Babylonians. They were the people from Judah and they have been that ever since.

3.  But it changed their identity and their religion in other ways. Let’s look at a few of those.

a. Without a Temple there was no place for sacrifices and without sacrifice there was no place for the priesthood as that was their main function. Without the sacrifice the preeminent place was given to the sages and scribes. It is in the exile that the scholars and Pharisees are established as leaders.

b. What becomes most important is the teaching of the Torah and you could say that the study and observance of Scripture replaces sacrifice. It is during the exile that Ezra collects the first canon of Hebrew Scripture. They become people of the book.

c. As a minority without a central place of worship they begin to gather in congregations (synagogues) in homes, beside rivers, in the country and create places of reading, prayer and study. Worship is detached from Temple ritual and decentralized. These home groups become the structure of Judaism.

d. Simplicity replaces the ornate nature of the Temple. What becomes important is Torah and observance – not ceremonies and maintaining the priesthood and a building.

e. Detached from the maintenance and focus on a fixed place of worship (Jerusalem) it became easy to carry Judaism around to other places. The first spread of Judaism actually occurs during the exile. Judaism became portable.

4.  Three individuals connected to the exile illustrate three different perspectives.

a. The first is Jeremiah. What should be the response to being carried off? Create an insurgent movement? Rebel? Wait for an enemy to support? None of these. They are to pray for the peace and prosperity of the city to which they have been carried. We use that phrase today to describe our relationship to our own cities where we have chosen to live. Jeremiah is not telling them to pray for Jerusalem but to pray for the city of the enemy; pray for the welfare and prosperity of those who have conquered them…and then settle down and be a part of that place. I read a good article this morning in the New York Times titled “Beware Social Nostalgia” and part of it would mirror Jeremiah’s advice:

“In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our current situation.

Nineteenth-century Americans were extremely worried, the historian Susan Matt points out, about the incidence of nostalgia, which was the term used to describe homesickness in those days. According to physicians of the era, acute nostalgia led to “mental dejection,” “cerebral derangement” and sometimes even death. The only known cure was for the afflicted individual to go home, and if that wasn’t possible, the sufferer was seriously out of luck.

Such was the quandary facing soldiers during the Civil War, when going home constituted desertion. Doctors diagnosed 5,000 clinical cases of nostalgia in Union soldiers and determined that 74 men had died from the affliction. To contain the epidemic, military officials prohibited Army bands from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” while ministers and officers avoided references in sermons or speeches that might touch off a new outbreak.

When present-day nostalgia involves homesickness for a period of time or a way of life that is gone for good, it’s time to follow the example of 19th century military commanders and stop fostering longings for the past that produce “mental dejection” about our prospects for the future.”

b. The second response is that of Ezekiel – the final prophet in their history. Ezekiel was there to offer both hope and correction as well as rebuke to those who took advantage of the people – but people liked hope far better than correction or rebuke.

Look at Ezekiel 33:30-32: “As for you, son of man, your people are talking together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, saying to each other, ‘Come and hear the message that has come from the Lord.’ 31 My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to hear your words, but they do not put them into practice. Their mouths speak of love, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. 32 Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.”

This is the worry and burden of every teacher and pastor. People come for a well-packaged and presented message from one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well and reduces belief to a few well-turned phrases that sound good but have no effect in their lives.

Steven Garber is a friend at the Washington Institute (www.washingtoninst.org) and last night we were messaging about a couple of chapters in a book he is writing. Part of it is on the relationship between knowledge and action. What moves us from knowing to doing? That is what Ezekiel hears from God in this passage. Your people love hearing you but it doesn’t make any difference in their lives.

Steve uses the illustration of the rabbi in Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen”. For fifteen years he does not speak to his young son and there is never an explanation until one day he shares with him why he has done this.

“The rabbi tells of his affection for his son, of how when his son was a baby he used to bounce him on his knee, to play games, to take delight in the company of his first child. As his son began to read, the father noticed that he would not just “read a book, but would swallow it.” He would read stories of people who suffered, and would feel nothing of their suffering; instead he would be so proud of having read the book, newly aware of his growing intelligence. I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, “What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I need from my son, not a mind without a soul!” And so he decides to raise his son in silence, as he himself had been raised, to feel the pain of the world in his own pain.”

While that is extreme, it makes the point in some ways of what we face today because we are so aware of and knowledgeable about suffering in the world yet so detached from it personally. Knowing becomes a substitute for responsibility. Can we care about all suffering? Not a chance. But how do we decide what is our responsibility? Otherwise, we become minds without souls.

Steve writes about Michael Polyani, a Hungerian Jew, who asked the question, “How dare we call ourselves enlightened? A surprising question, perhaps, for a child of the Enlightenment, especially for someone like Polanyi whose work was focused on understanding the nature of science and its chemical reality, a “project,” so to speak, at the very heart of the modern world. But having lived through two worlds wars in his relatively young life, he was horrified that Europeans dared see themselves as “enlightened,” as somehow more morally and intellectually mature than previous generations. Those who brought us into cultural chaos through the devastation of war had “gone to the best universities we have,” he lamented.

How is it possible that someone could be brilliant and bad at the same time? For the rest of his life, Polanyi pursued that question.”

We are inundated with news about suffering and media campaigns making us even more aware are everywhere we turn. How do we respond? To sit and look forward to delightful messages and stirring music or to take one thing and do something. I keep Edmund Burke’s quote on my desk. “No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” We do not need to do great things. As Mother Teresa said, we only need to do little things with great love.

I was encouraged this week. We had dinner on Friday night with friends. The conversation turned to the issue of sex trafficking in East Texas and Tyler. One of the friends said something that made me lose sleep. “Now that I know what is going on what can I do?” He wasn’t asking to be a hero or make a big splash. He was simply wanting to connect knowing with doing in some tangible way. Nothing could please me more.

c. The third response is that of Daniel. We all know the story. He is one of the captives and, like Joseph, he is noticed. He has special gifts and abilities but draws a line in the sand on how far he will go to serve the king. First, he chooses to eat his own food and not what is served to the others. For that, there is no punishment because he proves to be an even greater asset to the king. Even above being one of those chosen because he is one of the young men “without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace.” Daniel is even more than that. “In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.”

As well, he was incorruptible and those who were jealous of him and intimidated by his abilities could find nothing to fault because “he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.” We know the story of the three men who are thrown with him into the lion’s den and the result. Like Joseph, Daniel survives his greatest tests of faithfulness and prospers. He becomes one of the most powerful men in the kingdom and serves three administrations.

5.  Last week I was with Jim Daly, the relatively new head of Focus on the Family. He was talking about the difference in the culture today and thirty years ago when many of the leaders of parachurch organizations were formed. Part of the reason they became culture warriors was to protect the world in which they grew up – and that is a world young people today neither share or remember. They are not protecting a world of common values and assumptions. Everything has changed and is changing even more. He said something that has made me think. “We are not living in a time of the church being dominant and shaping our culture. We are living – at least for the next several decades – in the time of Stephens and even a time of exile.” How will we respond to that? We will not be deported but may well be deposed.

It’s caused me to wonder about how American Christianity will respond to exile. What will we mourn? How will we respond to such a loss? What if we were to lost those things we think are central to our faith and identity – like Israel lost the Temple? The Jews lost their core and their center of gravity when Babylon destroyed the Temple but they re-invented themselves and have survived long after that loss.

I don’t have the answer but what might exile do to us that is painful but reshapes us?

Let’s close with a passage from Ezekiel 36:19-36. We are not Israel but I believe God’s intentions about His honor are the same for the Church.

19 I dispersed them among the nations, and they were scattered through the countries; I judged them according to their conduct and their actions. 20 And wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name, for it was said of them, ‘These are the Lord’s people, and yet they had to leave his land.’ 21 I had concern for my holy name, which the people of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone. 22 “Therefore say to the Israelites, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. 23 I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes. 24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. 29 I will save you from all your uncleanness. I will call for the grain and make it plentiful and will not bring famine upon you. 30 I will increase the fruit of the trees and the crops of the field, so that you will no longer suffer disgrace among the nations because of famine. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices. 32 I want you to know that I am not doing this for your sake, declares the Sovereign Lord. Be ashamed and disgraced for your conduct, people of Israel! 33 “‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: On the day I cleanse you from all your sins, I will resettle your towns, and the ruins will be rebuilt. 34 The desolate land will be cultivated instead of lying desolate in the sight of all who pass through it. 35 They will say, “This land that was laid waste has become like the garden of Eden; the cities that were lying in ruins, desolate and destroyed, are now fortified and inhabited.” 36 Then the nations around you that remain will know that I the Lord have rebuilt what was destroyed and have replanted what was desolate. I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it.’

So, think about exile through the eyes of these three men who experienced it.

“Do not live in the past but pray for your enemies that they might prosper.”

“I desire mercy – not sacrifice.”

“They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.”