They all looked the same—same haircuts, similar clothing—so much so that early news stories reported the dead were 39 men, in their late teens and early twenties.  In fact, there were 21 women and 18 men, ranging in age from 26 to 72.  They were lying with their hands at their sides, as if asleep, their chests and faces covered with purple shrouds.  A mass suicide, apparently.  Drugs.  Alcohol.  Plastic bags.  The death scene was bloodless.

Among the bodies discovered on March 26, 1997, in the cream-colored mansion north of San Diego was Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the group.  Heaven’s Gate, they called themselves.  A former teacher at St. Thomas University in Houston and an early dropout from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, Applewhite came to believe that God was calling him and any who would follow to escape the corrupt world for a higher level of existence.

Their “gate to heaven” sounds bizarre to our ears: after carrying out the ritual over three fateful days, a spaceship hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet would transport them to their otherworldly destination.  Not quite so foreign, however, is the religious impulse that fueled their passion to escape the earth in hopes of a better life in the next realm.  They felt out of sorts in the world.  They were longing for another home.

Abuses aside, we do hear overtones of our own faith tradition in tragic stories like this one.  Hymns, like “I’ll Fly Away” and “In the Sweet By and By,” pick up on our longing for a heavenly home, where we can finally set aside the troubles of earthly living and rest in eternity with God.  In some sense, faithful Christians will always feel out of sorts in the world, as if we are in exile from our true home. 

The longing we feel is good and healthy, for we live on an earth that does not yet operate “as it is in heaven.”  The problem is not in the longing itself but in how we live because of it.  In light of our hope, do we separate ourselves out from the world around us, or do we pour ourselves in?  How do we live faithfully in exile?

Lucky for us, exile is a metaphor.  Not so for the Israelites.  Their best and brightest were taken from their homes and moved to a foreign land, whose customs and habits assaulted their sense of decency and justice.  They wanted nothing more than to return to the place of their birth and rebuild what they had lost.  Instead they got a letter from Jeremiah, the prophet who, through tears, had foretold their fate. 

I doubt they said, “Thanks be to God,” when they received this word of the Lord.  I am not calling you to return to Israel, says God.  Stay where you are.  Settle in among the natives.  Marry there and have children.  Let your children also marry.  Establish a home among your captors.  Build Babylon.  Seek its welfare, and there you will find your own. 

Thanks be to God?  The people of Israel wanted to escape Babylon, not build it.  “Stay here?  Build Babylon?  How can this be what God wants?”  We can hear the frustration in their voices: “How long, O Lord?  How long must we live in this foreign land?”  Ah, but that’s the wrong question.  The right one: “How, O Lord?  How shall we live in this land?”  And the answer is clear: Give yourselves to it, to the people where you live.  Work on their behalf.  This is what God requires of you.

There were false prophets, too, as in any age, who purported to speak on God’s behalf, who told the people they would soon escape, who told the people what they wanted to hear.  But time would bear witness to Jeremiah’s message.  And the Israelites would have to discern how now to live as the people of God in the land of Babylon. 

It wouldn’t be easy.  They would have to wrestle all the more with their identity as God’s chosen people now that God was not “saving” them from exile.  They would have to live by their convictions in a place that didn’t share them.  Theirs would be a peculiar existence among a people who didn’t know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   

By necessity, their faith became less organized around a place and more focused around their history of relationship with God.  The apparent crisis of forced relocation was, in retrospect, a formative time for the people of Israel.  Indeed, life in Babylon became one of the most creative periods in Israel’s history with the birth of the synagogue and writing of much of the Hebrew canon.  The fruit of the exile would sustain the people of Israel and their neighbors for centuries to come, for in Babylon they incarnated as never before their God-given mission to be a light to the nations. 

There is a strange correlation between exile and mission.  Some have made a case for comparing the exile of the Israelites in Jeremiah’s time to the dispersion of Jewish Christians after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Jewish poet Stephan Zweig, views the Babylonian exile not as a 70-year detour but as the dawn of a new understanding of the Jewish mission.  In his poem-drama, Jeremiah, written a generation before the Holocaust, he offers the prophet’s response to the people’s longing for Jerusalem:

     Wanderers, sufferers, march in the name
    of Jacob your father, who erstwhile with God,
    Having wrestled the livelong night,
    Strove till dawn for a blessing. . . .
    Wander your wanderings, watered with tears. 
    O people of God, for wherever ye roam,
    Your road leads through the world to eternity,
     home. 

[Stephan Zweig, Jeremiah, in “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun,” chap. in John H. Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Public (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 54.]

For Zweig’s Jeremiah, the Israelites’ understanding of home becomes a metaphor for eternity, much as it is for Christians.  And the only road back goes not above or around the world, but through it.  The hope of return, then, serves not to distract the people of God from life in the world but to renew the life of faith any place they find themselves in the world, giving them strength to be who God has called them to be.  [John H. Yoder, For the Nations, 53.] 

The people of Israel were taken captive in Babylon, and yet God says, “I sent you there to be salt and light.”  It’s a mission we recognize, for it is also our own as baptized Christians.  To understand Jeremiah’s letter as Christians in America or in any land for that matter is to recognize our own exile and mission in the world.  It is to see the land we live in, whatever it be, as Babylon—which is not, by the way, a four-letter word, but a place God loved and sought to save through the witness of God’s people.

Because our exile is less concrete, our mission can be difficult to discern.  Christian communities have responded to American culture in different ways, some better than others.  If we seek justification for pulling out of the culture, we won’t find it in Jeremiah.  Most of us agree that boycotting Disney and with-drawing completely from public schools sound more like suggestions of false prophets than God.  It is, however, important for us to identify ways in which American culture counters the gospel and to offer an alternative way of life that is distinctly Christian.

The society we live in is far too cozy, for example, with greed and violence.  It knows far more of judgment than grace.  It doesn’t show a healthy respect for the human body in its many shapes and sizes.  It doesn’t understand the value of rest or teach us to consider others as important as ourselves.  It is more comfortable with medication than meditation.  Its passion for individualism leaves people suffering for loss of community. 

Christians should not feel at home in such a land.  We should not enter so easily into the cycles of its life.  We must see that it is not enough in this culture for us to preach about personal confession of Jesus and leave it at that.  The Church needs to model a different way, so that it becomes apparent how many of our culture’s deep-seated values are at odds with a Christian way of life.  We need to realize that the Church is a culture, and the world around us is starving for what we have to offer.

It is easier, unfortunately, to follow culture than it is to shape it.  A few years ago, I heard a striking critique of the Church in America, that mainline denominations have tended to follow high culture, while free church and evangelical traditions have followed popular culture.  We see it most clearly in the so-called worship wars.  Some church services are barely accessible to the masses, the argument goes, while others have succumbed to the tastes and whims of the masses. 

A more faithful response to ordering our worship is to steep ourselves in the practices that have guided Christians over time and let our heritage rather than our setting be our primary guide.  As a short-timer here, I can tell you that Wilshire is doing a good job of this.  Wilshire has a sense of identity that is authentically Christian, and we offer our own culture to the world around us through the Church’s primary practice, the worship of God.  Wilshire is heeding its call, not to follow the culture around us but to offer ourselves to it in the name of Christ.

Beyond worship, we have within our faith tradition a wealth of Christian practices that serve our own renewal as the people of God and also offer new life to the culture around us.    

·        In the face of chronic greed, the Church offers another way: practices of stewardship, generosity, simplicity, a recognition that money is not the keeper of health or happiness. 

·        To our culture’s thirst for violence, the Church offers another way: peacemaking, radical love, the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 

·        To a people whose sole focus is on cause and effect, drives and results, the Church offers another way: contemplation, prayer, silence, an inner life that enriches and offers perspective to our experience of the world.

·        To a society that suffers from excessive emphasis on the individual, the Church offers another way: a community of faith so bound together that we know each other as brother and sister and mother.        

·        To a culture that has exploited and dishonored the human body, the Church offers another way: a conviction that every person is created in the image of God, and we should therefore value and respect our own bodies and those of our neighbor. 

·        To the rise of hostility toward strangers, the Church offers another way: a culture of hospitality that welcomes strangers as friends. 

·        To a people who are over-worked and undernourished, the Church offers another way: a time of Sabbath, where we take a break from our striving to reconnect with our families and remember that we are not self-sufficient, that God is our primary provider.

These practices and principles are our heritage as the people of God.  Their light shines through us, identifying us as God’s own.  Will we take our gifts and hide them under a bushel, or offer them to the land, the people, where we live?  We have heard the word of the Lord.  Now what will it be?  Amen.