By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

Conclusion

7 Conclusion Setting Waters on Fire “We confess as we depart and return, that you are the God of all our comings and goings, you are the one who watches our going out and our coming in.” –Walter Brueggemann1 Over the course of writing this book, the questions people asked me about my work have changed. When I started, they wanted to know what sorts of communities I would be visiting. As the project progressed, the questions shifted: “Well, what have you learned? What is the church in these places and among these communities?” And, finally, as I shared an early draft of this work with a group of seasoned pastors, the question morphed into something like a yearning: “We hope you will help us, those of us in ‘typical’ settings, to benefit from your work.” Don’t leave us out, they seemed to be saying. We too feel like exiles, but maybe not so obviously. What they named was a desire, I think, to see the church as an actual body, formed where, by the criteria of the world, it ought not to be formed: as the found among the lost, as the living among the dead, as the free among the captives. A hope not at all uncommon among those who walk in the way of the crucified and risen Lord. So a deep relation exists between the communities represented in this book and more “typical” congregational settings. 1. Walter Brueggemann, PRAYERS FOR A PRIVILEGED PEOPLE (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 94. 151 Yet the communities formed as a direct and theologically intentional response to exile did yield something in a sense uncommon—namely, the clarity with which they grappled with exile as both a concrete reality and a spiritual phenomenon. Many congregations may talk about exile, but the act of spiritualizing exilic language anesthetizes the church to its sociopolitical and ethical difference. Crucially, such spiritualizing distances communities from the Christ who took such concrete realities as basic to the good news he proclaimed. Perhaps it is a form of good news that today’s congregations and pastors feel displacement with greater sharpness than they did in the past. If God sends the church into exile, so that exile is a “natural” expression of the church, maybe the question becomes this: instead of fleeing from that sense of displacement, or fighting it, how might congregations come to embrace it? In this concluding chapter, I raise some questions for pastors and congregations to ask themselves as they seek to bring into articulated shape what it means to be a church as exile, among exiles, and as antidote to exile. One of my hopes is that readers will find within these questions a migration already underway. Questions Over the course of the book, three metaphors for the life and witness of the church emerged as focal points of reflection: the shrine, the labyrinth, and finally the dress or skin of Christ’s body the church. Worship, of course, remains a central feature of each metaphorical expression, but the place of witness animates the life of worship, sustaining it as a gesture of love for the world and offering to God. Worship and witness seem to be mutually informative, interdependent in ways that deepen and extend the faith community’s vocation. Interestingly, because these communities understood their exile as an intentional rather than accidental feature of their community life, they claimed that space and condition even as they witnessed to One who surpassed and subverted it. The questions introduced below attempt to draw out the implications of those metaphors for the church as it continues into its life in the twenty-first century. The first set of questions addresses issues of space: How does the church inhabit twenty-first-century socio-political and economic space? Would the congregation or perhaps onlookers say that the community is more a noun or a verb? And if it is a verb, what does it enliven? What verbs convey this community’s life in the place it calls home? How does it interact with the political and economic soil around it? To what human end do these verbs speak? 152 | By the Rivers of Babylon At a critical level, these questions go to the sense that many congregations have become captives to nouns: a people, a place, or a thing only. Obviously, there is something to being a noun. The church is called to...