Kindle Notes & Highlights
radical loss and discontinuity do happen and are the source of real newness.
The thesis, if you will, of this study is that this sense of out-of-placeness is actually the way disciples of Jesus ought to feel.
The kingdom of God always breaks into creation in subversive and overlooked ways.
most Christians—especially in Europe and North America—have not been completely displaced from roles of influence and authority in their nations and cultures.
Using the language of exile is not a clarion call to return to the Constantinian synthesis of the church and the world’s principalities and powers.
The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world means that we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.
the prophets invite God’s people to lament and release what has happened in the past in order to receive the new thing that the Lord is doing in their midst.
I want to invite the church to embrace exile.
this study is intended to help the people of God discover what faithfulness looks like and how holiness is possible,
There are two key things that a people must have in order to survive and thrive in exile. Those two things are a forming story and sustaining practices.
Many Christians are waking up to the reality that they are suddenly strangers in a strange time.
That feeling, as Christians, that we are living in a world that we struggle to understand, that no longer seems to speak the language of historic Christian faith, and over which we feel very little control is rapidly becoming the norm and not the exception. Like Moses, many of us feel like strangers in a strange land.
The primary story in Scripture is that God has called a people to be his reflection—his image—in the world. The problem is that those people always live in an empire that keeps trying to shape them in ways contrary to the ways of God. So every place in the Bible is trying to answer this question: How can we live as God’s unique people in the midst of this place that lives so contrary to his purposes?”
I would like to propose that as history moves in a linear direction from its beginning to its end, it also seems to move in a kind of spiral or looping fashion. History, for the people of God, moves forward in what I will call a hermeneutical circle—
If exile was the worst of times, kingship was the best of times. Or was it?
Despite momentary rebirths, the trajectory of history is headed for a return trip into exile.
In exile the people needed the prophets to speak.
The words of the prophets might even help the people imagine being part of a new kingdom led by a very different kind of king.
there is something about living with oddness, with a feeling of not having control culturally, and with a sense that the Christian story shapes the imagination of fewer and fewer people that sounds the echoes of exile.
What I do know is that there is an increasing sense for many in the Christian church that we are strangers in a strange time.
there is almost always a sense among an exiled people that the “glory” of God’s unique presence is gone and may never come back.
Exile also brings a loss of practices, habits, and places of familiarity.
Exiled people have to figure out how to live with neighbors whose worldview and moral code is very different from their own.
In exile, slipping into despair also is easy. Hope is essential for people who feel displaced. But hope is not always easy to find.
we rediscover the life of the church as a community.
When the people of God are secure and in power, they are not at their best.
But when the people of God are in places of marginalization and need, they seem to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in them and empower them to live faithfully despite the challenges.
exile is where God does his most transformative work in his people.
together they embody not just a lack of shape and empty space but in the Hebrew imagination all of the forces of chaos that can and often do break into life and turn things upside down.
we see clearly that what Revelation envisions is not a landlocked heaven but a new heaven and a new earth where all of the places of chaos and threat have been removed.
What I find significant is how God creates, how he defeats the chaos.
the opening three days are an attack on the tohu—on the formlessness.
the primary verb is the same on the first three days of creation: separation. God separates light and dark, separates sea and sky, and separates out the dry land.
God uses the second set of three days to take on and defeat the bohu.
I want you to notice the relationship between the days.
The key word is filling. The first three days are divine acts of separation. The second three days are divine acts of filling.
Perhaps more importantly it is informing us why creation happened and most significantly what kind of people we should be in light of the way God created.
they wanted their children to interpret the world God created through the three words of separation, filling, and blessing.
But one way to read the narrative of the garden of Eden (in Gen. 2 and 3) and humankind’s descent into sin is to read it as the reawakening of the chaos.
Thus the story of Noah is not just a scary flood story but a story about the world reverting back to its original formless and empty chaos.
separating, filling, and blessing is not just the pattern through which God created originally but also the pattern through which God brings about and will continue to bring about his new creation.
God is separating out a unique people in the world. He is filling them with his Spirit. And through them the world will be blessed.
the primary way he has done this (and continues to do this) is by separating out a people, filling them with his presence, and making them a blessing to the world.
The Great Commission is not a call to go out and get individuals into heaven. The commission of Christ to his disciples is a call to invite people through baptism (we’ll come back to this in more detail later) to enter into the people who bear the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit upon their community.
A culture shaped by individualism usually forms people who are self-centered.
If we take the Constantinian impulse, add in individualism, and then just for fun mix in the technological age’s love of consumerism, the blend becomes deadly for the church’s ecclesiology.
Perhaps a people who are tired of the isolation of rugged individualism and who are devastated by commitments that can’t be sustained will rediscover that they were created by God for community and seek a community of people that invites them to find their lives through self-sacrifice and covenant.
A people who desire to live as a community of covenant need two things to survive and thrive. They need a life-giving story, and they need sustaining practices.
it may be impossible to live life without a story.
For a millennium or more in the West the biblical story shaped the way most people thought about marriage, politics, nature, work, and even death.
