Jay’s Blog – Living as Exiles
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This week I was asked to do the ribbon-cutting message for the Texas Rose Festival here in town. It gave me a chance to think about what it means to be a good citizen of the communities we live in as a follower of Jesus.
The writer and poet Wendell Berry, who died this past year, grew up in Henry County, Kentucky. He made a successful start to his career as a writer in New York City. Shortly thereafter, he moved back to the farm in Kentucky. He lived the rest of his life there as a writer and poet, creating some of his finest works. Berry said that, “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.” To be committed to a specific place demands something of us: that we contribute to making it better. This creates a relationship with the place and a love for it, and engages us in caring for it. Berry said that it’s good to love the place God has given you, because loving that place well is the key to loving all other places. To be a good citizen of a small corner of the world makes us more attentive to all of it.
God understands this better than anyone, because He created us, after all, and He created all that is. His people, the Israelites, had a home, the land that had been promised to them. And yet, despite being blessed by God with their own place, they became calloused and disobedient to the God who had given it to them, forgetting His face. And so God, as a good, loving Father, disciplined their hearts by taking them out of that land through Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. They were given into captivity, into exile in Babylon, where they would remain for 70 years.
While in exile, they were charged with doing more than simply living as captives or even engaging in passive or active resistance, like the French underground in World War II. Instead, God called them, through the prophet Jeremiah, to be a beacon of light to the community of their exile.
God commanded, through Jeremiah:
4 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
As amazing as our city is, no matter how long we have lived in it, for those of us who are redeemed children of God, this is not our home. It never will be. No matter how connected we are to it, it is, metaphorically speaking, the place of our exile. And yet, as God commanded Israel, He commands us to be good citizens of this place where he has sent us. And, for those of us who are His church, we are called to further the Kingdom of God in this city where He’s placed us, to point the way in a broken and fallen world between the way things can be and will be again, when Christ makes all things new.
Events like the Texas Rose Festival give us the opportunity to celebrate our community, for all its flaws, a beautiful, generous community in which to live. But whether you live here or elsewhere, this celebration gives us the chance to consider, for just a moment, this question: How do we seek the welfare of the city? How do we seek to be good citizens in the city of our exile, as we await the day when we’ll return to our true home? How do we help bring the Kingdom of Heaven to our community? I think it means at least three things:
First, I believe God calls us to seek flourishing in our city by being people of hospitality to the Other. As citizens of Tyler, we hope our visitors feel welcome in our city and that we’re doing all that we can to make them feel at home or included here. But biblical hospitality is more than the hospitality we commonly think of. It’s different from the modern-day idea of “entertaining guests,” to the extent that that idea included the hope or expectation of payback or reward, or that they’ll be impressed with us, or that it will bring tourist revenue into the city.
Biblical hospitality is different. In Leviticus, the Israelites are encouraged to welcome foreigners among them because they knew what it was like to be foreigners in Egypt. In the book of Romans, Paul encourages the church to share with those in need and to exercise hospitality. Hebrews also tells us to recognize strangers and foreigners and show hospitality. Biblical hospitality is a heart posture of love and selflessness that reaches out to strangers, those who live around us, and the vulnerable. It reaches out to those who are like us and to those who are not. Biblical hospitality does the hard work of not assuming things about other people but actually stepping into knowing them.
Second, I believe that God calls us to seek flourishing in this city and whatever city to which we’ve been exiled by being people of forgiveness—people who are willing to extend forgiveness and to seek forgiveness. It doesn’t take much to realize that there is a lot of rivalry between private and public schools in this city. That’s no secret. Some of it is good-natured rivalry; some not so well-intended. I’d like to think, after 24 years of being the head of school at one of them, that I’ve grown out of all that, that I’m above it. The other morning, as I sat in my leather quiet-time chair before the Lord, He convicted me of how much I was actually still holding on to old hurts and past pain, how much I hadn’t released or forgiven. God did some good surgery on my heart that day. He is a good and gracious God, and He often reminds me of things I thought I had long since put behind me but probably had not.
We all harbor pain and injured areas of our lives we’re still holding onto in this city and in all cities, whether rooted in family, religion, ethnicity, economics, or friendship gone sour. But for those who have been forgiven much, we are called to forgive much. As the famous writer-priest Henri Nouwen said, “Forgiveness demands of me that I step over that wounded part of my heart that feels hurt and wronged and that wants to stay in control and put a few conditions between me and the one whom I am asked to forgive…Only when I remember that I am the Beloved Child can I welcome those who want to return with the same compassion as that with which the Father welcomes me.” The biggest victim of failure to forgive is ourselves, and God calls us to be free.
Finally, being people who cause the city of our exile to flourish includes being people of generosity. We all know this, but if we live in this country, we’ve been given so much. There are all kinds of reasons that people give, and, trust me, as the head of a local 501(c)(3), I’m happy to take your money for any of them, but biblical generosity springs from the realization that everything belongs to the Lord—there are no self-made people, because the moms and dads we were born to, the minds and work ethic we have, the educational opportunities we’ve been given, and the circumstances we had along the way—all of that is a gift from the Lord. God entrusts these things to our care as His stewards.
They’re absolutely given for our enjoyment, and we should enjoy them. But they’re also given to us so we can contribute to others’ enjoyment. Not as some legalistic obligation, but as an act of gratitude, so we don’t get tired of giving because we serve and reflect a God who never gets tired of giving to us. One of the things I’ve always been so grateful for in living in this community is seeing its generosity. Texas is frequently ranked among the top states in the country for charitable giving, and Smith County, where Tyler is located, is routinely ranked in the top 10 among Texas counties for charitable giving. As we all know, generosity is much more than money. It includes time, talent, and wisdom, and it requires us to live open-handed lives where everything we have is available for God’s use.
The paradoxical beauty of being hospitable, forgiving, generous citizens in the land of our exile is that being these people not only makes our city a greater place to live, but it actually makes us free—free from the petty anger and hatred associated with not knowing people unlike ourselves; free from the bitterness and health problems associated with hanging onto old grudges and past pain; and free from the chokehold that our material possessions can have on us when we don’t hold them loosely and make them available for others. Which, of course, is why our Father, who loves us and wants our best, calls us to be these kinds of people.
I agree with what our local friend Fred Smith said about this place a couple of years ago: “This place has a claim upon my soul.” We love this place, and we are committed to celebrating it and making it better, pointing the way between the now and the not yet to come.
Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.