Going through some old work of mine, I found an unfinished/unedited collection of sermon on the book of Jonah, preached when I was at Auburn Avenue in Monroe, LA in the early 2000s. Uri Brito and I eventually published a short commentary on Jonah, but prior to that I had been planning a much longer commentary based on 17 sermons I preached on the book. The working title was/is “Apostle to the Pagan City: Reflections on the Story of Jonah and the Missional Calling of the Church.” I may still get back to it and make it available online at some point. A lot of the applications would feel dated in 2025, but it is still much more extensive than the book Uri and I preached. Anyway, one of the sermons stood out to me because it is simialr to a message I preached last Sunday on 1 Samuel 24 (I will post a follow up to that sermon shortly). While Aaron Renn dates the start of negative worl to 2014 or so, for many of us, it already felt like negative world in the early 2000s. We already sensed that the church was being judged by God and pushed into a more exile-like situation. This sermoin reflects that. Some of it needs to be updated (e.g., Willimon eventually regressed back into progressivism over LGBTQ issues, so I would not cite him favorably today). Obviously, with the ascendancy of MAGA, serious Christians are not as disenfranchised as it felt like we were under the Bush administration. But there is still a lot in this sermon that is very relevant. For one thing, we don’t yet know if MAGA is a brief upswing during a longer trend into a negative world, or an actually reversal of the forces that drove us into negative world. This sermon was originally preached on September 27, 2003 and is available here.
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9. Life in the Belly of a Pagan Empire:
Learning to Live as Exiles
(Jonah 2 & Jeremiah 29)
We return to Jonah 2 once again, and you might think, “Well, this is his third sermon on Jonah 2. He’s sort of stuck here. He’s probably giving us the scraps and leftovers of things that didn’t make it into his two previous sermons on this chapter because he’s probably had a busy week with the birth of the new baby and so forth.”[1] If you thought that, you would be right. But I don’t apologize at all for coming back to this chapter. This passage is so full and so rich, I could not begin to cover it in 100 or more sermons. Because I find this passage so critical, because I find it so relevant to our situation, I want us to look at it again. This is a passage that, when properly understood, is full of vital lessons for today’s church. It is full of very important teaching for the people of God living in American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As we’ve seen, the narrative of Jonah foreshadows Israel’s history. This is a historical narrative but it’s also a prophetic narrative. Jonah undergoes a death and resurrection. He is swallowed by a great fish in the sea and then he is spit back out onto dry land. And, in a similar way, Israel will be swallowed up by a pagan empire, by the Assyrians, but then she will be spit back out into the land of promise. Thus Jonah’s personal narrative is a preview of Israel’s corporate story. Just as Jonah underwent a sort of death and resurrection in the belly of the fish, so Israel will also undergo an exile and exodus in the belly of a pagan empire.
Jonah in the belly of the fish, then, is very important. Jonah in the belly of the fish shows Israel what she is to do in exile. The things that Jonah does here is just the things that Israel is to be doing when she finds herself in exile. Jonah repents, he sings and prays to the Lord, he worships the Lord, and he trusts in the Lord for deliverance. Jonah in the fish becomes a model for Israel in exile. But why is this chapter so relevant to us? Why is this particular story so applicable to us in our day and time?
In order to see the relevance of this passage, we have to understand how the OT applies in the new covenant age in which we live. In the OT we find that there are several distinct periods of history. We are used to cutting history up into different epochs (e.g., the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, etc.). In OT history, these periods are more clearly defined and segregated.
For example, Israel has a period of slavery in Egypt. She has a period of wandering in the wilderness. She has a period of conquest when she is conquering the land of promise. Later she has a wonderful period with David and Solomon on the throne, a time of kingly glory and dominion. But she also has a time of decline and finally of exile when she comes under pagan domination.
No one of these time periods is necessarily more normative for us than any other as new covenant Christians. In one sense, any time of history is always like Israel’s kingdom period because now the greater David and the greater Solomon has been permanently installed on the Lord’s throne in heaven. So in one sense we are always in a kingdom phase of history. Those portions of scripture which deal with the kingdom phase of Israel’s history are always relevant to us. But, on the other hand, until the general resurrection and until the consummation of all things, our situation also has similarities to Israel’s time in the wilderness, as Hebrews points out. This was a time of apostasy for Israel and apostasy is a constant danger for us. There will be those who, as we trek through the wilderness together on our journey into the Promised Land of the new creation, will fall by the wayside. So that wilderness generation stands as a permanent reminder to us, as a constant warning that we must persevere in faith. In the same way, we could say that the period of Israel’s conquest is always instructive. After all, we’ve been given the Great Commission in Matthew 28. We’re to be ever and always conquering the world under our new and greater Joshua, the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re to be fighting constantly with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, bringing the nations (the modern Canaanites so to speak) under subjection to the word of Christ (2 Cor. 10:1-6).
Thus, all of these time periods from Israel’s history are applicable to our situation, whatever it may be. No matter what’s going on in the world, we can always find lessons from each one of these periods in Israel’s history to help us. We need to live inside the entire OT narrative.
But some of these time periods in Israel’s history are more obviously applicable at certain times in church history than in other times. So, for example, in the medieval period, Israel’s monarchial period, was especially relevant. The medieval Christian kings were entirely right, given their cultural situation, to pattern their rule (with certain important epochal adjustments!) after the kingly Davidic period of Israel’s history. Their Christendom situation, living as they did in a largely Christianized culture, had close connections with Israel’s period of kingly glory. The privileges and perils of the monarchial period of Israel’s history were especially important, as they formed a close analogy with the situation in the Christianized West.
In our day, however, things are a little bit different. Christendom has come to an end. Christ is still King, of course. But there are other periods of Israel’s history that more closely resemble our present situation. The church’s relationship to the world, after all, is fluid. It’s not static and fixed, but dynamic and ever changing. Thus, we have to be constantly asking ourselves: Which period of OT history is our present situation most analogous to? If we were going to pick one portion of the OT to take up and make our abode, which period of OT history would that be?
I would suggest that the church in America has undergone something of an exile. Western civilization once was largely Christianized; it once was largely influenced by the gospel. Our culture, our politics, our art, our entertainment, our work, and our values were shaped, however imperfectly, by Christian truth, by Scripture. There was cultural pressure, in fact, to live as a Christian, even if only externally. Christian moral standards and the Christian work ethic were generally enforced, at least to some extent, by the state and by cultural opinion. In some measure, it was easy to confuse being a Christian with being European or with being American (this was pone of the dangers of Christendom – covenant presumption, based on confusing the church and the nation). Once upon a time (believe it or not) it took great courage to be openly unbelieving, to openly be a non-Christian.
That Christendom situation is now over in our culture (though it appears a new Christendom might be emerging in other parts of the world). If anything, the roles have been reversed in our society. Faithful Christians now find themselves disestablished and the church has been marginalized. We could say the church has been swallowed up by the great fish of American secularism.
Often in our day the only way to climb the ladder of cultural power and prestige is to compromise or privatize the faith. As the Methodist pastor William Willimon once told the Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, “You won’t believe what you’ve got to pay theologically in order to be invited to the White House.”[2] Whenever the church has compromised in order to maintain or gain cultural ground, the net result has been disastrous for both the church and the world. Willimon, to his credit, has become aware of the compromises of the liberal church and sees how disastrous they’ve, not only for America but especially for the church. What the world needs most is for the church to be the church. The church is most herself when she is most distinct from the world. In this way, the world’s true worldliness is drawn out into the open where it can be dealt with.
It seems that in our day the only way that we can get in positions of influence and power is by diluting and distorting God’s truth. Privately we live as Christians but publicly we wear some other face. Or we try to get ahead by compromising God’s truth. Peter Leithart as he describes this situation:
No longer is there any question as to whether or not the West continues to be Christendom. The modern West is not Christendom in any meaningful sense. And Christians need to learn how to function as the church without the artificial support of Christian political and cultural systems.[3]
A passage like Jonah 2 can help us in learning to live as Christians in this new exilic situation, where we don’t have the support of the broader culture. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, just as Judah was in the belly of a pagan empire for 70 years, just as the early church was in the belly of the Roman Empire for several centuries, so the church in America today is in something of an exilic situation. This situation will last until God sees fit to grant us repentance once again on a wide scale, leading, of course, to the reestablishment of Christendom. But in the meantime, we need to be about the Lord’s business as an exiled church.
In particular, I want to point out two ways Jonah 2 helps us deal with our present circumstances. First, it reminds us of our identity is. Just because we are in exile does not mean that God has forsaken us. It does not mean that we have ceased to be God’s people. We still are the covenant community and we need to know what this means. But we need to know what it means in this kind of historical setting. Secondly, Jonah 2 reminds us of what our vocation is. That is, it gives us a clearly defined sense of calling so that we come to know what God would have us do in this situation.
Learning Who We Are In Exile
We are a community of exiles. To be in exile is to be in a position of obvious need. That seems to be the first thing, in fact, that Jonah realized about himself and about his situation in the belly of the fish in Jonah 2. In verse two he says, “I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction.” Jonah sees that he is afflicted. The language of affliction is associated with the covenant curse of exile in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, indicating that Jonah probably has the curse of exile on his mind.
The church today is in a state of affliction and needs to cry out in a similar kind of way. Jonah’s prayer must become our prayer. We need to repent even as Jonah repents here. Jonah was in deep sin, as we saw in chapter 1. He forgot who he was as a prophet of the Lord and tried to abandon his identity as God’s representative and messenger.
But here we find Jonah repenting; here we find him turning back to the Lord and begging for mercy. Jonah’s response was to serve as a model for Israel in her days of distress and exile. After she was swallowed up by the jaws of the Assyrian empire, she was to turn back to the Lord and cry out to him, to acknowledge her state of affliction and repent. The only reason that Israel went into exile in the first place was her own sin. Moses teaches this in Deuteronomy 28, when he gives something of a prophecy of how Israel’s history is going to go. He says that if Israel does not obey the voice of the Lord and carefully observe all of his commandments and statutes, then Israel would be cursed. And he lists out what all these curses would be. But right towards the end, the great climax of all the curses that God will bring upon Israel, is this: the Lord would pluck them up from their land and scatter them among the Gentiles. The ultimate curse for Israel would be the exile. That is to say, if Israel began to live like a Canaanite nation, she would be treated like the Canaanites. She would be vomited out of her land. She would be driven out of the special land that God had given to her and forced to live among Gentiles.
Of course the same basic pattern holds true for us in the new covenant age. We don’t have a Promised Land where God has placed us to dwell, so our exile is not going to be geographical in the same way that Israel’s was, but we can be exiled in other ways. We can be exiled from places of dominion, places of influence, and places of glory. And this is, in fact, what we are experiencing. It’s very clear from the covenantal pattern of Deuteronomy that if we are faithful over time, the Lord will bless the church and make her the most prosperous community within her society. In fact, she will find herself discipling all of society, more and more bringing the wider culture into conformity with God’s will. But, on the other hand, if the church is unfaithful, she will find herself cast out of places of dominion and influence. She will find herself to be like salt that has lost its saltiness, fit only to be cast out on the ground and trampled under foot. Society will despise her and view her as of no use.
If we find ourselves to be the tail and not the head, the follower rather than the leader, then the solution, according to Deuteronomy 28, is not to point the finger at those who now occupy places of political and cultural power. Rather, it is to join Jonah on our faces before God crying out for rescue. Had Israel obeyed, there would have been no exile. Had Jonah obeyed, there would have been no great fish. Had the church obeyed, there would have been no end to the glory and progress of Christendom. So the first mark of our identity and exile must be that we are a community of repenters. We must be continually crying out to the Lord and because of our affliction. We must be identified and identifiable by our humble spirit of repentance.
But secondly in exile we are to be a community of worshipers. Jonah acknowledges in verse 4 that he has been cast out of the Lord’s presence. He is cut off from the temple, the place where God dwelt among his people.
Here we have to make some redemptive-historical adjustments in order to draw out the application. One of the great blessings of the new covenant is that we no longer worship in an earthly tabernacle or temple built by human hands that can be destroyed by human hands. Our sanctuary is in the heavens itself. It is a sanctuary not built by human hands but built by the Lord himself. In Israel’s history, when the southern tribes were taken into exile, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. The destruction of the temple is explained in Ezekiel and lamented by Jeremiah. A great deal of attention is given to the destruction of the temple because the structure had served as Israel’s meeting place with God. It was the people’s cosmic bridge between heaven and earth, connecting the earthly realm with the heavenly realm. It was the place where believers could go before the Lord and pray in such a way that they could access power to shape the course of human history. But now, this structure vanished, taking away Israel’s most theological, political, and liturgical symbol.
Nonetheless, Jonah’s prayer was to serve as a model for the Israelites, even in exile. Even as they were cast away from the Lord’s presence, even as they were removed from his temple, they were to worship. They may not have a temple on earth, but (like Jonah) they could offer up prayers that would reach God’s heavenly temple. Just as Jonah could pray from the belly of the fish and be heard, so they could pray from Assyria and know that the Lord would hear them.
In verse 4 Jonah says, “Yet I will look again toward your holy temple.” In verse 7 he says, “My prayer went up to you, into your holy temple.” Even though he is geographically removed from the temple, he knows his prayer reached to the temple (the Lord’s presence). In verse 9 he says he will sacrifice to the Lord and pay his vows. Of course, these are liturgical actions. He’s talking about being restored to worship with God’s people. Worship is his fundamental exilic activity.
In the new covenant our worship is not centered around an earthly temple in Jerusalem. Our temple is in heaven and in our gathered worship each Lord’s Day we lift our hearts up to the Lord, ascending by faith into the heavenly sanctuary where, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we offer praise to the Lord (Heb. 10:19ff; 12:18ff). In Christ, we can never be exiled from that sanctuary. And in this sense, our situation can never be as desperate as Israel’s was. So long as we are in Christ we have permanent access to the Father’s throne room. Nonetheless, in a time of exile, we must understand that worship takes on a unique importance.
I can’t really say that worship is more important when we face cultural exile — worship is always central because it’s always the main thing that the church is called to do — but in times of exile, we find is that the worship of the Lord is really all we’ve got. Thus, worship takes on unique importance for the exilic community. We can see how this happened for Israel. During the exilic period, the Jewish synagogue really came into its own as an institution of worship and instruction. It had already existed from the time of Moses as a supplement to tabernacle/temple worship (Lev. 23:3). But in the exilic era, it became something of a substitute for the temple, or even an extension of the temple. It became the temple for the Israelites who were removed from the temple, or who had lost the temple altogether.
During the early centuries of church history when the church was held in a kind of cultural exile in the Roman Empire, the church had no cultural clout, no political say-so in the affairs of the empire, and no way to shape the public policy of the civil government. She was totally disenfranchised. And yet in less than 300 years, without lifting a sword, the church defeated the greatest empire that the world had ever known. How did she do so? Simply by worshiping faithfully, week-in and week-out. As she performed her liturgy faithfully, Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day, she transformed the culture. By exalting King Jesus on her praises, she brought the Roman Empire to its knees.
It’s no accident that as faithful Christians in the West have found themselves exiled from positions of cultural dominion over the last 150 years, they have focused more and more on matters of worship and liturgy. Particularly over the last few decades, there’s been an explosion of interest among faithful Christians in matters of worship, particularly in the theology and practice of liturgics. There’s been one liturgical renewal movement after another. Philip Schaff, the great church historian of the last century, said that the central question in our age is what he called the church question. By that he really meant the central question that confronts us now is the identity of the church as a worshipping community. What does it mean to worship God as his gathered people? Schaff, along with a group of other German Reformed theologians, sought to implement a liturgy based on the best of patristic and early Reformed sources. Schaff saw this as the key to uniting the fragmented people of God for service in a new era.
Times of exile are often the best periods for the church to sharpen and hone her worship skills and practices. Biblical history bears this out. We can think of Israel’s wilderness wandering as a time of exile. Israel had left Egypt and was making preparations to enter the Promised Land. But was Israel doing for those 40 years? She didn’t have any real cultural influence since she had no homeland. She was just a nomadic community moving through the wilderness. But the Israelites carried the tabernacle with them through the wilderness and so corporate worship became their constant focus.
Even earlier in Israel’s history, Abraham had made a liturgical journey through the land of promise. He did not yet possess the land, but he was able to trek through it setting up centers of worship wherever he went. Generations later, Israel would build on Abraham’s liturgical conquest of the land, by taking cultural dominion and driving out the Canaanites.
This is basic to our identity as exiles and aliens in America. While non-Christians might capture former Christian universities and schools, while they might take over Christian states and transform them into secular governments, and so forth, they can never capture our worship. It’s the one thing that the secularized world cannot touch (unless we let them, by dragging worldly culture in the worship service). They cannot take away our sanctuary, for it is in the heavens. The church can be the church — that is to say, she can do the one absolutely essential thing God has called her to do, the thing that is most basic to her identity — no matter how culturally disenfranchised she may be, no matter how marginalized she may be, no matter how ignored she may be by the powers-that-be. She can do the fundamental thing that God has put her on earth to do – worship the living God in the beauty of holiness.
Ironically, a time of exile can really be a blessing in disguise because it reminds us where true power is really found. It’s not found so much in politics or education or the media. True power is found in worship. True power is found in liturgical prayer. It’s all too easy for American Christians to still get preoccupied with the so-called culture wars over political and social issues, and forget about the greater war behind the culture war, namely, the holy war we’re called to fight. This is the Spiritual war that Paul describes in Ephesians 6.
To be sure, we must fight both battles. We’ve got to fight the culture wars as best we can. But more importantly, we’ve got to realize that the true fighting is the Spiritual fighting we’re called to engage in. The holy war is the way real change is going to be effected. The weapons that we wield in holy war of teaching and the sacraments, worship and service, prayer and church discipline, constitute a far more powerful arsenal than anything else we possess in terms of ways to change the culture. The secularists have no countermeasures to these weapons. The church is called to preach and pray her way to dominion.
Let me give you a few examples of this. Think about our response to abortion (or almost any other Supreme Court decision in the last thirty years, though Roe vs. Wade stands out for obvious reasons). If our first response to these things is political we are, as David Chilton has said, acting like practical atheists, because we are looking for real change through the engine of humanistic political machinery. Political action is good, and often necessary, but we have far more powerful tools at our disposal. In cultural exile we may find that kings and presidents do not listen to us, but we always have the ear of the King of Kings. We have power because even if earthly kings turn a deaf ear to us, in the worshiping assembly we have the ear of the King of the Universe. And if he is King of Kings and the church is his Bride, then the church is Queen of Queens! This is why there is so much power invested in the church’s liturgical practices. Jesus is a good Husband and he will listen to what his Bride, the church, has to say, and will act to shape history accordingly.
Thus a time of exile reminds us that the first task of the church is to be the church, to do what no other group or society on the face of the earth can do: to be a royal priesthood, offering up spiritual sacrifices to the Lord on behalf of the whole creation, through prayer and praise in Christ’s name. Worship is an end in itself, of course, but as a by-product of worship, we can shape the culture and the course of history. Without pulling a lever in ballot box, firing a gun, or marching on the capitol, we can transform the country because our prayers are efficacious. Even in exile we wield great power. So many Christians today wring their hands, out of constant fear and anxiety over the state of the culture. They need to turn that nervous energy into liturgical practices, pouring themselves out in praise and prayer. This is where true power and peace are found.
A third component of our identity is found in verses 8 and 9 of Jonah’s song. Here Jonah contrasts himself (and therefore contrasts those he represents) with idolaters. He contrasts true worshippers of the living God with those who cling to worthless idols by putting their hope in false religions.
In exile, the church is surrounded by false worshippers, and so the covenant community must adopt a countercultural stance. If you missed the ’60s and the whole countercultural thing, this is your big chance! Today, the counterculture of the ’60s is the mainline, pop culture we encounter at every turn. The counter-culture became the mainstream culture.
In our time and place, the church is called to be a counterculture of its own. This means the covenant community must be unafraid to swim upstream, to go against the grain, to stand against those who are clinging to other gods.
Again, Peter Leithart is helpful. Listen to his description of the church as a counterculture:
The church is called to be a counterculture, a separate city within the world’s cities, challenging and clashing with the world by unapologetically speaking her own language, telling her own stories, and acting her own rites, practicing her own way of life. Though she shares considerable cultural space with the world, the church is not an institution in the world alongside other institutions. She is an alternative world unto herself with her roots in heaven formed by being drawn into the community of Father, Son and Spirit.[4]
I like the way that Leithart puts that. He says we share social space with the world, but we fill that space in a radically different way. This is just the old adage: the church is to be in the world but not of the world. But Leithart sets forth in a more timely, sophisticated way.
When Israel was exiled, she was taken out of her comfort zone. No longer would Israelites live next door to fellow Israelites. They would have to constantly be on their watch, guarding themselves and their children, lest they be sucked into the idolatrous lifestyle that surrounded them. They knew that they were called to be an island of faithful culture, in the midst of a raging sea of rebellious, idolatrous culture. They would worship differently, they would work differently, they would have a different kind of family life, they would spend their money differently, they would use their leisure time differently, they would sing different songs, they would maybe even dress differently and speak differently if required. In all of this, they would be a threat to the pagan status quo because they would seem weird. They would be a subversive presence in the culture.
Of course, living counter-culturally takes courage, and they would need God’s grace to have the ethical fortitude to carry out their unique convictions. Just as importantly, they would have to have the diligence to teach their children to do the same. Once upon a time parents in the West, in America, could more or less count on the surrounding culture to reinforce the values that they were seeking to inculcate in their children. Not so now. If anything, the culture that surrounds us is hostile to the things that we want to teach our children. So we have to be all the more conscientious.
The Israelites in exile knew that they would have to be extraordinarily loving and kind because they would be so easily misunderstood. This is just a fact of life. The stranger your views seem, the friendlier you have to be in order just to break the ice and get a hearing. Of course this is very relevant for us, since this is the calling we have to take upon ourselves. Increasingly we find American culture more and more hostile to the Christian way of life. And so increasingly, we seem stranger and stranger. Orthodox Christians simply don’t fit in, so much that you might say it is impossible in many respects to be a faithful Christian and a good American. Those identities simply can’t mesh. A faithful Christian insists that Jesus in the one true way to eternal life. Good Americans, in our current setting, are committed to pluralism (a.k.a., polytheism).
The point here is that we’ve got to be prepared to pay the price that comes with being an alternative culture. It could mean being ostracized and perhaps even persecuted. We face tremendous pressure to conform to the world around us – and all too often we cave in.
One thing we must not do in exile is settle for privatizing our faith. Privatization truncates the faith into mere ideology. The gospel is not just a private set of ideas that we hold behind our eyes and between our ears, but that we never really push out into the public world. Being countercultural does not mean retreat or withdrawal. Again, think of the ’60s. The counterculture in the ’60s was not content to vacate the public square, retreating into its own enclaves. It was constantly pushing an agenda, aiming at cultural transformation (or deformation, as the case was). In a somewhat similar way, the church must aim at cultural reformation, without being squeezed into the culture’s mold. We’re to engage the world around us but we do so on the gospel’s terms, not on the world’s terms. We refuse to let the world dictate our agenda.
But there’s difference compared to countercultural movement of the 60s. As we’ve already seen, our weapons are quite different. Moreover, we do not push our views forward with arrogance or self-righteousness. We set forth the truth in a spirit of love and humility. We engage in conversation, not because we are at bottom relativists, but because we know the Spirit uses such means to pry open the door to hardened unbelieving hearts.
American Christians still have a hard time with all of this (particularly in the South, where the remaining residue of Christendom is greater). We still tend to think that America belongs to us, that somehow it’s an intrinsically Christian nation. We tend to think that the institutions of America are rightfully ours.
But in a missionary situation we would never make this mistake. Suppose we were to send a missionary to some pagan territory in the center corridor of Africa to proclaim that “Jesus is Lord,” Suppose the tribal head came and said, “No, you don’t understand, our tribe was dedicated to this other god a long, long time ago. That’s our history. We just have to stay that way.” How would the missionary respond? He would say, “It doesn’t matter what your history is. I’m here to tell you Jesus is Lord!”
In other words, appealing to America’s Christian past (and the extent to which we were once Christian is often highly exaggerated anyway) is not sufficient. History is not normative. The gospel is normative. This means we can’t simply rest on our laurels as Americans. We can’t simply say that in America, Christianity was dominant the past, and so it ought to always be. That doesn’t cut it. We have to proclaim the gospel in a fresh and powerful way. We have to defend the Lordship of Christ. We have to live out the reign of the Lord Jesus over all things, over all spheres and over all aspects of our lives.
We still struggle with really coming to grips with the fact that we are in exile. We still tend to think (even if it’s only subconsciously) that we are Americans first and Christians second. Being American is often more fundamental to our identity than being Christian. It’s as though our political citizenship in this nation was somehow more fundamental than our baptism into the new Israel and our heavenly citizenship. The church in America lacks any strong sense of Christian identity, and perhaps more than anything else, this is what is killing the church in America right now.
We’re not used to this tension between the church and America. For example, in many Christian circles, our primary heroes tend to be American political and military figures more than they do great churchmen. Of course, there have been many great Americans, and it’s fine to celebrate that fact. But we need our primary heroes to come from the church’s history, not American history, for the church, rather than America, is our true country.
If the church in exile is to preserve her identity, she must know and preserve her story. As Christians we have a different way of retelling the story of history. For the typical American, if history has any overarching meaning at all, it’s the progressive displacement of institutional tyranny by democracy and individual autonomy. But for us, history is the unfolding of God’s purposes, centered in the church. This story gives us a distinct identity. It leads us to view the world very differently than our fellow Americans.
In exile, nothing is more important than fortifying communal identity by living within the story that Scripture tells. We must train ourselves to live out not the American story of democracy, individualism, and pluralism, but the story of the kingdom of God narrated for us in Scripture. This story enables us to maintain our countercultural witness. This is story enables us to distinguish ourselves from the world around us.
Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern essayist and short story writer, once noted that Southerners have a rich tradition of story-telling. If Southerners have become known for anything, it’s being able to tell a good story! Interestingly, she points out that this great tradition of Southern story-telling really began to flourish only after the South lost the war in the 1860s. Only then, when southerners found themselves as an exiled and marginalized people in their own country, did Southerners begin to fine-tune the craft of telling stories to one another. Usually telling stories about the way things used to be. But through those stories, Southern culture and identity were preserved.
This is precisely what the church must do. As exiles, we must learn anew how to tell the Christian story. We must tell the story of God’s kingdom in order to preserve our identity as the covenant people. This means we need to know the Bible’s history. But we also need to know church history. We need to know where we’ve come from in order to know where we are going.
In addition, we must become acutely aware of ways we have confused our story with the story of American individualism, democracy, or capitalism. Just as Augustine did great work for the church in distinguishing the church’s story from the story of the Roman Empire, showing that the fall of Rome did not mean the end of the line for the church, so we’ve got to disentangle our story from the American story. While America and the church were closely related for much of our history, at some point along the way, the American story veered off in another direction. Perhaps these stories can join again some day in the providence of God. But that’s not where we are right now and we’ve got to be sharply aware of this.
Excursus: The Early Church and Exilic Identity
We can learn a lot about exilic identity from the early church. The Letter to Diognetus, written by an anonymous Christian in the early days of the church, is very helpful because it reveals a very clear sense of what it meant to be countercultural, living as exiles, strangers, and aliens in a non-Christian empire. In this letter, the author says that there is a new breed of men in the world who have a novel manner of life. Something new has happened; something different has arrived on the scene of history.
This is how the author puts it:
The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality or language or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own or speak any special dialect nor practice any eccentric way of life. The doctrine they profess is not the invention of busy human minds and brains. Nor are they like some adherents of this or that school of human thought. They pass their lives in whatever township, Greek or foreign, each man’s lot has determined and conform to ordinary local usage in their clothing, diet and other habits. Nevertheless, the organization of their community does exhibit some features that are remarkable and even surprising. For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behavior there is more like that of transients.
We are transients here – strangers and aliens. In fact, this is a take-off on Peter’s phrase in 1 Peter 2:11.
The letter goes on to say “They take their full part as citizens” — that is, they participate in political citizenship as much as possible – “but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens, as if they didn’t fully belong to that country.” In other words, their earthly homeland is secondary.
For them, any foreign country is a motherland and any motherland is a foreign country. They can be at home anywhere in the world because they’re really at home nowhere in the world. Like other men, they marry and begat children though they do not expose their infants. Any Christian is free to share his neighbor’s table but never his marriage bed. Though destiny has placed them here in the flesh, they do not live after the flesh. Their days are passed on the earth but their citizenship is above in the heavens. They obey the proscribed laws but in their own private lives they transcend the laws.
That is, they have a higher ethic that they live out, not just the ethic of the state or the empire.
They show love to all men and all men persecute them. They are misunderstood and condemned, yet by suffering death they are quickened into life. They are poor, yet making many rich; lacking all things, yet having all things in abundance; they are dishonored, yet made glorious in their very dishonor; slandered, yet vindicated. They repay attack with blessing and abuse with courtesy. For the good they do, they suffer stripes as evil doers and under the strokes they rejoice like men given new life. Jews assail them as heretics and Greeks harass them with persecutions and yet of all their ill wishes, there is not one that can produce good grounds for this hostility. They are hated without cause. To put it briefly, the relation of Christians to the world is that of the soul to the body. As the soul is the fuse through every part of the body, so are Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul too inhabits the body while at the same time forming no part of it. And Christians inhabit the world but they are not part of the world. The soul, shut up inside the body nevertheless holds the body together. And though they are confined within the world as in a dungeon, it is Christians who hold the world together. The soul which is immortal must dwell in a mortal tabernacle. And Christians, as they sojourn for awhile in the midst of corruptibility here look for incorruptibility in the heavens.
That is a wonderful description of what it means for the church to be a counterculture. However, I would quibble with one metaphor the letter uses. The author says that Christians are to the world what the soul is to the body. I don’t think that’s quite right. The church is not the soul of the world; the church is the body of Christ.
Why is this important? The soul is invisible. Yet the church, as the body of Christ, is a very visible entity in the world. The church is a nation within the nations of the world, a culture within the cultures of the world, a society within the societies of the world. Calling the church the soul of the world isn’t quite right because the church is merely not a hidden, invisible community.
But that criticism aside, this letter is wonderfully descriptive of what it means for the church to be a counterculture. The church is not necessarily alienated in just this way in all times and places, but in the kind of situation the early church faced, and the kind of situation that we face, the church must function as a kind of alternative society. This is our identity: We find ourselves as a people in exile, which means that we are to be a countercultural community in the world, engaging the culture in accord with the gospel’s norms. We reject the easy ways of assimilation or withdrawal.
Our Exilic Vocation
This basic exilic identity gives rise to a special vocation. We can turn once again to Israel’s exile in order to better understand this calling. Israel went into exile precisely because she didn’t fulfill God’s design for her. Jonah’s sin was representative of Israel’s sin. He didn’t want to bear witness to the nations. He didn’t want to carry the gospel to outsiders. He didn’t want to be a conduit transmitting covenant blessings to others. We see this same attitude a little later on in Israel’s history. This attitude characterized Israel in this whole period. For example, in the book of Esther, Esther and Mordecai concealed their covenant membership. They refused to bear witness, until the last possible moment. When they do so, God reverses their situation.
Because of Israel’s refusal to engage the nations around her, she was scattered among those nations. It’s as though God said, “You don’t want to go to the nations? Then I’ll force you out into the nations through exile.” As a result of the exile, the Israelites found themselves living next door to pagans of every stripe. They were in a perfect position to bear witness – whether they liked it or not.
This is just the situation that we’re in as the church in the modern West. The church in the West has been unfaithful. And so now Christians find themselves surrounded on every side by those who are without God and without hope in the world. But God gave a promise to the Jewish exiles and it is a promise that extends to us. In fact, if anything, it is a promise given to us more than it was given to them.
In Jeremiah 31, God describes the new covenant that he would make with the people. Note that this promise is made on the heels of the exile. What will God do for the people in exile? He’s not going to cast them off just because they’ve broken covenant; rather he’s going to restore them by making a new covenant. Buried right in the heart of the blessings of this new covenant, we find this: “No longer will a man say to his neighbor, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me from the least to the greatest.”
God’s promise to the church in exile is this: Keep bearing witness, calling on others to know the Lord. If you do so, there will come a day when you will no longer have to say to your neighbor, “Know the Lord,” for they will all know the him already. That is to say, there will come a day when evangelism will be obsolete. God will turn exile into a new exodus. He will convert those around us, our friends and neighbors.
Who are going to be the next door neighbors of the Israelites in exile? Pagans. Assyrians. Babylonians. And yet God says that there will come a day when the Israelites will no longer have to tell their pagan neighbors to know the Lord. God promises evangelistic success; he promises cultural transformation. As they bear witness faithfully, God blesses them and their culture. The events of Jonah 3 and 4 foreshadow this and were to serve as an encouragement to Israel when she finally did go into exile.
That’s not to say Jonah is any kind of perfect model. Jonah was far too reluctant as a prophet. But consider what happens in Jonah 3. He preaches — according to the literary record — a one sentence sermon of judgment! (You might wish that sometimes you got to hear one sentence sermons. Sorry about that.) Yet, what happens because of his message? The greatest revival in the entire old covenant history breaks out! The capital city of the most pagan empire of the world converts!
Israel, like Jonah, would find that the exile is not the end of the line. And we’re to see this as well. Our current cultural exile is not a reason to be discouraged or dismayed. Rather it should sharpen our sense of vocation as a missional, prophetic people. If you find yourself surrounded by those who don’t know God in your neighborhood, or place of work, or where you shop, do not despair. This is just what we’re supposed to expect in an exile situation. In this environment, we’re to go on boldly bearing witness with our lips and with our lives to the gospel of Christ. This is our mission in exile. This is the “liturgy after the liturgy” we’re called to enact – a liturgy of service and evangelism in the world. This is just the pattern we see in Jonah. In Jonah 1-2, the prophet enters exile. And yet, in Jonah 2, he prays and sings to God. Jonah 2 is a liturgy. In Jonah 3, we see the results of faithful worship in exile as the prophet goes about his mission with incredible success.
The apostle Peter shows us that the mission God has called us to carry out is holistic. It centers, of course, on preaching/evangelizing, but it goes beyond that. 1 Peter 2:11-12 makes a new covenant application for the exilic covenant community. Peter writes,
Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly desires which war against you. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they accuse you of evildoing, they may observe your good works and give glory to God.
Here’s the key to this passage: If the pagans are going to take note of our good works, they must see them. Our good works must be on their behalf so that they witness them firsthand. As they are the beneficiaries of our good works, they will come to glorify the Lord too.
Again, this takes us straight back to the book of Jeremiah and his program for Israel in exile. In Jeremiah 29, the prophet tells the exiles to settle down and seek the good of their new pagan communities. The exiles are to know that wherever they find themselves, they’ve been plucked out of their land in judgment and scattered among the pagans of the world for a good purpose. Judgment on the covenant people is made to serve God’s wider salvific purposes. Thus, the prophet tells them to settle down, seek the good of their new community, and find ways to serve. No doubt, this is exactly what God would have us do in our post-Christian cities and neighborhoods.
Against the World or For the World?
The temptation for a community in exile is to become self-serving — to batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, and take an “us against them” kind of stance. This seems “safe.” We accept our exilic identity, but then refashion our exilic vocation into something we can handle.
But is this biblical? Should we take an “us against them” stance, or an “us against them” posture? Biblically, we can say we are called to be against the world for the sake of the world. We seek the good of the city – but sometimes that isn’t in accord with the city’s own ideas of what is best.[5]
How does this work out? We should take the posture of subversive servants. This is the core of Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles. Essentially, Jeremiah shows that a church in exile is to be with and for those in its community, in order to serve and love them. We engage the culture without being assimilated into it. We witness against it as we witness to it.
How do we witness against the world? We aren’t afraid to admit that we have serious problems with the world around us.[6] We have serious issues with the way things are. We are against the world in all kinds of ways. We refuse to condone our culture the way that it is. We refuse to accept our status as cultural exiles as something permanent.
Jonah knew that things weren’t right in the world. He just didn’t know what to do about it. He got very frustrated with what God was doing. We get frustrated by what we see God doing (or not doing!) in his providence around us as well. But we must learn to cope with our frustration in a Christ-like way.
It’s interesting to look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26. Remember, earlier in Matthew’s gospel Jesus has already described himself as a greater Jonah. Now, just before he goes to the cross, Jesus says, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.” Jesus was so frustrated his soul nearly bursts to pieces. He’s so full of agony, he can barely bear up under it. These words spoken by Jesus right on the eve of his crucifixion are almost the same exact words of sadness, anger, and frustration that Jonah spoke in chapter 4 after the Ninevites repented. The intertextual resonances are unmistakable. Jonah says in 4:9, “It is right for me to be angry, even to death.” Jonah is angry enough to die. His soul has reached the breaking point. The questions torture him: Why has Israel refused to repent? Why has God poured out blessing on the despised Ninevites? Why has God hidden himself from his own people and shown himself to unworthy Gentiles? Jonah can’t stand it anymore! If this is way God’s world works, Jonah is ready to leave it all behind.
The intertextual link to Jonah 4 in Matthew 26 is very telling. Jesus is once again portraying himself as a greater Jonah, making Jonah’s words of pain and frustration his own. Like Jonah (though for different reasons), he is frustrated with the way things are. Jesus has issues, you might say. He has problems with the way things are in the world. But here’s the difference: Unlike Jonah, he refuses to sulk or despair. There is no self-pity. Instead he presses on to fulfill the calling God has given to him.
The church must follow Jesus’ way of dealing with the world’s brokenness. There are many things in God’s providence that make us frustrated and angry, even angry enough to die. We see things going on in the world around us that rend our hearts. We’re baffled and bewildered by what God seems to be doing — or not doing — in the world around us. But we must do what Jesus did in Matthew 26 and not what Jonah did in Jonah 1 or Jonah 4.
We must continue trusting God. We must stay the course. We must persevere. We must realize what Jesus realized but what Jonah did not realize, namely, that we can only fulfill our healing mission to the world, as we are wounded ourselves. We’re called to absorb the pain of the world, and keep on loving the world anyway. Our mission is not just to expose world’s sin problems, but to actually solve those problems by the wisdom, grace, and love of God. This is, in part, how God answers our frustration: He calls us to be a part of the solution ourselves. He calls to not simply stand against the world but to work for the world.
These two aspects of our calling must always be held together. We are against the world in its sin, but for the world in seeking to bring about the kind of life and society that God intended. Jesus, of course, deals with the world’s problems brokenness and fallenness in a unique, once-and-for-all kind of way, at the cross. But we are in union with Jesus, and so we are sent into the world to deal with its fallenness and brokenness as well. We cannot run from the Ninevites of the world. Rather, we must run to them, to extend God’s blessing and grace to them. Jesus said to his disciples in the Gospel of John, “Even as my Father has sent me, so I am sending you” (Jn. 20:21). Jesus was sent and we have been sent. As John says elsewhere, “The Father so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (Jn. 3:16). Jesus was sent not to condemn the world but to save the world. The Ninevites were very wicked, but God so loved the Ninevites that he sent them his beloved prophet Jonah, not to condemn Nineveh, but to save Nineveh. And we have this same calling. God so loved our city, that he sent us, not to condemn these communities, but to save them. We have been caught up into God’s saving mission in the world. We must not be like Jonah and resist that mission; we must be like the greater Jonah and embrace that mission, however painful and sacrificial it may be. Only then will we find God healing the diseases in the world that most trouble us.
Excursus: Are Christians Good Citizens?
Let’s take an excursus here and consider a test case to better understand how this “against the world for the sake of the world” paradigm works. Jonah was against Ninevah at the beginning at end of the book because he was for Israel. He did not realize that in the long run the best way he could serve Israel was by being for Ninevah in God’s way. We must be against the world in its rebellion, even as we for the world because of God’s redemptive purposes. This applies to everything we do in a fallen world.
For example, suppose we ask: Are Christians supposed to be good citizens? Are we supposed to be for America or against America? Are Christians the best citizens or the worst citizens? Paradoxically, the answer is that we are both for and against our nation. On the one hand, we admit to being a subversive presence in the American Empire. We cannot support the pluralism that stands at the heart of American politics because we serve the Lord Jesus Christ. We hail him as the world’s one true King – and his kingship extends even to modern day democracies.
Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that Christianity was bad for society.[7] He wrote, “Far from winning the hearts of the citizens for the state, it removes them from it, as from all earthly things. I know nothing that is more actively opposed to the social spirit.” According to Rousseau, Christians are hostile to the state because their fundamental citizenship is in heaven. Their loyalty to Christ’s kingdom creates tensions in society because Christians serve two masters, Jesus and Caesar. Thus, Rousseau concludes that it is impossible to be a good citizen and a Christian at the same time. The gospel does not serve public peace and prosperity.
In a deeply profound sense, Rousseau is right. Our commitment to Christ relativizes our earthly political loyalty. A Christian is never totally and unconditionally dedicated to the state in which he lives. Polycarp is a good example. This early Christian martyr refused to burn incense to Caesar and so he was burned at the stake. He had violated no other laws of the empire, but insisted on serving a higher Lord. He was a traitor against the Empire. Indeed, all Christians are political traitors.
On the other hand, Rousseau is absolutely wrong. What could be better than for a state to have within itself a group of people totally and radically committed to truth, honesty, charity, and generosity in all their dealings? What could serve the good of the state more than a group of people who are drawing others into a living, loving relationship with their Creator, so that they attain to life’s true end? What could be better for a commonwealth than to have a group of people who are living under the blessing and favor of the living God? What could be better for a society than to have a group devoted to strong family life, raising obedient children, caring for the poor, and submitting peaceably to all duly constituted authorities? For these reasons, Augustine called Christians the “salvation of the commonwealth.” After all, Christians obey the laws, serve their neighbors, pay their taxes, and render honor to whom honor is due. They do the state good. They’re a blessing. Most importantly, God promises to reward their faithfulness, and that spills over to the broader society.
So Christians are simultaneously the best and worst of citizens. We see this dialectic dynamic worked out in Acts. On the one hand, in Acts 17, the Christians are accused of being subversives because they preach another King, Jesus Christ. This sends the city into an uproar. The gospel that Christians announce rips the social fabric. On the other hand, Acts is at pains to show that Christians are not terrorists or revolutionaries. They are respectful of Caesar’s authority at every point. They always obey, unless human authorities require them to disobey Jesus. They are models of respect and submission to earthly rulers. They live in peace and harmony with others.
Thus, we could say the church constitutes the loyal opposition. We are subversive subjects. We are loyal to our rulers, but only to a point. We have a higher loyalty, and we are willing to die rather than deny Christ. We want wants best for the city even if it sends the city into a tumult.
We can apply this dynamic to Christian political engagement. Christians are simultaneously the most interested and least interested in politics. We are interested in the political process because we want Christ’s lordship honored in the public square. We want the principles of love and justice, as defined by his word, to permeate society. Our deep interest in politics stems from our confession that Christ is King of kings. The nations as such are to be discipled, so that the kingdoms of this world more and more become the kingdom of Christ.
However, Christians are also relatively indifferent to politics. We have nothing deep at stake in it. After all, we have our politico-social entity in the church. The church has her own government and courts, her own systems of welfare and mercy ministry, and she embodies a higher and more perfect of form of justice than can be found in the state. We also know that political processes can do very little to bring real transformation to the culture. The inability of pro-life Presidents to make a dent in the abortion carnage over the last thirty-plus years is proof enough of the limitations of politics. Politics can make things much worse, but rarely can politics bring any kind of substantial improvement to the life of society.
Again, this dynamic is at work in the public services that Christians offer in society. We do seek to serve the world, but not always in the ways that the world wants. This is because we serve on the gospel’s terms, not the culture’s. We serve in the name of Christ. The way in which we serve reveals that something is deeply wrong with the world, even as our service becomes a means of healing, mending, and repairing the fallen world order.
We must always ask ourselves: What difference does the church make in the world? In what ways does the church reveal the fallenness of the world, and the hope of the gospel? The world thinks of public services only in pragmatic terms. But the church cannot do this. This is why, for example, Christians can never view secular social work as a solution to domestic abuse, poverty, illiteracy, urban violence, teen pregnancy, or any other ill that afflicts us. The church will always put the gospel at the foundational center of any program of social renewal. Thus, we are subversive, even as we are servants.
Jonah had it all backwards. He thought being for Israel meant he could only be against Ninevah. He failed to grasp God’s bigger picture, which included good for Ninevah and Israel together. He failed to realize that the best way he could be for Israel was by being for Ninevah. By preaching to the Ninevites, he was preparing the Assyrian Empire to break Israel’s fall just as God prepared to fish to care for Jonah in the sea.
The book of Jonah helps us to discover our calling at this moment on the stage of redemptive history. We are exiles, which means we are to be counter-cultural servants, standing against the world for the sake of the world. Our vocation is to challenge the world and heal the world by the grace of Christ.
Conclusion
We leave off with this final thought from Jeremiah 29. In that exilic letter, the Lord says two times in the matter of just a few verses, that the exile is his doing (29:4, 7). The Lord says emphatically, “I sent you into exile.” That is to say, the exile of Israel is every bit as much God’s doing as Jonah’s fish was God’s doing. God says to them that they are to seek the welfare of the city. They are to pray to the Lord on behalf of the city. They are to be the priests of the city where they find themselves dwelling.
God gives them a rationale for this agenda. In seeking the good of the city, they are really seeking their own good, for God tells them that in the city’s welfare, they will find their own welfare. In other words, the best thing we can do for the church is to seek the welfare of the broader community in which God has placed us, for in seeking the welfare of that community, we find our own wellbeing restored. And this is where we find exile finally giving way to exodus. This is the light at the end of the exilic tunnel. It’s the light of a new exodus in which God restores his people. This is our hope and our goal. By God’s grace, it will be our reality.
[1] This sermon was originally preached on September 27, 2003, right after the birth of my fourth child, Elizabeth Anne. Like the other “sermons” in this book it has been considerably modified and expanded.
[2] I suppose that as a Methodist, Willimon was quite familiar with the nature of theological compromise. I like Willimon’s work, but he has a failure of nerve from time to time (e.g., homosexuality).
[3] Against Christianity, 125.
[4] Against Christianity, 123.
[5] A good example of this dynamic is Acts 17. Paul seeks the good of Thessalonica by preaching that Jesus is Lord. But this same declaration actually throws the city into total chaos and upheaval. Paul was against Thessalonica because he was for Thessalonica. We’ll return to this example below.
[6] Many of the thoughts in this section were inspired by an essay by Telford Work.
[7] See Christoph Schonborn, “The Hope of Heaven, the Hope of Earth,” First Things 52 (April, 1995): 32-38.
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