The Wilderness of Exile

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Take y'all back to March 15th, 1999. Nancy and I were living in Omaha, Nebraska at the time, but on this particular day, we went over to Iowa City to the Medical Center there with our son Jacob, who at the time was three. And we were deeply concerned about Jacob. He had missed a number of development milestones, including speaking, and there were some behavior issues, including violent behavior. And we had knocked on every door we could think of in eastern Nebraska, and people just shook their head and said, "Sorry." So we made it over to Iowa City there, and on that particular day, we got a diagnosis: Autism spectrum disorder.

The doctor concluded our consultation with him by saying the following. He said, "Look, he's only three. "This may sound harsh, but trust me, "this is in his best interest and yours. "About two hours south of where you live, "there is a state institutional facility." And we recommend that by the time he is eight, maybe nine years old, depending on how much you can stand of these behaviors, you need to put him into that facility for the rest of his life. For the rest of his life.

So began my particular journey in the wilderness, and I'm not unlike my friends here. I think I can fix stuff. And this was, as I proceeded through this journey, clearly I wasn't going to be able to fix this. And a message from a pastor to the church that we used to go to in Omaha, Pastor George Moore, may his memory be a blessing. He said, "You know, with a lot of life's problems, you can rely on your skills and your abilities and your education and your skills, but for some problems, you can't do that. And so you have to rely on something else called faith." I have problems with that. But we had nothing else. And so on faith, we began to dig in.

About three weeks later at the time, Nancy's sister Patty was living with us, and she saw on the local television a story, a woman by the name of Karen was talking about her son on the autism spectrum. And Nancy tracked this gal down and spent several hours one evening talking with Karen. She came back very late that night, and she said, "Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news." The good news is there's a therapy that won't cure Jacob but can kind of manage a lot of these challenges that we're seeing. The bad news is the closest location is in Madison, Wisconsin, seven and a half hours away. I'm gonna start making some calls. The first call wasn't a particularly good one. They said, "Well, we can take him, but it's probably gonna be a year or more before we can get him in." And sometimes we've learned a little passion and energy to get you through the wilderness is what you need.

And Nancy said, "Look, we will move heaven and earth. If you ever have an opening or whatever, call us, we'll make this happen." And the good news is not long after they called and said, "We do have an opening,” and by Memorial Day weekend, the end of May of that year, I had moved my family from Omaha, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin, where we were told they would be there for at least two years, maybe more.

I had a great job in Omaha, so I stayed there, worked, and out of the 60 weeks that they were there, I made it up on the weekend, 40 of those weeks to be with my family. And the therapy began to work. And a lot of the behaviors started to go away and the Jacob that we know and love now started to emerge. And we made a decision, and I don't still know if this was the right decision, but it was just getting really hard being separated. And so we decided to go back to Nebraska.

And the good news is we were together. The bad news is Nancy lost all of the infrastructure that she had. And so again, in faith, we started talking with some parents and we said, "Well, let's hire a therapist and put together a nonprofit." Like, "Well, how do we do that?" We just figured it out. And then we did some lobbying at the state legislature. There was some laws that needed to be passed that would be helpful for our family. And we got the law passed. It only took 10 years. Sometimes in the wilderness, you gotta be patient.

Little a tip for y'all. If you have a cause that you care deeply about and you get the state's largest daily newspaper to agree to come to your house for a personal, intimate portrait and they're gonna take photographs and they're gonna put those pictures in that story on the front page of the living section of the Sunday paper. Here's a little pro tip for you. Just make sure your spouse is okay about that. Just a little pro tip for you there.

We learned some other things in the wilderness when we were up in Madison. This therapy started out in our home.

And then Jacob progressed so much. They said, "Hey, we should put him in a daycare center. See how that works." So Nancy investigated and up there in the part of Madison where we're at, she found a daycare center, a Christian daycare center. And on the brochure that she saw us, it said, "We love all God's children." So she said, "Okay, I'll go talk to those folks." And things were going along pretty well until she mentioned the autism word. And all of a sudden some sphincter muscles got really tight. (Audience Laughing) And Nancy being who she is, as you know, she's a lovely woman, but she will turn on you. She said, "You know, your brochure that said you love all God's children, you ought to change that brochure." And they reconsidered their position.

And you know what happened? You know what happened? Jacob got into that daycare center and he had a great experience. And you know what? So did the other kids too. It turns out in the wilderness, when you get everybody to jump in the pool, things are better, amen? Amen. We also learned that some family and friends when they heard the autism word, all of a sudden their dance card got kind of busy. And it got a little lonely in the wilderness.

Fast forward to the first month or two of 2013, our daughter was working in the field of helping folks like her brother and others with intellectual disabilities in Nebraska. She's up here now as a consummate professional in that area. And she came to us and she said, "Look, my brother, when he becomes an adult, the services here in the Nebraska area are not going to work for my brother, get out." So apparently we need to go explore some other zip codes in the wilderness. And I, a couple years earlier, had applied for a job at a company in MSP called BI Worldwide. And I didn't get the job. You eat a little humble pie in the wilderness from time to time.

But just later in the spring of 2013, I got a call from Kevin Crowley of BI Worldwide. He said, "You know what? I think we've got the right job for you now. Would you still want to come to MSP?" And so it'll be 12 years this Labor Day. We came up here and we put our son into a new school and some of the other remarkable services that are here in the Twin Cities. And he began to thrive immediately and is thriving to this day.

Initially for his folks, not so much thriving. I was making my way in BI Worldwide. Things were great there. Nancy was her employer from Omaha, asked her to stay on, and she was working out of the little apartment that we had. She was kind of on her own and felt pretty lonely. And we started leaning into some churches and just weren't able to develop the kind of community and friendships that we had known that were so important in our life.

And we went back to Nebraska and Thanksgiving and we were describing that we were having difficulty developing friendships. And one of our folks said, "Mark and Nancy Hirschfeld are having trouble making friends in Minnesota. Who are these people?" But there was a time when we thought, "Well, maybe this is just the way it's gonna be. And the good news is Jacob is thriving. We're good and this is just gonna be part of our journey in the wilderness.”

Later on in the spring of 2014, we were at a church at that time nd there was an announcement for a small group that was gonna meet over the summer. And small group life has been exceptionally important to us. Both Nan and I are in small groups. If you are not in a small group and you would be interested in getting into small group, I'm sure there are people here who would be delighted to speak with you.

And I'll tell you exactly what I told her. I said, "I don't care if I have to bribe somebody. I'm getting this out of my way. I'm gonna bribe somebody. I'm getting this into that damn group." And we got in. And on a gorgeous summer June evening, Nancy and I went to our small group at the home of Debbie and Steve Manning. And from that moment on, all of a sudden, the wilderness just didn't seem as lonely anymore. And look, our family still has problems. Nancy has more problems because she has to deal with me. We all get that.

But coming to this family and to feel the love this family has for God and how we make a space for everybody, yeah, we're still a little bit in the wilderness. But some of those really difficult, isolated, lonely moments that we experienced, God was still with us. And with the love of this family, some of the most difficult times in our wilderness journey are now but a memory. (Audience Applauding)

Cody: Thank you, Mark, for that beautiful testimony and the word of community in the wilderness.

Past few weeks, we've moved through this series experiencing God in the wilderness with most of our focus being on individuals who have experienced God in those wilderness places, literal and metaphoric, people in our own community and people in the biblical text, places of precarity and possibility, risk and revelation like Hagar, despairing and near death with her child Ishmael in the desert when the God who sees shows up with water and a word of promise, Job who was in shambles as he said amid the rubble of his life, Ezekiel whose despair led him into a wilderness place only to give up and wish for death. Each of them in their wilderness places encountered God, God who showed up with a word of promise and water for the thirsting mother and child, God who appeared in the whirlwind to set Job's suffering in cosmic context, God who could be heard in the sheer silence that strengthened Ezekiel to go on.

The second week of this series, Debbie took our theme out of an individual focus and into a communal context with a sermon on Moses leading the people out of Egypt in the Exodus, 40 years traversing the harsh terrain of the desert wilderness toward the land of promise. There is no story with a more profound influence on Judaism and then later to Christianity than the story of the Exodus.

It is a cornerstone story of the Hebrew people. If you don't know about the Exodus, it's hard to understand much of the rest of the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. And while the Exodus is the cornerstone sacred story of Jewish faith, there's another wilderness experience of the Hebrew people that more profoundly shapes Judaism and the prophetic tradition that infuses the theology and ministry of Jesus than any other single experience. And that is the Babylonian exile. These two, Exodus and exile, are the central corporate wilderness experiences that form the ancient Jewish people. They're religious practice, they're sacred texts, all the way up to the time of Jesus. So I'm curious, and there's no shame here, who of you knows about the Babylonian exile?

Cool, probably half or more of you.

No shame if you don't because there is no single book of the Bible that you can open to learn about the exile. If you want to read about the Exodus experience, you can turn to the book of Exodus, good.

But the Babylonian exile is reflected upon all throughout the Hebrew Bible. In historical books like Second Kings and Second Chronicles, and prophetic books like Isaiah and Ezekiel, and many of the voices in the Hebrew Bible reflecting on the Babylonian exile have different perspectives on the exile and its meaning. And it's the backdrop of most of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. Even when it's not named, it is behind the stories being told because much of the Old Testament was written during the exile or just after the people's return to the land. So if you don't know much about the Babylonian exile, here's a little brief history.

Somewhere around 597 BCE, the King of Judah was deposed and sent into exile with his family and thousands of others. Then in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and deported another wave of Jewish people into captivity in Babylonia. The entire population wasn't deported. Many stayed in the land that was now decimated. But most of the educated and elite of the people, the leaders of the people, the leaders of the religious establishment were taken into captivity. Life went on for the people who remained in the land amid the rubble of their former life and life took on new directions for those who had been deported into exile. Then in 539 BCE, the Persian King Cyrus came to power and returned the Hebrew people to their homeland.

So depending on how you count the beginning and the end of the exile, the people spent somewhere between 50 and 70 years with exile as their lived reality. A homeland destroyed, a temple raised to the ground, the majority of the leaders of the people living in captivity elsewhere. During this time, the religious life of ancient Judaism took on a different shape. In fact, the way that we know Judaism now is because of the exile.

No longer centered on the temple which had been destroyed, no longer led by the priestly establishment, one of the major crises of the exile was how to maintain the cohesion of a community and the worshiping life of a community of people when all of the structures of corporate identity and religious practice were gone. How do we maintain an identity? How do we maintain a worshiping life when the center of that ritual worshiping life no longer exists and most of the people are nowhere near that place anymore.

So this is likely the time when the synagogue system was established, when people gathered for prayer and study of sacred texts in small communities rather than traversing to the temple in Jerusalem, which no longer existed. But this experience also shaped how many of the sacred stories of the people were told and how they were passed down to future generations because remember, this is really key to reading the Bible. Most of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament was written down during or right after the exile. That experience shapes how every story gets told.

Even the first words of the creation account in Genesis 1 are an intentional juxtaposition to the Babylonian creation epic, the Anuma Elish. Anybody read the Anuma Elish right lately? Maybe in your college literature class you did. The Hebrew people encountered the Anuma Elish, the Babylonian story of creation during the exile and that creation epic climaxes in the establishment of a geographical location as the center of the religious identity of the Babylonian people. In the Hebrew creation account, which you have in your Bible in the book of Genesis, chapters one and two, the climax is not geographic. The climax of the story of creation is temporal. What happens on the seventh day? Sabbath.

Sabbath is where the Hebrew creation account finds its pinnacle, a central religious practice of a distinct communal identity and guess where you can keep Sabbath? Anywhere, even in exile. There in the creation accounts as they were written down during and after exile, you see the exilic experience of the people reflected in how the story of creation is told. Even in the story of the Exodus, that central narrative of the Hebrew identity is written down by scribes in the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community and it tells the story in a way that reflects the people who are now in exile and perhaps possibly just returned as they reflect back on the narrative of their people.

Like Moses in the Exodus story, who gets to the edge of the land of promise, looks into the land of promise and knows that he will never enter the land of promise. The first Exodus generation, those who left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, that generation would not see the promised land, their children would.

And those later in Babylonian exile knew that it would not be them 50 to 70 years later who would see their land again, it would be their children. The exile even shapes how the story of Exodus gets passed down to future generations. And all along the way, the people of Israel grappled with their sense of God's absence from among them. It's one of the things that many of us who just like cling to the need for God to be close and always present sometimes overlook when we're reading the biblical text. There are many passages where the people who write these passages are wrestling with the fact that they cannot feel God's presence among them anymore. And from that wilderness experience, exiled from the land feeling a great distance from God, they developed the language of lament, that fusion of deep grief and sadness with anger over the circumstances of suffering.

Here's one of the best examples of lament during the exile from Psalm 137. It's a beautiful Psalm, but if you don't know, it's written about exile, you miss the profundity of it. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion or Jerusalem. On the willows there we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors asked us for mirth saying sing us one of the songs of Zion. How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

Many of the treatments of the exilic period in the Hebrew Bible really lean into the people's sinfulness, they're straying from God in order to make sense of the exile. Texts like Second Kings and Ezekiel, they really lay into the king of Judah at the time, Manasseh and the Hebrew people for their waywardness as the cause of their captivity and exile. And then we come to a text like today's text, which is also speaking to a people in exile, grappling with a sense of God's absence, worried over the fragile cohesion of the community, despairing over the possible foreclosure of their future. And the prophet's words are not accusation, but healing salve for their wounded souls.

So hear these words from Isaiah chapter 40:

Comfort, oh comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain shall be made low, and the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plane. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

A voice says, cry out, and I say, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers and the flower fades. When the breath of the Lord blows upon it, surely the people are grass. The grass wither and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion. Herald of good news, lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem. Herald of good news, lift it up. Do not fear, say to the cities of Judah, here is your God. See, the Lord comes with might, and God's arm rules for God. God's reward is with God, and God's recompense before God. God will feed God's flock like a shepherd. God will gather the lambs in God's arm and carry them in God's bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

It's clear from this text of Isaiah that the prophet's message and the people's understanding is that their circumstances of exile was a result of their turning from God over the course of time. Again, we don't get that same message clearly in every instance in the Hebrew Bible where times like this are reflected upon, but it's here in Isaiah. See, she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all our sins. But the opening words are not further accusation, but comfort. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. And the word comfort in verse one is a plural imperative. That means it should sound something more like this if it wasn't so cumbersome to translate it like this. All of you who are hearing this, comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

It may be that this plural command is in the prophet's mind a word spoken in the divine counsel, the sort of royal we, or it may be that the words are spoken to a community of prophets whose task was to speak words of comfort into a situation of despair. Amy-Jo Levine and Douglas Knight say of this text that such theological proclamation did not replace the despair of the initial population taken into Babylon. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah do not dismiss the distress. Instead, they share it. And yet they transform it by reminding the people that their God has not deserted them.

A voice cries out, in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. All the structures upon which people relied, the institutions that gave them a sense of identity, the temple, the nation, the land they had called home had been stripped from them. Their sense of God's presence with them was so diminished that for many, God appeared to be completely absent. And if, as many scholars believe, these words of Isaiah were written during the exile, then the future as a people, their future, was likely the subject of anxiety or dread. All of these messages, most of the Hebrew Bible really, make more sense when you read them with the knowledge that most of the Hebrew Bible, most of our Old Testament is disaster literature, written in the midst of communal trauma.

And today, while there are many messages that speak sacred words, even through the language of sheer silence, into contexts of personal and individual tragedy, and many of you have needed to hear those words these last few weeks, some messages are meant to speak to a whole people, a community in the wilderness. We might read these very messages alongside others who are now amid their own collective trauma.

We can read words like these with the people of Gaza who have seen their own homeland decimated these past two years with no place to go, now dying of starvation, while the world scrolls through photos of their suffering on a daily basis. A voice says, "Cry out, and I say, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and their constancy is like a flower of the field."

We could read these texts of communal wilderness, of disaster and trauma, amid the 376 million climate refugees forcibly displaced by floods and windstorms and earthquakes and droughts since 2008. The worst case scenario, projecting that 1.2 billion people will be displaced by climate-related disasters and ecological threats by 2050. 1.2 billion people displaced. God will feed the flock like a shepherd. God will gather the lambs in God's arm and carry them in God's bosom and gently lead the mother sheep.

Or we could read these words of communal trauma and wilderness experience alongside the millions of immigrants living in our midst right now. Many of whom have fled their own situations of peril from their place of origin, and who now live in fear of an increasingly cruel and violent immigration system that is intent on increasing their suffering through detention camps and deportations to countries to which they've never even been. A voice cries out in the wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up. Every mountain and hill be made low. The uneven ground shall become level and the rough places plain." These are words of comfort and justice to people in the midst of a desert place.

Because friends, here is the truth of the biblical text. You can't read a sacred text that was inspired by the Spirit of God and written down by the people of God in a time of conquest and exile and communal suffering and pretend that it's not political. If we do not believe the Bible speaks a sacred word into our own contexts of political conquest and the exile of millions into wilderness places and to those facing communal suffering and death, then we do not believe that the Bible speaks, period.

The common thread throughout the Hebrew Bible is that God goes with the people into the desert, into the wilderness, even into exile. When Adam and Eve are banished from the garden, God follows with them the whole way. When the Hebrew people make their exodus, God is there all 40 years. They create a tabernacle for the divine presence, carrying it with them wherever they go. And when the people go into exile with the temple in ruins and their identity as a people precarious and their future all but foreclosed, God continues to be the center of their lives.

So hear these words anew this morning in that context. All of you who are hearing this, all of you who are hearing this, "Comfort, oh comfort, my people," says your God. Speak tenderly to those in wilderness places who are facing their own death. And listen, a voice cries out, in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.