A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Israel in Exile, Paul in Jail

           A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

           The economist Paul Romer made that observation in a meeting with venture capitalists in 2004. He was commenting on the challenge that rising education levels in other countries pose for the United States, but the sound bite resonated with so many people that today it's become a meme of sorts. Some of our worst experiences provide fertile ground for our best opportunities.

           In the Old Testament reading this week, Israel is in exile in Babylon. In the epistle, Paul is in jail in Rome. But in both places God was fully present to his people.

Babylonian Exile.

           At the risk of oversimplification, the drama of God's elect people Israel revolves around two turning points in two places. First, after 430 years of slavery, God liberated Israel in the exodus from Egypt around 1400 BC. Then, eight hundred years later, there was tragic exile to Babylon in the year 586 BC.

           Exodus and exile reverberate throughout the Bible as two ways that God works in human history, and even in our own personal histories.

           The exodus was a dramatic liberation from oppression and exploitation. It was a miraculous deliverance, a regal display of God's mighty acts of power. It's a story of divine intervention to shatter the enemy, work wonders, and break the powers of bondage. No wonder it's celebrated at Passover even today by Jews.

           The Psalmist for this week proclaims, "How awesome are your deeds!" (Psalm 66:3). The exodus gives us every reason to hope and pray for God's dramatic acts of salvation, both in the world at large and in our personal lives.

           But with exile the geography of salvation changed. For the ancient Hebrews, the destruction of Jerusalem and deportation to pagan Babylon was beyond comprehension. What had happened? Where were God's mighty acts of power? How could he surrender them to a pagan nation? The ravaged temple was both a symbol and reality of failure.

           Exile to Babylon began a period of subjugation, servitude, banishment and captivity. It signaled isolation, loneliness, and even punishment. Certainly it meant despair, for the elite Jews who were deported and for the common people of the land left behind in the rubble of Jerusalem.

           How was a Hebrew deported to Babylon, torn from home and everything familiar, to understand exile? In the lectionary this week Jeremiah offers advice that few people wanted to hear. Writing from besieged Jerusalem, he sent a letter to the exiles who had been deported to Babylon (Jeremiah 29:4–7):

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 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. 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."

Babylonian Exile.

Jeremiah tells the exiles to embrace their disaster rather than to resist it. There was salvation in the strange place of Babylon as well as in the familiar place of Israel.

           Jeremiah tells them to let go of their past and to accept their new circumstances. He says that contrary to all appearances, and despite the foreign geography, at that moment in their story of salvation, Israel was better off in pagan Babylon than in holy Jerusalem. God was still working, only now in the most unlikely of ways and in the most improbable of places.

           Then there's Paul. In his book What Jesus Meant (2006), the historian Garry Wills calls Paul a "heroic traveler" who logged more than ten thousand miles spreading the good news of God's love for Jews and Gentiles alike. But in the epistle for this week, Paul isn't going anywhere. He's in jail.

           Paul says that he's "chained like a criminal" in a Roman prison. Remarkably, though, he's not concerned about his confinement. He's confident that "the word of God is not imprisoned." In fact, a few days after his conversion, God promised him that he would suffer much for his kingdom (Acts 9:15–16), and that "prison and hardship" awaited him in every city (Acts 20:23). And so it did.

           Luke records eight murder attempts on Paul's life. Ultimately, he was martyred in Rome. But you'd be hard pressed to name a person other than Jesus who did more to shape human history.

           Celebrating God's mighty acts of power, his dramatic miracles of deliverance, is easy. Who doesn't long for a personal exodus, whether for work, home, marriage, finances, children — the list is nearly endless. But we know that sometimes things don't work out as we wish, or as we think they should, or as we pray. History can take a bitter turn. Catastrophe can overtake us, sometimes of our own making, other times for no apparent reason at all.

           Living in exile, far from home, in a strange space or place, bereft of all one considers good and familiar, is difficult. Living in exile demands revised expectations. Courage to believe that God is still at work, no matter how bleak the circumstances. Learning a new language and grammar, much as the Jews settling into Babylon learned a new tongue, to articulate your lived experience. Perseverance over the long haul.

Babylonian Exile.

           Living in exile also requires hope about the future, no matter how dark the present. That, too, was part of God's message (29:11): "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

           That future was far off for those Babylonian exiles, seventy years and two generations before the Persian king Cyrus would rout the Babylonian regime and permit the Hebrews to return home (a story told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah). Hope for the future is also an admission that we can't have it all now in the present. Some of the exiles never returned home.

           We might imagine that God needed Paul out of jail so that he could proclaim the gospel. We might think that the God of Israel worked only in Israel, on "home turf." Jeremiah reminds us that God works always and everywhere, in exodus from Egypt, but also in exile to Babylon.

           These stories confound our expectations. We should never forfeit our prayers for exodus deliverance, but neither should we forget that God can be just as present in exilic banishment, in Rome and Babylon as well as in Jerusalem and Egypt.

           Romer was right — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

NOTE: On the eight murder attempts on Paul's life see Acts 9:23–24, 9:29, 14:5–7, 14:19, 20:2–3, 21:31, 23:12, and 25:3.