The Third Sunday After Easter

“So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you”

What does it mean to be an exile?

What does it mean to be a foreigner or a stranger in our own home, in our own lives? A stranger, even – in some ways – to ourselves?

That’s a hard question to answer if you, like me, have never really had to suffer estrangement from family, homeland, or self. This isn’t the case of course for many people in the world displaced by violence, persecution, or even just unfortunate family circumstances; it doesn’t have to be political: the young person ejected from their home by their parents knows exile and homelessness just as those fleeing from their country because of war know it. What does home really mean to us, and what does it mean for us to be separated from it?

For the Israelites, often exiled, often strangers in strange lands, we can get a sense of how it felt from what they wrote. The 137th Psalm expresses the deep sadness of the Israelites while in exile, thinking about their homeland, so beset by sadness that they could not even bring themselves to play instruments, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” They note that the Babylonians forced them to sing songs for them for entertainment, giving up something of themselves to strangers and – in some way – feeling less themselves as a result, “How shall we sing the Lord’s son in a strange land?” the psalmist asks.

More recently though we have another beautiful record of poetry and music that came about because of wickedness and evil. A record of the exile experience by a people that knew very well what it meant to be strangers in a strange land. One of the things that hundreds of years of slavery in north America produced was a body of music that we often call Black Spiritual music. Some of the music is pretty familiar to us while others aren’t as common in our tradition, but we all know Were You There When They Crucified My Lord, or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

The spirituals that developed amidst black slaves from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade through its end were, primarily, work songs but they were all songs that drew from Biblical imagery and told very powerfully of the experience of being such a slave, a person who knows that they are not where they ought to be. The lyrics, as you might understand, often speak soberly but hopefully about the judgement of God against the wicked, but above all else the language, imagery, and themes that recur over and over are about looking for a home, often making comparisons to themselves and the Israelites. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” says one well known spiritual, “A long way from, a long way from home. Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done, A long way from home. True believer, true believer. A long way from home.”

Words borne out of unfathomable and abhorrent circumstances, but yet words to which we can all relate, for who has not at some point felt as though they were almost done and a long way from home?

And while these songs speak about exile, home, and return, what is so beautiful about them is that there is never any confusion about where this home really is. These songs aren’t expressing a desire for something as trite as a ‘better world or a brighter tomorrow’, but rather expressing a deep longing for what those people, through great faith tested by great wickedness, knew to be their true and only home.

Our readings today for this Third Sunday after Easter draw us into thinking about what it means to be exiles, what it means for us to be exiles, and what is home.

In the Epistle today, St. Peter is writing to followers of Christ who are scattered abroad in various places. In our epistle today he begins by calling them, “Aliens and exiles”. Now the words Peter uses in Greek are also sometimes translated as sojourners and pilgrims, or resident aliens and strangers. However we translate it, Peter is writing to a group that is not at home, a group that is somewhere temporarily. Not at home physically, perhaps, but also not at home spiritually, and he gives them advice on how to live in this foreign land, how to live as exiles dedicated to God.

And we get a sense of this as well in John’s Gospel, from a portion called the farewell discourses as Jesus prepares the disciples for his death and resurrection. He’s telling them about what will happen, that he will not be seen, and then seen again, and that the time ahead will not be easy, that they will know sadness while the world and the powers that killed him will laugh and rejoice. But not forever.

You see, just as the Sundays through Advent, Christmas and Epiphany each prepare us for the next revelation of Jesus and what his incarnation means for us, so is the rhythm of the church year at this time preparing us for something. Forty days after his resurrection, during which time he appears over and again to his disciples, Jesus ascends to the Father in body and in spirit. Time and again we hear in the Gospels, and especially through Lent and Holy Week, about how Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world – and neither is ours.

His ascending to the Father, his going up before the eyes of the disciples, tells us something about our destiny as the children of God; it tells us that we are not yet where we are most truly meant to be, no matter how much at home we may feel in this world; it tells us as St Paul wrote to the Philippians that our citizenship is not in this world, but in heaven.

And however strange a concept this may seem to us, it’s something we know innately. We know it in the injustice of death that takes those we love from us; we know it in the sin and wickedness we see in the world – war, poverty, tyranny, and greed; in all of the awful things that we have personally experienced or endured. But we know it in ourselves too, because that wickedness of greed, envy, or anger lives in us – as Paul famously wrote in his struggle, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” We are even estranged from ourselves and our own souls, not even whatwe are meant to be.

Any time that we look with pity at ourselves or a situation and ask how this could be, how this could be allowed to happen, whenever we cry those deep cries of “Why?” to God, we are exiles crying for our homeland, like the Israelites by the waters of Babylon.

It is in this way that we are also exiles and pilgrims, sojourners through this world, on our way to our true heavenly home. And it’s a way beset on all sides by trouble, by things that want everything but to have us be on that path. Jesus, knowing what was to happen, the temptations the disciples might face, said to the them and says to us that we are going to have pain and we are going to have trouble, “but your pain will be turned into joy…but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

When we talk about his resurrection as being a victory over sin and death, this is what we mean: his resurrection and his ascension is not a promise that our lives will be free from suffering or hardship, but it is a promise that knowing where our true home is, seeing ourselves not as citizens of this world but as pilgrims on a journey home,  there is no wickedness, no darkness, no illness nor anything else in all creation…nothing…that can ever overcome us or keep us from that homeland.