Sermon Tone Analysis

Living In Exile

Our story this morning carries us to the land of Babylon.

The Jewish people live in desolation.

The Assyrians conquered and scattered the northern Kingdom of Israel.

Now, Babylon sacked the small Kingdom of Judea and deported most of the population to Babylon.

They had wiped the nation of Israel from the earth.

Now assimilation into a foreign culture with foreign religions threatened the continued existence of the Jewish people as a unique ethnic group.

Exile in Babylon was the place where the Jewish people knew they did not belong.

They belonged at home, in the God Promised Land, but exile was the outcome, willfully choosing to abandon the God of the promise.

Babylon was the place of their discomfort.

The Promised Land was home.

They were comfortable there.

They knew how to live off the land and how to live with each other—they spoke the same language, at the same food, celebrated the same holidays, and, at least in name, worshipped the same God.

Nothing is comfortable in Babylon.

They don’t know the language; the food is strange, the Jewish that gave restful rhythms to live disappeared, and God has forbidden them to give themselves to other gods and religions—how will that work in practice in this strange place?

These are desolate times for God’s people.

Will we survive?

How will we survive?

These were the questions at the top of every Jewish mind.

Those Jews tell us what those desolate times were like in Psalm 137:1-4.

By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?

Theses times of desolation were times of lament for God’s people.

What about our church family?

What is . . .

Our Exile Experience

The Place We Don’t Belong

· The community has changed around us.

It is sometimes easy to feel like we are in exile, and we haven’t moved anywhere.

Because where we are now is the .

..

The Place of Our Discomfort

· The culture of Sauk Village is foreign to most of us.

· Sometimes, we literally do not speak the same language.

· It’s hard to feel at home in a foreign land.

Our desolation has been on top of our minds for years.

Sometimes we hear the questions.

· Will our church family survive?

· How will our church family survive?

· How can we sing the songs of Jesus in a foreign land?

Our place of exile can and should be . . .

The Place for Our Lament

For us, as it was for the Jews, lament is our healthy front-runner to our Journey to Joy.

Biblical lament teaches us how to grieve our losses, our disappointments, and our failures with hope in God’s restoring goodness.

When we lament, we simply allow the sadness in our hearts to come to our attention, we honor that sadness or grief, by putting a name on that emotion, we acknowledge its reality and do not pretend it’s not there and live in the illusion that all is well.

Then we ask Jesus who lives in us to come and be with us in our sadness, using works like, “Lord, you know I am feeling so disappointed and I’m grieving over our dear friends, who have left our church family over the past years.

Come, be with me, Lord Jesus, in my sadness and grief.

Come, be with our church family as we grieve this disappointment together.”

Let’s take a moment for silent lament as we sit in the Lord’s presence together.

Please close your eyes as I guide us through this time of silent prayer and then we will conclude with praying together out loud a prayer of lament on the screens.

Please close your eyes and calm yourself in the Lord’s presence.

· When you think of our church family’s past and how we have come to where we are today, be attentive to the emotions of grief, sadness, or loss that come into your heart and mind.

· What name would you give to those emotions: disappointment, sorrow, anger, disillusion, stress, abandonment?

· In your own words, as Jesus come be with you in your sadness, and ask Jesus with our church family as we grieve our losses together.

Please join me in praying the prayer on the screen before us.

Oh, Jesus - You know every one of our sorrows.

You know all our losses, Lord, and you grieve with us.

We invite You into all that we are feeling this morning; we open the door to each of these sorrows and invite You into them with us.

Come and be with us here.

Grieve with us.

Love us here in our sorrows.

Lift our hearts and souls.

For You are our healer, and you understand our broken hearts.

Amen.

Jesus understands our broken hearts comes to heal them.

Psalm 34:7 assures us:

When we pass through the gate of lament, then we are ready to join God in our . . .

Journey to Joy

On this journey to our surprise we find that . . .

God Carries Us

Jeremiah 29:4 (NIV)

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile.

This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to you, Emmanuel Church, I carried into exile you feel today.

You did not come to these times by accident.

I brought you here.

I, Almighty, carried you from a place and time that felt like home, to this place and time that can feel like exile to you.

Yet, I carried you here.

It is another step on your journey where I will conform you, Emmanuel Church, into the image of Christ Jesus, your Lord.

This refining process is exactly what you need to be my witnesses in Sauk Village, the surrounding communities, and all the way to the ends of the earth!

You may not like where you are, but I carried you here for your wellbeing and for my glory.

After the Lord assures us we are not where we are by accident but by His sovereign goodness, He lays out before us His clear . . .

Path to Joy

“Build houses and settle down.”

This is a call both to activity and rest.

Create a home in exile and rest contented where you are.

“Plant gardens and eat what they produce.”

This is a call to find cultivate the resources that will sustain our life as a church in this place.

The resources that were previously available will no longer sustain us.

We must learn to cultivate and benefit from the place where we are in our present time and place.

The LORD Almighty calls us to build our church family in exile, to build a growing, flourishing church family; and specifically, not to decrease the size of my of our family.

When we are in an uncomfortable time and place, we shrink back to preserve what we have, rather than looking to leverage what we have for growing our family.

Renée and I for a time did not have children after our first two “because we were in Africa”.

Eventually we woke up from that delusion and then we had Mark.

Thank God we did.

Our lives would have missed untold blessings had we not done so.

In short, God calls us am to create a little Eden where He plants us.

This is Eden language.

Genesis 1:28 (NIV)

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.

Can you hear the similarity between God’s instructions to humankind in the Garden of Eden and to the Jews in Babylon?

The path to joy requires effort.