Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from the third Sunday of Advent, Dec. 14:

“Advent reminds us that we as Christians are exiles, not immigrants, and we look forward to becoming citizens of another kingdom: the Kingdom of God.”

Isaiah 61:1-3, 10-11

Among the things they do not teach young pastors in seminary are two that a friend of mine says can do-in a pastor in their first small church: steam heat and roofs. I was fortunate. In my last year in seminary I was employed in the maintenance department where I learned a lot about steam heat. Among our responsibilities was emptying out and fixing up vacant apartments in the complex owned by the seminary. The first of these I worked on was the apartment vacated when Mrs. Druva, a cook in the school cafeteria, retired and moved back to Michigan. She left behind a beautiful Queen Anne-style mahogany buffet. I was amazed at the time that someone would just leave such nice furniture: she could have given it to someone else or sold it, but instead she just left it.

As I have gotten older and learned more I think I have come to understand how Mrs. Druva could leave that nice piece of furniture: you see, she was Latvian and she thought of herself as an exile rather than an immigrant. She had left a lot more than furniture when she fled Latvia with her two small children ahead of the advancing Russian armies at the end of WW II. I used to think that everyone who came to the United States from other countries were immigrants - planning to stay here and become Americans. But that isn’t true: some people are exiles - they plan to return to the land of their origins.

In today’s first lesson we read some words that were written not to immigrants, but to exiles - the people of Israel who had been in exile in Babylon for more than 40 years:

The spirit of the LORD God is upon me,

because the LORD has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

These were words of hope written to exiles; people who wanted to return to their homeland. Exiles need words of hope, and lots of them.

Two years earlier my job was in the school cafeteria where I helped Mrs. Druva cook breakfast 5 mornings a week. During those mornings she told me about Latvia and the terrible injustice of this nation being - not occupied as those of Eastern Europe - but swallowed up, blotted off the map by the Soviet Union as if it never existed.

There were other younger Latvians at the seminary too, and from them I heard about the summer camp in Michigan where they sent their children to learn the language, reinforce their identity, and hopefully, someday, meet another Latvian to marry. I learned about the large Latvian community around St. Joseph’s, Mich., and the Latvian Lutheran Church.

Did they hope to go back someday? Or just to recreate here what they had there? It seemed a lost cause to me, hanging onto a past that was actually gone. As the descendant of immigrants and a student of sociology I know that it only takes 3 generations in this country to be fully assimilated. The Latvians were trying to prevent that, but I thought it a doomed effort.

It seemed a lost cause too when the people of Israel had been dragged from Jerusalem and settled in Babylon. They wondered how they could sing the songs of their faith and homeland in a strange place. How could they worship their God whom they believed dwelt in the temple in Jerusalem now that the temple and Jerusalem had been destroyed?

The longer they were in Babylon the more impossible it seemed that they would ever return. The middle part of Isaiah’s book records the words the prophet spoke to them in exile. The part of Isaiah that we read from today was written to the people after they returned from exile in Babylon. The return was not at all what they had expected or hoped for. They had an easy life in Babylon, but now they returned to a Jerusalem that was in ruins: all that they had worked for, had worshiped, had enjoyed, was gone and they had to start over to build houses, city walls and dig wells. They needed words of hope in the face of the hard work that lie ahead of them.

There was another Latvian woman who worked in the cafeteria when I did. She had a son who was pastor of the Latvian Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. Almost 30 years ago or so he made the religious news by going to the Soviet consulate in NYC and slashing a vein in each arm and letting the blood drip down onto the ground to symbolize the agony of Latvia under Soviet domination.

I figured his mother was proud of him, but why was he still carrying the burden of his parents’ generation? He is only a few years older than I am; what’s with these immigrants who try not to assimilate and to keep dead hope alive? The USSR will never let go, I thought, and even if they did, it probably will be too late.

Subsequent history, of course, proved that I was wrong. Latvia became one of the first of the former Soviet states to become independent as the USSR collapsed in 1989. I did not understand what it means to be an exile, and especially that this is a hopeful posture toward the future.

History proved Israel’s exiles wrong, too. They thought that they were stuck in Babylon for ever; that they would never be able to return to Jerusalem. Many of them thought that they might as well act like immigrants, make the best of where they were, and become assimilated. So, many married Babylonian women and settled in for the future.

But the prophets kept the hope of return alive. Ezekiel and Isaiah reminded the people that God had not forgotten them, that they would return to Zion - Jerusalem - that they were exiles and not immigrants. Forty years after the exile began, it ended with the unthinkable - the destruction of the mighty Babylonian empire. And, it was destroyed not by another repressive power but be the enlightened Persians under Cyrus. Cyrus was known for encouraging and even helping exiles to return to their homelands. What had seemed impossible became reality!

Advent reminds us that we, as Christians, are all exiles. We live in this world without ever being satisfied with its ways and compromises. We make our home here and do our best to make the world a better place, even though we know that we really belong to the kingdom of God.

We are never to be so content with this world the way it is that we forget that God has something better in mind for his people - that we are citizens of another country, another kingdom. God is always in the process of re-creating this world, redeeming it and us from the perversions to which we have subjected it.

We see what God has in mind for our world in Jesus preaching and teaching, in his life, death and resurrection, in his promise to return and judge the world in righteousness. As exiles rather than immigrants, we look forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises, the completion of the re-creation we glimpse in Jesus.

Paul describes this in Phil 3: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory...”

So in Advent we sing with Isaiah and the returned exiles of Israel the words of hope: (Isaiah 61:10-11)

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,

my whole being shall exult in my God;

for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,

he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,

as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,

and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

In Jesus, his Son, he is doing that and will do it. That is our hope, that for which we and all God’s exiles in this world long.