Christan identity is foundationally an exilic absence from the world. This exile is not one that is forced upon all of us, though because we are part of the Abrahamic covenant, there are originating narratives stored deep within us that talk about that exile at the hands of murderous enemies. Like Moses, who never saw the promised land, or like Christ, who wrestled with the desert the narratives function through refusal and absence. This originating absence is reflected in listening to the parables and stories that are told by Jesus in the gospel. These stories, the messages that the early followers wanted us to internalize, are cryptic and oblique. They seem to tell us that to be Christian is not only to be exillic not in the Jewish sense of being without a messiah, but in a new synergistic sense of being without a land, and being beyond language.

If Christianity is an identity that one chooses, and if by that choosing one moves into the obliqueness of a leader who speaks in tight stories of mystery and wonder, the believer is deliberately choosing to engage in any number of scriptural traditions. Each believer brings his story, the story of his exile, his peoples exile, the new exile of Christianity, the ancient exiles of the Jews and the slightly more recent exiles of the Christians. To be exiled is to live in a set of Chinese nesting boxes of self-contradictory positions and negotiations. To enter these boxes requires our autonomy. This autonomy engages in these traditions means to (in the best of our limited human understanding) discern the will and nature of YHWH, not only as a singular but as a collective noun.

This push me/pull me tension centralizes the believer between a profound personal relationship and a seeking of the communal. This tension seems to be one that swerves like that snake—it is in the gospels, and can be seen in many of the parables. One can think of how the sharing and hording implications of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or how Christ heals one-on-one, and then asks them to spread the gospel, or even larger acts that are about the isolation of speaking, the cryptic mysticism that grounds the gospels. Is the loneliness of the desert or the garden of Gethsmani not a parable that speaks the same lessons as Matthew 6:6 (But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. )

It makes sense that the parables mentioned so far, the ones that creep from meaning, show a tension that makes problematic calls toward justice and peace. The secretiveness of prayer abuts miracles of abundance. Calls towards justice clash loudly with the use of racial slurs, or the impossible to parse phrase “the poor will be always with us”. These clashes are not only in the Gospels though, they are embodied in the texts of our traditions—in reading Judges, which contains the horror of mass rape and the rousing Song of Deborah. These desires, these problems, this profound call for completion, for finding a new way of seeking the gospel that allows for the contradiction, for internalizing the multivalent power of being Christian is found deeply, belovedely in the reform theologian Walter Bruggerman, and his short book Cadences of Home, which assumes that we as Christians who are part of the world can strength in the exile that Christ calls of us. This idea is seductive, there is a loveliness in enshrining the loneliness that seems de rigeour in this post capitialist world.

But there is something profoundly problematic in calling people who are marginalized, who have their exile thrust upon them, to be exiled again, exiled by choice...the isolation of the marginalized, while absent from the gospels is often mirrored in the traditions of the church. (Bruggerman does his best in acknowledging that his privilege makes the exile easier for him: “As white, male, Western privlege comes to an end, some are likely to experience that “ending” as terrible loss that evokes fear and resentment”( 23) or talking about “abrasive blacks and aggressive women, and those whose vision require us to redefine what we think about our cozy definitions of power and money and sexuality and humanness. It takes no great imigation to think that wee might resist such emancipation, might prefer to stay bondaged in dear and isolation, if that is the only alternative offered by God.” (70)

The snake again, that slithers through these narratives, is present here, thinking that there is only two choices, of furling and unfurling—or to put it more prosaically, between exile and assimilation. Bruggerman understands the problems of his birth right, but he cannot interalize the problems of being called to break into a tradition that is often (and it could be argued essentially) violent to him. The femminist systematic theologian Sarah Coakley attempts to work through the same minefield as Bruggerman, except as someone who by her gender has been exiled from the exilic tribes that Cadences of Homes encourages so deeply.

Coakley has spent her life figuring how to submit to God and not to submit to the patriachary, and so she answers Bruggerman in the same tradition as Christ spoke to the Pharisees or how the late prophets spoke to the people of Israel. She writes of the problems of the marginal, and the instability of texts that do work against those who read them, via a brilliant feminist exegesis of Phillpines 2:6
"Where the question of gender then insidiously inserts itself into this scholarly divide is in the willingness... to construe forms of 'weakness,' 'passivity' or 'vulnerability' (all traditionally demerits for the male, but manifestly present in Jesus' passion) as either normatively human or even revelatory divine...if Jesus' 'vulnerability' is a primary narrative given, rather than a philosophical embarrassment to explain away, then precisely the question is raised whether 'vulnerability' need be seen as a female weakness rather than a...human strength." (Choking on Fishbones, 106)

Pushing Bruggerman and Coakley agaisnt each other, to define what it means to be open to the message of Christ, a message ethat is traditionally viewed as both submissive to a divine power and resilient against a state one, is a good indication of the paradoxical desire for a liberating Christ for a people in exile, considering that those who seek or need liberation are contained by the church, is constrained by how we construct narratives of autonomy. Constructing personal and political narratives and by extension these parables become the dominant way to pattern right living and right speech—they become heavily moralized fables, in the style of Aesop or Le Fontaine. To move against this simplfacation of the mystical or cosmic Christ, may be a way not only out of the kind of gendered exile that Coakley talks about, but also a way of internalizing the shadowing exile that we find in the prophets, Christ, the desert fathers, and that tradition.

One of the ways of working through those two structures, is to live in the mystery, that the parables are texts to be mediated on and not problems to be solved. This approach has been advocated by John Addison Dally in his guide to missional preaching—Choosing the Kingdom: “to apply the Word of God to our lives has always sounded topical at best, irreverent at worst. Yet Congreations everywhere cry out for it, and homiletics professors regularly teach it---this in spite of the fact that Jesus in the memory of the church repeatedly refused to answer the quesiton of how his teaching applied to the listerners. Agand and Again, Jesus turned such questions back to the asker...” (116)

How do we live the parables, go into the desert, engage in the city, and desire for the Kingdom of God, which is supposed to be within. Or to put it simply, how does one choose exile? This leads to other questions, raised but not answered in the texts mentioned here, or even the gospels-perhaps because these questions like which dramas are enacted, which roles are to be played, which narratives are engaged with, or how does one know that the exillic desires of YHWH, of moving away from the world, are the correct ones? How did Andrew and James know that abandoning their nets was the right descesion?

Bruggerman talks about this call towards narrative completion: “it is not our story simply because it is the story of everyone...it is our story because we have been prompted by it , had it take over our imaigation, been occupied by it and been caused to linger over it” (64). In this sense YHWH does not call us, but occupies us , like children born in refugee camps, whose home is only known through vague stories and lingering hope.

In this sense, the call towards god is one of liberation, against those that contain and break us, and perhaps figuring out that bondage, those problematic traditions and words, allow us to return home, though home is never explicit, it is never a place but an idea of place. This imperence, and the narratology of how are we included and excluded from the multivalent narratives of history---what Coakley does above, in her femminst reworking of a passage that causes great pain---Coakley does it in other places as well—embodying and sexualizing the trinity for example—and her influence allows to ask one more question.

If we are born in this refugee camp, and we live through the wandering, not knowing where we are going, but trusting the divine to take us there, how do we maintain our narratives. How do we avoid having our own stories subsumed under the grand narratives of Christianity...how do we remain the autounomous self when the history of the religion requires us not only to be isolated from the world, but paradoxically in commune with strangers.

I am unsure that these questions be answered. This thick bramble of personal and collective history is something that can only found in the wandering of the desert, it requires a long view, and I remain unconvinced that it can be externalised in a way that will aid other people---the history of the churhces attempt to make this intenral struggle extrernal, in fact, has proven to be the exact opposite of heelpful.