The Purpose of “About Last Sunday”
Occasionally, I reassess Sunday’s sermon message to determine if my capacity for learning and understanding is still present the following day or two. I began this process as a way to remember the outpouring of God’s word received on Sunday, which is often forgotten about by Monday morning. The human mind works this way to focus on the current and more pressing matters of a monotonous work-centric society. Were we hunters and gatherers still, our focus, come Monday, would be on how many handfuls of whatever crops we would have to work on. Or, depending on our geography, whether we would hunt our food or fend off a larger competing predator for the food. But here we are, in a capitalist corporate dystopia, navigating the world as Christians, attempting and often forgetting the life-transforming message we receive on Sunday, no less than 24 hours after hearing it, to focus on the mundane responsibility of making capital for making capital’s sake.
Therefore, it is my prerogative, through music or literature, to remember sermons that have a greater and lasting impact on me. This is what “About Last Sunday” write-ups are all about.
The Message
And this Sunday, Minister Rohan Samuels of Freedom Life Church titled his message “Scandalous Proximity.” In it, he discussed the beatific message of the gospel, in its simplicity, about God’s bizarre sense of selflessness in loving humanity to the point of shedding his blood for us.
“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8
The gospel commitment here is reinforced in our complete inability to approach God through our merits. The impossibility of our auto-salvific effort was so dismally in peril that God enacted operation redemption, in which he stepped into the muck and mire of our pitiful, sinful condition to deliver us. He did not wait for us to clean up, dress up, or pamper up to engage us in salvation. He offered us the same, unconditional, eternal love while we “were still sinners.” This message, radical as it sounds, is the simplicity of the gospel, which is often misplaced with gimmicks and specials by people who find themselves unimpressed by its straightforwardness. There is no other message, no other means, no other route. The gospel is about God’s sacrificial love for a fallen species; a fallen universe. God’s love supersedes our ability to perform good deeds, for, in his eyes, these deeds are insufficient to cover over the gap between us and the Divine created and solidified by sin.
And it is here where Minister Samuels invokes the conversation about sin to the forefront of my vivid conscience.
Souls In Exile
“Sin is not just a mistake. It’s not just breaking rules. It’s about breaking a relationship. It’s a condition, not just an action. Sin is a disconnection from the Divine. It is a soul in exile. […] You can live so long outside the garden [of Eden] you forget there ever was one. You can build a life in exile and stop missing Eden.”
I want to spend some time on these words. I’ve briefly pressed over the simplicity of the gospel in Romans 5. There is no other message that Christians need to wrestle into the world other than that. For in it, we find the purest qualities of God, once infused into the believer, insist on interacting with the world in a selfless, completely altruistic, redemptive spirit. Redeemed human beings want nothing more than to see the world redeemed. The world over. Not just individuals, but the quality of the earth for human beings and all who inhabit this planet (the biosphere).
But I want to engage with this concept of “a soul in exile,” as a formative sociological phenomenon which occurs and encaptures the human mind and habits for generations when exposed to negative influences.
Sociologists, historians, and psychologists the world over who engage the topics of indigeneity (the relatedness and being of indigenous peoples and their culture) have developed a theory about generational trauma, which grips and strangles many children within indigenous nations. The historical legacy of colonial violence on indigenous people, namely, displacement, disease, genocide, and second-class citizenry status forced upon them, creates a culture of self-hate, a mindset of inferiority complex which is difficult for indigenous people to name, and difficult still to break out of while inhabiting colonial places.
This legacy, exacerbated by substance abuse and abandonment on the part of local governing bodies, creates an environment flush with vulnerable people. There is a reason why it has been historically easier to “disappear” indigenous women and children. There are fewer structures to protect their vulnerable groups, and any attempt by locals to promote self-determination among their people is seen as taking advantage of government funds by lazy and unmotivated welfare recipients.
Conclusively, Indigenous nations in colonized environments tend to develop an image of the self and the community of both resilience and loss. Of pride and shame. Of progress and regress. Of hope and despair. Resilience for surviving the holocaust of their people at the hands of colonizing governments and of loss of family, land, names, language, and agency. There is an equal effort by the local body of indigenous leaders to preserve the identity of their ancestors, their language, their rites and rituals, prayers, dance and songs, all against a rush of anti-indigenous Western civilizing* of tribal peoples.
There are indigenous children born into the Americas today who do not recognize their cultural history, do not understand their local language, nor do they understand why it is important for them as indigenous and historical peoples of these lands to remember, acknowledge, and pass down their indigeneity. These children are born into a colonized reality where the memory of these lands before colonization is vanishing. The stories and myths of their people are being erased. And as the leaders of these groups fight against time and the Westernization of their cultures, the children and youth in this environment are readily accepting the new colonial norms as standard and historically right. The Indigenous Eden, namely, the memory of the connectedness of people to land that existed in the Americas long before colonial nations flooded this area, is slowly fading away.
They have spent so much time “in exile” that they forget who they really are and where they’re truly from.
It is no different for human beings who have spent their entire lives living outside of the loving will of God. Outside of Eden, in a place of spiritual despair.
Much of our lives are lived under the oppressive nature of spiritual colonial superpowers. We’ve lost our identity as children of God, our methods of communicating freely and openly with God, as a result of these oppressive structures. Sin has robbed us of our indigeneity in the presence of God and thrust us from His presence, into an unknown land where we struggle against greater forces which seek to disrupt not only our lives moving forward, but our shared memories of being in scandalous proximity with God.
This exile has made us reflect on the tendencies of a sinful colonial empire, which robs, kills, destroys, and separates by nature. We begin to resemble this nature, through recidivistic behavior, invoking the pathways of a demonic colony to attain our goals, well knowing we should reflect the nature of our Father in heaven instead. Exilic living has turned the children of God into orphans in an unknown land who behave as if God did not exist at all.
It is too easy, as we have seen through history, for us to become comfortable as spiritual exiles. We have adapted to this mode of being, becoming a new version of ourselves, which better reflects the colonies and not our historical lands of Eden. We are living with the generational trauma of sin and as sin-filled exiles, producing and reproducing sinful patterns not our own.
While We Were Yet Exiles
But God’s love for us is proved in that while we were yet exiles, living in complete disorder, forgetting our native lands in God’s presence, it is here, under the power of structural sin, that Christ died for us and rose from the grave for us.
He grants us the ability to remember and to be reconciled to him. Free from the methods of horror and death we have enacted cyclically as a result of sin infesting every fabric of our being, catapulting us from our native healthy communion with the Divine Father in Eden and into the darkness of Exile.
As spiritual exiles, we need peace and a return. The colonial superpower of sin and death will never let us return on our own. In fact, our very desires are corrupted by the colonial structure of sin, which holds us down and reinforces in us the desire to stay where we are, no matter the physical and spiritual consequences. These exilic structures create in us spiritual inferiority complexes where we learn to hate ourselves. Structures that make us believe we do not deserve love, forgiveness, redemption, and ascension. Exilic parameters that teach us our language and communion with God are inferior, less qualified to help us survive in the civilized world of pain, suffering, and death. But God proves His love for us that while we were yet exiles, living in sin, reproducing sin, Christ died for us.
I pray more of us may find a home in God, especially in a world rife with suffering and loss.
I pray that my indigenous brothers and sisters the world over may find peace and agency in a world ruled by colonial and imperial superpowers, which have inflicted felt and true pain on them for centuries. I pray for their healing, financial prosperity, and overall success as people made in the image of God.
I pray all spiritual exiles find their way home through the redemptive work of our loving savior, who, being untouched by the grievous nature of exilic sin, weathered through it for us.
“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners [exiles] Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
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