'I Want My Country Back!'

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

17 December 2023, 11am

Ezra 1.1-5; 3.1,3,10,12-13; 4.1-3; 9.1-3,12; 10.9-12,44

‘I want my country back’

          has become something of a rallying cry in recent years.

 

From calls for Scottish independence, to Brexit, to Trump,

          the desire for land,

                    to have and to hold, till death us do part,

          is firmly back in vogue,

                    although I suspect it has never really gone away.

 

From Islamic State, to the Englishman whose home is his castle,

          from Israel and Palestine, to Russia and Ukraine,

the idea that this particular patch on the surface of God’s green earth

          should belong to ‘me and mine’

is a compelling narrative that drives everything from war and terrorism,

          to oppressive dictatorships, to the entire capitalist system.

 

The idea that land ownership can be defined

          within a hierarchical system of tenure

          which ascends from the individual, via the family and tribe, to the homeland,

is fundamental to our understanding of the post-feudal nation state,

          and you only have to look at the hell that breaks loose

                   wherever people are required to live across borders

                   that are not of their choosing

          to see how wedded our human societies are

                   to the land that we live on,

                   the land which gives us life.

 

And the thing about land ownership

          is that it is always a multi-generational issue.

You don’t change these things overnight,

          because there is always an ideology at play

          behind whichever individual or family or corporation

          has actually got their name on the title deed.

 

So, for example,

          whilst it may be perfectly acceptable

                   for a member of the English landed gentry,

                             say, the duke of Westminster,

                   to own most of the land on which the better parts of London are built,

          it is deemed less acceptable

                   for foreign investors to buy up large tracts of prime real estate

                             with a view to long term profit

                             from what is often referred to as ‘our land’.

 

And so we come to slogans such as,

          ‘I want my country back’, or ‘Stop the Boats’,

          or ‘Rwanda is a safe and stable country’…

 

And the question of whether such sentiments, however heartfelt,

          can ever be enacted in any meaningful way,

          is as troubling today as it ever has been.

 

The thing is, many of today's most divisive political issues

                    revolve around land ownership,

          and have their roots firmly in the past.

 

So if you want to understand Brexit, or Trump,

          or Scottish Nationalism, or ISIS,

                   or the Palestinian problem,

then you have to go back a very long way

          into the history of why we are where we are,

          and why certain people feel so entitled to their territorial assertions.

 

People may forget the details, but the grudges remain,

          and the sense of prerogative for ‘my nation’,

coupled with the sense of fear and frustration

          when it feels as if someone is taking ‘my country’ away from me,

lies behind much of our experience of the world.

 

It's not all about skin colour, of course,

          although that can be one of the most enduring

          and vicious forms of segregation.

 

It's more usually about land (who owns it),

          money (who has it), and power (who wields it),

and these are multigenerational issues

          which echo down through civilisations,

creating the context within which each rising generation

          stakes their own claim on the world.

 

In all of this, who your parents are

          continues to matter very much indeed.

 

If they were blue-collar steel or textile workers in the Deep South of the USA,

          people who saw their jobs disappear during the twentieth century

          because of overseas manufacturing, and immigrant labour markets,

                   then you will probably be voting, again, for Donald Trump

                   in the hope that he will make your country great again.

 

The irony here, of course, is that Trump is hardly the personification

          of the defender of the working man.

If anything, he's the exact opposite,

          he’s the landowner who represents

          the vested interests and entrenched power of inherited wealth.

 

But he is, at least, an American landowner.

          And like the Grosvenor Estates here in London,

                   British born and bred,

Trump represents an embodiment of the all-American dream,

          which remains compelling to those

                   who desire an opportunity for a better life,

          and are frustrated because they feel

                   as if someone else is taking it from them.

 

What we call neoliberalism,

          the free market economic model that has prevailed in the Western world

                   primarily since the second world war,

          has, it seems to me, largely failed in its aim of reducing social inequality

                   and controlling the monopolisation of production

                   through competition and reduced regulation.

 

And I want to suggest that this is because

          it was just the latest manifestation

                   of an ancient story of control

          based on land, money, and power.

 

The rhetoric of the free market simply created a situation

          within which the rich have remained rich,

                   and where land has remained centralised into the ownership

                   of those who inherited the power to assert their rights over it.

 

And this is where I want us to turn, for a few minutes,

          to the story of Ezra, and the rebuilding of the temple.

Because I think this ancient story, from a land far away,

          helps us to unmask the deep systems of domination in human society

          that continue to make their presence felt in our own world.

 

So, firstly, a bit of the back story.

 

The first temple in Jerusalem was built by Solomon,

          as a religious symbol of the political unification of the land of Israel,

          that had occurred during the reign of his father David.

 

That story tells us that King David had succeeded

          where all other Jewish rulers before him had failed,

by uniting the disparate tribes of the Jewish people

          into one nation, with one King, and one border.

 

In many ways, David was for the Jews,

          what King Arthur has been for the English:

a mythical figure of old who set the ideology of the nation,

          defining for future generation what it means to be part of this people.

 

Well, Solomon’s temple was part of that narrative,

          and it cemented the relationship between the house of David,

          and the so-called ‘God of Israel’.

 

However, David’s political union of the land didn’t last,

          and it was already starting to fragment by the time of Solomon,

          hence his grand building project to try and unite the people.

 

However, after about 250 years,

          the Assyrians conquered the northern part of the land of Israel (740BCE),

and then a century and a bit after that, the Babylonians conquered the south,

          destroying Solomon’s temple,

          and carrying the King and the ruling elite off to exile in Babylon. (587BCE)

 

This Babylonian exile lasted for about fifty years,

          before the political situation shifted in Babylon,

with that great city itself falling to the Persian king Cyrus,

          who, it turned out, had a different policy

          with regard to exiled and displaced peoples.

 

Whereas the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar

          had believed that the way to control a conquered nation

                    was to take the elite into captivity,

          and to put his own rulers in place

                   to extract tribute and taxes from the local population,

Cyrus pursued a policy of letting people be ruled by their own leaders,

          worshipping their own gods,

and as long as they paid their taxes to him,

          he was happy enough to live and let live.

 

And so Cyrus decreed that the Israelites in exile in Babylon

          should be allowed to return back to the land of Israel,

and he encouraged them to rebuild their temple,

          and resume the worship of their God in Jerusalem.

 

And this is where our reading today from the book of Ezra

          picks up the story.

 

It’s a book that is written firmly from the perspective of Judah,

          the southern kingdom of the Jews

          which had Jerusalem as its capital city,

and it is clearly written to justify their ownership of that land.

 

This is history being written by the victors,

          who are telling the story of how they got to where they are,

          in such a way as to legitimate their current situation.

 

So, the returning Jews rebuilt their temple,

          and assumed power in the land,

and Ezra is their story of how they did it.

 

But there are enough glimpses in this story of the darkness of that time

          for us to recover from it what a terrible price had to be paid

          for this ideology of land ownership to reassert itself.

 

The thing is, those returning to the land

          were not the same people as those who had left it.

We’re talking two generations later, here.

          And in the same way that the New York Irish are more Irish than the Irish,

                   so the Jews returning from Babylon were more Jewish,

                             by a certain definition of Jewishness,

                    than those who had remained behind in the land.

 

You see, the Jews in exile had been busy

          constructing a national and religious identity for themselves.

Many of the books of the Bible that make up

          what we might call the Jewish history

          were actually written by the Jews in exile in Babylon.

 

So the creation stories of Genesis

          are clearly re-written versions of the Babylonian creation myths;

and the stories of the rise of the nation of Israel under the judges

          and the political unity achieved by King David and his successors;

are stories written to create and sustain

          a specific vision of national belonging

                    in a time when the land itself was under occupation

                    and the people were in exile.

 

We may never know what historical echoes lie behind these stories,

          but it was these narratives of identity that came to be true

          for the Jews who returned from exile.

 

Did King David ever actually exist? Who knows?

          Quite possibly he didn’t.

But that doesn’t matter, because the stories about him

          defined a nation and a culture,

in much the same way that the stories about Arthur

          came to define what it meant to be English

          in our own time of imperial dominance.

 

So those returning to the land did so

                   with a vision before them of national purity,

          a vision of what it would mean to worship their God in their temple,

                   with their king on the throne.

 

They were, to coin a phrase, getting their country back!

 

And it was Ezra’s job to make that happen,

          he was the leader tasked with delivering on the decision

                   to return the exiles to the land they believed was theirs,

          and I can almost hear him assuring the returners,

                   that ‘return means return’.

 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the implications of the decision to return

          had been fully thought through in advance.

 

Some of this was going to have to be worked out on the hoof, so to speak;

          such as the thorny issue of those already living in the land

who might also have thought that they too

          had a legitimate claim to the land they lived in,

and indeed, a claim to also be considered the legitimate children

          of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

 

The land that Ezra and the returnees came back to was not empty,

          it was inhabited by the descendants of those

          who had been left in the land by the Babylonians.

 

But when these locals asked if they could join in the fun,

          pointing out that they had been faithfully worshipping God,

                   through all the years of Babylonian invasion,

          and that they would like to help with the rebuilding of temple,

they are dismissed as ‘adversaries’,

          and made into enemies.

 

And so the ethnic segregation begins,

          and two groups of people emerged, with two different cultures,

          both feeling that they had a claim to the same piece of land.

 

Let’s call them Palestinians and Israelis,

          for the sake of argument.

 

But Ezra’s vision of radical ethnic purity doesn’t end there,

          and what we meet in the book that bears his name

          is the heartbreaking story of the fate of those among the returners

                   who had married local women and had children.

 

Clearly, for the exiles during the long years in Babylon,

          the pressure to not marry out of the Jewish clan,

          had been crucial to their ability to remain distinctive.

 

Much as some immigrant groups in our own country

          might frown upon those who

          choose to marry out of their own ethnic group.

 

But once the exiles had returned to their historic homeland,

          clearly some of the men had decided

                   that their cousins who had remained in the land

                   were more relative than stranger,

          and had married among them and had children.

 

This would be like, fifty years from now,

          the Syrian refugees to Europe

          finally being able to return to a rebuilt Aleppo.

 

Or diaspora Jews in the 1950s being encouraged

          to return to their newly recreated homeland.

 

It’s the same story, told over and over again,

          as people are displaced, and people return.

 

It’s the story of ethnic segregation,

          of the dream of racial purity,

          and of the challenges of multiculturalism.

 

But Ezra’s answer is clear:

          these women and children must be sent away.

 

It’s horrific, it’s barbaric, it’s xenophobic,

          and it’s where this story ends.

 

The vision of God that we see here,

          is of a God who dwells in the temple in Jerusalem

          desiring to be worshipped by an ethnically purified people.

 

It’s a problematic story,

          and we might wonder why it’s there in our scriptures at all?

 

From the point of view of the author of the book,

          the sending away of the women and children is a good thing,

          it’s a sign of the piety of Ezra

                   that he prioritised the purity of God’s people

                   even at the cost of great suffering.

 

But this is not the God that I recognise, as revealed in Jesus Christ.

          And I refuse to worship a racist, vindictive God.

 

I think the value of this story,

          as with so many of the deeply troubling stories

          that we meet elsewhere in the Old Testament,

is that it bears terrifying testimony to those dark places

          where unflinching adherence to the fusion of nationalism with religion,

          can take human beings.

 

This is the ideology of the terrorist,

          it is the ideology of the crusader,

          it is the ideology of Christendom.

 

And, thank God, there is another story in scripture

          which offers an alternative vision of what it means to be human,

a vision which allows us to step away

          from the narrative of Ezra and those like him.

 

Psalm 24, for example, proclaims:

          ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it’.

 

It is not mine, it is not yours, it belongs to God.

 

And the book of Revelation gives us a a glimpse of heaven’s perspective

          on the kingdoms and nations of this world,

as the loud voices of heaven cry out that:

          ‘The kingdom of the world

                   has become the kingdom

                    of our Lord and of his Messiah’.

 

Not in some future tense – but very much in the present tense:

 

          The earth IS the Lord’s, and all that is in it

 

          ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom

          of our Lord and of his Messiah’.

 

So, what do we say to the ideology

          which leads people to cry, ‘I want my country back’?

 

I think we say this:

          It was never yours in the first place.

 

The book of Genesis,

          one of the texts written by the exiled Jews in Babylon,

          and brought back by them to the land of Israel on their return,

offers a perspective on the earth

          where humans dwell there as stewards of creation.

 

The significance of the Genesis creation stories

          is not that they offer a competing narrative

          to the insights of contemporary science,

 

but rather that they offer a competing narrative

          which contradicts the localised, nationalistic view of God

                   that drove Ezra and his contemporaries

          to rebuild their temple and drive away the foreigners.

 

We need to decide which God we will worship,

          and it is a decision with significant consequences.

 

Ezra made his choice,

          and the people of that region

          have been living with the consequences ever since.

 

The current violence between Israel and Palestine,

          and the decades of violence that have preceded it,

need to be heard in the theological and geographical context

          of Ezra’s return and reforms.

 

The terrible irony of Ezra’s situation

          was that the very people who had just been released

                   from their own horrific displacement

          so quickly themselves became the agents

                   of the violent displacement of others.

 

And that is a story that echoes down the centuries,

          speaking directly to our own global situation.

 

So what God will we choose to worship?

          And what difference will it make to the way we live on this earth?

 

What if we live out the conviction

          that all that we hold, we hold in trust for God?

Not for our children, nor for our nation, but for God?

 

What if we live in such a way as to be accountable to a different authority,

          resisting the free market forces

          which constrain us to act for prudence and profit?

 

What if we discover in our midst ways of living generously,

          exercising hospitality,

          with our homes, and our land, and our decisions?

 

What if we live to subvert the notion

          that England is, or should be, a ‘Christian nation’,

because the God we worship is the God of the whole earth,

          not just our patch of it?

 

What if we live out in our lives and community

          the calling to advocate for those who have lost their homes?

 

What if we speak out in welcome

          for those who are displaced from their land?

 

What if we seek to understand and live out before God,

          the implications of asserting that this is not ‘our’ country,

                   and this is not ‘our’ land?

 

The earth is the Lord’s

          and all the fullness thereof.