“Exile” (Lamentations 1:1-7).

Oh Sutherland is a bonnie land,
Beyond the Moray Firth.
And Ross-shire smiles at the Western Isles,
The land of Gaeldom’s birth.
From Scrabster Bay to Mingulay,
The mighty mountains weep;
For each sad glen has been cleared of men
To make way for the great white sheep …
From every glen the silent men
Have a prayer upon their lips;
As they crouch by the sea in poverty
And wait for the white-sailed ships.
The Atlantic roar on the rocky shore
Will lull the bairns to sleep.
No more they’ll stand on their father’s land –
It has gone for the great white sheep.

The Highland Clearances are one of the most important, yet least-known, events that occurred in Britain between around 1770 and 1850 – I would never have heard of them had I not had a Scottish wife. The bare facts are these: through a variety of factors including a depressed economy following the Napoleonic wars, the failure of the potato crop, the falling price of kelp sold for fertilizer, and most important of all the desire of absent landlords to enclose the Scottish lands and fill them Cheviot sheep which were much more profitable than tenant farmers, something like half a million Scots were driven from their homes by famine, debt or forcible eviction.

Some people clung on to life in the Highlands, moving from fertile crofts to miserable villages on barren coasts where life was a constant struggle for survival. Others went to join the teeming mass of the urban poor in the growing industrial centres such as Glasgow. But thousands of others emigrated, to places such as Canada and New Zealand. Many, sadly, died on the attempt: just between 1847 and 1853 at least 49 emigration boats, each carrying between 600-1,000 passengers sank on their journey. Another 17,000 Scottish migrants also died of disease, either on these coffin ships or in the quarantine stations of North America. As one commentator has written, “The Clearances may not have been genocidal but they very much resemble what we have come to know as ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

The departure of these “white-sailed ships” for distant shores was a heartbreaking experience, both for those leaving and those who remained. Sometimes men and women flung themselves down onto the earth they were about to leave, clinging to it so tightly that sailors had to prise them free and carry them bodily to the boats. A writer from the Inverness Courier watched one leave-taking: “Hands were wrung and wrung again, flasks of whisky tossed wildly off amidst cheers and shouts; the women were forced almost fainting into the boats; and the crowd upon the shore burst into a long, loud cheer, while bonnets were thrown into the air, handkerchiefs were waved, and last words of adieu shouted to the receding shore. High above all, the wild notes of the pipes were heard”. These people knew full well that, even if they survived the journey, they would have to learn to live in an unknown land and would never be able to return home.

That picture has an uncomfortably modern ring to it. For not only has “exile” been a recurring theme in human history but just in the last few days we’ve seen those heart-rending scenes – among so many other horrific images – of people packing into trains, cars and buses (and forced to leave their beloved menfolk behind) as they sought to flee the carnage and destruction of Ukraine. The pace of this exodus has shaken us; we can only marvel at the way in which so many ordinary people in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have risen to the challenge, while we can marvel in a very different way at the mealy-mouthed words of our own Home Secretary.

So the theme of “exile” has been forcibly rammed home to us this week. But we should notice that it is also a profoundly Biblical theme; in fact it’s a thread which runs through the entire book. For we read of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden and forbidden to return, of the nations being scattered in the time of Babel, and of Joseph and his brothers seeking refuge from famine in Egypt, a stay which would last for four centuries. We also read of Naomi travelling to Moab to avoid starvation, later returning with Ruth for whom Israel was a foreign country. In the New Testament Joseph, Mary and Jesus are forced to run for safety in Egypt to avoid the threats of King Herod while, in the early days of the Church, the Christians are scattered by the persecution which sprung up after the death of Stephen. Even in Revelation we find John – presumably with many other Christians – slaving away in the quarries of Patmos after being deported during a harsher period of persecution which arose when Nero was emperor and needed people to blame for the great fire of Rome. I’m afraid that, contrary to our expectations, the Bible gives God’s people little hope of a life which is settled and secure!

Those of you who know your Bible will have realised that I’ve left out the most significant deportation in all Jewish history – an event which is known simply as “the” Exile. To put it into a time-frame, let me tell you that this took place 400 years after the great days of King David and 600 years before the time of Jesus. The Chaldeans from Mesopotamia under king Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, razed it to the ground, ended Israel’s existence as a nation and sent many of its citizens to Babylon. By no means every Jew was carted off but between 10,000 and 25,000 of the most prominent citizens such as priests, craftsmen and civil servants were chosen because they could be useful to the Chaldean authorities. Life for those who remained in Israel must have been hard without their leadership.

Now, because history is usually written by the educated and powerful, it’s the people who went to Babylon – folk such as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah – who the Bible regards as the “true Jews”: the majority of folk who stayed behind are scarcely mentioned. What we must realise that many of the exiles were never assimilated into Babylonian life: even after 60 or 70 years there they still formed a distinct community with their own religion and customs. They clearly felt that it was important to maintain their identity as they hoped that, one day, they would cease to be “foreigners in a strange land” and be able to return home. Many Ukrainians must have the same hope  – but will they have anything left to return to?

Its’s obvious that the Exile brought physical disruption and mental anguish to the Jews; I think that it also sorely tested their trust in God. For hadn’t he given them their own land for perpetuity? If that was the case, how could others have taken it over? They had to ask if their faith was misplaced; and this tension between belief and reality led first to a deep despair and then to a profound reworking of the way they understood God and the world. For it was in exile that some of the most moving Psalms and whole books such as Lamentations were written. And it was also in exile that they developed a theology of hope: for books such as Ezekiel and Isaiah speak of the Israelites eventually being gathered together again in a renewed kingdom ruled by a king “greater than David”. Unsurprisingly the idea of salvation became a persistent theme: one day God would bring them home.

I don’t know how easy it is to sustain a thought like that over many years, as new political regimes and borders become set in stone; as children grow up, set up home with their own children and generally put down roots in their new land; as stories of struggle and escape cease to be first-hand memories and turn into folk-tales to be handed down through the generations. Of course that’s not the case for our Ukrainian friends: their exile is still raw and painful in ways that most of us can’t even imagine and they must be hoping that it will be brief. At this moment we can’t even begin to assess how realistic that hope is. But we know that hundreds of thousands of people are living in a state of shocked limbo, hardly knowing which way to turn. Their secure lives have collapsed, virtually overnight. How awful is that?

In the longer term, exiles can develop a fresh outlook on life. Rosa Yassin Hassan, a Syrian author who fled to Germany about ten years ago wrote this: “I left Syria but it hasn’t left me: it’s not easy to leave behind your memory, even if you would like to. In just a few minutes we find ourselves like uprooted trees far from our country, the people we love and the details of our life”. But she continued, “Perhaps my perspective has widened – being far away has allowed me to see details that I could not see when I was near them. I’ve gotten to know new and different cultures from up close. This has brought me a form of hybridity, which is always enriching. My hasty departure made me realize that we were prisoners of a series of established beliefs which we had inherited without ever examining”. Ukrainians aren’t likely to think like that: their current concern must be for sheer survival.

Can we try to think ourselves into the experience of exiled peoples, whether they fled war zones, repressive political regimes, religious persecution or famine, whether they left their homes fifty years ago or last week, whether they’ve come to terms with their flight and have made a new life for themselves or whether they are still in transit, trudging their way across Europe? Their sense of dislocation and bereavement must be almost impossible to bear. But I’d like to close by suggesting that we all experience some sense of loss and yearning; not for a place which we can never return to but for a time when life seemed certain, when morals were black-and-white, when we trusted our Governments and thought we knew our place in the world, when we had confidence in the institutions of state, when it seemed we all knew where we’d come from and where we were going.

But we Christians, of all people, surely have a message of hope to proclaim! For the Bible tells us that, however settled we may be now, we are ultimately “foreigners and exiles” on this earth, pilgrims and temporary residents who look for our permanent home with Jesus in glory. This is similar to the same salvation message that Isaiah proclaimed so long ago when he invited the exiles home, a message which says, “You no longer need to feel you are aliens in a foreign land, you no longer are people without a permanent home”. For God calls to us in love and welcome, wherever we may be living on earth and whatever may be our situation. That isn’t to say, of course, that we ignore the very real plight of the thousands, possibly millions, of refugees now thronging our roads and railways; indeed, Christians have been at the forefront of challenging the prejudice so often shown to migrants and offering them practical help and friendship. (At the moment it seems that the Hungarian Baptists, as so often, are particularly well-organised). But we can add something more to people who are exiled within their minds, their culture, their relationships, their spirits: we can say that they no longer need to be outsiders, for God’s greatest wish is to give them a home with himself.