Biography
Dr. Ralph Elliott is senior pastor of the North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago. He is also widely known as a teacher of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. He travels extensively and serves his church in numerous leadership positions. In recent years Ralph Elliott has been greatly influenced by the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This has led to lectureships in New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Philippines. This led to work in the developing countries such as Kenya and in Central and South America. Dr. Elliott has a special relationship with the Philippines and the Aquino family. He soon journeys there again to participate in a joint worship service with Mrs. President Aquino. He is a truly mission-oriented. Some years ago, Dr. Elliott’s little book, The Message of Genesis, became a center of controversy and he and his book received notoriety on the pages of Time and Newsweek magazines. This center of controversy was not unlike our current question of inerrancy. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Pilgrimage of an Exile" 
Journey, pilgrimage and exile are among the most important images in all of Biblical tradition. Exile, pilgrimage and journey are among the most important exercises in life’s experience. It often is that because one is forced to go into exile that he somehow becomes a pilgrim which causes him to make decisions on a journey which he never would have made before and decisions which he never would have known before, with discoveries of the soul which otherwise never could have come.

Do you remember some of the themes? It was said of those early faith believers — they acknowledge that they were exiles, pilgrims and strangers in the land. To be a pilgrim is to journey to meaning. There are many ways to travel. One can, of course, be a tourist — just traveling around from place to place, with no ultimate goal, no ultimate destiny other than to return to the place from which one came. There are sojourners, of course, who likewise travel in a temporary time to a temporary place with no real interest in either the time, or the place, or the people of that place. But to be a pilgrim is to be on a quest for meaning, looking for a particular purpose. A pilgrim is a person who journeys from the foreign country of the soul, forced to live in a different and strange place, and thereby impelled to make decisions which impact the whole value system of life so that one is never again what one once was before.

I have made a wonderful discovery: one seldom becomes a pilgrim until and unless forced to live in circumstances of exile, where circumstances call for decisions which clarify who we are. Indeed forcing us to discover who we are, and whose we are, and then, praise God, even if we are pushed into exile, we can celebrate the journey.

I really don’t have to define the term. Many of you living in this land are exiles from your native homeland. You have come from different times and different places. An exile is anyone separated from his country or his home or his original status, either voluntarily or by the stress of circumstances. It may be physical — when you are caused to migrate from one country to another. It may be cultural — when you are caused to leave a southern clime for another clime. It may be social — when you find yourself in circumstances previously unknown. It may be educational, or intellectual. You are in exile when you recognise that you don’t fit. When you hear a different drummer for whatever reason, and you have to make some clarifying choices and grasp some clarifying visions which give a steadying value system to the remainder of life.

Exile was a most important time in the life of Israel. The greatest theological insights came in those days when Israel had no temple. Languishing in a strange land, they were taunted and tormented. But they went through the night of the soul to discover that religion was not a place, but that it’s a relationship. A relationship which provides a grace that is greater than any place.

Exile is when you discover and clarify visions which can neither be discovered nor clarified in any other way, and then you thank God for the experience. Exile is when you discover the ownership of some things for yourself. Maybe the things which you had memorized by rote but which never truly became yours until you had the experience of exile.

Job was learned in religion, but it was not until he was caught in the nightmarish exile of the soul that he found it possible to say, “I’d heard of thee with the hearing of my ears, but, ah, now I see you with the seeing of my eye.” It is worth any exile to come to the place where you can see things that you could not see before.

I grew up singing about the “Old Time Religion”. “Give me the old time religion, give me the old time religion. It was good enough for my father and it’s good enough for me.” But one day, in a sense not until I was 38 years of age, did I discover, by being exiled from all that was to me at that time held dear, that you cannot have your father’s religion. There has to come a time in the night of a soul when it is yours, yours in a way that neither your father nor your mother could have given it you. And then you thank God for the exile.

Do you remember Moses whose mother hid him in the bulrushes — who became the “basket case” who floated into the Egyptian system? And after awhile, lost his identity in that system, severed from the faith roots of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Finally one day when he saw his ethnic kind being beat into slavery, he was touched to know who he was, and he fled into exile on the back side of the desert to come to grips with himself and to come to grips with God. Everyone has to do that. And it usually happens in some exile, in some night of the soul.

Exile prepares us to make a contribution even when everyone else cannot see. So it was that Moses went back to lead his people out, and as the Scripture says, initially, even Pharaoh did not know that they were gone. So, when all of the people came out in an exodus of Egypt, and found themselves in an exile of sorts, Moses could help them to see some things that initially they could not see. He saw manna on the ground. Not everyone can see manna on the ground, but thank God for the pilgrimage of the exile which enables us to see.

There are many other exiles in Israel’s life. For 40 years they had been roaming around in the wilderness, lost and without direction, and here they are now, having crossed the Jordan, led by Joshua into the initial conquest of the land. Joshua wants to know whether they have learned anything, experienced anything, seen anything, decided anything. But there is nothing magic about exile. It was a mixed mob. For some the rugged years had led to a virility of faith and to a spiritual toughness of mind. But for others it had meant only an unsettledness. They owned the pagan ornaments of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, there was a double mindedness and an unsettledness very much as often we know now. Exile had only meant a capitulation to a temporary thought form with doubts and ugly practices. It is up to you whether you become a pilgrim in the exile.

But standing in sharp contrast was Joshua, for whom the wilderness experience of exile had only polished the diamond of personal faith. His life pattern had been set decades before when, as one of several spies, he went into this promised land. He was one of two who came back believing in the promises and in the hopes of God. It’s a classical text. “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the Amorites who live in this land, but as for me, I will serve the Lord.” That’s what an exile and a wilderness experience forces you to do. It forces you to choose the one whom you will serve for the remainder of your life, and it helps you to declare what that decision means. And it forces you to struggle with something and with someone, and to clarify what is real and what isn’t real, even about religion.

Now I know it’s dangerous, and one can easily appear self-serving, and it can seem arrogant and egocentric, but I want to make a transition now. A transition to the existential exile of my own life as a Christian. But I would have you remember the title: “The Pilgrimage of an Exile”. A pilgrim is one who has not arrived, but is traveling on to a destination not fully achieved, and so, remembering the nature of the pilgrim, put the telling in proper perspective.

I was a hothouse variety Christian. Signing on was no difficult task. For everything about my culture, my family, my setting was geared in a religious direction. It would have been much more difficult for me to say “no” to religion than it was to say “yes”. Even in high school I was, so much of the time, the president of the student government, or of the student council, able to set a pattern which allowed me to begin every council meeting with prayer or with one of my great sermonettes, and artificially and oppressively, as I look back upon it, put people into my own mold. Thoughtlessly forcing the Jewish Newman or Lowenstein in that group to surrender their freedoms and to fit my mold.

My first glimpse of exile, forcing me to get beneath the surface of what had been handed to me on a cultural platter, was a period of service in the army. Primarily on duty in the winter’s cold of Europe where, for the first time, I saw people die, I watched as men went through hell. I began to recognise that some of the easy shibboleths handed to me were surface deep and would not hold. I made progress during that exile. A progress in spiritual depth. But it was much like Israel’s wilderness years, for much was yet unclear.

And then life became easier again and the terrifying struggle was not so necessary. Suddenly, I found myself as a young professor. Sharper than some in my biblical field, easily handing out easy answers to age old questions. One day my answers did not fit and suddenly I was humbled by my arrogance and cut off from my beloved southland, cut off from my professorship, and cut off from those whom I thought to be my friends. and living in exile. I have lived the remainder of my life in religious and physical exile, no longer fitting into the right-wing culture to which I once belonged, never fitting into the cynicism of a liberal theological culture whose surface humanism is often accompanied by cynicism. But I want to bear a testimony to you, that when I was cast out of Jerusalem into exile, I began a struggle, a struggle which has blessed my soul. Initially I wandered, almost in a suicidal setting, I wandered, and I discovered that in a depth far beneath the theological dogmas and forms which I knew so well was a Jesus of experience — often hid by the very religion I was seeking to maintain. And that was when I began to discover, beyond my religious and denominational labels, other ecumenical Christians who had been through the same experience of exile and experience of grace. It was a journeying in the rich exile of the soul that I discovered that there is a spiritual newness which makes the defense of the old fences both unnecessary and undesirable, for God carries me and I do not carry God.

Worry not about exile. Exile is not bad, for exile is when you begin to grow and claim God as your very own and probe beneath the tidy, doctrinal catechism which you may have memorized, in a surface way, as a child. It is because of the exiled experience that I have discovered a value system which holds, which was there all along, which I really was, sometimes, allowing to be hid by the external forms in which it was conveyed.

When I was a young boy, working in the back of my father’s store, sorting the pop bottles, there was an old black man who worked for my father named Charlie Price. He would not have known what A was from Z in theology, but I often heard him say, “Yes sir, God is faithful and he will not tempt you above what you are able to bear. Don’t you forget that, Mister Ralph.” And then he would sing, “He knows, he knows, how much you can bear.”

And so, in the exiled times I have discovered that core belief which is much more than easily mouthed shibboleths or conformist creeds, but the bedrock attitudes and relationships that govern all of life and give response to all crises, providing anchor in the storm and compass on the journey. During the exile days, I have discovered the new Christ, the Living Christ, the experiential Christ, the Christ beyond all of the creeds. And while sometimes I miss the old sights and the old sounds of home, I thank God for the growth of exile.

But don’t forget the exilic choices. For if you forget to make the choices in exile life can be like a ship without a rudder, like a car without a wheel. And instead of being a pilgrimage, it can be a nightmare. If you, then, would enjoy the pilgrimage of the soul, make the choices and quit straddling the fences, and with choices easily made, one must be willing to exert influences on others instead of being pushed around by the fashions and the fads of life. In picking your way through the wilderness and through the exile, know that there are certain absolutes which God will share with you in the experience, but you must make some decisions about those absolutes.

A short time ago, Elie Weisel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As the Christian Century said of Weisel, “His own life is a story of an enforced citizenship in the Kingdom of Night — his name for Auschwitz — and a long, long journey, stretching over decades before any glimmer of a true dawn entered that darkness and gave faint signs of a possible sunrise.” He had traveled through a lone exile, but always pushing back the darkness until now, having traveled through the exile, he could say in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, “No one is more capable of gratitude than one who has emerged from death’s kingdom.” Every moment is a gift of grace, our lives are no longer our own. That’s what it means to be in the pilgrimage of an exile.