Lonely Exile: A Daily Advent Devotional

Part Zero: An Introduction to Advent and the Meaning of 'Lonely Exile'

Hello, my friends! Can you believe that Advent begins in just a couple of days? Yet, here we are, on the cusp on the Christmas season, and the beginning of a new Church year. If you are anything like me, some of this language might be unfamiliar. I grew up in various iterations of Baptist and non-denominational churches, and observances like Advent or following the Church year/calendar were not even on my radar. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I was introduced to these ideas and more, and over the last twenty years they have shaped and significantly enriched my experience. So, before we begin our daily devotional posts I wanted to send this little Introduction to Advent, and share why I chose the title “Lonely Exile” for this series.

What is Advent, Anyway?

The word Advent is a transliteration of the Latin adventus, which means “coming or arrival.” As a season on the Church calendar it serves as the beginning of the New Year, and it is observed over the four weeks that lead up to Christmas. I’ll say more about the idea of a Advent and the New Year in our first post in the series.

While we can’t say for certain when Christians began to observe the season, it does seem to have been a practice by the fifth century. The focus then was similar to the season of Lent, a season marked by regular fasting and penitence. Beyond that, it’s hard to say much with certainty.¹

Today, Advent is a season of preparation for Christmas that is marked by themes like waiting, longing, and hope. Each week, on one of the Sundays of Advent, candles are lit to symbolize the light that shines, even in the darkness.

Why “Lonely Exile”?

The title for this series is derived from the quintessential Advent hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Originally composed in Latin, perhaps as early as the 9th century, the hymn expresses the longing that defines Advent.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

The use of exile draws our attention to a couple important contexts for the story of Jesus. First, it contains echos of the Babylonian Exile. In 597 BCE the Babylonians began deporting the residents of Judah after laying siege to Jerusalem. Around a decade later, in 587 or 586 (there is some disagreement about the year), the Babylonians would once again lay siege to the city, this time with catastrophic results. Jerusalem fell, the Temple was razed, and more of the inhabitants of Judah were exiled to Babylon. It was in that setting, longing for their home and their God, that the poets among them put into lyric and meter the collective grief they were experiencing.

By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down, and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

we hung up our harps.

For there our captors

asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song

in a foreign land? Psalm 137:1-4, NRSVue

That exile would last between 59 and 48 years, depending on which deportation a person experienced. When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon he permitted the Judahites to return home and to rebuild their Temple. They were still under Persian rule, but also enjoyed a roughly two hundred year period as an autonomous province. They remained under the umbrella of Persian rule, but had some say about their lives. That would collapse in the aftermath of Alexander the Great.

Not long after Alexander conquered the Persian Empire he became ill and died at the age of 32. His vast empire, stretching from Greece to India, was divided up among his generals, two of which (Ptolemy and Seleucus) played a direct role in the unfolding story that leads to the birth of Jesus. The Ptolemies and the Seleucids would both control the land of Israel, the latter being the central villain of the Hanukkah story. After defeating the Seleucids, under the leadership of Judah Maccabee, aka “The Hammer,” the citizens of Judah would experience about a hundred years of independent self-rule which ended when the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem in the year 64 BCE.

That is the context that leads us to the birth of Jesus, and it is also the second meaning of exile that is important to understand. The Babylonian Exile was one of geography. The people were taken from their land and placed elsewhere. This second exile, under the Roman occupation of the land, was not geographical in nature. They were in the land, but they were not free in the land. Someone else was making decisions about their lives and their land. This sense of exile was not just external, but internal. They are home, but not really home. They have their Temple, but they also lived with the sense that God had not really returned to it fully. They longed for a New Age, a time of peace and prosperity, in which Israel would be free from its oppressors, and God would return once more to Zion. This is the background and meaning of “lonely exile,” then. Part of our journey in this series will be what it means for us and our own experience, now.

My goal in these daily devotions is to offer a couple of things that I hope will deepen your experience of the season as well. First, I hope to help place the stories that surround the birth of Jesus into their historical and social context so that their meaning becomes more accessible, and by doing so, second, to open up the hope, peace, joy, and love these stories offer, back then and now. Perhaps you, also, are feeling a sense of “lonely exile” during this season. If so, these daily devotions are designed with you in mind.

1. Lent is the forty day period of fasting and penitence that stretches from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. The focus of Lent is preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus.