We all feel alone at certain times. It’s common to human experience. Even if we aren’t alone, we feel it. And when we feel alone, we run to the wrong things, things that destroy us. What is it for you? Is it the chemical version? The relational version? The internet version? Or some other version? Do you see how it’s ruling you? How it dominates you, even threatens to destroy you? We need to run to Jesus. How do you do that? Next time you feel alone, instead try praying, try your Bible, try worship, try fellowship with other believers. God hasn’t given up on you; don’t give up on him.

As you likely know, the holidays, which are a time of joy, feel like a curse for so many—because during a time of celebration, many people are never more aware of feeling alone. Whether from memories of lost love ones, regrets of things that have happened, feelings of abandonment—those or many other things—depression spikes, loneliness hits, and sadness reigns instead of joy. Have you experienced lonely seasons among the crowd? Have you found yourself there, hoping that maybe showing up at church will help? Truth is, even if you’re not suffering holiday depression—whatever time of year you’re reading this piece, you and I can understand and feel the loneliness. Pretty much everyone feels alone at some point, because being alone and feeling lonely are two different things. Loneliness is a subjective feeling, so it can happen even if you’re not socially isolated. In fact, often people are most lonely when they’re anonymous among so many people. New York is one of the loneliest cities in the world—all 11 million people of it.
But the irony of being connected but alone isn’t isolated to big cities. Despite internet connectivity—Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and 15 new startups that we haven’t even heard of yet—we’re connected like never before and yet more isolated than ever. We can reconnect with high school classmates, but we feel less known and connected with those who live across the hall. And the worst can be when you’re in a relationship, but that person’s not really with you—loneliness in marriage, loneliness in family, a college student out on your own, with roommates but not really known, a mom or dad home dealing with young kids. Here are the news headlines, sampled from a Google search: “Loneliness is a modern-day epidemic.” “Loneliness is a threat to public health.” “Widespread loneliness is killing people, and we need to talk about it.” According to one BYU researcher, Julianne Hold-Lunstad, the negative impact of loneliness on our health is the equivalent of 15 cigarettes per day.
In the end, we all feel a need for someone to really be with us, and in the Bible Matthew 1 works with the text of Isaiah 7 to remind us that in Jesus we have exactly that.
Way back in the year 734 AD, Ahaz, the king of the land of Judah, was in a terrible spot. He was diplomatically and militarily alone. His land had been invaded by a coalition of nations that included the kingdom of Israel up to the north and most all of modern-day Lebanon and Syria. In other words, he was facing an enemy about 40 times his size and power. It wasn’t a fair fight. And that enemy coalition had conquered pretty much his entire land and had Jerusalem, the capital city, under siege. They intended to conquer the last bit of Judah, forcibly annex it to their coalition, kill Ahaz, and install a puppet king in his place. Ahaz’s options were few—alone, surrounded by an enemy army that would settle for nothing less than destroying him.
In that situation, God sent the prophet Isaiah to king Ahaz and said, “Trust me, and I will deliver you.” I know it looks like you’re alone, but you’re not. I will save you. But you have to trust me, not anything else. And Isaiah was about to get married, in fact, but his wife was still a virgin. And Isaiah said to the king, “Look, by the time I get married, and my new wife has a child, and that child grows up to be a young adult (which to them was probably more like a teenager), God will have destroyed this whole coalition that is threatening you. The name of the child will be Immanuel—God with us—because God will be with us in this terrible, threatening situation. God will be with us to deliver us from peril.”
1 In the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, son of Uzziah, king of Judah, Rezin the king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah the king of Israel came up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but could not yet mount an attack against it. 2 When the house of David was told, “Syria is in league with Ephraim,” the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind. 3 And the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out to meet Ahaz, you and Shear-jashub your son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Washer’s Field. 4 And say to him, ‘Be careful, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, at the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria and the son of Remaliah. 5 Because Syria, with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has devised evil against you, saying, 6 “Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it,” 7 thus says the Lord God: “ ‘It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass. 8 For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin. And within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered from being a people. 9 And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.’ ” 10 Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: 11 “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” 12 But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” 13 And he said, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 15 He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. 16 For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. – Isaiah 7:1–16 (ESV)
But Ahaz didn’t trust in God with him. The prophet warned him to stand firm in faith, but Ahaz decided that another, more visible answer, was far superior to trusting God. Way off to the north and east, on the other side of that huge coalition, was a mighty empire, called the nation of Assyria. And 2 Kings 16 tells us that Ahaz decided that trusting the emperor of Assyria was a safer bet than trusting the God of Isaiah. He sent a message to that emperor saying, “You come save me from these people who want to destroy me.” Ahaz’s answer to being diplomatically and militarily alone was to call for the king of Assyria, not to trust God. He preferred the visible answer of a human military power, not the invisible trust that God would be with him. And before we’re too hard on him, how well does the invisible hold us?
Well, the sad end of that story is that Ahaz’s call was answered. The king of Assyria did come and destroy that attacking coalition. But he also subjugated Judah. The king that Ahaz called for to end his loneliness ended up ruling him. And, a couple decades later, when Judah rebelled, that same nation of Assyria ended up destroying the entire nation of Judah except Jerusalem itself. Ahaz ran to the visible answer, the king of Assyria, and that answer ended up ruling him and then destroying his land.
And then we realize that we’re just like Ahaz. When we’re lonely, we run to the wrong things. And those things then rule us and eventually even destroy us. There’s the chemical version, where we run to something because we’re feeling lonely again, or a failure, or don’t know how to relate well. That drink seems to save us at first. It loosens us up, or it dulls the pain. It gives the buzz. But before long it starts to rule us—we need it, and we no longer have control. And eventually it doesn’t just rule us, it destroys us.  Or there’s the relational version, where we run to that person that we think will meet all our needs, will fix all our loneliness, will make us feel loved and accepted and connected and secure. But he or she ends up ruling us, controlling and distorting us, and the relationship that we hoped would bring fulfillment brings only toxicity. Or there’s the internet version. Lonely singles run to the dark places of the internet, because for just a moment those videos or pictures give the feeling of intimacy, even if it’s false. And lonely spouses run to the same places, or to the message boards that make it seem like someone will listen to us and accept us.
So, what do you run to? After four years of management consulting and 70-hour weeks, completely burned out, I took a two-month leave of absence and spent the first month of it in California with only a rental car and a plane ticket back a month later. I woke up each morning and followed my nose until I found the day’s fun. That meant is I spent almost a whole month alone. There were whole days where the only person I talked to was the grocery store clerk or the campground attendant. And for me the introvert, of course, it was glorious. But when you spend a month alone, you learn what you obsess about really quickly.
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Temperance is the attitude of respect and careful consideration and judgement with which the disagreement is carried out.  It is a spirit which is kind, gentle, self-controlled, which evidences the fruit of the spirit.  We ought not think such a spirit will simply emerge, either in ourselves or in our churches.  Instead, we must campaign for it, work for it, sacrifice for it.  In that sense, in fact, temperance is like every other biblical virtue.  It is hard won against sin, not easily achieved, in ourselves or others.  But it is worth it.

Will it be any better the next time?  For several years, the trifecta of COVID, an election, and race tore churches apart.  What was obviously missing was that pesky fellow Paul’s understanding that we ought to put the needs of others first.  (See 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14.)  Instead of becoming a hotbed of charity and kindness, churches reflected many of the same warring tendencies as society at large.  Nor was this a new phenomenon; just ask any worship leader from the 1990’s about the “worship wars.”  Christians, like the rest of society, sadly find it much easier to fight for what we want than to sacrifice for others.  We simply dress it up in sheep’s clothing, telling ourselves that we are “fighting for what is right,” often not recognizing our own biases and our own enculturation of our faith, not realizing that we, ourselves are not actually enunciating pure Christianity but instead our own version, one with all sorts of cultural biases.  In other words, the church of the past few years has been, in many — and concerning — ways, resembling society more than leading it.
The past year has felt better, though, as if everyone has been able to just slightly catch our collective breath.  There is a tiny bit more peace now in most churches.  Could it be that this disease has finally begun to generate its own antibodies?  Could we have all taken a look at our failure to act with charity, at our conflict, and realized that we had lost at least some of our moorings?  It could be.  Or could it be that the sparks to light the cloud of fuel vapor are simply not currently present?  It could be that, too.  Or could the splitting already be complete, leaving only monocultural churches who now have nothing left over which to split?  It could be that as well.  We will only know if the church has made progress on its fractiousness once the next set of sparks flies.  We won’t know until the next time.
Society more broadly, at least in the United States, shows some of the same.  No one need rehearse the mess of tribalization and conflict that 2020-2022 generated.  Could it be that societal strife has also begun to generate its own antibodies?  It could be.  Anecdotal reports indicate that traffic on the most extreme left and right websites is down.  Even San Francisco has moved a bit back to the center.  Or could it be that we are, again, simply waiting for the next set of sparks to light the vapor cloud afire?  It could be.  With both the church and society, we simply do not know until the next crisis comes.
That said, there remain huge causes for concern.  The fundamental factors that created the tension and rancor of the past few years have hardly disappeared in a flurry of kindness.  The internet remains, as Jonathan Haidt reminded us in a seminal Atlantic article in May, no longer a place of “techno-democratic optimism” but instead an epistemological disaster.  Social media feedback loops continue to control and radicalize many, especially those with much time on their hands.  It is fashionable to dunk on TikTok these days, but for a reason.  Yan Wu and David Byler’s analysis of TikTok posts on abortion, for instance, concluded that the platform is “almost perfectly designed” to divide, driving “a steadily increasing dose of partisanship and extremism.”  Nor, honestly, is the internet even necessary for this process.  Cable news, whichever one’s ideological perspective, can provide much of the same high, serving as only a slightly less potent drug.
Again, churches have mimicked society, not lead it.  Tim Keller commented last year:
In virtually every church there is a smaller or larger body of Christians who have been radicalized to the Left or to the Right by extremely effective and completely immersive internet and social media loops, newsfeeds, and communities. People are bombarded 12 hours a day with pieces that present a particular political point of view, and the main way it seeks to persuade is not through argument but through outrage. People are being formed by this immersive form of public discourse—far more than they are being formed by the Church.
Beyond social and cable media, the more basic challenges of human psychology remain.  The loudest voices get the attention, even if they are irresponsible, eventually shifting the Overton window.  Humans share a common tendency to take anything too far; as Alexander Hamilton famously stated, “The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.”  Casting opponents in the worst possible light remains one of the easiest ways to win the argument, even if not to find real truth.  Opponents are easier to shout down than to argue down.  Insults win the crowd, even if they hold no real truth.  Whoever disagrees is an idiot and a menace, not a responsible person with a different opinion.  And, if all of that is not enough, humans still rarely abandon a position once we have publicly taken it.
False witness is alive and well in the world, and not only our society, but also those of us in the church, too often do not pause to think carefully, to stop before we share it.  And, of course, no retraction or fact check ever catches up with the rumor or falsehood that sped out of the gate before it.  There remain many causes for concern.  Do not exhale just yet.
The question is ultimately one of temperance.  “Temperance,” of course, for many of us immediately draws up images of 19th and early 20th century rallies, attempts to restrict or outlaw “booze,” replacing it with the teetotalers’ delight of 1920-1933 (at least in the United States).  The association of the term “temperance” with anti-alcohol legislation is often overpowering.  It can make a wine-lover’s head spin.
Yet “temperance” certainly has a broader meaning than alcohol.  Most broadly, temperance is self-restraint, moderation, self-control.  Such qualities are, of course, necessary when dealing with alcohol, but alcohol consumption hardly exhausts their value or need.  Where older Bible translations used the English “temperance,” many modern translations will use “self-control.”  Such self-control, such temperance, is clearly a biblical value.
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The world we live in has changed, and the faster the church gets our heads around it, the better. And the past two and a half years of a global pandemic have only turbocharged the change.  In a time of rapid, dislocating change, it becomes easy to want to get back to what we lost.  Instead, we must embrace God’s call into what we are.

Last month Jacob Birch wrote a widely-viewed article at Christianity Today questioning the common use of Jeremiah 29 in the Western church.  In short, Birch complains that the common refrain, “We live in a period of exile” in today’s Western church is an ill-advised framework to understand the church’s relationship to our broader culture.
We can understand the basic thrust of the article.  In essence, Birch states, “It’s really not that bad to be a Christian in the West.  And so, when the Western [and he presumably particularly means the American and Canadian] church starts talking this way, it cheapens people who really have been forced out of their homelands, experienced all sorts of horrors, and suffered mightily.”  Birch raises a valid point.  Those who have fled war, who have been forcibly deported, who will never see their homes again, those who have suffered, deeply – they may rightly take umbrage at comparisons which seem to imply, “Yes, we feel that too.”  No, honestly, we don’t.  We can agree with Birch’s concern at that level.
Yet, we shouldn’t entirely abandon the analogy. We shouldn’t abandon it because the bible itself talks this way.  In fact, in 1 Peter 1.1, Peter calls God’s elect, Christians, exiles in the world:
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Peter 1:1–2, ESV)
Other English translations render the ESV’s “exiles” as “scattered,” “sojourners,” “strangers,” and the like, so we should be careful to note the potential range of meaning in Peter’s description.  Not every sojourner is an exile, nor are the terms identical, but they do have overlapping ranges of meaning and signification.  In other words, the ESV, though not the only possible translation of the term, is a legitimate and defensible rendering of Peter’s meaning.
And why that designation?  Those who read the New Testament know what it means to be elect, and verse 2 confirms what Peter means – the ones who were chosen in advance by God the Father, sanctified by the Spirit, for obedience to Christ, redeemed in his blood.  Peter writes to Christians scattered through the Roman Empire, choosing imagery that links them to the dispersion and exile of the Judeans following the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC.
According to Peter, the elect were scattered throughout the world.  Why?  They were scattered because of persecution.  We should be careful not to read that too far – Birch has a point – the persecution wasn’t yet as bad as it could be…or would be.  But Nero was probably already ruling when this letter was written, and it would keep getting worse.  The Christians of the early church faced hardship and persecution – socially, economically, and eventually physically.  And even when these early Christians experienced social and economic persecution, Peter wrote to them as “strangers in the world, scattered – exiled – among the nations.”  They were in the same spot that the Jews in Judah had been centuries before – oppressed, harassed, living in the midst of a pagan culture that mocked all they stood for.
In other words, there’s nothing per se wrong with using the analogy of exile for Western Christians today.  We simply must recognize that this is an analogy, and every analogy can be pushed too far.  Our situation in the Western church is not nearly as bad as what many brothers and sisters around the world face daily, nor should we act like we have it so hard.  Yet, we can still profitably look at and learn from the question of what it means to live as exiles in the world.
And whatever analogy we use, it is fair to say the Western church has moved and is moving towards a minority position in terms of its influence on culture.  Now probably, from what all the statisticians say, the number of people who have really met Jesus, been born again, has not changed terribly much as a percentage of the population.  Instead, the well-documented rise of the “nones” is driving this change.  Christianity in America for a long time managed to live in a position of cultural hegemony, where the mainstream, whether or not it truly believed in Christian orthodoxy, still gave lip service, accepted many of its cultural claims, and voted with it, so to speak.  We must remember that was often a hollow faith, but in many places in the West, including until recently in most of America, it was relatively easy, safe, and even socially helpful to say you were a Christian.
That, certainly, has changed in much of the West, somewhat earlier in Europe, then first in the American Northeast and West, then spreading more broadly to cultural centers across the nation; and we have no reason to think the trend will suddenly cease.  The church is moving towards a position of less cultural influence, and whether we describe that as “occupation” (Birch’s preferred analogy) or “exile” (also valid), that requires rethinking how Christians relate to our world.  And Jeremiah 29 remains not just helpful, but crucial in thinking through the question.
These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and the metal workers had departed from Jerusalem. The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. It said: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the Lord. “For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.” (Jeremiah 29:1–14, ESV)
How did we get here, to this cultural moment?  We might start with how Israel got there.  This is a letter from Jeremiah the prophet, back in Jerusalem, to some of the exiles deported to Babylon, a letter written near the end of the history of Judah as an independent nation.  After Solomon, God’s people split into two separate nations, sometimes allied, often fighting each other.  A couple hundred years later, the northern nation, called Israel, had been wiped out by the Assyrian Empire.  Now, a bit past one hundred years later, the southern nation, called Judah, was in the process of being wiped out by the Babylonian Empire.  The Babylonian judgment happened in three stages, and in each of those three stages the Babylonians deported a portion of Judah’s elite, exiling them, taking them back to Babylon for what basically amounted to a forced reeducation campaign, one that made them into Babylonian civil servants.  Jeremiah 29 occurs in the midst of those three stages.  The prophet Jeremiah, still back in Judah, wrote to God’s people who had been exiled to Babylon.
To understand this situation correctly, we must recognize that Israel ended up in exile because of both injustice AND false worship.  Jeremiah 7:1-7 says – and the OT prophets had been repeating both these themes for centuries – that God had exiled them because of both their religious apostasy and the rampant injustice of their society:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’ “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever.” (Jeremiah 7:1–7, ESV)
One can almost open the preexilic prophets of the Old Testament at random and find these two themes.
First, as to idolatry, this remained a very religious people.  Atheism was a much, much later cultural movement.  Everyone at this time was religious; the only question was which god you followed.  Further, this remained a people who said they were worshiping the Lord.  If you had asked the people themselves, “Have you turned to other gods?” they would have answered, “No, this is how we worship the Lord.”  Of course, God didn’t see it that way.  In his eyes, they were “going after other gods.”  In other words, they had a religion that claimed it was still the worship of the Lord and even formally looked like, at least in many ways, it was the worship of the Lord.  It had the same ceremonies, the same sacrifices, the same patterns, yet it was a false worship of the Lord.  It had much of the form of Yahwism, but in God’s mind it was something else entirely.
Second, as to justice, this remained an incredibly blind people.  Their stated faith and their market and societal ethics simply did not match.  As long as the Temple continued its work, as long as the sacrifices were made, people considered themselves to be good with God, well set, having done their religious duty.  No matter if one then went out and slept with a prostitute, exploited the poor, oppressed the widow, the orphan, or the refugee.  No matter if one’s business practices were technically legal but corrupt.  No matter if one’s faith had no impact once he exited the Temple courts.  Jeremiah critiques, standing in a long line of Old Testament prophets, the worst of legalistic, formalistic religion.
And, we might add, Jeremiah rejects their complacency in the light of all of that.  They cry out, “This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord.”  In other words, they cry out, “We’re good, so long as we meet the obligations of the Temple sacrificial system.  We have nothing to worry about.  God will always protect Jerusalem, because he has promised to.”  To which Jeremiah says, “The Temple’s presence will not save you.  Give me a true religion, one that rejects idolatrous religious compromise and one that seeks justice.”
If the Western church has moved into a position that is much more exilic, even if in a very light form, how did we get here?  Interestingly, the two warring halves of the movement formerly known as evangelicalism each concentrate on one or the other of those causes.
One of the two halves often traces the roots of the church’s loss of influence to false worship, particularly to the rise of liberal theology in the early 20th century, which then really flowered with the 60’s and the sexual revolution and then more recent cultural moves on gender and sexuality.  The narrative goes as follows:
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