I thirst.

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. (John 19:28)

Down by the river I have often stood where the water sweeps from left to right, pouring towards me and then passing away, inexorably, indifferent to my presence. As I immerse myself in it I get used to the cold and I find my way along the bottom, my feet searching stable places between the stones, until I find that one deepest pool. There I stand, the fresh clear cold water washing against me, and I look up river and down. It is always here, always moving. I am here today. I will not always be here. I will be in desert places.

In one of those desert places a group of pilgrims traveled following the footsteps of Jesus, from his childhood home and his early ministry paths, to the long uphill climb to Jerusalem. As the bus carried us along downstream through the Jordan Valley from Galilee toward Jericho, someone asked about keeping kosher, and the practice of separating meat and milk. (“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Deut 14.21) And I thought, you are keeping separate that which gives life – milk – and that which comes from dealing death – meat. But there is a time when life and death are brought back together, the time of baptism. We die to our own old life; we rise to new life in Christ.

We turned off the highway and went west toward the hills, to the border marked by the river Jordan. There we walked down the bank and stood where a curve of the river swept toward me from the left and away again to the right, carrying with it silt – and sorrow. There we stepped into the water and there we renewed our baptismal vows, and received anointing.

Jesus stood by that river, accepted the baptism of his cousin John, and received the blessing of the Spirit: “This is my Son, my Beloved. In him I am well pleased.”

There was plenty of water for baptism. It was a little dirty, a little fast, and the bottom was uncertain. On either side of the river soldiers kept watch, weapons ready. Perhaps that was no different in the time of Jesus and John. What were they up to? Sedition?

And yet the real revolution was yet to come. It would come when there was no water. It would come when there was no hope. It would come when there was no life. And yet. It would come. Beyond hope, beyond despair, beyond death… but he did not know that yet.

Jesus was on the cross. And like any human he was thirsty. And he said, “I thirst.”

Water is the sacred essential of life. For in all the universe, when wise men seek turning heavenwards eyes of knowledge, what they look for is this same sure stuff, essential to life. When they look for life in the universe, astronomers say, they look for water. And they say there are therefore twenty billion inhabitable plants in our galaxy alone. Where it is, life is possible; where it is not, nothing lives.

And yet here he is without it. Imagine him, pinned there between heaven and earth, on a rock outside the city, surrounded by soldiers, lookers-on, and a few faithful women. There is no solace now, no comfort. There is no life to look forward to. He lacks the basic stuff of survival. He is a human being without resource. He is one of us. He needs water.

In all the universe, water is sacred, the primal substance of life. Combine of two common atoms, it is found on twenty billion planets in our galaxy. Where it exists life is possible; where there is no water, nothing lives. Exclude the possibility. On earth three per-cent of fresh water lies on the surface, ten per-cent of that three per-cent in Lake Superior alone. But it is not evenly distributed. Need it as we may, we cannot always get it. Ask farmers with crops stricken by drought. Ask people who have crossed the desert. Ask this man, hanging on a cross.

Like thousands before him and millions after, he thirsts.

Think of all the times and places turned to dust now hallowed by his presence.

            Mary’s well, in the childhood village of Nazareth, was perhaps the only source of living flowing water there. From it they drew and drank.

            Jordan River, where John his cousin put him under, covered his head with glad stream, sounding the depths of rebirth. He submitted to that ritual and received his blessing. Down on the river he found death and life together: death in immersion, death of a sort, of the part of all of us that needs to be shed, and there from the living water he emerged newly alive, proclaimed beloved, ready for his mission.

            Along the lakeshore of Galilee he walked, among fishing boats and nets in small villages, gathering his first disciples. By that sweet sea he found his first fast friends, fisher folk, and called them to a new life and a new task.

            Back up the hill then, to Cana, they went, where the wine ran out – until ahead of his time his hand revealed what would be poured out, what would be transformed. The water of life he changed into sacrament’s prefiguration, like Eucharist wine. Joyous in recreation yet sorrowful in anticipation, blessing the jars marked thereafter for the cool clearness reddened and heated, fore-speaking that which was pouring from him now. Remember later what it means.

            And the well woman of Samaria: what had he said to her? I know of living, flowing water, you know not of – for I am the source, the spring for the well from which eternally it comes.

            From Jericho’s ancient spring, where people have drunk for eight thousand years, on the road to Jerusalem the travelers tread.

            By the pools of Bethesda he brought healing … and yet the precious element was soon to be lacking, for him. He himself, the source of life, would soon be in need of it. A meal ended, betrayal began. He prayed in a garden. You know the story. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And so we find him –

            – suspended between death and life, between those heavens and this sordid torturing rock into which his mocking tree is planted. (It is said below him rests Adam on whose head his precious blood descends and cleanses, symbol of all our release.)

And from his side the living water flows.

            Our freedom restored to worship without fault or folly we start fresh now except this wellspring man from whom this freedom comes pinned to board and upright suspended gasping dying parched and dried out like an overcooked chicken nobody wants to see, even on a dung hill, now there is nothing left in him to exhaust or extinguish, now he is dying: I thirst.

            Humanity on the cross. Not some illusion. Not some fake. Not some cheat. Not some cheap grace. No. The expensive, all costing, kind of grace. The absolute obedience that compels us to think unpleasant thoughts. If that was his cross, and he picked it up, what does it mean to pick up mine? If he could thirst, I could thirst; how could I live? Would God save me?

            Or is something more expensive, all costing, in mind for me, too?

whip of cords

In many ways my trip to the Holy Land was the simplest of the three pilgrimages I’ve been on: 2002, Celtic Northumbria and Scotland, 2007, Into the West of Ireland, and 2015, Holy Land. The means were straightforward: sign up for a package tour with Bishops Beisner and Rickel. We gathered by the door of Tel Aviv airport where we met our guides and driver. It was a very Christian trip – Episcopalian/Anglican, even liberal non-Evangelical Anglican, to be more specific. There were ecumenical and interfaith encounters certainly. And what we see encompassed all three Abrahamic faiths as well as prehistoric ruins. We largely bypassed what was not on our focus; which was: (1) footsteps of Jesus, (2) current Palestinian predicament, and (3) riding in a bus together.

Of these the first is the reason I went. We began where we could begin.

Mount Tabor, transfiguration
Tabgha, multiplication; Nazareth, annunciation; Capernaum, Magdala: Galilee
Jericho
Jordan River, baptism
Bethlehem, nativity
Jerusalem, crucifixion
            Settlements, a Palestinian hill town
Jaffa, airport

At Capernaum I got a sense from the ruins of the synagogue (post 1^st Century C.E.) that lie on top of the building Jesus would have known, that it was not a very big place: 300m along the lakeshore – of course that lakeshore, along which Jesus came to call his first disciples…

And so from a building not much bigger than a small church (St. Andrew’s Tucson, e.g.) Jesus and his friends crossed the street to a small house where he healed Peter’s mother-in-law. And the whole town crowded round the door that evening, hoping for more healing – which they got. But in the morning he gathered his team and moved on, announcing in word and deed that the reign of God was beginning. And they moved about that region so the news spread.

Eventually it was time to go up to Jerusalem so they took the Jericho road. And on the way he healed beggars and warned them, and all who would follow him, that it was necessary for him to go – and take his message and its consequences all the way.

This meant appearing at the center of Jewish religion at the tensest, busiest time as all converged on the Temple – where the great feast would be inaugurated. But he would not live to see it – if John’s timing is right.

From the triumphal entry on a colt, a political drama enacting the arrival of God’s anointed – in pointed opposition to Herod and Rome – to his teaching in the Temple, he continues his mission, announcing the arrival of God’s kingdom: now not in a small synagogue but on a big open plaza with the Temple machinery plonk in the middle of it, the possibility of thousands gathering who could hear and see him – and then he does this! [The Cleansing of the Temple] – which may have set the match to the tinder. He drives out the cattle and overthrows the business dealings because that is what the Messiah does when he arrives. So they plot to kill him – or have him removed, as an administrative inconvenience.

Grabbed in the dark outside of town at his encampment among olive trees, he is dragged – lets himself be dragged – to the house of Caiaphas then across town to stand before Pilate. On the common pavement the soldiers mock him, play games with him on their traditional game board (see where they kept score) and load the crosspiece on his back of the engine of his own execution. They march him through the marketplace, indifferent or gawking people brushing past him and they go take him outside the walls, up a little precipice, pound in the upright, and kill him. Rome is done with him – except for the laughter, the relieved chatter, the embarrassed or amused spectator. His body can rot there for all they care – or be case on a dung heap. Rome has no tears to shed.

But a pious Jew (like Tobit) takes the body and gives it proper burial, in a new tomb. It would stay there until the flesh is consumed and the bones collected and put in an ossuary (see examples in Israel Museum including Caiaphas’ and a Jesus son of Joseph) if all went as expected.

Just why did Jesus go up to Jerusalem? What did he hope to accomplish?

Luke 4:18-19

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

   because he has anointed me

     to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

   and recovery of sight to the blind,

     to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

Mark 1:14-15

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Did he achieve his purpose? After all?

You can go there – to a place archaeologists say is “very probably” the tomb, and lay your head on the stone – the marble slab where the body lay. Eyes closed. All is dark. Time stops. Then breath returns.

Is the world the same? Or different?

Land of Hard Edges - Review

Land of Hard Edges: Serving the Front Lines of the Border (Tucson: Peer Publishing, August 2014)

In her account of working with recently deported migrants just south of the Arizona/Sonora border, Peg Bowden has given us ample room for discernment – of a national avocation of hospitality for our country. She provides the context for an alternative to the reign of fear in the engagement with the other, and a chance to welcome the stranger as the one who comes – the God with us, Jesus of the end of time. Peg was shocked into awareness of a need to “do something humane” by the shootings at a Safeway in Tucson on January 8, 2011. Almost immediately she resolved to volunteer, a day a week for a year, with the Green Valley Samaritans, who cross the border from Arizona into Mexico every Tuesday to serve meals, share medical supplies, and offer simple sympathy, with people who have been deported from the United States. On the day I went with them (March 2014) the Samaritans greeted a roomful of men, mostly, with a few women and a couple of boys, who were finding their feet again after the disorienting experience of deportation. We stood at the back or sides of the dining room, after being welcomed by the nuns who run the place, waiting to serve, observing, as the benches at the tables filled with refugees. A group of young Mennonites from Canada received a lecture on the realities of the border, including an interpretation of the politics. Other Mennonites, from Brazil and France deployed through the Mennonite Central Committee office in Mexico City, were on hand. Also on hand were lawyers, young women, interviewing the recently deported about their experiences at the hands of border officials (both sides). We formed a line to pass plates of rice and beans to those at the tables – but first! There was a game of sorts, led by one of the sisters, encouraging people to create simple paper ‘vests’ representing their humanity – their identity, their connection to home and family. Then we formed a line from the kitchen and passed out food – among us was a filmmaker, a lawyer, who had just completed a documentary on the border. The Green Valley Samaritans were mostly retired, over age 70 in many cases, with a cheerful way of being helpful. What could be a dire situation was lightened by the indomitable cheer and endless passion of leaders who come here, see the big picture in small things, and see the people too, each individual one. This is the world, the reality, which Peg witnessed to in her book.

Doing something – her response to the events of January 2011 – was parallel to what some friends of mine did in Oakland after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. You could stay home and watch Channel 2 News as Dennis and Elaine, the anchors, became more frazzled through the long day of news reports, or like Doug and Mary Ellen you could walk down to the Red Cross and offer your help. The practical, healthful response to catastrophe also reminds me of the reconnaissance flights into occupied France that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes in Flight to Arras, a small effort, maybe fruitless, but better toss a cup of water into the fire than stand aside and watch the world burn.

In a series of episodic chapters Peg takes us through a year at el comedor, “the dining room” in Nogales, Sonora, beginning in winter, in January, when the nights are prohibitively cold and deaths in the desert come from exposure, cold, lack of water and food, exhaustion: this combination. In the summer there is hypothermia, heat and sun. All year temperatures can vary forty degrees from the cold of dawn to the heat of mid-afternoon.

Samaritans tell those who want to brave it that the journey across the desert is several days at best, not two as the coyotes (human smugglers) say. Still, at the dining area that is el comedor, there are people who have tried. Some of them may have been quickly caught and returned. Others have been caught up in Operation Streamline, in the Federal special procedures court in Tucson, a judicial process which takes only a few minutes to arraign, accept guilty pleas, and sentence as felons (some of) those who have been caught more than once entering the United States “not through an authorized point of entry”. They are detained – jailed in privately run jails – then deported. Central American migrants fare worse – they are not welcome in Mexico either.

All this goes on – has gone on – since U.S. immigration enforcement became more intense in 1994. All this goes on, along with the summer surge in migrant refugees – women and children – that bulged so large in popular consciousness in the June and July of 2014. Casa Mariposa, a small community of volunteers, was first to meet that crisis in person, in persons suddenly in large numbers dropped at the Tucson Greyhound station in the middle of the night, from a handful to dozens a night without warning. In August, other volunteers and community relief agencies took in hand this acute problem.

Those who do not make it across the desert are mourned in a weekly vigil at el Tiradito, a folk shrine in the barrio of Tucson. Franciscan brother and Redemptorist priest, activist and pacifist, atheist and faithful believer, together remember the thousands who have died in the fifteen years since they began this vigil. And they check in with each other: who has been to the border this week? How many have died? And they check the statistics, of mortality in this Federal fiscal year.

The problems continue because the underlying causes continue. People come north because they need to – to escape violence or desperate poverty in the south, to get some work, or to reunite with family, seek a new life, up north.

* * *

When disaster strikes, natural or human, some people react by going forward. In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake prompted Oakland residents Doug and Mary Ellen to walk down to their local Red Cross office to volunteer. On September 11, 2001, former firefighter Steve dug his old gear out of the back of his closet in Brooklyn and headed to downtown Manhattan. And after the shooting in Tucson, January 8, 2011, Peg responded by setting out to “do something humane”. She resolves to go every week for a year, with the Green Valley Samaritans, offering her experience as a registered nurse, her compassion and her insight as a human being, to the newly deported refugees of “el comedor” (the “dining area”). There on the south side of the border, displaced and disoriented people found comfort, company, food, and good cheer – and some timely information – as they found their feet again after a traumatic experience. Mexican or Central American, mostly men, some women and children, they had crossed the desert in hopes of finding their families, a job, a new life, free of the desperate poverty and impending violence that they had left behind. At some point, however, they were stopped – no papers – and sent back, south.

Out of the system, they found their way to el comedor. Here the spirituality of migration meets a theology of hospitality, an enacted belief in compassion. Volunteers, many elders among them, along with young people and assorted religious men and women, greet them; give them a change to be human again, not deportee but person.

John Leech (an Episcopal priest of the diocese of Olympia sojourning on the Arizona border)

Climate Change resource list

Walter Brueggemann. Journey To The Common Good. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Jimmy Carter. A Call To Action : Women, Religion, Violence, And Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Bill McKibben. Oil And Honey : The Education Of An Unlikely Activist. New York: Times Books, 2013.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Fifth Assessment Report. available online at http://ipcc.ch/.

Public Religion Research Institute. Believers, Sympathizers, and Skeptics: Why Americans are Conflicted about Climate Change, Environmental Policy, and Science. Findings from the PRRI/AAR Religion, Values, and Climate Change Survey. [11.21.2014] available online at http://publicreligion.org/research/2014/11/believers-sympathizers-skeptics-americans-conflicted-climate-change-environmental-policy-science/.

Common English Bible, CEB Study Bible with Apocrypha. (2013) http://www.commonenglishbible.com/

I found these resources very useful in preparing my remarks for the climate change forum this morning, and quoted from them extensively. The CEB notes on Genesis were very helpful and insightful, especially in looking at the challenging passages about human relationships to creation and Creator.

Copyright © 2014 John Leech. All rights reserved.

Climate Change Forum 2014: Stewards of the Earth

A Religious Response to Climate Change – II: Living

Advent, Stewardship, and Metanoia

The Episcopal Parish of Saint Michael and All Angels

602 North Wilmot Road, Tucson, Arizona 85711

Saturday, December 13, 2014, 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM

Theological reflections on the spiritual context for environmental action

There was a landowner who put his top employees in charge of his holdings. He said to them, “Take charge of it – and take care of the place. Bring your families to live on the land, and enjoy its produce. Serve it faithfully, and from its care you will live abundantly.”

So the servants came on board. They lived on the land, and raised families there. They were as fertile as the land itself and they grew in numbers. And it was theirs for the taking – to take charge of, to take care of, or to take advantage of – and with the land they served as their home they would live in hope and abundance, or in fear and scarcity – it was up to them.

What will they say when the landlord comes? How will they be with him? As servants entering into joy, or as sad stewards with empty fields, exhausted resources, and mistreated fellow creatures, to show for their stewardship?

We are familiar now with the data and analysis that have exposed to our concern the phenomenon of climate change. It is a transnational challenge that faces us on a global front. Many of the crises and problems facing humanity on occasional or local bases connect to this root phenomenon: we live in the Age of the Anthropocene. Human activity shapes geography, climate, biosphere – and even geology. We are making, through our collected and cumulative activities, a permanent impact on the landscape of our world: its ice and free water, its air and clouds, its land and growing things (including food for ourselves and all other animal creatures), and hence the sustainability of life for ourselves and our fellow beings.

A Turkish seminarian from Istanbul, an exchange student in the United States, told me he’d polled his fellow students: If you saw a cricket in your room what would you do? Ninety percent said, I’d kill it. And these were seminarians! He exclaimed. What became of compassion for all creatures?

Let us not make the Anthropocene the anthropocentric. Let us remember our special mandate as human creatures to care for the earth: not just to multiply and fill it – but to tend it. We are the stewards, the workers in the garden, of this green and gold, and glorious, blue white planet. It is our home, but not as owners – not as exploiters – but as chief tenants. We are the manager of the apartment house, so to speak, not the landlord.

Indeed Advent is the season we turn to that landlord and yearn for his presence. We look forward to Christmas, the feast of the Nativity of our Lord, with joyful expectation but also some anxiety. Our anticipation is mixed, now, with loss and grief – and even guilt. As preparatory work for the hope that is born anew every year at Christmas, we now must acknowledge our failures – perhaps irrecoverable, some of them – as stewards, even brothers and sisters, to earth and our fellow created beings.

But our Christian perspective, even in the kingdom of anxiety, is that we can do something still worthwhile, small and large, in our collective identity and our solitary pursuits, to move toward the day of his coming with rejoicing – a welcome made possible only because we do not stand alone. God is indeed already with us – in our suffering and elation, our watchfulness and neglect.

What we face now with environmental catastrophe is unprecedented in scale, possibly, but not in moral quality or human impact. A famine up close is a hungry village, a starving face, and a child with no solace. A forest fire or a drought is in aggregate a great disaster. But, again, up close it is the tragedy of each creature swept up and away by destructive forces. Each of us has stories to tell, and promises to keep, on the human level – efforts token or tiny that help us forward as we confront the common foe. Together – as we band together – there are large things we can do even yet to make the world a better place.

Maybe the time of changing light bulbs is over, as enough. But the time of the Anthropocene, the human-fashioned epoch, has just begun. A couple of speakers at the American Academy of Religion convention in San Diego this past Thanksgiving – including Bill – had some things to say that are useful to us all, to guide our deliberations, and set a spiritual context for our focus on climate change: sustainable living.

Bill McKibben talked about the comforting whirlwind out of which God spoke to Job. We could distinguish two calls in that voice: One is the call to humility – we are nowhere when it comes to the vast majesty of creation.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
   Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
   Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
   or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
   and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain,
   and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no one lives,
   on the desert, which is empty of human life,
to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
   and to make the ground put forth grass?

(Job 38:4-7, 25-27 NRSV)

The other is the call to joy: we are uniquely able to perceive God’s delight in this world. What we can see and touch invites us into a joy just of being – not us exploiting or using – just being.

We need that good-news reminder at times of distress. There is too much goodness to give up now.

Our keynote speaker in San Diego was Jimmy Carter, the former president. Jimmy Carter was there to talk about the plight of women and children around the world. In getting there he had some things to say about religious attitudes that shape our responses and he had some things to say about the effect of climate change on women and children. That effect, I can tell you first, is that the women and the children are in so many places and cultures and traditions the last in line – when food is scarce, medicine is absent, and there is no roof, or a lack of clothing, they are the ones who go with the least, the last, and sometimes completely without. That is only made worse by climate change – as resources become scarce these the least able to cope, the most vulnerable – are first to suffer and last to share in what’s left.

Cultural attitudes persist that somehow some group of people are not as well beloved as all God’s children are – and we are all God’s children – these attitude have played their part in more than one story of human deprivation and prejudice.

The president’s example was from his own childhood. He grew up in a small town in Georgia, playing with other kids, working with them on the farm, and going to school together. That his was the only white family did not seem to matter. Except when experts came to town, to the church, and sought to prove from the Bible that blacks were inferior to whites and deserved a status of servitude. Folks, it’s just not there. It’s not in the book.

That teaching was a willful self-delusion on the part of people who benefited, holding positions of power and privilege on the basis of that notorious falsehood.

Likewise, then, women and children, treated as less than equal, as subservient, inferior or less deserving, as if that was what God mandates in Scripture. Again, folks, it’s just not there. It’s not in the book. It’s self-delusion, a prop for power – power over one’s true equals in the sight of God. The truth is, we are equal before God and equally beloved. To quote the president, “We are all created and loved by God equally.”

Women feel the pain first: climate change will exacerbate their plight in the future.

Finally, a third self-delusion – is this is my own addition to the mix: we are deluding ourselves if we think our self-assumed pose of superiority to creation is something mandated in the Bible. We are chosen, yes, and special, because we are called to self-understanding, to knowledge (as partial as it may be) of our place in the cosmos, and our role as stewards of the earth.

So you can see why this forum has the theme, Advent, Stewardship, and Metanoia. Advent is a season of preparation – it is anticipation of hope but hope built on a foundation in reality. We really have experienced, are experiencing, and will experience, loss and grief as this world changes – but that grief and loss have a purpose and a meaning. As Walter Brueggemann points out, once acknowledged and voiced, it is “the hard, painful, preparatory work of loss and grief that makes hope credible. Without the preparatory work, the offer of hope is too easy and too much without context to have transformative power.”

As to metanoia, that word for a change of heart, two things: Repent means stop doing it. Metanoia means so much more. Metanoia is not just a turning away – it is a turning toward. It is a response to a call to humility and a call to joy. It is a change of heart, replacing a heart of cold stone with a living heart of flesh – vulnerable, real, and alive. As the passages from Job remind us, there is much to be humbled by when we turn our eyes to the stars – or to the smallest element of creation. And in what those same eyes see there is much to respond to with joy – the majesty of the infinite and the delight of the minute. And that humility and that joy are part of what make us human, make us special, and give us a unique purpose in the plan of God.

Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.

In other words, we are both to cultivate the land and to take custody of it as servants of the Lord. We are stewards of the earth, caretakers and custodians.

In Genesis 1:26-28 (CEB) God says, Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.” God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.

As the notes to the Common English Bible inform us, to take charge – to rule as a master over servants, or a king over subjects – is a way of characterizing human power and authority over the rest of the animal world. But that in itself does not say anything one way or another about how that power is exercised, whether in caring for creation or ruling harshly over it. We are God’s representatives, or images, in creation, so exercising that authority of “taking charge” is a servant role, subservient to the true Lord of the universe. We have power to alter the world but we depend on the earth and its life for survival. Our “rule” is subordinate – submissive to God and God’s will for creation – God’s will, not our own.

Take care, take charge. Fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And delight in it.




________________________________________

New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Common English Bible (CEB)

Walter Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good.
Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind.
Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action. 

Copyright © 2014 John Leech. All rights reserved. 

road to joy

“In times of great change, we can be mourners of the past or midwives of the future.”— 

• Herbert O’Driscoll – January 31, 2010

If nothing else is certain, we know that Isaiah, and Jesus, lived in times of great change. And so Handel’s oratorio Messiah, which many may take as a symbol of triumphalism, actually communicates a response to uncertainty – and insecurity.

Composed, perhaps, or compiled, from 22 August to 14 September 1741, the oratorio came during a period of consolidation of British royal power. The union with Scotland was new but the hegemony over Ireland – where Messiah had its premiere 13 April 1742 – was by now old.

So as we look at the Scriptures selected for the libretto – the book – the words and phrases of this work, we look at something both eternal and unstable – and new.

A new age now begins – Isaiah proclaims, the gospels proclaim – for God who was absent from our lives is now present right in the midst of them. In his first context the prophet Isaiah anticipated the removal of the people from Jerusalem, the Holy City of Judah, and by the 40^th chapter of the book of Isaiah that exile is an accomplished fact – but one about ready to be turned over. In the prophecies beginning “Comfort ye my people” the return of the people to the promised land is just over the horizon – and with confidence the passages we read today (Isaiah 40:1-11) look forward to that deliverance. It is a vindication, not of the people, but of their God.

In the 8^th century before our era, the king of Judah, the southern of the two kingdoms of the Jews, had been under siege from two allied kings: the king of Syria or Aram (Damascus) and – get this – the king of Ephraim, that is, the northern kingdom of Israel. Besieged, he appealed for help to the great power of the north – the Assyrian empire – and as a matter of course became their vassal. (The northern kingdom fell in 721 BCE and its people were deported, enslaved, and dispersed.) In 701 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib nearly destroyed Judah. But Assyria faded and the empire of Babylon took its place. In 586 the southern kingdom fell and the Babylonian captivity of the people of Judah began. It was only in 539 that they were able to anticipate returning home. And they anticipated a return of Glory – that is, of the presence of God shining in their midst as of old.

The prophets of the book of Isaiah took a bold stance. They proclaimed that Cyrus II (“the Great”) of Persia would be the instrument of their deliverance. He – a foreigner, an unbeliever; a non-Jew – would be God’s anointed one, chosen for this task. And anointed one means Messiah. Sure enough Cyrus proved tolerant (for the time) and as Persia conquered Babylon he allowed the subject peoples of the empire of the Middle East to return to their home territories. The Jews anticipated a great awakening of faith, a joyful triumph, a procession of mirth and confidence, through the desert wastes of (modern) Iraq and Syria, from Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates) right across the hills to Judea, and the recovery of all that they had lost.

It was not so simple, as later sources say: there was much to rebuild. But the point is: God was at work in the world restoring his people to right relationship with himself, and in doing so, establishing a new order of the ages, where God would dwell in their midst and the divine reign of justice and peace would begin.

This all seemed so far away by Jesus’ time. There the kingdom of the north, Assyria, of the east, Babylon – or, following, Persia – and the kingdom of the south, Egypt, had all been swept away, and new powers, of Greece and Rome, had taken their place. Israel – Judah – again was under the boot-heel of a foreign power – and the people again cried out for deliverance.

Some of them even cried out to God. (While others trusted in the strength of their own arms – or the hope of alliance with yet another foreign power.)

The hope that responds to loss and grief was still there, in competition with despair. And some looked for a savior. Now this savior figure could be a nation – or a person. And in the person of various false messiahs they thought they’d found the answer. They expected a deliverer to be a Son of David, political – and military. What they got was a Son of David, obedient, and a shepherd. But we anticipate. What we know today from today’s lesson (Isaiah 40) is that the season of expectation has begun – a season of preparation, of joyful expectation, one in which to make a highway for our God.

Let’s look at the passage as chosen and organized by Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens.

What questions confront us from the text?

How is our own time a time of expectation – and fulfillment?

How are we preparing the way for the Advent of God’s anointed – his change agent – in our own lives?

What does it mean to have a real, deep, grounded faith as opposed to a superficial understanding? Does it mean simply that we have begun to go deeper in our understanding of what was always there – or have we begun to see (God at work in the world) in new ways?

How can we bring this new reality into production in our lives? – as a people, a congregation, a community; as individual persons?

So – what is the good news for us? How is the expectation of Isaiah 40 a message of hope for us?

How can we share it?

Can we see as far as Isaiah saw, that even the most unlikely human could be made an instrument of God’s returning glory?

What does it mean to have GOD WITH US?

A highway for our God: do we make it? do we walk on it? or is it God alone – or his anointed – who travels the way?

How could God allow exile? abandonment? Is it false to hope for salvation?

Does God’s arrival redeem the time?

What do you look for as signs of hope? 


_______________________

Herbert O’Driscoll – January 31, 2010 (sermon at St Alban's Episcopal Church, Edmonds, Wash.)

Union of Scotland and England  http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/act-of-union-1707/

Emerging Elderhood

Here are links to several posts on the emergence of elderhood as a vocation:

 

Number Our Days

 

The Integral Years

 

Elderhood in Religious Congregations: the elder among the generations

 

A Heart of Wisdom: Theology, Spirituality, and Pastoral Care

 

invocation

 

Listening to your Elders

 

aging resources

 

 

 Copyright (c) 2014 John R. Leech. All rights reserved.