Prophets, its time. Its always time.

 

On spending time with Brueggemann, with Irenaeus, with Isaiah, with every honest woman I know, and my facebook newsfeeds, a month after my momma dies….

Its intense and its good. Not a time to be afraid of.  Clear eyes.  (Full hearts, Can’t Lose! …..sorry can’t help it.)

 

 

Prophets. They call us back. They, these people with words–strong words, call us back – to that great axis of existence. To the steep and Godward heights and depths and also to the broad movement, a slow line drawn across the earth (Irenaeus) They call us back from apostasy and injustice, towards reconciliation with God and reconciliation with each other.  They call us back to loving God and loving our neighbor – who is our neighbor? – It is everyone who needs love– the real life tears-and-laughter, help-and-welcome, kind – not the sequined pillow kind.  In case you missed it, our neighbour is each one of us, no matter how different we are from each other.

 

We need the voices. We need our prophets and our preachers to call us to imagine that more real world. We need prophets and preachers to tap into the dream of God. We need prophets and preachers to inspire the weavers—the weavers of the fabric of God’s cloak that is This World. To call us out of the violence we accept and to call us out of the satiety and numbness we succumb to. Both, both, both negate our humanity – negate our createdness. They actively fray the heart, your heart, my heart, that God made so delicately, so intentionally. They actively dis-integrate your heart, my heart. They actively bring death to what was created alive. – Do not fray and denigrate and slowly kill your heart so lovingly made with thousands, millions, BILLIONS of years of God’s presence woven into its beautiful creation by either actively or passively negating life. Do not negate God’s incarnated presence – in yourself, in others, through violence or indifference. Both violence and numbness are determined by what we long to grasp for ourselves, they are the broken ways we try to protect our heart forgetting that there is nothing about having a heart to protect – these hearts belong to God and they belong to this world, that is to each other – There is nothing grasping in Jesus and nothing protectionist and everything that opens hands, ready to embrace, ready to hold that heart with ten thousand years of growing and beholding love within that reach.

 

Hear the voices calling you back to that axis with their grief. They are the echoes and reverberations of all the prophets calling us to see the destruction, the ripping grief that is coming and that is now here. Hear the voices calling you ahead, calling you to look up with their amazement, to see the astonishing beauty of living here now. They are echoes and reverberations of the promises that were woven into our own hearts since the dawn of time.   Listen to the grief and listen to the amazement (Bruggemann).

 

He is always on the side of his creation – all of it. In such times as these, which is all times, every time humans have existed in their brokenness and in their dear hope, these are the times we pay attention to the grief and to the amazement.   And in these times,  something like a door opens up before us to that dream, to that more real world that is actually this one,  to that weavers workshop with all the color you could imagine spreading out before you.  Open it and walk in, dear friends.  It what we were made to do.