5 January 2006

We move to comments about our conventional domesticated speech in contrast to the liberating speech of the poet - by Walter Brueggemann.

We mostly are scribes maintaining the order of the day. We mostly are appreciated by and paid by people who like it the way it is, who do not sense our exile and resist discerning it, who do not yearn for a homecoming because we have fooled ourselves into thinking this present arrangement is our home. To accommodate such social reality, our language becomes prosaic and didactic, because it helps keep the lid on things. Our language becomes descriptive, because it is better to tell what is, than to trust what will be. Our church talk becomes dull and contained as all other talk in such a flat imperial society as ours.

These words have a bite to them. They must. It is far too easy to maintain the order of the day. We need to be pushed...pinched...and somehow awakened to what is still possible once we have become quite comfortable with what is. We must remember that the promise of homecoming is always a place and time that is to come. We find our rest in its coming and yet it is not fully ours. Therefore, we become a people who are willing to keep our eyes open and our ears ready to hear the story of what is to come - a story that already shapes us and brings us a feeling of hopefulness no matter what imperial power is claiming to own us and the whole world. But when we are satisfied with where we are and expect to go no farther than the world in which we have lived or even live right now, how can we expect to be caught up with the images of poets and the promises that are made to us. In those images and promises, not only do our heads turn, our whole lives begin to turn and we need only take the first step to be a part of what was never ours previously.

Connection: Once the words bite, relax. Once the words bite, seek out someone you can trust and tell that person how it feels...how it hurts...how it may have opened your eyes. Once the words bite, it is difficult not to hear them again and again...and each time they will bite again and demand our attention. Repeat the process of feeling their sting.

Come, Lord of New Life, and turn our heads. Turn our heads even if it means the turn may set us spinning. Spin us by the power of your Spirit for we have been assured that when the spinning stops, we will see all things with new eyes. Amen.