Wednesday 8 August 2007

We continue in "Mandate to Difference" by Walter Brueggemann. This week I will try to lift up pieces that focus around this statement: I submit that in the context of the North American church, worship that is spirit-led imagination is powerfully over and against dominant reality. He turns to three texts to bring our what a "contrary" way may be.



This text is Psalm 107 in which Brueggemann notes...we have considered four cases of human disaster and misery, lost in the wilderness, abandoned in prison, sick and without appetite, nearly lost at sea. ...we have seen that every troubled person become a person able to cry out in need and address pain to God. It turns out to be no surprise that God in fidelity answers, reassures, and makes transformation possible. But the trigger in each case is the cry, the capacity to find voice, the sense of entitlement that pain may speak to power and insist upon the redress.

But imagine a world without Psalm 107. What if there were no one to sing this great song of thanks... Imagine a world without cry, without the public processing of pain, without the insistent sense of entitlement that we deserve better than this. Imagine a world that has grown silent and cold of human pain. Imagine a world totally silence, no prayers uttered, no hopes voiced, no hosting of the human condition and, consequently, no miracles of newness and healing.



The "capacity to find voice" - wow! Some people never do find voice. For those of us who are able to cry out...we become the voice for and with them. Too often, there are people who will not lift up their voice - or cannot. We are a people who are invited to do that - to cry...to ask...to demand. We enter into this because we remember the power to which we speak. It is not like the powers of this world who will use anything we say as something that can one day be held against us. We are encouraged and invited to bring the tribulations and the brutality and misfortune of our lives into the presence of the congregation and the Lord who promises to be available to us in all things. There can be no silence among us. We cannot be lulled to sleep and silence by powers that call up images of compassion and fidelity but are actually nothing more that self-indulgent arrogance that only nods at the pain of the world without risking to enter in and resolve that pain.



Connection: Listen to the politicians in the secular and religious circles in which we live. Nothing is to get in the way of the machine that wants to roar along as it has. The brutality of the world cannot be acknowledged without turning into a way to gain advantage and create more deception.



Come, Lord of Life, and encourage us to raise our voices so that the reality of the pain of the world will be held before us in all our day. For as we learn to trust voices that do not try to hide the pain of the world, we may actually come to live through our pain and find the new life you promise. Amen.