I am so sorry about the last two days. Though the text for yesterday was printed, nothing else made it onto this blog. I will go ahead and continue with the next portion of Moltmann's work on the spirit and the flesh. Where the rebirth of the whole of life is as Advently near as Jesus proclaimed it to be, then the chains begin to hurt. We can no longer come to terms with them. We begin to rub ourselves raw on them until they break. 'The crime on the streets is not the worst of it,' said a friend in New York, 'What is far worse is that one gradually gets used to it.' If redemption is close at hand, we stop being accustomed to evil; the habit of mind that accepts it is broken. then we get up out of our apathy and change things. I have always thought that the worst sins of all are to get accustomed to injustice and misery, to make oneself small so as not to be noticed, and no longer to feel the humiliations. 'Bend down so low till down don't bother you no more,' said the black slaves in the southern states of America. But they didn't follow that advice. They fought for their liberty, even though they were forced to suffer in the struggle, and many of them lost their lives. As followers of Jesus, we cannot sit back and look on at what is happening around us as though we have a better place to go - in a better time than now. God is breaking into this time and this place - that is Advent. It is at hand. I would submit that we can be so used to what is evil that it is what is considered ordinary and normal. That is a disease among us - that is sin in full infection mode. I won't even point at the sin of corporations and governments as that can all be quite obvious (even though we do nothing about it). Instead, how is it that we learn to live with who we are and how we like the world to run? How is it that we settle for our own perceptions of the world and how we want it? How is it that we will give up connections with others because we are convinced that our way of seeing and living is the way everyone else would work if they all got it right?! The example of the slave bending down until down "don't bother you no more," reminds me of that Quaker hymn I quote to myself and other quite a bit: "When true simplicity is found - to bow and to bend you shall not be afraid - to turn, turn will be our delight - till turning, turning you come down right." Connection: We begin now to be within the Advent of our God that faces the day with the vision of the real, down-to-earth life that comes within the Reign of God. Stir up our hearts, O God, and in your coming among us move us to live in your ways. Amen. |
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