| Today is a continuation of yesterday's piece.
The reason I stress that the biblical testimony is revelation-as-human-imagination is that the text tradition fully delivers on adequate partners for YHWH, partners who are capable of sustained dialogic transactions of fidelity. Israel, in its formation and transmission of the text, found itself drawn out beyond itself into this always lively, redefining transaction. And while the framers and transmitters of the textual tradition lived in quite concrete human life - of family and sexuality, of money and property - they also understood that life in faithful intentionality was a performance of an ongoing transaction that caused it to be different in the world. Beyond its own performance, moreover, it also imagined (was led by the spirit to imagine) that all other creatures are also partners of the same God and so recruited into the same dialogic transaction. Thus Israel could construe the life of sea monsters and birds and creeping things as YHWH's creaturely partners (cf. Ps 148:7-10). and it could in like manner discern Nebuchadnezzar as "servant of YHWH" (Jeremiah 25:9; 27:6) and the unwitting Cyrus as "YHWH's messiah" (Isaiah 45:1). It could imagine in the sweep of its performance that all of life is drawn into this dialogic transaction. It appears as though the faithful storytelling of Israel was one that helped them see that their God was beyond them and yet involved in and throughout all that was taking place. This was not like a puppeteer who could control and move things however the master would want them to go. Rather, the way things were going or had gone were all within the realm of the God of Israel. In many ways that is how a people is able to keep hope alive. Even in times of utter despair and defeat, the God who will rescue and restore is here with us - faithfulness will come out of this mess because our God is the God of all time and every place. I don't take this to mean that this view or this grand imagination takes away from other stories. Rather it is the story of this people - just as the story of Jesus is the story of those who claim to follow Jesus. All are stories in dialogue with our God as we move through the day.
Connection: Could it be that hope springs among us when we are able to see and hear God beside us in some of the stranges ways we could ever imagine? O God, who gifts us with the ability to imagine the life that is more full than the present seems to allow, help us to see your living presence in all things so that we can be encourage to live bolding through all things. Amen. |
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