| Faithful living is always contemporary and therefore as Brueggemann notes, the stories of old are ones that bring about the fullness of faithful living even as we simply listen to them.
It is the contemporaneity that causes the metaphor to continue to be powerful in the life of faith. The generation of the faithful in Babylon reused old memories from Moses. The first generations of the church used the Babylonian memory of Israel in order to face up to the empire of Rome. And now, in our time and place and circumstance of empire, we may attend to the allusions to Babylon yet again, as pertinent to our faith and practice. We are always called to be faithful. And yet, if we are honest, there are so many ways that we are pulled to be nothing more than another part of empire. As we hear, the stories of old become the stories of substance that help us to walk in the present. Well, I was just thinking. Those great stories were always a bit of a stretch. Faithful imagination does that. It takes us beyond ourselves so that we will walk into the faithfulness that is a part of God's Reign. Like all storytelling, stories get stretched a bit. But that doesn't take away the power of the event in the memory of the people. These stories are always meant to tie us up into them. Connection: So how do we tie ourselves into the story of liberation we call the cross and resurrection? It is to be a liberation story - a story of new life that is to be a part of the story of this day. Again, through stories you call us into new life today, O God. Open our hearts that we may join in the liberation of God's Reign. Amen. |
No comments:
Post a Comment