26 April 2005

Walter Brueggemann in "The Prophetic Imagination" continues to address himself to need for compassion in an world that is overcome by numbness. He draws on the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal son by writing:

Both the Samaritan and the father are Jesus' peculiar articulation against the dominant culture, an so they stand as a radical threat. The Samaritan by his actions judges the dominant way by disregard of the marginal. The ones who pass by, obviously carriers of the dominant tradition, are numbed, indifferent, and do not notice. The Samaritan expresses a new way that displaces the old arrangements in which outcasts are simply out. The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals of social revolution. In similar fashion the father by his ready embrace of his unacceptable son condemns the "righteousness of the law" by which society is currently ordered and by which social rejects are forever rejected.

The move to be engaged demands attention to that which we would usually walk right by as we go along "our" way. Compassion pulls us into engagement and when that begins, the present structures begin to fade as people feel and experience and touch what was previously untouchable or unloveable. The vision of the Reign of God pulls us...across the road into the ditch or running across town to embrace a real outcast. What arrives at that moment is something beyond our plans and, quite frankly, beyond our expectations. I often wonder about how difficult it is to go back to what once was after we have been pulled into a new life like these two parabolic characters. That must be the task of the church...to keep us wondering about the life we enter through baptism and how that keeps pulling us beyond a world that is willing to settle for numbness.

Connection: Have you ever thought what you need to be the story or the action that would bring life into your numbness? We are all numb to the pain around us...at some times more than at other times. Important for this day is trusting that we can be moved into something new and dynamic.

Lord of the Exodus, just as you delivered Israel from the grasp of the powers of Egypt, we expect that you will be with us today to pull us through your living water and into a promise land in which justice, mercy, peace, and compassion prevail among us. Amen.