Walter Brueggemann notes that the lyrics to a song "Time in Babylon" (Harris,Hall, Cunnliff) evoked his study about the image of Babylon and its use through time - even our time. Here's a look at verse 1 and 2. Doin' time concerns an SUV, a speaker phone and chrome. The passion is for big cars and a federal highway system and cheap gasoline, all markets of an insatiable power wrapped in speed and show, ever eager to get there first. Contrast Babylon's appetite for power and speed with covenantal community that remains "in place" with neighbors a practice embraced by the counterculture of monastic commitments to "place." The mansion is on a hill. The high ground bespeaks control and evokes the rhyming "pill." The capacity for technical medicine is available to serve every need, every ache, every deficiency, every risked pregnancy, so that we may be "ready when the time is right." Place between "hill" and "pill" is an ironic use of "Plesantville"; the term not only rhymes, but evokes an ersatz Ozzie-and-Harriet telling of a simple time, a time marked by neither mansion or pill. But now, on both sides of Pleasantville is the capacity to fend off the exigencies of reality whether challenges from down below or risks from our own bodies, now either way completely safe. First of all, I'm impressed that Brueggemann is listening to this stuff! I was caught up by the many images (and more to come). A complete wide-open look at time in Babylon - time within the structure of the day which is not the way of the ones who have this God whose love never ceases. The Babylon we look at is us. It is the whole complex of life within 21st century America ( and other nations). The community is diminished but the individual gets whatever s/he wants and things s/he needs to carry on. So how do we live in such a culture? How do we shaped something that will be a living presence that brings something else to life. In Babylon of old, we are told, a faithful community went about looking at ways to view life from another perspective. We don't have any snapshot of that life. We do have the words of those prophets who (like the verses above) sang songs of other ways to live when the ways of empire are the rules of the day. Connection: I am so 'empire' it rattles me. I would like to think differently. And yet, I also know that I count on the poetic critics of what is to help me keep my eyes and ears open to the strange ways of empire and how they are able to changed just about everything - and everyone. Again, songs of resistance open up our minds to that which is contrary to what has become expected in Babylon. O God who bids us to follow the way of the Christ, we need the power of your Spirit to guide us and hold us and send us off with one another to open up the day to your reigning life of love that will reshaped all things. Come, O God of Peace. Come. Amen. |
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