Glimpses of God-Alive

 

Isaiah 11:1-9

Wisdom and insight; counsel and might; peace and joy; unity and hospitality; knowledge and reverence; judgment and repentance are the definitive marks of the reign of God.

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Sojourners

These are signs of God-alive – God’s way being lived, already though not yet, in the sense that we only catch glimpses and live it in moments.  Obviously, it has yet to become the way of all things, the way of politics, of systems of order and organisation, of hearts and minds. This world we are living in is more like a dead stump, a wilderness.

But it is happening. There are new shoots and they drawing on more than what shows above ground. These qualities, quoted above, are being seen in down-to-earth action, everyday living, right relationships and faithfulness being the goal.

Peterson’s paraphrase speaks of brimming with knowing God-alive, of a living knowledge of God to the depths and the breadths, no limit. A living knowledge meaning it doesn’t need to use the word that many people around us can’t relate to – God. It’s known through living, through experience, through action, through simply being.

As the text pictures it, our initial reaction is likely “impossible!” Lions turning vegetarian, snakes losing their venom. A child as leader (wonder what that says to the matter raised by the Supreme Court about the voting age and of the majority response to it).

Now ideals can be a brilliant source of encouragement and purpose, but also dangerous. We can use them to moan about the world, or to escape from the world as it is, or we can put them into a glass case.  Nice to look at and leave be.

What is best is to give space to the contradictions in what Isaiah pictures, because this is life surely. Never simple, often perplexing.

Here’s a thought:

Think not so much actual animals, as human beings  in our context who are prey, and those who are predators.  The predators and prey in our world of politics and economics; those who socially are the upside and those who are the underbelly of our society, left behind by “progress”.

Notice where Isaiah’s vision is happening already: hospitality replacing hostility and the vulnerable sitting down with the powerful, the poor with the rich together, interacting with mutual respect.  It is possible.

Just one example that I saw on the news programme Te Karere: initiatives that are picking up young people who’ve got totally off track, ram-raiding and the rest, and enabling them to choose life rather than self-destruction and hurting others.

In Advent, these weeks before Christmas, we’re revisiting the anticipation and hope of this future: the poor get equal access to having their issues resolved, those who are harmed and those who do harm find peace and good purpose, and the voiceless and ignored benefit from the resources of the earth just as much as those in the centre of things.  We’re re-committing to being part of this transformation.  We’re preparing for Jesus’ coming, coming again and again every place where his way of turning things upside down is needed.  This is how a world of conflict will become the peaceable realm.

For now, our antidote to fear is to slow down from our racing after whatever we are told we need to race after. Take time to notice the signs of God-alive. Be aware the wilderness in people’s lives, and in our own lives, and notice the signs even there.

And believe the apparently impossible.

Eco-Inspiration

 

Silvia Purdie has a passionate faith and a gift for bringing to light inspiring people of faith. Eco Church is her focus, in particular, how churches can turn mission statements about caring for creation into regular and effective practice. She has found that people’s stories are the best way to communicate this kaupapa, this mission, to put the eco-theology of our faith into action. Yes, Christian faith is ecological at heart. The Bible is steeped in eco-theology: once we strip away the layers of narrowed interpretation inherited from Europe and Christendom, what we see is God’s story with land together with people. Atua, whenua, tangata.

Silvia envisaged creating a resource for faith communities by compiling a collection of stories of people working on eco-projects. Her decision to focus on women’s stories was to narrow the field but even so she found herself connecting with more and more material than a slim volume could contain. What we have is a substantial, and still affordable, volume (thanks to Philip Garside Publications) containing material to inspire and encourage all kinds of people who have a heart for God’s future for all creation.

My connection with the book is as contributor and proof-reader. The latter meant I got an early taste of the delights of the lives and activities of truly amazing people. I read and re-read the stories and found myself thinking how insignificant my contribution through rural ministry has been. But I also felt great encouragement, pride even, in being counted among them. Which points to the fact that it is not about comparing ourselves with others but doing our bit in our own place with our own life experience.

The title of my chapter was “I relate therefore I am”. Silvia used a set of questions for her interviews, and for those of us who wrote our own chapters, to draw out the personal as well as the practical, faith and values feeding action. We started with personal history and ended with thankfulness, and in between told of passion and pursuits in creation care. Awhi means to care or embrace: “Awhi Mai Awhi Atu” is being embraced and embracing, receiving and giving – what I grew up with as the Jesus ethic. This thread wove its way through my ministry with rural communities and it keeps hope alive for the future, even when things feel overwhelmingly negative.

This is a resource for local faith communities anywhere. With stories to encourage and – a distinctive feature of this publication – action points with every chapter, I’m imagining groups of us, men and women together, meeting and chapter by chapter chewing the Eco Church fat. Chewing the fat and finding practical ways to live the care and concern for our world that is basic to our faith.

The book is available as an ebook ($20) as well as printed ($35 plus p&p). 

The Isaiah Vision

 In 1992 Raymond Fung wrote a little booklet called The Isaiah Vision. It was based on Isaiah 65:17-25, a text that countered the dominant view of the world and human nature, showing it up as illusion, as disinformation, and not the only possible course into the future.

In summary the vision is that:

• children do not die
• old people live in dignity
• those who build houses live in them
• those who plant vineyards eat the fruit.

That is, the key issues of inequity in society and the poverty it gives rise to. Then and now.

It was one of the texts for Easter Day this year and I’d been asked to fill in when the minister’s household went into Covid-19 isolation. What a gift for this very occasional preacher. What an opportunity to explore what the tomb being empty might mean in practice for the vocation of living faithfully and hopefully in this time of huge challenges.

This text from Isaiah 65 is what Jesus reads when, as Luke 4 tells it, he goes to the synagogue in Nazareth. After reading from the scroll he delivers the shortest sermon ever: “Today these things are coming real.” Then and now.

From vision to reality.

This is poetry that can trigger practical action.

This is the Jesus manifesto.

Good Friday effectively says “no” to Jesus and his manifesto. Disinformation holds sway; control by any means rules. The future will be just more of the same, with an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and despair.

Easter is God’s “yes” to Jesus and the Isaiah Vision. Not dead, but living and continuing to turn vision into reality. Christ is alive and the universe can celebrate.

I remember a Bible study back in my first ministry appointment that looked at this Isaiah text and I recall clearly a participant’s reaction to the bit about the lion and the lamb. Impossible! How’s the lion supposed to live? I knew that it one sense it is impossible, and yet I also knew that there was something here that was offering an opening, an alternative to how things could be. It was, I would discover, “imaginative construal” and an act of “prophetic imagination” that changes the way we live.

The key to hearing the Isaiah Vision is that it is poetry. Not scientific description. Not literal, but metaphor. A metaphor points to truth. It puts an image into our minds that carries something meaningful, at the same time knowing that, as metaphor, it doesn’t fit exactly. Like the classic example of snow blanketing the ground. Yes, covering and wrapping, but definitely not warming. Take the image a bit deeper and it evokes ideas of hibernating, protecting, and healing as the cold knocks back harmful diseases.

So the lion and the lamb lying together: an image of no violence and no harm. Which, going deeper, means no fear.

Our fears are easy to name right now. The big three: climate change, viral pandemic, and war. And plenty of regular fears – having what’s needed to get by – shelter, food, health, e.g. all exacerbated by the big three. The Isaiah Vision dares to imagine these things not being a problem: children not dying of preventable diseases (measles, illnesses caused by unhealthy homes), old people living safely, valued and respected, not slave labour but people’s work bearing fruit for themselves, including having their own homes and accessible sources of food.

This is not to deny how bad things are; rather, it is refusing to take existing world-ways as the only option and presents an alternative of life-giving ways. This, not our fears, can then be front and centre to our view of the future.

We can make this vision the horizon that, following Jesus’ example, we are living towards. It is a case of believing it is possible, despite appearances, despite current events, and acting accordingly. It makes a difference.

This, to me, is the tomb emptied. Emptied of everything that deals death. Which means we can focus our hearts and minds on what is life-giving.

Mike Riddell, who has been living in Ōturehua and died unexpectedly very recently, had just written an article for the latest Tui Motu magazine.

He wrote:

The time of Easter is a celebration of transformation. In the midst of darkness, loss and disillusionment comes the resurrection – the shining light of hope sidelining death and despair. Through Christ, we look backwards on history from the other side of all that would distort life and joy.

As I write, there is ample cause for despair. The Russian invasion of Ukraine haunts us with nightmares of 1939. Whatever the situation might be by the time you read this, many innocent people will have lost their lives in the crucible of power politics driven by insatiable narcissism.

A virus runs rampant through our society, and our Parliament has recently been occupied by disaffected citizens – a disturbing though sometimes amusing sideshow.

It would be easy to feel bleak and powerless. But that would be to give too much weight to forces we have no hope of controlling. My own strategy has been to focus on beauty.

Mike then describes the beauty around him – his wife Rosemary’s music, the creative projects he’s been engaging in, his family nearby. His strategy for living is to give towards a good future, poignantly commenting that he may not be around much longer to enjoy it.

Quoting again:

Too often I suspect we regard the resurrection as some sort of magic trick to be applauded from the sidelines. It is so much more than that. It is the recognition that… whatever may befall any of us along the path, all will be well. The challenge becomes to live as if this is true, rather than drowning under the stormy swells of doom and gloom.

“To live as if this is true.” Grammarians, note well. Not as if it were true, but as if it is true. That is Jesus’ gift – showing us God’s future made present.

God – the love and energy that pervades everything that was, is, and will be – has said a resounding “Amen” to Jesus and his making real the Isaiah Vision. This lives on and is the core of our living as followers of the Way.

The Seasons of Alzheimer’s

 Alzheimer’s in itself is surely the winter season of a person’s life. It can be a long winter, with a painful start for all involved most notably for the person affected. For in the early winter of Alzheimer’s knowing what is happening is a big part of the suffering. For loved ones it is also a season of winter, sometimes a very long winter. That’s how it was for a friend from some years back and for her family and we shared a very special time recently saying farewell to her, speaking the pain and taking a step in letting it go and letting her go.

The winter of Alzheimer’s has seasons of its own, that is, the stages that a person goes through. Looking at it from the side of those who travel the journey with a loved one with Alzheimer’s, these stages, or seasons, are experienced as stages of grief.

The first grief comes with diagnosis and the loss of all assurance that life would continue as before. There is no way back.

The next grief comes as behaviour and interaction changes to the extent that what is distinctive about the person starts to fade. For example, a person who was known for the gift of listening and understanding and was always there for people: now no longer engages in the same way.

Then comes the grief at the loss of identity. Who is this person who looks like the person I have known so well, but feels like a stranger?

Each stage is hard but the season of disconnection is surely at the top end of hard. The grief we feel at the loss of response, when this person seems to look through me rather than at me, is deep. Where has our relationship gone?

When death comes, the loss of physical presence brings its own grief, compounded by all that has gone before, with the fear that we’re only going to remember these years of winter. What about the life we had before – the spring of childhood, the summer of the adult years of making the best life we can with people we love, the autumn of easing back on hard work and enjoying our favourite things and special people.

Stories bring back that life. They trigger our memories, as do photographs. For 15 minutes we just sat and let the photos and music wash over us. And our dear friend was restored to us.

I was aware too that letting go had happened at different points for different people. For some the loss of identity made it too hard to continue close contact, for some the letting go happened again and again at each stage. Whatever and however, it was surely right for each person and their relationship with their loved one. It’s the relationship, their unique relationship, that’s there to hold onto. For young ones who only knew her with the illness, the relationship is rich with what they did for her, visiting, taking turns to feed, spending time with her. This will always be part of them and helped make them the caring young people that they are. For those who knew well the person before illness, the task is to keep that person front and centre, along with all the loving that have continued to give her whether close at hand or at a distance. 

They kept holding her in their hearts and that will not cease.