Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Lent Reading Day 19
Isaiah:
Isaiah 9:1-7

We live in a time of gathering darkness...there seems to be growing injustice in terms of the priveleges awarded the hyper-rich and the suffering of the expanding population of the poor-er class, war has become so common that we seem almost complacent to change in the world (I'm not just talking about the Middle East, and Iraq in particular...but also Lebanon, the Lord's Resistance Army of abducted children in Uganda, and the violence in our cities). More and more we seem to wonder if anything can change, if anyone can bring transformation to our broken world, bringing healing to what is shattered, unity to what is divided, sight to the places where we're blind, and rivers of justice to the dry-places dominated by the lack of justice. But it's not just in our day and time that such darkness seems onmipresent.



Isaiah's prophecies were recorded nearly 2,500 years ago when

the powers of Babylon and Assyria were rearing their head in the
ancient Middle East....they were dominating the "known world" establishing an empire that the Israelites could not resist nor vanquish even though they fantasized that God would deliver them (despite his warnings of the contrary).

Hear Isaiah offers an oracle that justice - peace - light in the darkness - hope in the hopelessness - would emerge in the birth of

child - an event first-and foremost - about relationship, interdependence, mutuality, and growth. In a world yearning for change - God doesn't ask them to settle by simply waiting for it - but to live fully - to anticipate that God's zeal would accomplish something so new, so different, so beyond-the-imagination that it could only be imagined as the using of the uniforms and weapons of armies as fuel for fires to warm the cold, and make food for the hungry.



Looking back the early church community saw with clarity that Jesus of Nazareth who they knew and experienced as Messiah and Savior - was this baby born into the world like light illumnating a room engulfed in darkness. How do we experience this same baby today? We often fight over what specifics to believe, over the historicity of this or that event, or the translation of this or that word in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek....yet what the prophetic oracle is first and foremost about is HOPE. How does faith bring hope? How does our common faith, that in Jesus of Nazareth God does something unique, authoritative, and world-changing, gather us together into a transforamtive community, equip us with new HOPE, and send us into the world as peace-makers, and bridge-builders with that same hope? Such hope can't be limited to programmatic declarations of what is or isn't a family value, what is or isn't righteous, or what is or isn't proper according to tradition. Such radical hope is the currency with which deep, radical, hope-giving, life-sustaining, and world-transforming are built, strengthened, and shared. How does your faith give you hope? How does it give you new hope? How does it inspire, encourage, and equip you to share such hope in active peace-making and bridge-building ways with those in our homes, neighborhoods, cities and across the world we share with each other?