2/5 Lectionary Notes, Pt. 2
As I've been thinking about the service Rob and I will be doing on peacemaking in our local community, I've come across some additional resources that I think will be useful. I'll write about a couple of them now and maybe about others later.
As I mentioned in the last Lectionary entry, I'm thinking about peacemaking essentially as cultivating the Kingdom of God in right relationship. I've had several general thoughts on this in the course of reading:
- We practice resurrection by living in the "now" of the Kingdom of God, without fear that the good will be overcome (referred to in the Isaiah text as "wait[ing] for the Lord").
- We begin to see the possibilities for making peace when we have a comprehensive view of life as God's in its entirety, with no artificial separation between "sacred" and "secular." All of life then calls for a faith response.
- The historic context of the Isaiah passage is the exile of Israel: how many of us feel such a sense of displacement in the current age of war, community breakdown and overconsumption? To those who feel like outsiders, this passage is a call to remember who we really are in God and an assurance that God is above all earthly power.
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, a book of essays by Wendell Berry
Berry's writing is so rich with insight that I find myself scribbling and underlining constantly. He has much to offer the topic of peacemaking in our community, starting with his observation in "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" that "possibly the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is this: what sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? What, for Christians, would be the economy, the practices and the restraints of 'right livelihood'?" By economy, he does "not mean 'economics,' which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of nature." He observes a cycle of give and take, cautioning that we must draw on the interest of nature, never the principle.
He touches on a theme that I've noticed in many of the writings I've been exploring, which is the desire and the ability to see the world around us. He writes, in "Conservation is Good Work":
[Ours] is an absentee economy. Most people aren't using or destroying what they can see. If we cannot see our garbage or the grave we have dug with our energy proxies, then we assume that all is well.... The closer we live to the ground that we live from, the more we will know about our economic life; the more we know about our economic life, the more able we will be to take responsibility for it. The way to bring discipline into one's personal or household or community economy is to limit one's economic geography.
Of course, I would add, as the manager of a fair trade store, that seeing goes beyond our local community and that limiting our economic geography solves one part of the puzzle, but doesn't address the problems we see beyond our few surrounding counties. The local and the global seeing should complement one another, with right relationship being the common theme. But on the local side of things, Berry is a font of wisdom: "If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your spaceship, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large and full of beguiling nooks and crannies" (from "Out of your Car, Off your Horse"). We can apply this principle, literally and figuratively in our relationship with people, neighborhoods and nature. I think especially of how walking and riding my bike gives me a completely different impression of and appreciation for the neighborhoods through which I pass.
Another theme common to several resources is that of thinking locally and humbly about the work that is within our reach to do. Again from Berry ("Out of your Car..."):
Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found.... Local life may be as much endangered by those who would "save the planet" as by those who would "conquer the world." For "saving the planet" calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know--and thus will destroy--the integrity of local nature and local community...The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one's love for the place one is working in and for the things and creatures one is working among, then destruction inevitably results. An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.
The next resource picks up on this theme...
"No Great Things," An article by David James Duncan from Orion Magazine
In this article, Duncan reflects on the application of Mother Teresa's words: "We can do no great things--only small things, with great love." In the midst of worrying about the direction our country is taking as a military superpower, her words re-framed his responsibility and gave him "permission to do stuff like play with my kids and go fishing again." His words are worth quoting at length, both here and probably in the sermon:
I have no faith in any kind of political party, left, right or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist or activist is by giving little or no thought to things such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach....Watch a female salmon turn her body into a shovel and beat it into the stone bed of a high mountain stream, smashing aside rock not for the quarter-hour it takes a commentator to make a string of partisan wisecracks, but for the three or four arduous nights and days it takes to build a redd that can house and protect living progeny. There is no disingenuous bullshitting in the life-giving operations of nature, nothing snide, nothing needlessly clever.....
For which reason I'm trying to live and celebrate a dead-earnest, though far from humorless, Mother Teresian politics of no politics. I am focusing on one small thing after another, driven, each time, by the greatest possible love.
I think such a realization will be at the core of the hope that Rob and I can offer the the congregation, which is present in Isaiah 40:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Know who you are. Know the limits and possibilities of your capacity. Don't faint under the pressure to be God, but discern how you might transform what you're already doing. More later...