What a time it is! Jane and I sit down with friends for our Saturday evening supper together. Jane raises a glass of wine with the words: “Well, that was quite a week.” It doesn’t seem to matter anymore what the week is - it's all spinning and turning in ways few of us would have imagined even a few months ago. I engage with other Christians from around the world every week. The power of the internet allows me to dialogue with reflective leaders in other parts of the world. All of us, in our own ways, are wrestling with questions of what’s happening and where we are in this unprecedented time. We all want to get some bearings, some way of making sense of this moment, finding a pattern so we can, perhaps, figure out how to navigate all this unraveling. I find myself trying to do this every day. I’m not alone!
What do we say to one another as God’s people? It's not that, as Christians, we have some special insight into current social, political, and economic upheavals. We don’t. What I find important at this moment is to be reminded that, as God’s people, we live and move and have our being in another story than the anxious, churning story coming at us through media and national capitals. I am aware of how important it is for me to keep reminding myself and those I love that we live in a radically different story than the one that greets me in the media every single day. This other story orients me in this time. It roots me in hope, in a way of orienting and being present in this moment. Here are convictions I remind myself of every day. What story currently shapes your attention in a darkening, out-of-anyone’s-control world?
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth … and it was very good.”
In the midst of much darkness and anxiety, another world is growing like grass in the midst of hard pavement. This is God’s creation, God’s world. The direction of Creation, and what we call history, is in God’s hands. God is on a mission - to remake and reweave all creation, to bring all things (Ephesians 1: 9-11) together in Jesus. This is the true story of our world. I find hope and direction in remembering Christian communities in other darkening times. A favorite of many these days is Benedict. A member of Rome’s elite, he saw the collapse of his world, of Rome. Rather than being filled with anxiety at every new report of its devolution (the Barbarians at the gate), he formed a little band around simple practices without the need to know how God was going to engage that catastrophe but confident God would birth other ways of life from this ending. He didn’t need to predict what that would look like or strategize a future. In a local place, he shaped lives around a rule and everyday practices. The rest is, as they say, history.
God’s story isn't in the hands of the oligarchs or pharaohs
In this reweaving of all things, God came down, all the way down, to be among us in weakness, vulnerability, and obscurity. A child dependent on women. This is how God remakes history. We’ve been schooled to look to capitals, powerful people, think tank elites. But the future isn’t being formed in places of power, but of obscurity and abandonment. Seeing what’s happening is about where we dwell, where we’re paying attention. God’s remaking of the world is perceived in kenosis. We’re formed into God’s life (theosis) to the extent we join with God in this way. This is God’s plan to remake the world. Pharaonic politics and economics will not prevail.
God can only known by dwelling with the other
In crises, we want the security of knowing. We reassert habits and patterns that seemed to have worked for us. But this is not the way to be God’s people at this moment. That way is shown to us in Jeremiah 29. The prophet makes it clear there is no going back. To know what God is doing means embracing the alien place where we find ourselves. It is to settle into a godforsaken place and embrace the other. There is no other way of joining in God’s plan to remake the world. Dwelling where we are in our broken communities and neighborhoods is the place of discernment, not in church meetings. Lesslie Newbigin spelled this out in a way that has never really been grasped by the church of North America. He described a way of being God’s people dependent on a certain way of knowing that is about a God who took immeasurable risk (he came all the way down) in being with and in relationship with the other, with the neighbor. Knowing God in these upending times means our willingness to risk relationship with the other. Only in this risk of relationality can we form communities of hope. So, I choose to settle in a place where people are socialized to be frightened of connection and relationship (the more isolated we are from one another, the better consumers we are of Amazon and social media). I choose every day to be with, listen, love, and ask what is the Spirit doing here? To do this, I need practices like the Daily Office and other Christians who ask me hard questions.
Another kind of church must be born (again)
If Jeremiah 29 tells us that we cannot go back or fix the world we have lost (Jerusalem), Acts picks up this story of how God is remaking the world. Luke writes his narrative after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. The catastrophe had happened again. In the midst of that catastrophe, Luke tells of Pentecost. This is not some silly argument for home groups. That’s ecclesiocentric nonsense. This dying Jerusalem was filled with foreigners (Jews from the very Diaspora formed out of Jeremiah 29.) The church was, from the beginning, about the coming together of the foreigner and stranger in community through Jesus. So what does it mean to form communities of hope in our great unravelling? The answer is that in the embers of Jerusalem and Temple - in homes and neighbourhoods, foreigners were forming a new reality because of the One who came all the way down and met us in the other. There it is again in 2 Corinthians where communities of hope in Jesus wrestled with being Christian across polyglot, national, and ethnic boundaries. It's there again in Acts 16 where Jewish leaders were confounded by a woman, Lydia, and another way of being “church” took form in her house.
So it is and so it goes on! God has not stopped reweaving and remaking this Creation. We can all sit before the news and social media, we can join the “ain’t it awful” choir (and it really is) like the chorus in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral but, amidst desperate calls to act, I want to dwell in this other story which will end in “it is very good … thanks be to God who gives us the victory in our Lord, Jesus Christ”.
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