Sunday, December 14
Suggested Readings:
Trying to get the Bible right is a very big deal. When we speak of it as the Word of God, we do well to remember that it is also the composition notebook of a centuries-long caravan of asylum seekers. In a time like Advent, we might be prone to skip straight to the baby Jesus and…whatever else we might find comforting. If we do that, we risk losing a sufficient sense of our own context as well as that of the people whose experience of God yields the Bible itself. We need to take it slow.
Isaiah speaks of a highway to come called “the Holy Way” for all people. We’re invited imagine a path void of predation in which “no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.” Aligning our hearts and minds and nervous systems with this incoming way means contemplating and embracing the call to lovingly and creatively confront the otherwise normalized denial and degradation fearsomely a-foot in our lives and the lives of those around us. As prophets to the nations, we, like Isaiah, are charged with nonviolently undermining the strategies of abusers while busily seeding that which serves and heals the human form. Can you feel it? Does it hit home?
This charge marks and defines the movement Jesus urged John the Baptist to discern (through intermediaries) when the latter requested confirmation that Jesus was indeed “the one who is to come,” a lively, healing movement of God’s spirit engaged in a revolution of intimacy and neighborliness and the sharing of resources. In beloved community, words like “power” and “property” and “family” come alive anew as they’re measured by kindness and conviviality and the overturning of hierarchies. Jesus and his followers, in sync with the prophets, appeared as a social innovation in the ancient world, a diverse community of individuals casting aside titles, dividing identifiers, and social status to live as an embodied witness to God’s healing of our sweet old world. What would it mean to enter — and be — that kind of witness in the days to come? What might it mean to enter anew (and even exemplify) the Holy Way?
David Dark
Professor of Religion and the Arts
Daily Readings
