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Praise
Praise the Lord! Praise God, sun and moon; praise God, all you shining stars! Praise God from the earth, you sea monsters and creatures of the depths, you fire and hail, snow and frost!
(Psalm 148:1-2 & 7-8, NRSV adapted)
What makes the T-Rex dinosaur a scientific fact and the Loch Ness monster an ancient myth?
It’s a rhetorical question, mainly. To a large extent, I believe the distinction doesn’t matter. It’s certainly not worth fighting over. It doesn’t make much difference in the daily lives of millions of people.
But the question of science vs. myth points my spirit toward something important: faith needs fiction, perhaps far more than it needs facts.
By which I mean: faith needs imagination. Wild and wondering and expansive imagination. Faith needs the unimaginable and the improbable. Faith needs awe. It needs questions that cannot be answered; it needs stories that reach beyond the limits of knowledge.
While faith might long to claim certainty, it does its best work when it claims surrender. When it gives in to hope. When it opts for unearned trust. When it lives in dreams and aspirations beyond what can be proven. When it tells stories.
Madeleine L’Engle wrote in Glimpses of Grace: “Myth is the closest approximation to truth available to the finite human being.”
Somewhere in the chasms of the oceans, there are sea monsters praising God. The Bible tells us so, although we may never know whether the psalmist was writing about a cousin of Loch Ness, a descendent of T-Rex, or a creature of the psalmist’s own imagination. The provability of the monster isn’t the point.
The point is creation’s praise for God, which is beyond imagining. In fact, creation’s praise of God is so vast and wild that it can only be told in fiction.
Prayer: Praise to you, O God, for the praises too mystical and magical for me to perceive!
cross-posted with the Daily Devotional (ucc.org)
Bad News
The spirit of the Holy One is upon me, because the One has anointed me and sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of divine favor, and the day of God’s vengeance.
(Isaiah 61:1-2, NRSV adapted)
On that holy day when the prisoners are set free, a whole lot of people will be out of a job.
Also, a whole lot of public services will be halted. Some wildfires will rage without resistance. Some streams and parks and highways will not be cleaned of litter. Some sandbags will be unfilled and unavailable for the next hurricane. All un- and under-paid tasks currently assigned to the incarcerated in our prison system.
When Isaiah’s vision is realized, what some experience as a year of God’s favor will be experienced by others as an endless day of God’s vengeance:
The oppressor will no longer be propped up by power over the discounted. The captor will lose their chains of control over the imprisoned. The mercenary will no longer be insulated by selfishness against the outcries of the brokenhearted.
That holy day of divine release will make many people very uncomfortable. Probably you, too. Probably me, too. Because even if we don’t consider ourselves to be capital “o” Oppressors, even if we have been on the heartbroken side more often than the heartbreaker side, even if we agree that the prison system is unjust, we still live and breathe and carve out comfort zones within systems of oppression.
We might not recognize the day of God’s good news. We might even, heaven forbid, lament the day as bad news in rejection of our comfort zones being transgressed.
Let the good news come mightily nonetheless.
Prayer: Teach my comfortable heart to love others’ good news, to break for others’ pain, to cry with joy at others’ release—even as much as I would do for my own.
cross-posted with the Daily Devotional (ucc.org)
At the Table
You make me lie down in green pastures; you lead me beside still waters. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. - Psalm 23:2 & 5 (NRSV) Green pastures aren’t hard to come by when you grow up in...
Protest (A Psalm)
The Holy One has been rejected so that routine might not be disrupted. Cry out, O Brokenhearted! The Holy One has suffered so that the murderer might walk free. Cry out, O Brokenbodied! Raise your lament, all you who are witnesses. Do not hold back your rage before...
Heart and Soul
Here is my heart, O Holy Life: ancient with the dust of stars, new as the day I was born. What use can it possibly have if it beats only for itself? Here is my soul, O Mystery: reluctantly tethered to flesh, marked with scars and calluses. Who else can recognize it...
Sunset
Light runs out before love is finished -- some days, I think, even before love begins -- and the horizon blazes with the angry grief of time we wish we'd had, moments we missed, stories we didn't begin to write together or could've written differently if the sun had...
Easter Feast
Who will break the fast? Joyful Jesus, how dare we continue to feed upon scarcity when there is a rich feast spread over endless banquet tables so that all who are hungry may know peace? We raise a glass to you -- Holy Abundance, Open Invitation, Broken Bread....
Harrowed
I'm not interested in your pain having purpose, my Friend, only in the space to grieve what has been done to you. Let no one call these harrowing days a hallowing. The broken flesh is not a fruit to harvest. The tortured earth is not a fortune to reap. The spilled...
Pit of Despair
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away. - Psalm 31:9-10 (NRSV) I do not wish...
Hyssop
Sprinkle death with truth, O Mercy, to dispel its plague upon the living. Mark every doorway with wisdom to guard against violent hatred that courses through the streets. Purge evil with fragrant hyssop. Bind up broken spirits and bones with cleansing joy. Make of...
Upstream
To make my way to the Source, I pray, and to understand how it carves through the rock and reshapes the earth along its holy path; I pray to meet the One who loves the path -- its movement more than its destination -- and to learn the patience of unknown ends; To...
