10.30.07

Post-Seabeck II

Posted in emergence, formation, missional order, pilgrimage at 9:42 am by len

I wish I had time to gather all the links of those blogging post Seabeck.. but I’m swamped with work and I’m tired. So I’ll just note Bro Maynard’s series and then offer another reflection.

Bro Maynard blogged today on “shalom” with reference to missional engagement and living in exile..

But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.

Imagine that! A letter written to displaced persons in hated Babylon, where they have gone against their will and watched their life and culture collapse. And they are still there, yearning to go home, despising their captors and resenting their God—if, indeed, God is still their God. And the speaker for the vision dares to say, “Your shalom will be found in Babylon’s shalom.”

The Babylonians certainly represented “the other” to exiled Israel, and they were told to seek shalom in the shalom of these “others.” It must have been almost too much — yet there’s that element of promise again, of assurance that all is not lost. Remember who you are, and what you’ve been promised. Get back on the road to shalom. Extend shalom to your captors… be agents of shalom.

It’s a long post and worth reading. The day before he blogged on the importance of memory for exiles. He quotes Brueggemann again:

[T]he quest for meaning as it has been interpreted is not first on our agenda, precisely because it is rootlessness and not meaninglessness which characterizes the current crisis. There are no meanings apart from roots. And such rootage is a primary concern of Israel and a central promise of God to his people. This sense of place is a primary concern of this God who refused a house and sojourned with his people (2 Sam 7:5-6) and of the crucified one who “has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58).

THAT is a significant insight. And I’m as interested in the place of its location as much as its significance. Notice where these insights come from: the first – old – testament. I’m intrigued by that location. Brueggemann’s insights grow out of a place that many of us would have thought would have little value for our current crisis: little value for reflection or reimagining the way forward. And that is precisely the quandary we find ourselves in. In these days we have little use for anything that is dated, and our sights are set firmly on the future. But we have no working maps. We have no working maps because we are uprooted from the soil that birthed us. Until we know who we are we cannot know the way forward. The themes that should root our reflection are land, promise, exile, covenant, shalom: themes that have a particular history and are rooted in a particular place among a peculiar people. They are themes that are storied – themes with which we can reconnect . Maynard quotes again:

Whereas a pursuit of space may be a flight from history, a yearning for a place is a decision to enter history with an identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage. Humanness, as biblical faith promises it, will be found in belonging to and referring to that locus in which the peculiar historicity of a community has been expressed and to which recourse is made for purposes of orientation, assurance, and empowerment. The land for which Israel yearns and which it remembers is never unclaimed space but is always a place with Yahweh, a place well filled with memories of life with him and promise from him and vows to him.

It is in the first testament that we discover our identity as the people of Yahweh – we too are pilgrims and wanderers. As God’s people and in that story we partner with God in His mission of redemption. We stumble along, we forget who we are, but then we remember that Yahweh offers a hope and a future, and that is what we offer to other wanderers. We offer shalom: peace – by entering the story of God’s mighty acts. That story is our story. God has entered history to give us a home: and not us alone, but many others. To paraphrase, “we go to prepare a place for them.“
I have a book on my desk waiting to be read that I wish I could open this week. The title is Artists, Citizens, Philosophers: Seeking the Peace of the City by Duane K. Friesen. But the book I was digging in this weekend is Signs of Emergence by Kester Brewin. In chapter I Kester is also using Brueggemann, primarily Hopeful Imagination. He writes,

“Only through the practice of memory will new possibility emerge. Without some form of memory, this sentence you are reading would make no sense… Without memory we become imprisoned in an absolute present, unaware of the direction we have come from, and therefore what direction we are heading in. Without memory there can be no momentum, no discernible passage of time, and therefore no movement or velocity…

“As Israel in exile began to accept their lot as their ..captors fed it to them, Isaiah stepped in and began to exercise their imaginations. His poetry opened the sealed vaults of their minds..

“Our problem today: the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live. Driven hard and fast, we lack the time to allow alternate worlds and possibilities to form, careening past small turnings and exits, bound to follow the obvious straight paths of the present arrangement. Yet if we stop and wait, and close our eyes to the “buy now, take me now” images, we will begin to remember, new worlds will form and new exits will become apparent. Before change.. comes waiting..” (56-57)

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