...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with
entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but
that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in
the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final
day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and
mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.” ― N.T. Wright
The world is not going to hell in a hand basket. “What?” you say? “Have you seen the poverty in Africa? Have you
seen the individual and corporate greed run amok? Teens are killed for their shoes. Children are abused by those they trust. Pornography is a billion dollar
industry. The rich are healthy. The sick are poor. We waste precious
resources for our creature comforts.
Those on the margins of survival are systematically corralled on the
margins by those who benefit from their hardship. The defenseless are slaughtered. Government chips away at freedom as if
they’re sanding off old paint in order to apply their own new color scheme. And there’s a Democrat in the White
House.” To all of that I say, “Ok there
are a few good points there.” It’s easy
to see that the world around us is a wreck.
It’s easy to look at the world and become discouraged, and even to
despair. I’ve been there. Sometimes I visit discouragement and
despair. Sometimes they visit me. When we listen to their voices, the world can
seem like a pretty dark and foreboding place, and in all reality it is. However there is another voice speaking into
the wreck, one which should be recognizable to those who have pursued a trust
in Christ. It’s a still small voice,
singing a redemptive melody. It’s hard
to hear, and can often be entirely inaudible, but I would suggest that an
anchored faith that that voice exists and is active in its song is essential to
both preventing our own despair, and to breathing hope into the larger cultural
conversation. I’d like to focus in on the theology that is the back beat of
that song and draw a few practical applications out of it, if you’d be willing
to humor me and my metaphors.
The hub around which this wheel turns is the notion that God
is in the process of completing God’s redemptive work in the world. We get snap shot images in scripture of the
shape and feel of this completed work.
See Isaiah 25, 35, 61 and 65, and Revelation 19-22. If we were looking for words that we could
glean and reconstruct from these passages that would help provide that feel, we
might come up with: peace, justice, equality, love, joy, sanctuary, and
community. In these passages God reveals
to us how the story ends; or to push the music metaphor a bit, the song, or
better, the symphony God has been composing, conducting, and perhaps even
improvising through history has a glorious end which God is longing to share
with this beloved world. What must be
remembered if we’re not to be overcome by the voices of discouragement and
despair is that this symphony is still being written, and those of us living
here now are caught in one of the symphony’s taut movements, full of dissonance
and unresolved tensions. If we allow
these dissonances to define all the symphony is in our minds, we lose the
beauty and attractiveness of the story being told through the music. This, I believe is part of the reason God
lets humanity in on the end of the story, to provide a modicum of hope that the
unresolved tensions that surround us do not define the whole of reality. What is even more beautiful is that God at
times allows us to hear hints or foreshadows of the glorious conclusion that is
waiting at the symphony’s end, both in scripture (see the Resurrection) and in
our experiences. God even allows and
requests us to participate in the playing of this song.
Thus, our efforts to learn the prior movements and glorious
end of this symphony, and recreate them using the instruments God provides
(ourselves) are a good part of what we have to offer the world around us. To unwind the metaphor a bit, the more
Christians share the good news of God’s self revelation of the depths of God’s
love for humanity revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Christ
and the more we embody that love and the peace, justice, equality, joy,
sanctuary, and community that characterize the symphony’s conclusion the more
we get to participate in the still small voice’s part in the larger cultural
conversation. It’s then that we not only
fight our own despair, trusting the promise of the symphony’s finale, but play
our part in the symphony, attracting people to its composer and come alongside
God as a voice of hope, continually singing to the world. It’s then that we learn and trust that the
proverbial hand basket is not heading toward entropy and destruction but is
actually heading toward a bright, glorious and divine future.
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