Wednesday, January 30, 2019

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8, New Revised Standard Version) 

A sentence in my devotional book by Walter Brueggemann has caught my interest over the week-end.  He wrote, “We may ponder how God’s extraordinary power may yet unsettle our settled ordinary.”  (Gift and Task, p.56)

He uses some examples from the Bible in which the personalities could have settled for the ordinary, the obvious, the inevitable, the predictable, or the safest thing. Instead God encouraged these people to push their expectations, to look further, to open up their limitations and boundaries and experience something new and different and sometimes even radical in their lives.  He uses the phrase “it would be ordinary” for these folk to simply go along with the usual and normal responses to their situations -  looking out for number one, resigning themselves to their “fate”, and accepting the consequences.

But instead the love from God initiates and elicits a new and more lively imaginative hope that runs counter to the ordinary. Take any of the healing stories in the Gospels, for example. But two stories stand out for me. 

The first is the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at the well and who engaged in a lively, smart, personal dialogue with Jesus that centred on her ordinary life – made ordinary by endless trips to the well, doing the same old thing over and over again, dragged down by several, possibly failed marriages. Jesus interrupted the ordinary routines of her life and challenged her to make better choices and take a leap of faith.

The other example is the paralyzed man who had sat at the pool-side in Jerusalem for thirty-eight years waiting for his opportunity to be put in the water for a chance to be healed. The ordinary was that he was perpetually disappointed. The ordinary was constant failure and frustration. The ordinary was always just another day at the pool. Jesus interrupted that fruitless cycle and invited the man to take a bold, new, audacious step away from his oh-so familiar and ordinary existence and was made well. “My Father is still working and I also am working.” (John 5:17, NRSV)

Brueggemann makes the point, “The gospel is inherently subversive of all the ordinary protocols that we assume as tried and true. The oft-reiterated truth of the gospel is that the power of the God is not contained within the claims of business as usual.”

“Nor are my ways your ways!” says the Lord. This seems to be often expressed by the spectacular ability of Jesus to intrude upon the ordinary and make us aware that there is more to the world around us.

By stepping outside the ordinary I am not suggesting that we take up sky-diving, climb mountains, or move to a new country. But I am suggesting to open our spirits to the energy and movement of God’s Spirit, to look at ourselves and our neighbours and our world with renewed vision and a different set of criteria than the ordinary that the politicians, the media and the culture insist we cling to. Let the Spirit of Jesus Christ interrupt the fashionable, the presumptions, the assumptions, the tired old beliefs, the dogmatic approach, the weary traditionalism that weigh us down and keep us living sinful and empty lives.

There is a better way!

Jesus said, not in a spirit of exclusivism but in a spirit of invitation and welcome, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) Jesus is saying that one does not need the Roman Way, the way of the pharisee, the way  of old laws and prohibitions, the way of accepting the ordinary and mundane and inevitable, the way of blindness, limping, paralysis and blindness, the way of Sin, but the Way with God is altogether a new and different Way, the Way to renewal, to discover a new and fresh experience of Creation itself.

Dale