When every word can trigger offense, anger and division, sometimes silence seems the easiest alternative.
When every effort seems met with an insurmountable wall, why even bother?
I stopped listening to the news (local NPR) soon after the election. I've been listening instead, when I drive, to the Porters' Gate on Pandora.
I've dramatically cut my time on social media, doing what I need to do for my work, but scrolling as little as possible.
I've been keeping my head down, tackling the daily tasks before me, praying for wisdom and grace and continuing my normal morning practice, reading the daily notes and passage suggested by Scripture Union's Encounter with God. .jpg)
The Prophecy of Isaiah, Francisco Bayeu, Spain, 1778-9
From November 15 to 30, the readings were in Isaiah 22 to 34. The accompanying notes were written by my husband, Whitney Kuniholm. He worked for Scripture Union from 1976 to 1983, then was President of Scripture Union USA from 1997 to 2016. Over the years he's written many Bible studies and many Scripture Union notes. The Isaiah notes were interesting in that they were written almost two years ago, but felt as though they'd been written very specifically for the weeks after the election.
Those chapters have much to say about justice and righteousness, the danger of trusting oppressive leaders, the folly and snare of selective prophecy.
Sometimes passages of scripture seem as immediate as the day's news, sometimes as timeless as humanity itself. The people of Isaiah's day thought that as God's chosen, they could pick the rules they liked and ignore the deeper obedience of listening closely for God's voice and caring for the poor, the weak, the hungry and the weary earth itself.
The prophets can be rough going but for me, in this season, the chapters in Isaiah, and Whitney's daily commentary have been a gracious reminder than political turmoil is not new. Manipulation, deceit, corruption and abuse of power are recurrent themes in history and in scripture.
But they're not the end of the story.
In almost every chapter, Isaiah describes corruption, disdain for the poor, environmental destruction and God's fury at disobedience. Interwoven with those passages, often without transition, are descriptions of a future overwhelming joy.
Isaiah 24 surprised me. It seemed to capture the moment entirely.
Heartbreaking news of Gaza and Lebanon battered by drone strikes.
Strange president-elect pronouncements beyond the bounds of legal authority.
My own feeling of exhaustion.
And there in the middle: announcements of joy.
They raise their voices, they shout for joy . . .From the ends of the earth we hear singing:
“Glory to the Righteous One.”
How do we live as people of song, rather than angry protectors of our own sense of right?
Jesus told us in the beatitudes: blessed are the agents of mercy, peace and light, even when surrounded and attacked by darkness and division.
Sometimes, looking toward Christmas, we fall into a vision of twinkling lights, with all we hope for wrapped and waiting beneath a tree.
It's helpful to remember that the lights of the Christmas story were angels, speaking to shepherds on the margins, and the one bright star, ignored by God's people, drew distant travelers longing to be included.
And it's wise to remember that the tree of the Gospel was not a well-decorated fir tree, laden with ornaments and happy memories.
It was the cross, an instrument of power, oppression, pain and death.
Thinking and praying about this time we're living in, I stumbled on a Christmas Eve sermon by Anglican bishop N. T. Wright. The sermon is called "Emperors and Angels," and begins with short verse, apparently Wright's own:
Sing a song of Christmas, of emperors and angels;
Sing a song of Christmas, of darkness now past;
Sing a song of starlight, of shepherds and of mangers;
Sing a song of Jesus, of peace come at last.
In his sermon, Wright insists that the Christmas story is deliberately political and that Christ's kingdom challenges all kingdoms, values, and existing power structures. He shares the example of William Wilberforce, who spent 20 years pressing the British parliament to outlaw the slave trade, then spent the next 26 years doing all he could to outlaw slavery completely throughout the British empire.
[I]n 1833, as he lay on his deathbed, Parliament passed the bill which got rid of the scandal once and for all. My friends, it can be done. There were massive vested interests ranged against Wilberforce, but by prayer and faith and sheer hard work he and his friends took the gospel forwards into the real world. It’s always costly, always tiring, it always takes everything we’ve got; but this is what it looks like when the song of the angels is heard and obeyed, when the power of the emperors is challenged and confronted, and when the Prince of Peace is celebrated and proclaimed in the middle of it all.
While Wright's sermon encourages political engagement, I'm doubtful he meant it in the ways we've seen most recently. He doesn't argue on behalf of a party, or a particular point of view. Rather, he suggests we learn to watch and listen well:
we can watch for the empires of the world, the Augustus Caesars of our day: we can keep our eyes open for where the powers that run the world are crushing the little people who live on our street, in our town, in our local hospitals or prisons. And we can listen for the song of the angels. It will come in surprising ways, as it always does. God doesn’t call everybody in the same way. But if you are learning to love the Christ-child you will find your eyes gradually being opened to what the powers of the world are up to and your ears gradually becoming tuned to the particular song that God’s angels are trying to sing to you, and, more dangerously perhaps, through you.
The more we read the songs of the Psalms, the songs embedded in Isaiah's prophecies and recorded in the early chapter of Luke, the more we can recognize and repeat the recurrent themes, as in the song of Isaiah that Jesus read in the temple in Luke 4.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free."
May that peace, rest and joy be yours this Christmas.
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The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Nicolaes Bercham, Amsterdam, 1649 |
