Not Ours to Save

I’ve been thinking about a book I read and wrote about several years ago: The World is Not Ours to Save, by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, an advocate for the global abolition of nuclear weapons. A description of the book by publisher Intervarsity Press says

Wigg-Stevenson's own pilgrimage from causes to calling shows how to ground an enduring, kingdom-oriented activism in the stillness of vocation rather than in the anxiety of the world's brokenness.

What an interesting proposition.

These days the grief of the world hangs heavy.

There’s the growing catalog of losses, sad versions of the same refrain: he tested positive and two days later he was gone.

There’s the long catalog of disappointments: graduations, weddings, parties enacted in small settings while loved ones watch on Zoom.

Jobs gone. Neighborhood businesses gone. Simple pleasures set aside until some distant undetermined date.

And the constant background of partisan spin, turning simple precautions into cosmic battles.

No wonder our hearts are heavy.

Our anxiety – MY anxiety - is rooted in the sense that the world is broken beyond repair, and there’s nothing I can do.

But none of this is out of God’s reach. None of it beyond his intervention.

At the start of Advent 2014 I wrote:

The older I get, the more I invest in people and communities around me, the more clearly I see the depths of our dilemma and the more certain I am that the world is not mine to save.
I am not able to solve or even shake the entrenched racism and oblivious injustice that will put one in three African American men in prison, that continues to question the outrage of one more, and one more, and one more unarmed young man shot dead by those sworn to keep the peace.

My uneven boycott of slave-harvested chocolate, my uneven support of Fair Trade coffee, will never make a dent in immoral labor practices.

I'm not able to ensure safe food, water, air, for my own family, let alone this suffering, sorrowing world.

I can't heal the sick, restore broken families, fix broken systems.

As Wigg-Stevenson observes, in a moving chapter about a trip to Hiroshima to honor those who died there in 1944, 

The sin of the world is not some minor laceration. . . It is a vast and ragged puncture wound driven deep into the lungs and heart of creation itself. The divide stretches between us and God, and between every person and every other person. Even if we cared enough or were good enough to work in perfect concert to try to fix it (though we don’t and aren’t, and thus we won’t) we lack the capacity. The wound of sin is the very ground on which we live, eking out our unpredictable lives along its edge. (61) 

Looking back, I wonder what it was that so alarmed me in those quiet, peaceful days of 2014.

Now, in this strange pandemic season, it feels like the sin of the world is more visible than ever. The vast, ragged wounds of racism, partisan fury, economic injustice, idolatrous pride overwhelm me. It’s exhausting work to get through the day without falling into a quagmire of sadness or fury.

Earth from Expedition 44 June 19 2016,
Creative Commons License, NASA.

I wrote then: 

Is healing possible?

No.

Give up.

Forget it.

Yet, we’re told not to give up. We’re commanded to hope.

And not just to hope for a time in the future, but to speak, act, live as agents of that future wholeness alive in this fractured present.

That action starts in stillness, not anxiety. Sometimes the best work we can do it to ground ourselves in awareness that the world is not ours to save. We are not the ones writing this story. We are not the ones determining the outcome.

Yet we have a role to play. We are called to kingdom-oriented activism, activism grounded in love, experience of God's unfailing love that gives us confidence to hope.

I’ll be praying and writing more about this in the weeks ahead, but for now, I wait where I waited on that Advent Sunday six years ago:

There are days I start out with no vision of what the next step will be, and then words are given.

There are times when I stand in the middle of dry bones and watch in wonder as they spring to life.

There are moments when the rushing-breath-of-wind breathes through the valleys where I live, and I marvel, and go my way rejoicing.

There are seasons when I simply wait in hope. This is one of those seasons. 

No king is saved by the size of his army;
    no warrior escapes by his great strength.
A horse is a vain hope for deliverance;
    despite all its great strength it cannot save.
But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him,
    on those whose hope is in his unfailing love,
to deliver them from death
    and keep them alive in famine.
We wait in hope for the Lord;
    he is our help and our shield.
In him our hearts rejoice,
    for we trust in his holy name.
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord,
    even as we put our hope in you.  (Psalm 33:16-22)

Earth from Expedition 44, June 19 2016, Creative Commons license NASA