When I was a young man, so much younger than today–in days of Flower Power & the Age of Aquarius–I possessed a button which read “Bloom Where You’re Planted”. I wore that button almost all of the time, pinned securely to my cardigan sweater. Those were the days! Filled with hope for the New Age, predicting an immediate end of hunger and war… If only the Old Guard woulda listened to us Young Turks… Nostalgia feels so good; but it’s never entirely correct. According to Gordon Livingston, “Nostalgia is the enemy of hope.” (quoted by Diana Butler Bass, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY, p.307) Scriptures for the upcoming weekend deal with picking up the pieces and keeping on with keeping on.
Jeremiah, left behind in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to those who had been taken without their consent to Babylon (29:4-7). In it he urged them not to be held captives by The Good Old Days in Jerusalem, rather to build houses & gardens, get married and implanted within the new place! “But seek the welfare of the city where I [God] have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you shall find your welfare.” This is also a religious expansion; the God of territorial Judah is evidently the God of Babylon and the rest of the world, too! Exiles and aliens of all sorts are reminded to live in hope, because God’s still in charge.
As I was reading the Epistle, II Timothy 2:8-15, verse 9 jumped out at me. Paul is saying that even though HE is chained, “the Word of God is NOT chained”. This is certainly good news to the prisoners and all those feeling chained by contemporary crises. Evidently bad experiences of derision and being ignored could have tempted Timothy and the rest of us to dismiss the Christian story as a dream, to lose confidence in the Kingdom. “The sense of failure and loss of social status that haunts the Christian life finds future redemption in sharing Jesus’ victories.” (Lewis R. Donelson, FEASTING on the WORD, C 4:163)
Luke’s Gospel, 17:11-19, tells the story of Jesus on his way to Jerusalem, but first he has to pass through a no-man’s land of conflicting traditions, those of Judah and Samaria. (What a wonderful analogy!) Here he meets and touches ten lepers (eww) and sends them off whole/affirms that they’re ok. The story could be about gratitude, for only one returns to give thanks. Being grateful acknowledges that God IS good even in Samaria, and thus completes the journey from outcast to valuation.
The flood brought on by Hurricane Agnes in 1972 was extremely destructive to Northern Pennsylvania and Southern New York. Jim Baker, one of my colleague pastors of a congregation near Wilkes-Barre told of the desolation when the water finally went down: there was mud drying over everything, and piles of debris created by those trying to clean up. And, Jim says, one morning there was a tiny flower growing from a crack in the driveway, bravely shouting that there was still Life despite the surrounding wreckage! I often think of that flower when my world seems overly dark and fetid–I guess I need to live it up wherever I am…
God Bless Us, Every One Horace Brown King
My journey with scripture lessons for the upcoming weekend can be joined every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com
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