"If My People..."

The images in the news in recent days leave many of us speechless. Words like horrifying, torture and barbaric keep coming to the forefront of our conversations with strangers and friends alike. They stand alongside words like freedom, liberty, hope and justice. The losses of the war in Iraq are becoming more frequent and graphically diverse. A Stanford linguist interviewed on the news last week suggested that Americans are having a hard time finding the words for what we are learning as our psychological and emotional loyalties may be found to be at cross purposes with our ethical and moral sensibilities.

At our most recent Council meeting, one member echoed some of this struggle by leading us in devotions, but sharing honestly that it was deeply difficult to find words to hold it all together. How do we take in the images of the world — deeply, horrifyingly broken, and integrate those images with the images of our faith and of God’s Easter presence and activity in the world? Not a small question. But then living the gospel is not a “small” commission for those who are called to bear it’s light and bring it’s power to life.

If the world were neatly divided into good people and bad people, good choices and bad choices, good situations and bad situations, we humans would have an easier time of knowing what we feel and think and want in various scenarios that flood our daily lives. The truth of life is that it is messy, clouded with partial information and semi-truths, messy and foggy and changing so quickly that on any given day it may seem beyond our ability to get clear about it all. Otherwise, good and kind and loving people make serious mistakes that give rise to a series of tragic results. Real people in every nation suffer and die, often unjustly. Sometimes we are those people; sometimes they are people we love, sometimes we look at them on the news with the distance of continents between us. In the midst of the pressures and demands on our lives we struggle to find the path that is true and right and good and to live in it.

Jesus was no stranger to this human struggle; his experience of humanity was firsthand. The choice that God made to become human was not naïve to who we humans can be, at our worst moments and in our most precious times. I believe God is grieved by our inhumanity toward one another. And I believe God holds all of life, together, even when we can’t begin to make sense of it.

In 2 Chronicles, the prophetic voice of God comes to us through the pages of human frailty and depravity, “If my people who are called by name will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” Times are tough. Let us not run to easy answers or easy apathies. We are to be salt, light, transforming the world around us. Digging in our God-given heals and finding ways to be God’s healers. So, since we bear the name of Christ, let us live faithfully in the midst of the struggle, let us be on our knees, praying, seeking God, and acting for justice whenever and wherever we can, and looking eagerly for those places where God will, can and is healing the nations of the world, and you and I in it.

Praying with you for our hurting world,

Pastor Janet