First things first

In the beginning, there was only us. As Sally Lloyd-Jones wrote in her Jesus Storybook Bible, when God made us, God looked at us and said “you look just like me.” Like a proud parent, God looked at us and said that we were the best thing God had ever made. And God called us very good. God called the relationship between Creator and creation very good. We were named lovely by Love itself, free to live and move and have our being without shame or fear of scarcity.

But then, the hiss of half-truth, rooted in greed and vengeance—can God really be trusted? Our egos stroked by the assurance that power and dominance would be worth the price of admission. How could we pass up the opportunity to become our own gods?

How quickly our eyes were pried open (and yet somehow also hemmed shut?) by fear. Now, it is you and me and us and them, no longer enveloped by the perfection of shalom, but rather, at war with each other and God and the rest of creation. What was once called very good has been fractured, leaving us to grope in the darkness for anything that might satisfy our craving for eternity. In our struggle to secure power and comfort and autonomy for ourselves, we’ve become suspicious of each other, believing that our neighbor’s ability to live and move and have their being somehow infringes on our own freedom. We tout our readiness to trample and strip our neighbors of their humanity because we’ve been conditioned to believe that less for them means more for us. We have been denying each other breath almost our entire existence. 

We are a long way from the garden now. 

But Jesus said, “behold, I am making all things new.”

I believe this, I do. Believing this has kept me from self-destructing under the weight of my own ego and the shadow of the empire humanity has built in an effort to make ourselves great. And yet, at times, that faith has been threatened by fear and doubt that seek to engulf and snuff the life out of everything they touch. Sometimes, the tension feels unbearable. We who follow Jesus are called to create a home and a life in a place that has been restored and is also being restored.

How can we sing in a foreign land?

This restoration of shalom, the reign of this ego subverting, self-sacrificing, death defying Jesus is the thing I am willing to bet my life on. I’m willing to look foolish for it, and I’m willing to be wrong about it. I will choose it again and again, and plead mercy over the moments when I am distracted by the mirage of shiny things that woo me away from the Real.

But belief means little if it does not propel me towards the front lines in the battle for justice and peace. In his most famous teaching, Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers,” and “those who are hungry for righteousness.”

In other words, blessed are those who conspire with Creator God in the mission of reconciliation and who carry the gospel of shalom restored into the places where ego’s craving for supremacy has encroached on ground that has been called holy.

This week, I learned that the word “conspire” literally means to breathe together. Bless my heart, I wept when I read it. Sometimes what we really need is to get low to the ground so we can see the root of things. And the root of manifest destiny, that all of creation is ours to dominate including each other, is evil in its purest form. 

There’s a saying where I live—it shows up in street art and murals in the city and can even be found plastered across our license plates: while I breathe, I hope. And hope, by its very definition, means that all is not well—but there is still time. Time, not to fret over how we are perceived by those who are comfortable with a thin and brittle understanding of the gospel, but rather, to clumsily put one foot in front of the other as we work to dismantle the systems that we have created in our struggle to be God. 

Hope is the song we sing. It turns out, hope is the only thing that we can hold. 

We have no time or space to hoard anything for ourselves, and how dare we even attempt to when our own eyes have seen the breath stolen from our neighbors’ lungs? Creation is begging to breathe under the weight of our supremacy, and if this is not a tipping point—a moment in which we are forced to examine the soil our hope is rooted in, I don’t know what is.

God, forgive us for attempting to resuscitate our own egos while we watch those who bear your image suffocate and die. 

There are some who would call for unity today whose cries echo those of Isaiah 30: they say to the seers “no more visions” and to the prophets “do not prophesy to us the truth, but illusions.” Their ideas of unity are insulated by their own image, and thus, their own priorities. Their flimsy understanding of justice requires thoughts and prayers and stops short of actions that would threaten their comfort. Dissenting voices and the experiences of others muddy the waters of their certainty. I understand this. I crave comfort and am quick to feed my fear if I think it will leave me alone, but it never really leaves me alone. 

I wonder, when comfort is our highest aspiration, do our demons ever really leave us alone?

The older I get, the less certain I become about most things. But these? These are my first things. The inherent mark of Creator God present in the fabric of mine and my neighbors’ DNA, and the realization that if I have attained any measure of privilege in this life, it is only for the purpose of making sure that those on the outside have a way in. And I have no time to apologize for my shamelessness—not when I am striving to imitate a servant being told to go out to the far reaches in search of those who are hungry.

There is shalom to be carried, peace to be planted and tended and grown up from this soil, and if I am to live as evidence of Immanuel, God with us, I cannot accept being chosen and blessed and decline the call of being broken and given. Grace, you see, always takes it too far.

Lord, have mercy when I forget.