Gospeling Your Life through Tension

 

Read Luke 20-21 ~ The deeper you move into each of the Gospels, the more you can feel the tension building in the air.  Like any good movie or book, the main character faces challenges that threaten his/her/them.  These two chapters start with questions concerning Jesus’ authority, move on to a violent parable about tenants (reminding us that violence begets violence that we still see in the newspaper headlines), to questions of taxes and death (there are small topics that everyone loves to talk about ~ note the sarcasm in my typing those words).  You turn the page to chapter 21, and the dramatic tension dial is turned up as Jesus talks about giving, temple destruction (which think about someone talking about our church being destroyed, these are harsh/hard words), our own confusion and the call to stay awake amid the heaviness of the world within/around us.

 

I am particularly taken by where we land in chapter 21, with themes of confusion and certainty.  We live in a time where we take in more information than perhaps our brains can process in healthy/faithful or loving ways.  We are on overload and our devices are designed to keep our eyeballs glued to them for as long as possible.  Just keep clicking is the motto of our day, just keep scrolling and scanning and searching, we consume information that can consume us too, keeping us always in fear.  Neil Postman’s book from the 1980s said, we are amusing ourselves to death.  We are asleep and awash in a fog.  At the same time, we crave and cling to certainty so tight we leave fingernail marks in our own opinions, that we freely share (anonymously) online.  Double sigh. 

 

How do we stay awake? 

Go outside with no phone, don’t worry it has built-in memory to keep your texts and record messages.

Go outside with no music to distract you, because God has a symphony of sounds in the wind and birds and squirrels scurrying and playing. 

Go outside to breathe deeply and listen to the trees.

Go outside and sit down on a bench in the shade, notice how the breeze feels on your skin.

Go outside and say, “Hi” to the fellow featherless biped who walks past you.

Go outside, because creation is teaching and telling us about God’s wisdoms in ways that Google and my morning meditations never can share.

May our Creator renew and sustain you as you step outside into God’s creation, of which you are a part, today.  Amen.