We’ve gotten a soft reminder these last few days that Fall is on its way once again. Change in the air. The crisp air of early morning; the light of day is beginning to slant the way it does during the coming season, setting asparkle the water of the bay, the shadows of clouds lengthening towards some proposition perhaps…..the leaves on the trees look tired and ready for easeful rest…storms from the tropics about their work bearing equatorial heat to the northern climes…all in a rhythm hauntingly familiar. It is the rhythm of change.
The Covenant between the people Israel and God in Hebrew scripture is about this people worshipping the one God, The great I AM, and in return their God will bless them…and this covenant over centuries is set within the context of change. The people of Israel live as slaves, as nomads, as a loose confederation of tribes, then as the subjects of monarchs, both good and bad, then as occupied people of other kingdoms, then in exile to a foreign land….and then for a brief period under their own sovereignty….only to again to be conquered and ruled by empire….and scattered among the nations… The theology of Israel was to speak of God as present amid the inevitable change that has and will forever wheel them towards their destiny.
New Testament literature which covers a much more brief period of history, a little more than a century, still sets its context within the perpetual rubric of change….the gospel writers call for a new world order represented in the teachings of Jesus in which wealth is shared; in which well being and dignity for all is the way of life, a world order in which justice kindness and mercy and nonviolence are the law…for this to come about requires change, change of hearts and minds and the courage of sacred agency, agency being the empowerment that comes with well being and dignity(salvation in short)…the courage of agency to effect such change….we’ve seen it in our own day. We are seeing it still.
In the last presidential election a prominent theme was “change.” That will be the theme in the upcoming election as well. Our job as people of faith is to see to it, as the seasons of the life of the human community come and go, as change comes inexorably, that the change is for the better, that the marks of God’s sacred commonweal of equality, dignity and well being are the cardinal marks of the change that comes. Change is always about opportunity, the opportunity to name the world we live in as good and therefore sacred, and that requires courage. Perhaps in the cosmic scheme of things there is an innate courage that enables change….an innate courage woven into the fabric of the universe…perhaps summer in its plenty yielding to the dying process of Fall perhaps takes courage….the migration of birds surely must take courage….the deathly grip of forgetful winter awakening, conceding to the raucous new life of spring must take courage….If courage drives the seasons…If courage is innate to the created order then we must claim our share of it and be the sacred change for our world that God envisions…God is change….an unchanging God makes no sense in a universe that is marked by change….God, change divine among us creating anew the world, as has forever been and forever shall be.
In our own families we know that there are seasons…a grand procession of change which sometimes feels unbearable, because change is the birth pangs of possibility and therefore change is sacred. Dare we claim that in our families…dare we claim that for our world….Take courage good people, because in the midst of life and death there is always new life that comes on the wings of change, borne by the courage that is ours by birth…know that the seasons will not forsake us….for God is present and therefore the whole of this grand and mysterious process is good, sacred…and worth celebrating.
