Micah 4:1-7 (see also Isaiah 2:1-4)
4 In
days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s
house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
2 and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem.
3 He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
4 but they shall all sit under their
own vines
and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of
hosts has spoken.
5 For all the peoples walk,
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
forever and ever.
6 In that day, says the Lord,
I will assemble the lame
and gather those who have been driven away,
and those whom I have afflicted.
7 The lame I will make the remnant,
and those who were cast off, a strong nation;
and the Lord will
reign over them in Mount Zion
now and forevermore.
Revelation
21:1-5a, 22:1-2
21 Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed
away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy
city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a
bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud
voice from the throne saying,
“See,
the home of God is among mortals. He
will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples, and God
himself will be with them;
4 he will wipe every tear from their
eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and
crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making
all things new.”
22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through
the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree
of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month;
and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
A
‘cutting’ of tree wisdom (Genny Tunbridge)
Trees were once vital in human
warfare – used to build chariots, spears, arrows, bows, siege engines, gun
stocks, ships, ammunition crates, pit props and duckboards for trenches…
The two world wars of the 20th
century, in addition to their human death toll, saw massive destruction of
trees – not just from the direct devastation to entire forests on battle sites
caused by bombing and shelling, but also from the huge increase in demand for timber
for trenches and all the logistical demands of the war machine. Half Britain’s
productive forests, and alarming amounts from the then colonies, were cut down
to feed WWI. Similar worldwide deforestation was caused by WWII.
The common or European hornbeam,
Carpinus betulus, has a very dense, hard wood, resistant to wear, thus once
used for wheels, handles, shafts, wooden gears. Romans apparently used hornbeam
for their chariots. Maybe this toughness
is why a hornbeam was the one tree left standing after the battle of Delville
Wood on the Somme. That hornbeam is still alive and flourishing today,
surrounded by newly planted trees, part of a memorial to the South African
forces who fought there.
Although our National Memorial
Arboretum is relatively new (first trees planted in 1997), there is a long –
and growing - tradition of planting trees as a memorial to those lost in war.
They live on long after those they commemorate, even those who plant them,
giving solace and hope. Are we learning
to stop cutting down trees for war, and start growing them for peace?
Introduction to the theme (Al Barrett)
We’re in the second of four weeks of the ‘Kingdom season’,
the time at the turn of the Christian calendar when we ‘remember the future’:
looking back to remember what has been, to grieve for those we have lost, but
also to remember God’s promises of future healing, justice and peace. Promises
that find their voice in the prophets of the Hebrew bible, promises that find
their fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth – himself both standing in that line of
Jewish prophets, but also ‘the word made flesh’, as we will proclaim again
soon. But what comes to birth with Jesus, the fulfilment of the prophets’
hopes, is not yet complete. The vision glimpsed by Micah and Isaiah, and by
John the Visionary (the writer of Revelation), describes a world that we’re
still longing for, praying for, working for, aching for – a world that is not
yet the world we live in.
It’s in that context – this season of the liturgical year,
and the ‘big picture’ stretched out between the Hebrew prophets and the coming
Kingdom of peace, with Jesus at the centre – that we Christians mark
Remembrance Sunday. It’s surely a coincidence that Armistice Day fell when it
did (11th November 1918). But from a Christian perspective it ‘makes
sense’ to join the wider ‘secular’ remembering of these days (focusing particularly
on those who’ve died in the wars and conflicts of the world) with the ‘big
picture’ remembering of this liturgical season.
When Christian and ‘secular’ moments coincide, however, we
always need to ask ourselves: how do we mark this moment? which story do we
tell? where do we draw the boundaries around the space we’re inhabiting – and
around who is included? Sometimes – as has been the case with our recent Black
History Month – the challenge to remember (to pay attention, to celebrate
stories of hope and struggle and reflect on our past and present failures) has
come from beyond the Church, stretching the horizons of us Christians,
especially those of us who are Christian and white. At other times – and this
week is one of the most important examples of this – our wider cultural
traditions, especially national traditions, need to be challenged and expanded
by the story with which the Church has been entrusted.
Seen within the Christian ‘big picture’, Remembrance Sunday
can never be limited to the affinities of nationhood. The visions of Micah and
Revelation are about the coming together of the whole world and all its
peoples – a world where national identities are a thing of the past, along with
war and death and mourning and pain. Our remembering, this week, must include
the whole world – including those who have at times been labelled our
‘enemies’, including the non-human world that has itself also been scarred by
wars and conflicts.
Seen within the Christian ‘big picture’, there is only one
cause which requires the giving of everything, even our lives: not ‘national
security’ or a particular ‘way of life’, but the healing, peace and justice of
God’s kingdom – a world where swords and guns are melted down and turned into
equipment for gardening; where those who have been ‘strong’ are brought to
judgment, and where those who have been wounded (the ‘lame’) and excluded (the
‘cast off’) are at the very centre of the new creation.
Between the prophets and the new creation, we find ourselves
in the middle of the story. The ‘middle’ is the space where we have to
do the hard, complicated, compromised work of working out how we join
with God in the work of ‘making all things new’. But the middle is also the
space into which Jesus comes, and lives, and calls us to follow, and
accompanies us on the way.
Reflection (Ruth Harley)
Today’s
readings are all about the future. The future can feel difficult to talk about
at the moment. In these strange and uncertain times in which we live, even
writing these words on Monday, knowing that they will be read and heard on
Sunday, feels like something of a hostage to fortune. Who knows what might have
happened by then?!
But here in
our Bible readings we have a vision for the future, or rather two visions,
written centuries apart, but they are very clearly visions of the same future,
seen from different angles. This is a future of peace and healing, justice and
equity. This future is the kin-dom of God – and it is on its way.
And what a
future it is! Where swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into
pruning hooks, where war and death and pain will all be things of the past.
What a beautiful vision, and what a far cry from our present reality. It is, I
think, no accident that visions of the future when God’s rule is fully
realised, appear most often in the Bible as poetry rather than prose. Perhaps
we need the depth and subtlety of the poet’s craft to even begin to grasp the
enormity of the future God promises, especially when it seems at odds with our
present experience.
These are
indeed beautiful visions. But what good, you may ask, are they to us now? And I
must confess that was my first thought as I read the opening of the reading of
the Malachi reading: “In days to come…” is all very well, but what about here
and now? What about us?
We read of
people coming together from every nation to worship God. What use is that in
the face of a lockdown which doesn’t even allow us to gather with our
neighbours? We read of God gathering together those who have been driven away.
But what use is that to all those people who feel now that they are being
driven to the fringes of society by an elite that just doesn’t care? We read
about swords beaten into ploughshares and about God’s justice which is
righteous. But what use is that in a world riven with injustice and violence,
where teenagers are stabbed in our streets, the national and international
political landscape seems to grow more unstable, and governments continue to
spend outrageously more on nuclear weapons than they do on housing or health or
education? What comfort is it to hear “neither shall they learn war any more”
even as we remember all those who have died in so many conflicts since ‘the war
to end all wars’, which did no such thing?
And then
there is the Revelation reading. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying
and pain will be no more.” That sounds wonderful, but what about now? We are
mourning now, we are hurting and crying now, and so many people are dying now
that can feel hard to untangle the individual lives from the unimaginably big
numbers. The planet on which we live and depend is dying now, and how does that
fit in with a vision of a new heaven and a new earth?
All these
questions, and more, are ones with which we might approach these texts. All of
them, and more, are questions we might want to bring to God – and we shouldn’t
be afraid to do so. God is big enough to handle even our biggest, scariest,
most anguished questions.
There are a
number of ways we can bring these visionary texts into conversation with the
reality of life today. We could say: “it’s ok, none of this is important,
because in the end God will make all things well, and that’s all that matters.”
I think we can all hear how hollow that would sound to any of us who, in
whatever ways, are suffering in the present. And theology (by which I don’t
just mean academic theology, but all the ways we think and speak about God)
which doesn’t resonate with real life just doesn’t ring true.
Instead we
could say: “yes, things are bad now, but we just have to hang on through the
tough stuff and it’ll be worth it in the end.” And sometimes, when we’re
hanging on by a thread, that promise that things will change, it won’t always
be like this, is what we most need to hear. But it perhaps raises more
questions than it answers: is God indifferent to human suffering? Does God not
care? These, perhaps, are the sort of questions the authors of the Psalms are
wrestling with when they cry out, “How long, O Lord, how long?”
We could
say: “We just need to sort it all out, and then things will be ok. There’s
always something we can do.” And often there is, but sometimes there isn’t, and
often what we can do never feels like enough. We must resist the idea that if
we just tried harder, did more, were better people, we could make everything
ok. It’s bad for us, and it’s bad theology. We don’t have that sort of power.
Only God does. Salvation does not depend on us – thank God! The vision of God’s
kin-dom which we receive in scripture is wholly God’s gift, wholly grace freely
given.
So where
does that leave us? We are living in the between times, the now-and-not-yet of
the kin-dom. In Jesus, God’s promises find their fulfilment, but not yet their
completion. It is this position of incompleteness and of promise which we
recognise at Remembrance as we not only remember the dead, but also commit
ourselves to work and pray for peace in whatever imperfect ways we can,
trusting that all our fragile efforts will one day be subsumed by the perfect
peace of God’s kind-dom.
We find
ourselves grappling with the tension between the reality of the world as it is,
and the vision of the world as it shall be. And somewhere in that tension, if
we sit with it honestly instead of turning away in search of neat answers or
quick solutions, we will find hope. Perhaps we will find it in the poetic
visions of scripture, or in the unexpected kindness of a neighbour, or in the
beauty of the world around us, or in the faithfulness of our companions on the
way. Hope that we are part of a bigger picture. Hope that we are held in the
hand and the heart of God who loves us infinitely. Hope that all these bright,
visionary promises which seem so impossible now, will indeed come to pass –
somehow, someday - because nothing is impossible with God.
And clinging to that hope, which is so precious and so fragile, clinging closely to God in whom we live and move and have our being, we can find strength just enough for the next step, the next day, the next breath.
Questions for reflection / discussion
As I read / listened to the
readings and reflections for this week…
·
what
did I notice, or what particularly stood out for me?
·
what
did they make me wonder, or what questions am I pondering?
·
what
have they helped me realise?
·
is there anything I want to do or
change in the light of this week's topic?
A prayer for this week:
BLESSING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
Which is to say
this blessing
is always.
Which is to
say
there is no place
this blessing
does not long
to cry out
in lament,
to weep its words
in sorrow,
to scream its lines
in sacred rage.
Which is to
say
there is no day
this blessing ceases
to whisper
into the ear
of the dying,
the despairing,
the terrified.
Which is to
say
there is no moment
this blessing refuses
to sing itself
into the heart
of the hated
and the hateful,
the victim
and the victimizer,
with every last
ounce of hope
it has.
Which is to say
there is none
that can stop it,
none that can
halt its course,
none that will
still its cadence,
none that will
delay its rising,
none that can keep it
from springing forth
from the mouths of us
who hope,
from the hands of us
who act,
from the hearts of us
who love,
from the feet of us
who will not cease
our stubborn, aching
marching, marching
until this
blessing
has spoken
its final word,
until this blessing
has breathed
its benediction
in every place,
in every tongue:
Peace.
Peace.
Peace.
(from Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrows: A Book
of Blessings for Times of Grief)
Activities / conversation-starters with young (and not-so-young!) people
On Remembrance Sunday (8th November), find a tree in our neighbourhood where you can take some time to remember…
Tie a red streamer to remember all those who have had their lives taken from them in war and conflicts in our world
Tie a white streamer to re-commit yourself to Jesus’ way of peace-making
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