The blessed martyrs

Ephesians 1.3-14; Mark 6.14-29

In the story we heard this morning from Mark’s gospel, we learn that John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed because he spoke up against the law of a powerful family in the name of the law of God.  Herod, the Roman-appointed governor of Galilee, had ‘married’ Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, even though she was still married to Philip.  The priests and rabbis apparently tolerated this situation because they were afraid of Herod’s power.  But John did not.  Presumably he believed that officials who sat in the place of David in Israel had a special responsibility to set an example for others.  In the prophetic tradition to which John belonged, the king was also the pastor or shepherd of the people.  It was therefore intolerable that any heir of David should publicly bless and normalise any behaviour that trampled the love of both God and neighbour underfoot.  John clearly made these observations in the public arena and, having suffered imprisonment for some time, was finally executed for his trouble.

Although Stephen is properly regarded as the first Christian martyr, John the Baptist can be regarded as the prototype of Christian martyrs in that (1) his essential calling was to be a witness to the coming of the Christ, God’s anointed king; (2) he lived that calling out by loudly proclaiming the difference between the values of the messianic kingdom and the values of the socio-political reality in which he lived; and (3) he was executed for his trouble.  This is what Christian martyrs have done ever since, have they not?  Think of the famous martyrs of the ancient world, whose essential crime was a refusal to put aside the Lordship of the Christ for the sake of keeping things nice with the Empire.  Think of modern martyrs like Oscar Romero or Dietrich Bonheoffer, who did not consider themselves free to tolerate the oppressive power of Military juntas or Nazi Führers because of their Christian responsibility to love God and neighbour before even their own safety and survival.  Think of the less famous martyrs of the Philippines or of West Papua, humble pastors and church leaders who dared to confront the murderous greed of their governments in the name of God’s love for the poor.  These many lost their lives not because they were careless or suicidal, but because they felt compelled to bear witness to the faith, hope and universal love that had been revealed to them in Jesus Christ.

It is perhaps difficult for we distracted occupants of the world’s ‘most liveable city’ to imagine our way into the minds and hearts of the martyrs.  For the martyrs believe in God’s blessing so powerfully that they are willing to entrust themselves to that blessing even to the point of death.  They believe, with the writer to the Ephesians, that they are destined to received all that God has promised in Jesus, a share in that great company whose sins and failures are forgiven, a share in the inheritance that the gospels describe as the kingdom of God.  We, on the other hand, are so regularly unsure of God’s blessing that our faith stumbles at the first hurdle.  How can God be God, we ask ourselves, when so many of God’s people live as though God didn’t really matter?  How can God be God when the world is so full of pain and evil?

With thoughts like these we display our lack of genuinely Christian faith.  For we are not called to believe in the church or its self-made righteousness.  We are called to believe in the righteousness of God in Christ, and in his infinite mercy towards all who place their trust in him.  Nor are we called to believe in the evils of the world, as though they had some kind of substance of their own.  We are called to believe in the God who, in Christ, has disarmed the powers and led them captive in his train.  In Christ the powers are revealed for what they are:  hollow nothings which have no more substance than the fear and awe of those who are taken in by their lies. In that light, we are then called to be part of the antidote of God would apply towards everything that is evil, a people of compassion who love our neighbours genuinely, offering care and shelter in the midst of whatever has befallen them.

So let us examine our lives and our faith in the light of the martyrs, their lives and their deaths.  For the martyrs are simply what we are all of us called to be:  ordinary people who trust themselves, absolutely, to an extraordinary God.  Make no mistake, the martyrs do not possess anything that you and I have not already received in baptism.  They have no super-human strength to withstand the darts of the evil one.  The martyrs are tempted in every way, like us, and their biographies are often littered with many failures along the way.  Yet the martyrs, like all the baptised, experience the call to cling not to their own works of righteousness, but to God, and to proclaim this mercy from God before the cruelty of powerful men.  For them, a time came to answer that call even to the point of endangering their lives.  In such a situation, every baptised Christian is forced to choose who they really believe in.  Do I believe in myself, and in the fears and anxieties that flood my body?  Or do I believe in the God of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen that my fears and anxieties, and even my death, may not have the final word?

We are fast coming to a time when even Australian Christians – who, for generations, have taken their freedom for granted  - may also be asked these kinds of questions.  With a government like ours – which so clearly despises God’s little ones who suffer because of persecution, poverty or illness - anything is possible.  The questions are certainly asked as we approach that time when our fragile bodies are no longer able to go on, and death suddenly becomes a reality we can no longer avoid.  But the questions are also asked in the midst of our lives, at the noonday of our powers.  I hear God asking these questions of me, every time I become obsessed with my own survival or success, every time I am tempted to worship at the idols of public opinion or economic aggrandisement, every time I am tempted to spurn the needs of another in order to sure up my own future.  When God comes to ask such questions of your own life, how will you respond?  Will you respond with the faith declared at your baptism, a faith in the love and mercy of God beyond even death?  Or will you cling, ever more tenaciously, to the shadows and illusions of the propagandists who dominate our meda?  That is the question for this day and this moment.  Think on the witness of the martyrs.  How will you respond?

The White-Robed Martyrs

Texts: Revelation 7.9-17; Psalm 34.1-10, 22; 1 John 3.1-3; Matthew 5.1-12

On this All Saints Day, I should like to turn to the Book of Revelation, which purports to be a vision given to a fellow named John, who happened to be in prison for the sake of Christ on the Greek island of Patmos.  The vision he is given takes place largely in heaven, and concerns things which ‘must soon take place’.  An angel instructs him to write down what he sees and make the contents available to each of seven churches in the region of Asia Minor. 

The Revelation to John is a fascinating read on many different levels.  First, it is written almost entirely in a poetic-symbolic language which scholars call ‘apocalyptic’.  Apocalyptic means, literally, an unveiling of the truth, which is kind’ve ironic, because most readers find the symbols of Revelation quite mysterious and impenetrable.  The book becomes much more readable if you happen to have (a) a vivid imagination of the kind that is able to appreciate fantasy or science-fiction novels; and (b) a fair-to-middling appreciation of Jewish literature and theology.  If you have neither, then I’m afraid you will continue to struggle!  The book is also fascinating because of the insight it gives into the self-understanding of Christians who are being persecuted for their faith.  Most scholars date the book as having been written sometime in the final decade of the 1^st century, when the early persecution of Christians by the Roman state was just beginning to become more pronounced.  In many ways, the Book of Revelation was written to assure a persecuted community of Christians that God remains faithful to his people, and to encourage that community to also remain faithful to God, even in the face of strong opposition.  Not surprisingly, the Book of Revelation became a firm favourite of various persecuted churches down through history, while it has been hardly read at all by churches that felt or feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’ with their political environment.

Armenian martyrs 1916

What I should like to do on this All Saints Day is ask a particular question of the Book of Revelation, and see what answers it might yield:  who are the saints and what is their vocation? For the sake of time I shall have to be mercilessly brief and to the point.  The answers I give may therefore succeed only in raising yet more questions in your minds and hearts, which I shall not be able to address right now.  If this is the case, then please do feel free to chase me afterwards.  As you are probably aware, I thrive on being chased about such things!

So, ‘Who are the saints, and what is their vocation or purpose in life?’  Well, according to the passage we read a moment a go, the saints are a great crowd of ordinary Christian people who are marked by the following characteristics:

1. they are drawn from every language, tribe and ethnicity
2. they stand before the throne of God and of Christ, ‘the Lamb’, praising God day and night
3. they wear robes of white, and hold palm branches in their hands
4. they are people who have survived something called ‘the great ordeal’
5. their robes have been, rather strangely, washed white in the blood of the Lamb
6. they are sheltered and protected from pain and evil by God
7. the Lamb, again rather strangely, is their shepherd; he leads them toward something called the ‘springs of the water of life’.

 What does all this mean?  Well, it’s not that difficult to work out if you bother to read the rest of the book.  The saints are those who trust Jesus Christ with their lives, absolutely—so absolutely that they are willing to choose even death over the prospect of serving authorities that would usurp Christ’s rule, especially the authority of the state.  This become clear once you begin unpacking some of those mysterious apocalyptic symbols.  The ‘great ordeal’, for example, is an extended time of persecution in which Christians are tempted to abandon their faith for the sake of more cosy relations with a morally questionable state.  In Revelation, the Roman state is called ‘the Great Babylon’ and its emperor ‘the Beast’.  The beast’s demand that every citizen worship the beast and do everything that it says is an apocalyptic way of talking about the tendency of the state to undermine the absolute rule of Christ in the lives of his followers.  There can be no doubt that the early Christians would have had a much easier time if they had chosen to put their beliefs aside at certain points, in order to obey the law of the land.  But the Book of Revelation will allow no such compromise.  The saints are those who will NOT compromise.  The saints are those who a therefore willing to choose persecution, prison, and even death, over capitulation to the state and its values.

Some of you may be asking, ‘What was so wrong with the Roman state?  In what ways did it threaten Christian beliefs and values?’  The answer is at once stark and subtle.  Starkly, the Roman emperor demanded the absolute allegiance (even the worship) of his citizens.  He demanded that every citizen of the empire bow before his image, as the embodiment of absolute authority in heaven and on earth.  What this actually meant in daily life was much more subtle.  Worshipping the empire meant accepting and enacting its ethics.  It meant accepting that slaves, women and children were the property of men, and could therefore be treated or mis-treated according to men’s whims and fancies.  It meant accepting that those who were richer than yourself deserved your fawning obeisance, while those poorer than yourself were to be regarded as a resource to be exploited.  It meant accepting the superiority of Roman blood, such that the Roman state had a right to invade, subjugate and enslave the peoples of other lands and nations.  It meant accepting your fate in life, and never questioning your station or fortune. 

You can now see, I am sure, why Christians got themselves into trouble with the Romans.  The early Christians preached a classless society, a society in which it one’s social and ethnic markers were of no relevance whatsoever.  In Christ, they believed, all the social distinctions which make men and women somehow ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than one another, has been done away with.  In baptism, they believed, the human person was immersed in Christ’s death and resurrection, putting to death their social and economic significance in favour of a new identity which came as a pure gift from God.  That is why the Book of Revelation imagines the saints in robes of white:  white is the colour of baptism; white is removing of every colour, all that one may or may not have achieved in life, in order to accept the pure gift of God’s acceptance and love.  It is also why Revelation insists that not even the threat of death should dissuade the Christian from their baptismal vow to obey only Christ.  For if, in baptism, the Christian had already died to the authority of the world, why would being killed, physically, make any difference at all?  If, in the end, it was only God’s acceptance that ultimately mattered, what could the evils of state-sanctioned torture possibly steal away? 

In the end, the Book of Revelation does not see even the threat of violence and death as a power that is able to overcome the power of God.  For its vision of the saints is one in which their refuge in God’s care has been won for them by the violent death of their own Lord at the hands of the Roman state.  Note well.  The blood that makes them clean is not the blood of their own martyrdom, but that of their Lord Jesus, the one imaged as a slaughtered lamb.  The saints persevere not because there is anything special or heroic about them, but simply because they place their faith and trust in Christ, who alone has overcome sin, evil, and death.  They believe that he can carry them in his wake, as it were, all the way to the banqueting room of heaven.

Let me conclude with a few remarks about the relevance of this vision of the saints for our own time, our own sainthood, if you like. 

Since the upheavals of the Reformation, the Western church has settled into a fairly cosy relationship with the state.  In our own time, most of us have grown up assuming that the aims of our state authorities and the aims of the church were more or less compatible.  We therefore assumed that there was nothing particularly odd about being a good citizen as well as a good Christian.  I suspect it is time, however, to wake up from these assumptions, for everywhere in the Western world, the state is departing from even the thin veneer of Christianity.  In Germany there is no longer any doubt about this, of course, because there the state went on a mid-twentieth-century rampage, which left the church in tatters because it believed, even well into the second world war, that Hitler was a Christian—even when he was hanging Swastikas in the churches and putting its more errant clergy in prison.  In allied countries, however, many of us still believe that the state is more or less Christian, if only because some of our political leaders claim to be churchgoers.

I put it to you, however, that the time of multi-lateral co-operation between church and state is coming to an end in the West.  When the Australian state refuses to engage seriously with Aboriginal people over the tragic consequences of our colonisation; when it fails to care for people living in poverty; when it locks people away for years at a time without there being any kind of trial; when it proposes legislation in which anyone who expresses opposition to state policy may be imprisoned without charge or even shot dead; when it refuses to honour its obligations to asylums seekers under international law; then the alliance between church and state has well and truly come to an end.  In the present circumstances, it may well be time for the Western churches to take out the Book of Revelation, to dust it off, and to begin a serious study.  For here is a book that may teach us a great deal about how to be a saint when the state is showing every sign of becoming a dangerous beast.  I recommend its vision of sainthood to you this morning.  Not as a curious historic relic, but at a model for our own life and times.

'Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .'

Text: Matthew 5.1-12

Matthew's beatitudes summarise the essential spirit of Jesus' teaching in much the same way as the ‘Ten commandments’ summarise the Jewish Law.  The first hearers of the beatitudes would have been familiar with their form:  “Blessed are the so-and-so, for such and such will be theirs.”  This was a common form of blessing in the Mediterranean world, often used in general conversation as an aphorism which reinforced the common values that everyone shared . . . .  “How blessed is the man whose has many children; he shall have an easy retirement!”  The main function of the form was to exalt and support the status quo, the way things were . . .  “Blessed is the man who is sober in business; he shall enjoy much wine.”  Matthew's use of the form is striking, because it does precisely the opposite of what it is supposed to do.  Instead of reinforcing the most common values and attitudes, Matthew's beatitudes actually seek to subvert these values by giving a new status to all those who were regarded, at the time, as stupid, unlucky, or cursed by the gods:  the poor, the mourners, the persecuted.  It is not an exaggeration to say, in fact, that the beatitudes are more interested in changing the world for the sake of these people, than in affirming the world as it stands.

Now, over the years, the revolutionary power of the beatitudes was effectively watered-down through sentimental preaching and the establishment of state churches as an instrument of the aristocracy and merchant classes.  In this setting, the beatitudes were heard as nothing more than exemplary religious ideals which were of no practical use in everyday life.  They made sense when associated with heaven, God, and the end of human life, but they did not make sense with regard to the real world of daily toil and commerce.  Thankfully that time is past, for most of us at least.  We no longer live in a world dominated by State churches or, indeed, any church at all.  I suspect, nevertheless, that the revolutionary vision of the beatitudes remains quite lost.  For we are moderns, most of us, and moderns are likely to regard the beatitudes, along with the rest of Christianity, as little more than a curious oddity, a relic from a no-longer-relevant past.  They have nothing to say to us in our brave new world of medical miracles and technologised capital.

Well, we could capitulate to that point of view.  Most do.  But let me ask you this.  How would your life be different if you were to take a renewed interest in the studying the beatitudes and taking them seriously?  Note that I'm talking about your life, for the moment, not the life of the whole world or the whole church.  In modernity, we have been hoodwinked into thinking that what happens in the world and the church is beyond our influence.  When addressed in these more general terms, we moderns always seem to think that the speaker is talking to someone else.  So I want to make it clear that I am addressing each of you personally, as ‘individuals’.  How would your own life be different if you took the beatitudes seriously?

Perhaps you are a person who is satisfied about your life and the way you live it.  Perhaps you believe that you are doing all that God or the Universe requires, and that you will be welcomed into heaven with open arms.  Or . . .  Perhaps you are a person who is deeply aware that you haven't got it together, that despite all efforts to the contrary, you cannot produce your own contentment.  You are deeply aware that every joy in life, every moment of happiness, every sense of well-being comes as a gift from the Lord of love.  Whatever the case, the Lord stands before this morning and says, “Blessed are the ones who know the poverty of their own religion, for God belongs to them.”

Perhaps you a person absolutely at home in the modern age.  You welcome the new technology and you know how to use it.  For you, the world is full of promise and opportunity.  There's a dollar to be made around every corner.  The good life comes to those who work hard and make the most of their natural creativity.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who mourns the loss of a more gentle age,  when people knew their neighbours and looked out for each other; when the strong helped the weak, when the businessperson was content with his or her share and felt no need to buy out his or her competitors;  when the fruits of one's labour were shared with those who were poor. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed are the ones who mourn this passing, blessed are the gentle of heart, blessed are those who are merciful. They will receive back a hundred-fold of all they have given.  They shall inherit the earth.”

Perhaps you are a person who is content to live in your enclave of privilege and plenty.  You see your comforts as your due for hard work and right living.  Perhaps you turn a blind eye to the homeless in your own city, or the impoverished millions in that far-away place called the 'two-thirds world'.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who sees that your own peace is utterly interdependent with that of the whole world.  Perhaps you feel hungry and thirsty because so many others are hungry and thirsty.  Perhaps you weep and cry aloud because so many are denied their fair share of the earth's plenty. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.  Their hunger will be satisfied as they work to fill the stomachs of others.  Blessed are those who work for peace; they will know themselves to be children of God.”

Perhaps you are a person whose attention is always divided.  Deeply discontented with your life, you leap upon every fad which comes your way.  You buy what the advertisers tell you to buy.  You wear the right clothes and watch the right TV programmes.  Your values change according to your appetites for the day.  Perhaps, in your emptiness, you have become interested in astrology and bizarre theories about a spiritual world populated by angels and demons who control everything we do.  You feel like you have no control over your life, that you are a victim of forces far more powerful.  Or . . .  perhaps you are a person who knows that every heart is restless until it finds its home in God.  Perhaps you have seen that the pure vision of truth and beauty is forever being clouded by our desire for the lesser things. Perhaps you have renounced your idols for the sake of finding the one true God. Whatever the case, the Lord stands before you this morning and says, “Blessed is the heart that wills one thing, which seeks after God and God only.  In seeking, that heart will be found by God.”

If we were to study the beatitudes, and take them seriously, we would become what our faith tradition calls prophets, saints and mystics.  To be a prophet, a saint or a mystic is not only for those who have gone before us, those mysterious figures hidden away in some unattainable age that is no longer entirely real.  For every ordinary Christian, any who would take their faith seriously, is also called to be a prophet, a saint and a mystic.  Even today.  A mystic is one who makes communion with God their one goal in life.  A saint is one who has renounced worldly power and prestige for the sake of serving God.  A prophet is one who resists the values of the age in order to live the values of God's kingdom.  All Christians are called to be mystics, saints and prophets.  All Christians. 

Through the reading of these beatitudes, God today challenges all of us (myself included) to have done with trivial pursuits, and embrace the great vocation that God has put before us.  The vocation of blessedness.  Not ‘happiness’, mind you, as some would have it—even the “Good News” Bible.  Blessedness: a deep-down knowing that you are in the right place, the place where God would have you be.  Blessedness is not about ease or comfort.  Indeed, you can expect some level of vilification or even persecution for your efforts, as Matthew says.  But you will be blessed.  You will belong to God.  You will become an agent for the dawning of a wonderful new age in the world, and you will be granted that perfect peace for which all human beings seek, even in the midst of all that is wrong with the world.  In all seriousness, my friends, what else really matters?

Shalom Dreaming - hope and endurance

Texts: Isaiah 65.17-25; Luke 21.5-19

When the exiles returned to Jerusalem, their prophets imagined a time when the misery of former times would no longer be remembered: the fundamental injustice and corruption of Hebrew society in the period before Jerusalem's destruction; the fall of Jerusalem to the foreign invader; the captivity of Israel's noble families in Babylon.  In the passage from Isaiah, the prophet declares that these memories of trauma and disgrace are to be put aside forever, because God has begun the work of making a new Jerusalem out of the ashes of the old, a Jerusalem characterised by peace, or Shalom.

Where the former Jerusalem had ignored the terms of covenant with Yahweh, this new Jerusalem would be a 'joy and delight' to its God.  The resources of Israel would no longer be concentrated into the hands of the aristocratic few.  The peasantry would no longer suffer the early deaths of malnutrition and disease, because they would now enjoy equal access to the land's bounty.  Neither would the majority be alienated from the fruits of their labour.  No longer would they work for others without just recompense.  No, in this new Jerusalem of Yahweh's making, the poor would live in the houses they built and enjoy the harvest of their own planting.  Shalom.

Alongside these covenantal social reforms, the prophet anticipates a new depth of spiritual communion between the people and their God.  In former times, the people had cried out to God for deliverance from their ills.  Yet God, on many occasions, had seemed distant and unresponsive: as distant and unresponsive as the people sins had made them from God.  But now God would come closer than ever before.  Even before the cry of distress came to people's lips, God would already be present to offer assurance and care.  Here the prophet implies not so much a change in God as a change in the people's approach to God.  In times gone by, the people would cry out to God for help.  Yet they had shown little inclination to mend their ways by returning to the peaceful terms of the covenant.  The prophet dreams of a time when the spirituality of the people is thoroughly covenantal, where the people are more intimately and wholeheartedly lovers of God.  Shalom.

Finally, the prophet indulges in a little cosmological dreaming.  Not only will the people enjoy peace, but the non-human order also. The imagery here is quite beautiful:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;

the lion shall eat straw like an ox;

. . . they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.

This is a vision of cosmic peace, where even 'natural' enmities have been put aside; where even carnivorous animals become vegetarians!

 

Now, contrast all of that with the rather bleak vision of Jerusalem presented by Luke's gospel, a Jerusalem that would have been profoundly disappointing to the prophets we've been discussing. For this Jerusalem of the 1st century, far from experiencing covenantal Shalom, is once more the scene of terror and dismay, this time at the hands of the Romans. At the time in which Luke writes, the temple, which so poignantly symbolised the hope of Shalom for so many Jews, was once more in ruins. And with it, one might conclude, so was the ancient Hebraic dream of peace.

 

How does a community deal with disappointment on this scale, particularly a religious community, which has dreamed such wonderful dreams—dreams about a world reborn to justice, truth and love? How did the black community of America cope when their great dreamer, Martin Luther King Jr., was taken by a sniper's bullet? How did the Salvadoran community deal with the death of their courageous archbishop, Oscar Romero, who had dared to imagine an El Salvador where the poor would be destitute no longer? The easiest thing to do, it seems to me, is to give up the dream, to conclude that the dream is a hoax; or, perhaps, that such dreams belong to an era of idealism which we have wisely left behind. People who come to such conclusions often join the very forces against which they have raged for so long. Like the hippies of the peace and love generation, who grew up to become the kings of western capitalism, thus demonstrating that they were really just as greedy and individualistic as those they had formerly accused.

 

I must confess to having felt the temptation to abandon the Christian dream on many occasions. Whenever I see a disaster like the inter-ethnic massacres in the Sudan a few of years ago, I feel that temptation. Or the civil wars in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria. For these conflicts are not, in any way, fated or necessary. They are the results of centuries of co-operation between ethnically-based oligarchies and foreign colonialism. They are the result of the greedy exercise of power and a basic lack of care and respect for people and their future. For years, ordinary people in each of these places have been agitating against the power of the privileged few over their lives. And, eventually, they each gained a victory of sorts. The promise of free elections and an end to violence. Yet now, as we speak, the dreams which came into being through the poet-politicians of each of these communities . . . with so many dead and dying, where is all that now? And when I see the decline of genuine Christian witness in the midst of our own increasingly stratified and materialistic society, I ask myself the question: what am I to do? How can I resist the power of these enormous forces?

 

In that context, the exhortations of Jesus for those who are being persecuted take on a new power. Here in the western church we are not being persecuted with the ferocity that Christians were being persecuted towards the close of the new Testament period. And we are not being killed and maimed like countless Christian workers in Africa, Burma, the Philippines and the Middle-East. But we are facing a time of terrible decision. In the face of the colonising and secularising forces of western capitalism, how are we to respond? Do we simply join in with it all? Do we simply capitulate to the New World Order where the rich get richer and the poor die young. Or do we somehow find the Christian dream once more, and live by it, no matter how difficult?

 

Jesus stands amongst us this morning, as he did in the Lukan community of old, and encourages us to keep living the dream. 'Don't run after false messiahs', he says. These are the American-styled ‘pentecostal’ preachers who promise peace when there is no peace, who promise a personal relationship with a ‘Jesus’ who does nothing except numb your heart and spirit to the realities of everyday life in much the same way as alcohol does. A real Messiah, I submit, would ask us to bear witness to the Christian dream right in the middle of everyday life, with our eyes open and our hearts and minds alert. Which is precisely what Jesus asks of us: to offer a critique of everyday life in the light of Shalom. To protest. To say it is not good enough that so many thousands of children die of malnutrition, that Aboriginal children suffer in squalor, that the resources of the future are being exported to provide for the greed of today. Don't be afraid, says Jesus, when you make your protest before even the captains of industry or the officials of government. If you keep living in the dream—if you allow it to well up into your thinking, your feeling, your praying—then you will find wisdom and words to do it justice. 

 

But most of all, when all seems lost, when the whole world seems mad on destroying itself, keep believing the dream. For if you do this, you will, in the end, actually become the dream. You will, in the words of the new Testament, become its body and spirit in the world. For the dream is Christ—all that he did and said as an incarnation of God’s own dreaming or Spirit. Insofar as we allow Christ to become the primary compass for our own living, insofar as we allow his own dream and Spirit to become ours, that is the extent to which the kingdom of Shalom will arrive in our own place and time. That is how the dream will stay alive in the world. So what will you do? Capitulate to the way things are? Or make yourself available for God’s dreaming?