Dangerous times, dialectics and disasters

It is easy to make room in our heads for chilling natural and human disasters, gun-toting children, imported killers, honey-tongued liars and other such associates of evil. All we have to do is to go to the Scriptures and reap the chosen verses that tell us to make up a bed for them in our lives, because ‘the Bible says’ these things will happen. After that, we can sleep in peace, sharing our pillow with these pestilences, our tables with these prodigals, mixing our worship of God with disgraceful allowances for child abuse, social injustice and violence against the Almighty!{{more}} We are doing quite well, actually, cohabiting with evil, unconsciously, as well as fully well knowing what we are doing. We have been becoming an organic part of the reproductive cycle of cruelty. Didn’t we watch the masquerade of impotence, pretending to be an exercise of people’s power in the recent election season in the USA?

I was in the class there when the same powerless victims of the spin doctors sought to release their heads from the ruling class diet of Scripture verses. They consulted their gang-leader, Yehoshua. They were puzzled. ‘Boss, they said, this brukup comrade in the corner here, how you see his condition here? How he come so, and how he can get out of bondage? One set of teaching says that is his mother’s sin that have him blind from the day he born. At the same time, doesn’t the prophet say that children teeth can’t get edge because their parents eat sour grape/mango? Doesn’t the prophet teach that each one has to bear the cost of his and her own transgression, but again, how he could sin before he was born? Who have to carry the blame for the blind, brukup comrade, here? And they have too much people like him, is too much boss. In truth, We wanted our chief-leader to pick the right scripture verse to put our minds at ease about the ton load of disaster all around Judea and Galilee and Haiti and SVG. I not shame to admit my scene; I really don’t follow what the preachers saying about how we bless more than the rest! Nah, that is dotish people talk; God doesn’t deal so. I wanted to settle my mind about the youths who losing their lives just so, and the tsunami people who wash way, and the land that sink down, and the airport that can’t done. That is why I watch every word that come out of Yeshua’s mouth. Which verse was he going to pick and show us God’s revelation? But Yehushua never pick a scripture verse. He teach so different from the rest preachers and scholars. Listen.

The Dialectic

Yeshua gathered us in his teaching cluster around brukup and he said: This is not a blame game dispensation. Don’t try to make this into a situation that we can explain and leave it so, cast in concrete with a verse of Scripture. Brukup is not supposed to stay brukup, just because you can throw a scripture verse at him and make it stick. Then Yeshua made us think a new thought. ‘What,’ he suggested, ‘and who is the opposite of brukup?’ My mouth suddenly shut up and my mind start working in a new revolution. You know something, I never heard a word that Yeshua said after that. A new creation was happening in me. I saw things unfolding, changing; we doing stuff that we never did before; God, blessing us with abundant will and a missioning, inventive spirit. And when I came down to my senses, brukup was up and trodding away with a strange slow, but sure spring in his step, going to the riverside, while Yeshua and the gang were on the road to town. Through brukup, God was showing us a purpose in or for our lives. Distress and disaster were not to be set in concrete. In them, we face a criticism and a challenge. Creation and the cosmos are a calling from God for us to come to greater care and knowledge and bonding with God’s unfolding work. Instead we focus our research on arsenals of deadly aggression and conquest. We leave creation to groan our neglectfulness, and failures in discipleship. The New Testament letter to the Church in Rome puts it quite clearly in verses 17-19 for the thoughtful conscience. Disasters are the cry of a neglected creation, a groaning cosmos, longing for its liberated human, co-creation to come to bed, to come to explore, to come to love God’s glorious purpose. The cosmos, like brukup, is not to remain brukup. There is an opposite of brukup for creation and for the criminalities we endure. We have dialectic missions to fulfil. END, Oscar.

John 9. 1-3; Romans 8 17-19; Colonial Dinosaurs.