March 24th

Five Minutes on Friday #65

To Mend the World

Mary Oliver’s powerful poem LEAD refers to the heavy metal that pollutes water-ways and destroys wildlife.

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

BEATITUDES – Matthew 5.11-12

‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.  [nrsv]       

Wonderful news for you, when people slander you and persecute you and say all kinds of wicked things about you falsely because of me!  celebrate and rejoice; there’s a great reward for you in heaven.  That’s how they persecuted the prophets who went before you.     [N.T. Wright]

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, but we say blessed are the aggressors.        [Augsburger]

This week we come to the end of our comments on the Beatitudes.  I trust they will provide ongoing food for reflection and life.  As Stanley Hauerwas says:  ‘If such a community [of those who live the Beatitudes] does not exist, then unbelievers will have no way to know God’s peace.’

‘Nonretaliation is not a strategy for success, to get what we want.  Rather, Jesus calls us to nonretaliation because that is the form that God’s care of us in his cross.’   [Hauerwas]

‘The patience required to live the Beatitudes makes no sense unless we truly believe what we are told in the Revelation of John, ‘worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power.’  [Hauerwas]

‘In the cross alone is it true and real that suffering love …overcomes evil.  Participation in the cross is given to the disciples by the call into discipleship.  They are blessed in this visible community.’    [Dietrich Bonhoeffer]