Ordinary Time 16: The Path to Shalom

Tim started his sermon today, talking about two approaches to understanding what wholeness is and how peace can be established. Both revolve around the brokenness, struggle, failure, and negative aspects of life.

The first aims to exclude and eliminate these parts of life in order to achieve wholeness and peace. The second involves embracing and reconciling oneself to these aspects of life.

When talking about the brokenness, the struggle, the failure and the negative, Tim said these things are “hardcoded into creation for our benefit.” They, he said, help us to learn and change and grow.

What are your responses to these ideas? What thoughts or feeling surface for you in response to the idea that these difficult things are hardcoded into creation for our benefit?

What are your thoughts about the differences between the first and second approaches described above? What kind of experience do you have with each? What have your experiences taught you?

Is there a difference between the approach that you mentally “better” and the approach you might default to in troubling times? What does that look like for you?

Tim talked about prophets as people who feel the falseness of the age and refuse to go along with it. He talked about three elements of the prophetic imagination: feeling the pain of the marginalized, criticizing injustice, and energizing toward a better future.

Take a moment to consider people that you consider to act, at least at times, as prophets in our world today. What is it that prompts these people to come to your mind? What traits do they have? What actions do they take?

Consider the paradigm of the prophetic imagination. In what ways are you participating in this way of being in the world? How does it feel to consider yourself as a participant in this type of activity?

As he closed his message, Tim talked about the way that we are still at church in exile and that the story told through the section of the Old Testament helps us know what to do:

We still gather in small communities, read the scriptures, talk about faithfulness instead of success. We break bread together, and put our hope in the future where everyone belongs and knows the love of God. We don’t try to be perfect, and mostly we just struggle and fail. But we confess, we change and we grow, we forgive, and we reconcile.

These things, Tim said, help keep us from becoming people who fall for the lie of empire.

What are your thoughts about this? This list of things may seem to describe small actions, but what is the size of their impacts? What experience do you have with choosing these paths and how do they shape and form you, your experience of the world, and the world around you in which you do what you can to create and extend shalom?

Do they feel like meaningful action? Why or why not?