...remade, for good

We are called to be God’s people, showing by our lives his grace,

one in heart and one in spirit, sign of hope for all the race.

Let us show how he has changed us and remade us as his own;

let us share our lives together as we shall around his throne.

---Thomas A. Jackson, 1973

In a new year’s effort to loosen the grip of the 24-hour news cycle on my attention (and life), I have been watching (less contentious) house-flipping and home renovation shows on HGTV and DIY networks. These are the shows where homeowners or professional renovators take tired, dated houses and turn them into places anyone would be proud to call home. The renovators have one goal in mind—to ‘flip’ the home for a hefty profit if they are professionals, to create a cozy family gathering place if they are handy homeowners.

In this hymn, Thomas Jackson imagines God as our re-modeler, creating something ‘one’ out of something scattered, disparate. In this wordplay, God is recreating us as a home, as a family, as a reflection and a sign.

In his work 1939 ‘Life Together’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.

God has remade us, for this life together, forever, for good.

...in the gap

Stand for truth and cry for justice, share with those who don’t belong,

And remember as you serve them, sing for those who have no song.

Sing a joyful alleluia, praising God in all you do,

And remember as you witness, God is singing over you!

---Wesley Forbis, 2000

This fall our First Bells are learning a handbell setting of the American folk hymn ‘Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley’. I love the arrangement, and I love the bluesy folk tune. I even love the poignancy of thinking of Jesus turning his face toward Jerusalem, alone among his circle of friends and followers in understanding what lay ahead for him. But I am, perhaps, just as content not to sing the hymn, and to play it instead; for the second verse begins, “We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves….” And friends, I am not sure that is the calling we have received in Christ. Because, when we do it best, walking with Jesus is walking together with our brothers and sisters, sharing our joys and pains, our successes and failures, our tears and laughter, our burdens and strengths. When we do it best, we live life together.

This second verse of this relatively new hymn addresses the being there-ness of the Christian life: we stand up, we cry out, we share, all on behalf of those who, for whatever reason, cannot. And then a line lovely and true --- “…sing for those who have no song.” Even more than lending voice to the voiceless, this phrase brings to mind the Old Testament image of ‘standing in the gap’. When there was a breach, or gap, in the walls of a town, a defender would stand in the breach, defending those within at the spot where the wall was weakest. Leaders including Moses were known to have figuratively stood in the gap where God’s people were weakest, being strength for them in their time of need.

When we stand in the gap, when we sing for those who have no song, when we bear each other’s burdens --- then we live life together, and become Christ’s body, here, in this place. Alleluia.