Hope is looking for God's beauty in the encroaching storm.
This is a re-run of a blog I ran almost two years ago, after the floods in Tennessee. Tomorrow I’m leading a workshop on community at First Presbyterian Opelika, and today the Sarah Sisterhood ladies and I will be engaging Mary’s story, so I was looking for the quote and when I found it, I thought I’d share it with you:-).
Though it’s been submerged in the media, the devastation wreaked by the floods in Middle Tennessee last weekend have been the consuming story for many this week. What I hear over and over from my friends there is the glorious story of community joining together to restore broken things. Our individualistic society sometimes overemphasizes discerning our ‘individual’ call, losing the big picture of God’s call to love and redeem this broken world. Here is a favorite quote from N.T. Wright, about our calling to be extraordinary heroes and heroines. For a prayer specifically related to the flood, see Pastor Scotty Smith’s Facebook page.
But we mustn’t imagine that Mary was a heroine, an Annie-get-your-gun type, grasping the promise of God and riding off with it through all the problems to emerge in triumph at the end. As we saw in an earlier chapter, she must lose her dream before she realizes it. She must watch her Son, whom she thought was to be the Messiah, taking up with the shabby crowd down at the pub. She must watch him being fawned over by the girls of the street, not seeming to mind. And she must watch as his Messiahship is conclusively disproved as the occupying forces execute him as a failed Messiah, a would-be national leader who lets the people down. There is the obverse of the dramatic call of God. When God calls a woman, he bids her come and die – die to the hope she cherished, the hope she suckled, the hope born from her own womb and heart. Mary had been called to an ambiguous task – to have people up the street sneer at her, pregnant just a bit too soon, to have her pride and joy going off in quest of a Messiahship totally unlike her idea of Messiahship, to have him executed before her eyes. The call of God is not to become the heroine or hero in God’s new Superman story. It is to share and bear the pain of that world, that the world may be healed.”
N.T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire, The Call of God, 76
