Advent is a good time to remember that the Bible we read is not a peaceful read. It is a text borne of trauma, displacement, and loss. The ancient writers who penned sacred scripture — and the vast majority of characters who populate its pages — were not, by and large, history’s winners. They were the persecuted. The dislocated. The enslaved. The desperate. They lived through periods of famine, war, plague, and natural disaster. They suffered starvation, violence, barrenness, captivity, exile, colonization, and genocide. They were, in countless ways, the wretched of the earth. Brave, lonely voices, crying in the desert.
Tag Archives: wilderness
Sunday’s a-Comin’
In the startling economy of God, even a dangerous desert can become holy. Even our wilderness wanderings can reveal the divine. This is not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a chaotic, fragile and broken world that includes deserts, and because God’s way is to take the things of shadow and death, and wring from them resurrection.
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