Be our primary Disease: A prayer by Walter Brueggemann

Be our primary disease,
and infect us with your justice;
Be our night visitor,
and haunt us with your peace;
Be our moth that consumes,
and eat away at our unfreedom.
Be our primary disease, our night visitor, our moth
infect, haunt, eat away...
Until we are toward you and with you and for you,
away from our injustices,
our anti-peace,
our unfreedom.
More like you and less like your resistance.
In the name of the one most like you,
most with you,
most for you...even Jesus. Amen .

All will be thrown down

It will all fall apart. Do you sometimes feel like this? That things are just coming apart at the seams and you can’t do a thing to stop it from happening? Do you look around and think, things are just a mess. What a mess we’re in. Do you feel occasionally sick at what you see happening around you? The lack of civility, the lack of compassion, people’s indifference to others, illnesses, sufferings, depravity, the careless waste of good things…Do you think, how can people live like that? Sometimes it’s easier to bury our heads in the sand or to blame others. We are usually better at judging and commenting than at acting and doing. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, unless they begin to take action to confront the situation we are in. Some of you are thinking, what situation? I mean the one in which everything is falling apart. The situation in which things are not how they used to be. The situation in which what was once whole is now broken, what once had life is in decay, what once worked no longer works. You’re a soldier in training on an army base on Texas and one of your own officers opens fire in a classroom and kills 13 soldiers and wounds over a dozen others. This person’s act is linked to some extremist Muslim views, allegedly. And the implications for other Muslims in the armed services is…now the army is a diverse operation, perhaps one of the most diverse institutions we have. But we are in a war with Muslim extremists. Welcome to Chaos. Do you recall Japanese Americans being interred in camps during WWII? Diversity is risky. But sameness creates the façade of tranquility. Chaos is when the forces are at work to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy any semblance of created order. The earth was formed out of chaos, according to Genesis. And yet chaos ensues and disrupts in so many ways, personally, corporately, systemically; threatening to overwhelm us. We are living in a chaotic time. Change is happening at an exponential pace as technologies and advances in communications make it possible to take action on everything from locating friends to buying stocks from the comfort of your computer or handheld device. And yet we feel more alienated, depressed, lost. We are living in a time of great transition and flux, a time of chaos.