I’m preaching (via Zoom) with the good people of Washington City Church of the Brethren this coming Sunday (7/14), and with the equally good and very different congregation of LaVerne Church of the Brethren (also virtually, alas!) next Sunday (7/21). Glad and grateful for these people, places, and their welcome.
I listened to a podcast interview with climate activist Colette Pinchon Battle this weekend. The episode was titled “On Knowing What We’re Called To,” and Battle tried to put the immense, all-encompassing perils of climate change in perspective:
“And this is not a political issue. It’s time to put the money, it’s time to put the action, it’s time to put all of that into this issue. This is lives we’re talking about. This is mass migration. This is people’s lives. This is heat deaths. This is fires. This is storms. Put everything into this. We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to vote? We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to their bodies? That is child’s play compared to what this climate crisis is. Where is the righteous indignation on this issue? And why can’t we get past that?”
You should listen to the conversation yourself; what I took away was that climate change and its repercussions are the backdrop for every other supposed conflict and crisis we find ourselves in, that perhaps we should broaden our view and consider the bigger, more pressing picture.
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Psalm 85 is a vision of what God’s shalom looks like. In Hebrew, the word can be translated simply as “peace,” but its actual meaning is much richer and fuller. It is something like “complete well-being.” Biblical scholar J. Clinton McCann says “Shalom exists when all people are attended to and provided for in such a way that they will be able not only to survive, but also to thrive.”
One of my pet peeves is preaching that doesn’t start with scripture. That’s not the only way to preach a good sermon, but it’s the way I was taught and the way I try to honor an ancient, mysterious, powerful text filled with more possible interpretations than there are people reading it at any given moment.
Psalm 85 is one of those particularly ancient, mysterious and powerful texts. No one knows for sure when, exactly, this psalm was written, but some of the language mirrors that of Haggai and Isaiah, who wrote soon after some of the Israelites returned from being exiled in Babylon. They’d been allowed back to their homeland, but all was not well. God’s glory, they said, was not in the land. The land was not fertile, and people were not well-fed. There was no shalom.
So the psalmist, who wrote hymns for the people, followed a hymn formula, remembering God’s faithfulness from the past, lamenting the lack of wholeness in the present, and longing for God’s promise of shalom to be fulfilled in the (very near) future.
And in the course of that writing, the psalmist paints this beautiful picture of what God’s shalom - which she also names as “salvation” - has looked like before and will look like again.
God’s glory will dwell again in the land.
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet. Righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The land will produce food and we won’t be hungry anymore.
Here’s how artist John August Swanson imagined that vision:
We’re in a drought here in Virginia, so the guy watering the roots of that Truth Tree strikes me as especially refreshing. But also: the little kid climbing the tree! The dogs frolicking in the field! Justice and peace running toward each other to embrace! The guy telling a story that’s got his audience spellbound over on the right! God’s glory: EVERYWHERE!
In this psalm, “salvation” and “shalom” operate as synonyms. Comprehensive well-being. Communal flourishing. God’s glory present, visible and experienced in the immediate moment, together. God’s desire for the world is not individual; it’s communal. It even extends to the trees and the chickens. It is not an internal philosophical assent; it is solidly material, the stuff of water and soil and sunlight and bodies. It is reconciliation, truth, kindness, richness, fullness, wholeness, togetherness, a context where everyone is seen and everyone can not only survive but FLOURISH.
And I don’t know about you, but very, very few of the conversations I find myself in these days ever reference this kind of large-scale vision for comprehensive well-being of the world. Should Biden drop out of the presidential race? Will Israel ever end its genocide in Gaza? Is AI ruining our lives? Can church people ever figure out how to get along? None of those conversations ever - EVER - begins from a place of prioritizing a vision of shalom like Psalm 85.
I think, if we did root ourselves in that kind of comprehensive, inclusive, immediate vision of the flourishing of all of us - including the trees and dogs and chickens - our conversations, conflicts and decisions might look a lot different than they do right now. Maybe we’d start prioritizing the actual problems that are keeping people from wholeness, instead of the made-up problems that keep us distanced and distracted.
Maybe we would learn how to lament like the psalmist, how to remember God’s salvation in the past and expect God’s shalom in the future.
Maybe.
Envisioning that kind of wellbeing and worldwide shalom is probably the biggest challenge you’ve given me to date. I can’t wrap my head around where even to begin. Maybe I am just tired today. I look forward to more thoughts on this goal.
All I can say is AMEN!