As I try to spend some time in quiet this morning, a tree crew is right next door. Chainsaws are buzzing. People are yelling to one another. So much for quiet prayer!
So I decided to watch them for a few minutes. As I watched, the older crew leader was teaching a younger person how to tie the ropes and where to cut so that the branches would fall safely. It was, in fact, interesting to witness and got me thinking about the spiritual life.
If you have a chance, go back and read Isaiah chapter 58 (we’ve been getting bits and pieces of it all this week in the readings). Isaiah 58 is very explicit about God’s anger with injustice and oppression. Isaiah specifically mentions income inequality, low wages for workers, food insecurity, lack of housing and the oppression of people as things that God wants us to address. I have no doubt in my mind that Jesus read Isaiah 58 and put this into practice in his life.
Isaiah 58 also invites us to become “repairers of the breach”. I really love that term and think of it often. We’re called to try to repair where there has been a fracture or separation. We work to become the healing bridge somehow that unites what has been separated.
But like the younger member of the tree crew I watched today, we need someone to mentor us and teach us how to do this work. We need help learning how to be repairers of the breach. One mentor we can learn from is Jesus. In the gospel today, Jesus eats at a tax collector’s house and the religious authorities question him.
Jesus knows that if you’re going to repair fractures, then you have to get close to the pain and the people who bear that pain. And while we all have pain that we bear, Jesus is particularly attuned to social pain – the kind that Isaiah speaks about – which results from oppression and injustice. This kind of pain results from human choices and can be addressed. It is the pain caused by all of the -isms in the world. These powerful social forces have separated us and hurt us. And they can be repaired. But in order to be addressed, they must be noticed and named.
This is why I think Jesus spent so much time with and among the people most impacted by social pain. They can very clearly name and articulate how the systems of the world work. Generally speaking, the more you excluded you are from something, the clearer your critique. Correspondingly, the more you benefit from something, the less likely you are to know how it actually works. So Jesus gets close to people who will help him understand the separations and the pain they cause, and then he tries to address them.
And he invites his followers to do the same.
For today, spend some quiet time with Jesus. Think about the many social breaches in our world that you would like to try to repair (and maybe already have committed yourself to trying to repair). What might be a next step for you?