Saturday, March 9
Readings: IS 58:9B-14; LK 5:27-32
Isaiah tells us today (speaking for God): If you remove the oppression in your midst, stop with the malicious speech and accusation, feed the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, the light is going to rise again, your strength will be renewed and the ancient ruins will be rebuilt.
“Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined homesteads.”
What an amazing vision for the world – repair and restoration! It means that the world will be made whole again and that we will be made whole.
Most of us are aware that the -isms and injustice of the world exact a heavy toll on those who are oppressed. What we often fail to recognize is that oppression exacts a toll from the oppressor as well. It costs the oppressor their wholeness.
The biblical narrative emerging in Isaiah reminds us that when we engage in tikkun olam (the Hebrew phrase for the repair of the world), our collective strength gets renewed and what was ruined by the past has a chance of being healed.
But in order to be repairers of the breach, however, we must be willing to take risks, imagine new ways of being in the world and imagine new ways of being in community with each other.
One of my recent favorite authors, adriene maree brown, says that the world that we live in right now was “imagined” by someone else. Someone else imagined an exploitative economic system. Someone else imagined borders and walls. Someone else imagined prisons. Someone else imagined slavery. The question for us is, “Can we imagine a different world?” And in general, it is the people who have been excluded and left out of the current structures that we need to help us do that imagining.
We see this reflected in the gospel. Jesus calls Levi (who responds immediately!) and then they both go eat with sinners and tax collectors. Jesus knew that these folks could imagine a new world – the kind of world that he and they would want to live in. And so he stayed close to them.
There’s no way to be repairers of the breach if we’re not willing to go to where the excluded and marginalized are. This is part of the Lenten journey and our faith journey. For today, let’s think about what needs to be repaired – in our lives, in our relationships and in the world – and work to be an active participant in its healing.
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