"I need to worship this morning where it's safe for me to weep over the millions of lives that have just been lost due to the lack of a climate agreement."

Wow, the most succinct observation on the whole climate cherade.  Cuts through all our pride in our institutions to solve our problems for us.  Now, millions of people are going to die because of them.

You've spoken the taboo words of death, and genocide, because of the Auchwitz-like furnace that modern society has made for its own self. 

'Work shall set you free.'  Our work always involves pollution.  Maybe that's why that sign was stolen off of Auchwitz right after Cop15.  The modern Catch-22.  You have to work to eat.  But to do modern work and survive in its system, we must destroy the Earth, which will end up destroying us too.

Too negative.  Too deep.  We are not ready to seriously 'work' for our 'salvation.'  We are not ready to sacrifice for the Earth, and thus for ourselves.  We just want peace and pain relief.  What is our relationship to pain and God in all this, for our own survival?

You are going into the heart of the pain that cannot be sidestepped for the sake of our abundant life in Christ.

I return to Brueggemann's view of the importance of lament as I contemplate your question about our relationship to pain and God in all of this. We are NOT alone as we lament and creatively imagine how God's dream and realm does - and will - appear. As our United Church Song of Faith puts it:

"Divine creation does not cease until all things have found wholeness, union, and integration with the common ground of all being. As children of the Timeless One, our time-bound lives will find completion in the all-embracing Creator. In the meantime, we embrace the present, embodying hope, loving our enemies, caring for the earth, choosing life." And elsewhere in this song we sing "...we participate in God's work of healing and mending creation."

This is the song I sing. I believe that we must wonder our way into the challenge of your statement: "But to do modern work and survive in its system, we must destroy the Earth, which will end up destroying us too."

I am listening for, and hearing stories of people who are immersed in the wondering, the imagining and the living of postmodern ways of working which do not destroy the Earth. This isn't a simple or easy matter and I don't want you to hear any suggestion of that. However, I believe that in community we can and are imagining such ways and I look forward to hearing about them through this blog.

Thank you very much for engaging in this conversation so deeply - now and earlier.

It`s hard to see hope when my eyes are full of tears.

After my partner died in 92 I started a community not for profit BBS in Ottawa.  

I lamented not just for myself, my partner and my dead and ill friends, but also for the church of my youth.   

Those of us who had AIDS in Ottawa had no church to go to. The local MCC closed after their minister and many other members had died.  Churches In Ottawa were otherphobic, or had physical barriers that blocked access to those with physical disabilities.

Menage BBS was an online  place to gather for GLBT people in Ottawa. Our motto was" There is never something that is so bad, that it can not be made worse by being alone"  At it`s peak we had 1400 people using it everyday. Before it had to be shut down due to my increasing illness, more and more of our members died from AIDS, so my lament turned into anger, and I used my anger to speak out, be more loving to make up for the lack of love I saw coming from others for people with AIDS.

I feel that having had the luck to survive AIDS, and witness the deaths of everybody I knew, I am only here to show people that is is possible to live during your last days while you watch yourself and your world die.

As I look back on that time now, I realise that all I was doing in runny Menage BBS was providing a space for me and others to not only be in community, but to give each other care and love during their last days, weeks, and years of living.

You are an inspiring example of what can happen when lament turns to anger and to speaking out to be more loving.  What a difference you've made to so many!

I also recognize the truth of your opening statement that it's hard to see hope when your eyes are full of tears.

Thank you so much for sharing your story of soul, community and hope.

Greetings in these days of change...

I appreciate your reference to Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination". This text has done much to illuminate and encourage my emerging theological commitments. Without diminishing your insightful reflections, I would like to notice a small shift in nuance specific to Brueggemann's text and your representation of his insight. The shift is present in your suggestion that Brueggemann describes "Moses' efforts to form a new community centered on God’s freedom, justice and compassion - a community that would reject oppression and exploitation."

Critically aware of both conservative and liberal interpretative bias, Brueggemann is quite clear that the liberating action is consequent to the determination (effort) of God (see, for example, Isaiah 43: 10-13). It is God who hears the cry of the people and responds by setting in motion a series of determinative events in which Moses plays a key role through his faith animated response to the initiative of God. In this trusting participation with God Moses stands in stark contrast to Pharaoh, who makes present the paradigm of autonomous power exercised in the service of self-interest.

What I am getting at is well expressed in Daniel Schutte's compelling lyric, found in Voices United (509). God is present as one who listens and intervenes. This living God seeks human partnership for the work of liberation. This work, to which you and many others are inviting us, is rooted in dialogic relationship with a free agent expressing effective presence. This is quite different, in its implications, than a relationship with an abstract God that informs our autonomous activity. Brueggemann speaks of this as the liberal bias which leaves everything to our discretion and activity, in contrast to the conservative bias which leaves everything to God's discretion and activity.

God has us each where we are. This makes present a remarkable spiritual energy adequate to the challenge now present to our personal and collective experience. So we joyfully sing: "Arise, your light is come!" 

Post Scrip... to express appreciation!

Today I went back to Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination", my thought being encouraged by your post. Found two short phrases that seem pertinent to our personal and corporate aspirations. That is, they indicate a matter of substantial consequence as together we contemplate strategies for a time such as this.

Here then is Brueggemann:

"And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points in human community."

And:

"So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what that name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken. There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom*. Egypt is wont to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers, but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for all that."

Grace and Peace attend you along the way...

George

* Israel's doxological witness - my asterisk and note