Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Today’s text

Isaiah 25:6-8

On this mountain, for all peoples, the Lord of Hosts is preparing a banquet of rich food, a banquet of fine wines, of succulent food, of well-strained wines. On this mountain, he has destroyed the veil which used to veil all peoples, the pall enveloping all nations; he has destroyed death for ever. The Lord God has wiped away the tears from every cheek; he has taken his people's shame away everywhere on earth, for the Lord has spoken.

Reflection

Beyond every future, you are, O Lord.

Beyond the pain that grips our souls, beyond the fears we try to suppress, beyond the sorrows of life from the loss of those we love, beyond the hopes that once carried us, beyond the deaths we bear and those to come that we can’t stand to consider: beyond it all, you are.

So lift your heads, O people. Lift your hearts and see what is not yet.

Look not at what your hands can do or your mind imagine. The hopes of the human heart are paltry and fail to satisfy the need within us.

We hunger for a dream we cannot remember as when we awake from our sleeping world. Our agitated hearts grasp at air to hold the beauties of what we have felt in the night but cannot name in the morning light.

The dream is not our own but the intimation of eternity within, moving us to hunger for that feast of victory when the Holy One sits at able with the souls of those wounded by life, and joy washes every tear from their eyes.

Once veiled eyes are wide with joy, no longer shrouded in fear, no longer clouded by the weight of care they bore for those they loved.

That is all gone, for death is no more, and the thousand deaths human souls die during their days have all passed. The hope that haunted their hearts is no longer hope but present in the Presence of the One who is Love and who was present in every love they ever tasted.

For every love fans the holy dream of God within us, dreams of a world barely born and scarcely seen, a world where the hungry sit at table with the Lord of the Universe and receive their fill, their hearts flowing with songs of praise, a world where parents no longer watch over threatened children gripped by disease, a world where every soul is reverenced as the Maker’s art.

This is the dream, the hope, the future God has planted in our hearts so that we can’t remove it. Nothing else will finally satisfy, and nothing we can do will bring that future.

Yet, we taste and know it in every love and grace, in every moment of beauty and justice. In such moments, the dream takes shape within, fanning hope for the day when death is no more and justice covers the earth with peace.

Until then, we lift our eyes to imagine and a new world, and seeing we sing sweet songs of love and hope to the One who is all love and all hope.

Pr. David L. Miller