Not Just Our Storm

When we lived in Dallas we shopped at ate at some of the businesses and restaurants at the intersection of Royal and Preston where this picture was taken.

Last Sunday’s storm in Dallas, Texas has been on my mind this week. After all, we lived there for 17 years and have a son who still lives there, and those tornados passed just a few blocks from our former home. Also this week my lectio divina that started with the lectionary reading from the Hebrew Scriptures in Joel 2:23-32 prompted me to read Joel’s entire prophecy. The imagery of mingled disaster and hope resonated with the images of Texas destruction in on the news and gratitude for no fatalities and only a few minor injuries.

As the weather service released its analysis, they identified 9 maybe 10 tornados that left a trail of destruction for many miles. As I have reflected on Joel and world news this week, the storm in Dallas seems an apt metaphor for the storm brewing in our world. Regardless of your opinion about the politics surrounding President Trump, including but not limited to the impeachment investigation, this is but one of many tornados of chaos in our world right now. Canada's Justin Trudeau rejected a coalition in favor of a minority government. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, the first such failure in Israeli history, so Benny Gantz is tasked with the perhaps impossible task of forming coalition government. Brexit has Great Britain and Prime Minister Boris Johnson floundering and immobile. Russia, Turkey, and Syria (with US complicity) have upended the balances of power in the Middle East and positioned the Kurds for genocide. China seems baffled by how to manage the popular, democratic uprising in Hong Kong. Chile has plunged into violent political unrest. I know more whirlwinds are swirling out there. For us in the US to think of the storm around President Trump as the only or most important tornado would be a most malignant form of “American exceptionalism.”

I suppose wanting to identify a single, simple solution – or at least explanation – of these storms is natural. However, the mingling of images of disaster and hope in Joel rightly points to a much more nuanced and complex perspective. Yes, God is present and active through both disaster and hope, but not that God will magically make it alright for us. Nor do I believe that shreds of the apocalyptic literature of the Bible can or should be picked apart and reassembled to invent a kind of Ouija so Christians can forecast events, prompting a perverse cheering the evils of disaster as a way of accelerating the arrival of hope.

Jesus taught his followers to pray for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10) He also said that the Kingdom of God is among you. (Luke 17:21) Now I know examining what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God has prompted all kinds of theological dancing around a variety of understandings. I don’t think it is just my Anabaptist proclivities that call me to prayerfully and courageously explore how to live in the already of the Kingdom of God, fully aware that its fullness has not yet arrived (and relinquishing personal imagining of how I want it to arrive). When Jesus spoke of “the signs of the times” (Matthew 16:1-4; 24; Luke 17:20-37) he seemed to be describing what to expect as we live this already when the not yet is distant and may seem impossible.

I am also aware of the limitations of human language that cloud the expression “Kingdom of God” with hierarchal and sexist implications. I do typically use “Reign of God,” but for my present reflections “Kingdom of God” seems to me to work a little better. In any case, I don’t want the fussing about language in our time to deter us from struggling with how to live by faith as Jesus’ followers in the storms of our time.

 So I come back to the metaphor of Sunday’s storm in Dallas alongside the mix of disaster and hope in Joel (and elsewhere in biblical eschatology). I am cautioned against a narrow, provincial outlook that sees the storms in terms of me and my community. I am cautioned against dismissing the storms that seem far from me as isolated and disconnected from me and my community. I am cautioned against invoking any one, simplistic political or religious viewpoint as either explaining or disarming the storms. I am cautioned against giving up on living the already of  the Kingdom of God by postponing it to a remote not yet.