Lent
April 1, 2019
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 43:16-21
Thus says the Lord,
who makes a way in the sea,
a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out chariot and horse,
army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old. –Isaiah 43:16-18
Humans romanticize history, but we fail to learn from it. My “cooking” today involves heating something five minutes in a microwave and loading water and coffee into a single-cup coffee machine then pushing a button. I do not recall the last time I used my kitchen range. Other food preparation includes opening a single serving cup of hummus or guacamole, pouring pre-cut salad greens in a bowl, tossing in a few nuts, adding canned salmon, and salad dressing from a bottle. Food preparation in my childhood was a major production three times a day. We raised most of our food—vegetable, fruit, beef, and chicken—which required a lot of hard work. The advent of the pressure cooker to hasten cooking time was an innovation my mother appreciated. My dad bought a home freezer in anticipation of the installation of electricity in our neighborhood. His mother had to can or dry the beef they butchered, even more hard work. And yes, it brings back happy memories for me because it involved working with my family and the love that flowed through everything we did.
Isaiah warns the Israelites about longing for the ways of the past and about how fleeting they were. Progress happens and much of it is driven from finding new and better ways to meet our needs. We have excelled at creating better machinery of war. Chariots and horses have been relegated to movies and rodeos while we now build nuclear missiles and fight digital warfare. We have learned from experience how to build bigger and better machines of destruction. We have not learned how to eliminate war through developing better relationships with our worldwide neighbors.
What mattered in the past were the relationships among people. That is the same thing that matters most today. God calls us to heal relationships and turn our weapons into instruments of harvest* because we no longer need them for wars and there are many hungry people in our world who could benefit from our harvest.
Prayer: Lord, heal our relationships with each other and with all others so that we may live in peace. Amen.
*Derived from Isaiah 2:4