New Earth

Now that poverty has become so much more personal to me,

I can understand so much more of the Bible

and of God's call for justice.

Before, I knew it was there

I would read God's heart for the oppressed,

my heart would break with his,

and I would feel anger towards structural injustice,

and a desire to do something.

But what, and how?

Now I have seen it, experienced it,

and I am walking through life with those who are victims of oppression,

and the call of the prophets, the life of Jesus, the responsibility of Christians

to bring God's kingdom to earth

has such greater meaning.

I think that often we read the prophets as something of the past,

a story of God's call to his people and to Babylon etc to repent.

What we in the West don't realize is that the injustices the prophets are crying out against

still exist.

Last night I was reading Isaiah,

and my heart yearned for the New Earth

that we always speak so much about...but whose meaning I don't know that we grasp.

At least I hadn't.

The sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child....They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat....my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune... (Isaiah 65)

When I read this passage, the images that come to mind are India. Not the superpower India that you hear about in business, and not the India that Obama interacted with when he was here last week. This is real India. Infants die malnourished, females are killed via gender-selective abortion or shortly after birth because girl children of of no use - they simply another mouth to feed and a large dowry to pay. India has the 2nd largest population in the world, but only 5.2% are over the age of 65. Many have been displaced by settlers and farmers, given instead a plot of land worth 45 cents, and rather than work the land for their own sustainability they are paid meager amounts to produce food for others. The work that most of India does is not for them, it is for the benefit of those who are already wealthy...or at least better off. And their children, their dear sweet children, are born doomed to the same undignified life.

I wish you could see the images that I have when I read this passage, the people who I've met who flash through my mind...I only wish that, when I read "Your kingdom come" in the New Testament, of "freedom for prisoners and the recovery of sight for the blind", of "setting the oppressed free" that the images coming to mind were as vivid...if not more.