In late 1984 after my ordination in New York, my journey as a missionary took me to the small village of Bugisi, Tanzania where I lived alone at a small location I had worked months to rebuild, a place that included a medical dispensary with a modest supply of medicine. I quickly built eight (8) large, 5,000 galvanized rain tanks around my cement block home, all of which were filled before the rains stopped for nearly three years. We had enough water for three years, water that served hundreds of people each week who came for treatment by our local rural medical aids, water we boiled and filtered. it was a life-changing period in my life, one I never forgot.
One night an old Land Rover pulled into our compound just before the sun set. It was so unusual to receive any unexpected guests, especially these two who were British archaeologists working in an old bog in the Olduvai Gorge at a place Louis and Mary Leakey had founded decades earlier. Turned out that these two archaeologists were digging and studying a time that occurred 4,000 BCE when the first human civilizations were born. I spent the night listening to them discuss the decline of old human civilizations and the birth of new ones. I remember them complaining about all of their work for which they personally received little public adulation or recognition.
Our conversation that night got me thinking of the old civilizations in the Hebrew Scriptures, with echoes of Isaiah speaking of God doing a new thing, something fresh springing forth, so that there will be good news for the poor, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the incarcerated and oppressed, especially the poor. The prophets promised a time when weapons would be recycled into farm equipment. I thought of Ezekiel’s oracle about a new heart, a heart of flesh that replaces the heart of stone. I remembered Amos envisioning a time when a river of justice rolls down from the heights, filling the lowest places first. I thought of Micah relativizing everything in his religion except doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly before God.
And so I imagine that now in that distant night in the middle of some of the oldest places where civilizations were birthed what it might have looked like where old empires, dominations, extractions, and exploitations were born and then died. I wonder what if a long succession of prophets, including Mary, John the Baptizer, Jesus, Paul, and others, were giving us a vision for a new movement being born!
This meeting that dark night 40 years ago makes me realize how big our world is, bigger than any single religion. In fact, it is bigger than religion as a whole. It is an invitation to me, perhaps even an ultimatum, to remember that all religions, all economies, all educational and political systems, all arts and trades, all sciences and technologies, everything you might say, is a spiritual movement that encompasses everything. Wherever you and I invest our life, I hope it will be in this larger movement laboring for the birth of something new. My prayer is that you and I might embrace the long view and find the deep current, the infinite flow.
This certainly gives me reason to pray today. Lord Jesus Christ Son of the Living God have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” Luke 4:16-19.
"4 He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more” Isaiah 2:4.
“26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28 Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God” Ezekiel 36:26-28.
"24 But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
Amos 5:24.
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