I was recently given a stack of a fun magazine to look over called Garden and Gun, kind of like if Southern Living were edited by Charleton Heston. (You’ll have to pry this magazine from my cold dead fingers!)
There was this article about favorite Southern things, it had the typical things, grits, manners, family, bbq, the land. It was innocuous and pleasant and disappointing.
It made me think of something more profound that Flannery O’Connor wrote about the South 60 years ago, that the South has a “conception of the whole man.”
I think that is what disappointed me about the article, it missed the sense of unflinching resignation at the grief and tragedy of our failed humanity and the wild hope and vision of humanity glorified.
God’s Word speaks, it is living and moving, always confronting us with our brokenness and failure and always dragging us forward into hope and redemption.
That is what it means to be prophetic, to hear this singular and searing Word and to speak the Word that re-speaks creation and humanity into wholeness.
When Flannery O’Connor speaks of the South having a conception of the whole man she is saying that the South is haunted by the prophetic Word, who is Jesus, the whole man who at once reveals our failure and graces us with a rapidly approaching restored humanity.
Jesus is both the judge and the doctor.
The scripture lessons today from I Kings and Luke have resounding echoes of each other: both are about widows whose children are brought back to life. The prophetic Word speaks and brings the shamble of our humanity back into life, echoing creation when God speaks and it is so and foreshadowing the new creation where death loses its sting.
We hear the words that we will all hear one day, “I say to you, rise” when our humanity will be made whole.
These scripture lessons of what God’s word does to the world are disturbing.
All these walls and divisions and exclusions and outsiders that we work so hard to maintain in order to make sense of our lives-they are all torn down as the Word speaks and the world is put back together with a different plan than we had in mind.
Jesus may be our friend, Jesus maybe just alright, he may be Savior and Lord but he is damned frustrating.
The vision and conception of the whole man, of humanity and creation being whole, what the world ought to be and what our humanity is intended to be is a different blueprint than we are usually using.
If we think we have the conception of the whole man all figured out, if we think we have the humanity of Jesus that we are being shaped into, the fullness of the image of God all figured out then our world is about to fall apart and start over.
This prophetic vision and conception of a whole humanity always pulls us forward kicking and screaming into God’s future, into God’s time where grief and disappointment are answered with the full weight of glory.
“I say to you, rise.” The Word summons us to leave death and the ways of death behind.
That double resignation of being resigned to failure and to glory, that is where we live, there is a certain wry humor and joy that comes with this as we always wait upon the Word that brings life where we only find death.
This steely-eyed hope that we carry, it brings dignity and honor to everything and everyone.
This is our ministry at Grace Church, the prophetic Word, it pours out honor and dignity like a fountain onto everyone.
How do we live with this Word pouring through us and spilling out of us?
Jesus is conceiving a whole and restored humanity, and we are caught up in that remaking, the re-speaking of creation.
We carry this steely-eyed hope with us through our days, in all our relationships, old and new and yet to come. We carry it with us in joy, in the ordinary stuff, in pain, in grief, in death, and in resurrection. Dignity and honor are showered upon us.
Hear the word. Carry the word. Say the word.
Shower one another with dignity and honor, this is the vision set before us of what it means to be human, it is the vision of the full weight of God’s glory.