Sunday Snapshot: No newness yet

You are the one who makes all things new.

We gladly raise our voices and move our lips to acknowledge, celebrate, and proclaim your staggering newness.

As we do so, we hold in our hearts deep awareness of all the places where your newness is not visible, and has not come.

Our hearts link to many places of wretchedness short of your newness.

We know up close the deep wretchedness of poverty, of homelessness, of hunger and no newness yet.

Move our hearts closer to the passion of our lips.

Move our lips closer to your own newness.

Work your newness in hidden, cunning ways among us.

Move us closer to your bodied newness in the Son, newness of strength come in weakness, newness of wisdom come in foolishness.

Draw us from the wretchedness we know to his scarred, bloody wretchedness that is your odd entry of newness into our life.

We ask in the name of his suffering newness. Amen.

Words taken from Walter Brueggemann’s Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth.