Preaching this Sunday on Isaiah 40 and on the theme of weariness. I often explore Scripture text by reframing its themes into the disciplined focus of Haiku. Sometimes it works better than others - but most times it allows a serious playfulness, and invites an alternative approach to exegesis - contemplative exegesis. The three Haiku below acknowledge the soul fatigue and body weariness we often experience in the stampede of the Gadarene swine that we call daily living, in a culture built on an unquestioned assumption of constant economic growth and now facing the realities of an eaually unqestioning recession.
Isaiah 40 is a text for a culture like ours, which bought into the worship of finance and lost heavily when it's god began to dissolve by acid of its own making - a culture that now needs to find a less exhausting deity, a different liturgy and a new vocation as stewards of a fragile creation. One way Christian's witness to the Gospel in such a culture, is by a life less driven by acquisitive competition, and more impelled by agapaic generosity. But that will mean Christians like me learning to see the world differently, because from the heightened perspective and with the precision sighting of the eagle. But such a radically different worldview only comes when we wait, and are ourselves upborne by strength beyond our own, by the one Isaiah describes with defiant confidence, as the Creator and Redeemer.
Three Haiku on Isaiah 40. 29-31
Unable to run,weariness weighs down the soul
unwilling to wait.
...
To walk and not faint;
yet the body has limits
we cannot transcend.
...
Borne on eagles wings,
resurgent strength uplifts me,
changing my worldview.
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