A Demonstration Plot of God's Reign
From Eden to Empire and Back Again | The Word in the Wild, Proper 5, Year B
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After Eden there was Empire. It came gradually, rising from the blood stained ground of Abel’s murder. Cain, the agriculturalist, was cursed to wander. It was a curse he rejected, a curse he rebelled against by founding a city—a settled center that would soon devolve into the same sort of violence practiced by its founder. There was the flood, Noah, a new beginning and then the old patterns starting again. Abraham was called and put on a course toward a different belonging, one defined and dependent upon a covenant of hesed—God’s steadfast love. From Abraham was to come a people—not a kingdom, not an Empire, but a people who would be marked by their common worship, their common life of dependence upon God rather than the technologies of control, the power of military prowess.
It was the Empire of Egypt that defined this people. Egypt with its centralized agriculture, its monopoly of grain, its leaders who claimed to be gods—this was the place where the people promised to Abraham were formed in contrast. They learned first hand the suffering of the Empire way of life, the degradation, the ceaseless demand for more production. “This is the way things are,” could have been the response. But God called them to be another possibility, one with safeguards against commodities, and control, and the temptations of Empire. From Egypt God called a people who would be defined by their dependence, who were forbidden to accumulate generational wealth, who had to learn to rely on God’s generosity of rest and abundance beyond their labor.
The journey through the desert, the settling of the promised land, was a lesson in a kind of divine anarchy. The people had not come together to form a state, they had no king nor did they need one. They were a people because they were bound by this hesed—a covenant of steadfast love that they lived out in obedience to its commandments. Sometimes there were threats, and some person would arise to lead the way, but just as quickly that person would recede when the danger had passed. This was the way, it seemed, God wanted it. To quote Clarence Jordan, they were to be a “demonstration plot of God’s kingdom.”
Will it work? Can we keep up? Farmers know the pressures of changing methods, an economy that demands that in order to survive one must “get big or get out.” In his beautiful book, Pastoral Song, James Rebanks shares the story of his family adopting the new chemical agriculture due to the pressures of the supermarkets and a changing economy. It destroyed their land, unsettled their lives, made them dependent upon distant corporation more than the soil and their neighbors. But at first, at least, they had high yields and it seemed they were doing the right thing to help their farm survive.
With Empires to the north and south, and Egypt still all too close to the west, the people of Israel were losing faith. It had worked, this worship based, divine anarchy, but would it still work? Shouldn’t they give up the demonstration plot and just do what all their neighbors are doing? Those were the concerns that drove them to demand a king of Samuel.
“It won’t work out,” Samuel warned them. “This experiment is a success and with it all of you are living in the freedom and abundance of autonomy.” But they were blinded by fear, by ambition, by that fatal mix that keeps new life from coming into the world. They wanted the power of their neighbors; they were afraid of the power of their neighbors. And so, God gave them a king, and it was a disaster as predicted.
Samuel was written, most likely, in retrospect—assembled and shaped in the captivity of Babylon. “What went wrong that we should end up like this?” They asked. “Remember when we demanded a king?” Came the answer.
But God wasn’t finished with the demonstration plot. Even if it had been abandoned, God still wanted to show that there was another possibility for human life; that flourishing didn’t come through the Empires of exploitation and control. God wanted to show that love, steadfast and faithful love, would bring healing and renewal and human community in all its fullness.
Jesus came to cultivate this new plot. It would have to be different from the old one, but its aims would be the same—a community dedicated to interactive relationship with God, rooted in dependence upon God’s steadfast love. This new plot would not be grounded in a nation, it would not be based in family or ethnic ties. It would be grown from the common life of those who have submitted themselves to an ever growing Yes to what God is doing in the world.
The place of this new demonstration plot, this new showing of an alternative possibility for human life, would not be a land, or a people, but a person. Jesus himself would become the site of this new community. And all who follow his way of living into the will of God, echoing his prayer, “thy will be done, thy kingdom come,” are part of this new reality. It is a reality a world sick of Empires, of exploitation and power, needs now as much as it did when God first set to work, creating a path back to the life of harmony and hesed we lost east of Eden.
To join this new example, this demonstration of another way, is simple and yet the task of a life-time. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” “Who are those people to whom I belong?” “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” This is the outline of a new community, a new belonging through a common obedience to God’s will. It is to that will that we must harmonize our lives, as we grow the Eden that will overcome Empire in the end.
"creating a path back to the life of harmony and hesed we lost east of Eden."
In the introduction to This Day by Wendell Berry he mentions he has misused the word "wild." Considering his most famous poem hinges on this word for many people, the shift is pretty profound, i think?
"As for "wild" I now think the word is misused. The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as "wild." ..."They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and they are right. We are the ones who are undomesticated, barbarous, unrestrained, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control."
Like you said,
"It would be grown from the common life of those who have submitted themselves to an ever growing Yes to what God is doing in the world."
I'm trying to piece together how the shift in perspective from "wild" to "domestic" invites a person, a community, to view or hopefully partake in what's given? Running from our wildness, the world of man, to the domestic order of gods given world.