A meditation on Rev. 21.9-14; 21.22-22.5 delivered in the Wine Before Breakfast community on September 20, 2011

Grief is the doorway to hope,
tragic endings give birth to surprising beginnings,
lament gives way to praise,
and death is overturned in resurrection.

That’s the good news this morning.
That’s how the failed, painful reality of Babylon
meets the restored city of Jerusalem.

And it is all there in the very first line of our reading.

“Then one of the angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me….”

Man, by the time I’ve got to the end of the book of Revelation
…the last thing I want to see is one of those angels
…with their bowls of plagues.
The last thing I want to hear is any more bad news
…from one of those angelic messengers.

But this time it is different.

This time, that angel of woe, that angel of judgement, that angel of endings,
…brings news of blessing, of restoration and of radical new beginnings.

Instead of ‘come look at the whore of Babylon’
…the angel says “Come, I will show you the bride,
…the wife of the Lamb.”

And instead of presiding over the fall of Babylon, this angel
…shows St. John “the holy city of Jerusalem
…coming down out of heaven from God.”

No wonder we sing,
…Love divine, all loves excelling
…joy of heaven to earth come down,
…fix in us thy humble dwelling,
…all thy faithful mercies crown

In this vision, the joy of heaven comes down,
…the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven
…as a bride adorned for her husband.

And in this city, God dwells with his people,
…God moves into the neighbourhood,
…God tabernacles with his people as he did in the wilderness
……so long ago.

No wonder John can’t see any temple in this city.
…Who needs a temple when God is dwelling with you?
…Who needs a temple when the whole city,
……indeed the whole creation,
……is the temple?

If Babylon symbolized the city as a failed construct of idolatrous humanity,
…then the New Jerusalem is a city that comes directly from the hand of God.

If Babylon was a place where the sound of the minstrel will be no more,
…and the sound of industry will be no more,
…and the sound of lovers in erotic giggle will be no more,
then the New Jerusalem is the city where “death will be no more
…mourning and crying will be no more
…for the first things have passed away.”

If Babylon was a dwelling place for demons
…and foul spirits and all foul things,
then the New Jerusalem is the dwelling place of God
…where no foul things can exist.

If Babylon was an economy of opulence coupled with exploitation,
…if the kings of the earth weep over Babylon in her fall,
then the New Jerusalem is a city of rich cultural diversity and abundance
…as the kings of the earth bring the wealth of the nations into her,
…gifts of gratitude, not the avails of greed and injustice.

If debased Babylon was a city of unbearable lightness,
…superficiality and vanity
then the New Jerusalem is a sight of glory,
…this is a city infused with the weighty, presence of God

And note that this is a city with walls and gates,
…but the gates are never closed.
Those gates are named after the twelve tribes of Israel,
…because it is Israel’s story that gains access to this city,
and the city is erected on the foundation of the twelve apostles,
…rooted in the gospel of Jesus and his Kingdom.

But the gates are never closed.
…This is a city of radical hospitality,
…this is a city of welcome.

And it is a gardened city,
…with a river of the water of life,
…bright as crystal,
…cascading from the thrown of God and the Lamb
…right down the middle of the city.
On both sides of this life-giving river grew the tree of life,
…producing twelve kinds of fruit, one for each month,
…a city of sustenance, a sustainable city,
…a city of urban gardening.
And here is the bit that blows me away,
…while the fruit is good for eating
…(unlike a tree we meet at the very beginning of our story in a different garden),
…the leaves of this tree were for the healing of the nations.
Those very nations that fornicated with Babylon,
…those very nations that wept over Babylon’s collapse,
…those very nations subject to the same judgement as Babylon,
…come to this city of God for healing.

No more trees felled for battering rams
…to lay siege to other cities.
No more trees cut for sailing masts
…to power colonial warships.
No more trees pulped for propganda
…to fuel the fires of ethnic cleansing and ideology.

This tree is for life.
This tree is for the healing of the nations.
This tree is for shalom.

While Babylon paints a picture of the brokenness of our urban reality,
…the New Jerusalem is a vision of urban life restored.
While Babylon depicts our urban present,
…the New Jerusalem gives us a vision of a possible urban future.
While Babylon captures our urban nightmare,
…the New Jerusalem offers us an urban dream.
While Babylon embodies our most distorted desires,
…the New Jerusalem fulfills our deepest and most abiding longings.

My friends, I don’t know how I could continue to survive in Babylon,
…if I didn’t have a vision of Jerusalem.
I don’t know how I could face the urban brokenness of the present,
…without a hopeful vision of an urban future.

In this vision,
…St. John is offered a glimpse of the Holy City,
…he is offered a glimpse of urban life under the banner of covenantal renewal,
…just beyond the range of normal sight he can see a city
……of unspeakable beauty,
……of shared abundance,
……of hospitable welcome,
……of homecoming in the temple of the Lord.

And maybe he can hear a voice singing:

My kingdom’s built with the blood of my son
selfless sacrifice for everyone,
faith, hope, love and harmony.

So, all you slaves, be set free,
come on out my child and come home to me,
we will dance, we will rejoice,
if you can hear me than follow my voice.

And to hear that voice,
…to join that dance,
…to come home to Zion,
…is to live with that vision before us,
……to work towards the coming City of God,
………in the face of the Babylon in which we live,
………seeking the peace of this city in hope of the city to come.

Amen.

This fall, Brian Walsh will be teaching a new course at Trinity College in Toronto entitled Film, Prophecy & Culture. Registrations are limited, so if you’re interested, get on board soon!

Humans are story-telling animals. We find our identity, memory, vision and our meaning through the narratives of our lives. While the church has been a foundational story telling institution, it has clearly been eclipsed in the last half century by various forms of mass media, and most notably through cinema.

In this course we will use the Toronto International Film Festival as our classroom. Engaging in a two-way dialogue between film and Christian theology, students will develop a biblically theological understanding of contemporary film. We will explore the prophetic, pastoral, liturgical and theological contribution that contemporary cinema can make to Christian reflection and praxis in a late modern socio-historical context.

Format: This course will begin on the evening of Sunday, September 11 and run daily until the evening of Saturday, September 17 with four more seminars arranged throughout the rest of the semester.

Note: Students will be responsible for the cost of their own tickets for the Toronto International Film Festival.

For full description of this course consult the TST website or contact the instructor.

This year’s keynote speakers are Ched Myers and Elaine Enns. Their work with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries focuses on building capacity for biblical literacy, church renewal, and faith-based witness for justice.

From August 5-7, participants will explore the theme of ”Urban Agriculture and the Peace of the City” through hands-on workshops, challenging keynote lectures, practical gardening, singing, campfires, cooking, conversation and more. Visit our web site for more information about workshops and speakers.

www.practicingresurrection.com

Ched and Elain have long been committed to faith-based peace and justice efforts such as Christian Peacemaker Teams, Borderlinks, the Catholic Worker movement, Witness for Peace, and the Servant Leadership Schools.

There’s a lot of interest in this year’s conference, so register early at www.practicingresurrection.com

It has been about home from the beginning.
…The very beginning,
…the beginning of all beginnings,
…was about home.
……A good home,
……a rich home,
……a home of blessing,
……a creational home,
……home with God.

And when homebreaking raises its violent face,
…the homemaking God makes covenant.
The homemaking God embraces the homebreaker,
…with eyes wide open.

The promise was of a homeland,
…the promise to Abraham
…the promise to the patriarchs
…the promise to the slaves
…the promise to exiles.

Homelessness would never have the last word
…Homelessness would always give way to homecoming.

And Jesus came proclaiming that the homecoming of God was at hand,
…exile was over,
…the promise was fulfilled,
…and the poor hear good news.

………So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

…The forces of homelessness rendered Jesus most finally homeless,
……the homelessness of the grave.
…Some folks are afraid of home.
…Some folks will defend their facist architecture,
……their self-enclosed constructs of home,
……their hierarchies of in and out,
………worthy and unworthy,
………us and them,
………privileged and lowly,
………unto death.
But homelessness can never have the last word,
…homelessness gives way to homecoming
…the grave gives up the dead,
…and resurrection proclaims a homecoming
…that no one could have imagined.

This is Paul’s story,
…this is his song,
…and this is his homemaking project
…in his letter to the Romans
(or at least it is one take on this letter).

In the face of an imperial home of slaves and freemen,
…Paul is a slave of Christ.
In the face of imperial homemaking myths of the gods,
…Paul retells the story of Israel,
…rooted in the story of Jesus.
In the face of a home that has a lineage rooted in Augustus,
…Paul speaks of Jesus, heir of David.
In the face of a gospel proclaimed from the court of Caesar,
…Paul proclaims the gospel of God.
In the face of an imperial home subject to the lordship of the emperor,
…Paul announces that the risen one is the Lord of all.
In the face of a home rooted in Roman justice and fidelity to the empire,
…Paul insists that in the gospel of Christ, the justice of God is revealed,
…from faithfulness to faithfulness.
And in the face of a home of hierachical, class and ethnic division,
…Paul calls the believers to associate with the lowly,
…extend hospitality to strangers,
…embrace Gentile and Jew alike.

And so Paul calls the community to be the home of God,
…a place where whole lives,
……embodied lives,
…are presented as living sacrifices;
…a site of worship and transformation;
…a body of family members, each with gifts for the upbuilding of the whole;
…a community of homemaking virtues
……of love and hospitality,
……of generosity and compassion,
……of rejoicing and weeping,
…a community of shalom and harmony.

But this is homemaking in the shadow of empire,
…so be careful around the authorities,
…subject yourself and their laws to the only law that can make for home,
……the law of love,
…recognizing that the night of homelessness is far gone,
…and the day is near.

So live in the day!
Be a people of the light, not the dark.
Build a home together that can stand the light of day,
…that has nothing to hide.
And do not hide those who are weak in your midst.
…Do not avert your gaze from the struggling sister or the fallen brother.
…You see, this is a house where all are welcome,
……because this is the house that the covenant God is building.
…This is a house where all are welcome,
……because this is the house of Jesus.

Does the empire exclude the powerless?
Does the empire render them homeless because they have no standing in society?
Then be a community that embraces the powerless,
…welcome the weak,
…build up your neighbour,
…transform her homelessness into homecoming.
That is the path of Christ,
…that is the imitation of Christ,
…that is the scandal of Christ.

Welcome one another because Christ has welcomed you.
…It really is that simple.
…That’s been the story throughout this whole letter.
…Christ became the suffering servant of the Jews
……in order to fulfill the promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
…The homemaking sacrifice of the Messiah fulfills the promises
……and the nations sing praise.
…The promise was always one of homecoming for all nations,
……for all creation,
……for the restoration of the loving homemaking rule of God.

That’s the power of the gospel.
…That’s the power,
…that’s the mighty power,
…that’s the power of the gospel.

That’s the power of God dwelling with us in Christ.
That’s the home restoring power of the resurrection.
That’s the embracive, welcoming, forgiving, healing power of gospel.

And that is the power that has taken hold of Paul’s life.
…That is the gospel that he has proclaimed
……from Jerusalem all the way to Illlyricum.
…That is the power that has given birth to alternative communities,
……an alternative body politic,
……an alternative homecoming
…throughout the eastern regions of the Roman empire.
That is the gospel that has been shaping house churches,
……alternative homes rooted in an alternative story,
……homes of welcome imitating the embrace of their Lord,
……bodies of inclusion in the face of the exclusions of the empire.
That is the gospel that gives birth to a generosity and loyalty
…of Gentiles to Jews.
That is the gospel born of the root of Jesse and now bearing the fruit
…of economic blessing from the far reaches of the empire
…to the suffering and impoverished Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.
That is the homemaking gospel of Jesus Christ,
…and Paul is a careful and bold steward of that gospel,
…a minister of the homecoming kingdom of God.

And yet … and yet, Paul himself seems to be perpetually homeless.
…He is Paul of Tarsus,
……but he never names Tarsus as home.
…He is a Jew of Jews, a Pharisee born of the tribe of Benjamin,
……but Jerusalem is not his home.
…He is a Roman citizen,
……but Rome is not his home.

All roads lead to Rome it is said.
…If there is to be “home” in the empire,
…then surely Rome is that home.
…If home is a place of centredness,
…then surely Rome is the centre of all things.
All roads lead to Rome.
…Rome is the destination.
…Rome is the site of arrival.
But not for Paul.

All roads lead to Rome,
…but Paul’s road leads through Rome.
Rome is no more the centre of Paul’s universe
…than is Jerusalem.
Paul writes to reimagine the shape of home at the very heart of the empire.
But he writes from the road.
…He writes as a sojourner,
……on the way home
……and making home along the way.
…He writes as an emissary of a home not yet realized.
…He writes as one exiled from home,
……deeply not at home,
……even as he calls forth a home-making community
…….wherever the gospel is bearing fruit.

Home is not a place of arrival.
Home is a way of living together on the way.

…Incurable homewreckers all,
…the invitation remains,
…come home.

Come home and be a community of homemaking.
Come home and be a community of healing.
Come home and be a community of forgiveness.

…The path may well be one of betrayal and failure,
…a path where it all went wrong,
…but we’ll stand before the Lord of song,
…with nothing on our tongue but Hallelujah.
…A cold and broken Hallelujah,
…but Hallelujah nonetheless.
………Amen.

by Allan Reeve

What if Jesus were born in Canada today?

To be true to the story, he would most certainly be born an indigenous native Canadian. He would be of a tribe out on the fringe of the Empire. He’d live within a day’s travel of the capital – say within an Otter’s flight – putting him perhaps in a community in Northern Quebec?

It’s been seven generations since his people have drifted from their traditional ways. Slowly at first, they lost their trust in the land as the source of security. Slowly they began to depend upon the machines and tinned foods and coin of the realm that eventually invaded every aspect of their lives.

Mary and Joe remember the stories their grandparents told them. They remember trips stolen away from school where they were shown how to negotiate the waters, get what was needed from the land, use everything to good purpose, watch the stars, the birds, the tracks that would tell them where they were, when they were, who they were. Sometimes they can even remember parts of the songs their grandparents sang.

So the legend goes – seven generations is the time for renewal, for rebirth, for hope – when ancient ways become new again. When a new path is found that will lead the people – Anishnabe – for seven generations still to come.

It was bad timing. It was perfect timing. Mary got pregnant just as the government orders came through for evacuation. Their town’s site would soon be deep under water. Their town was about to be flooded by the power damn under construction. They’d protested and fought against it in courts. They’d prayed against it since they were children. They resisted – and held out – staying while others gave up and left – hoping for a last minute court injunction.

But when Mary was just about due to deliver – Joseph had a dream. The visitor told him to go. Told him that the journey they were about to begin would be a great unwinding of the circle – starting small and reaching far beyond any horizons he could imagine. He would name his son “Singer of old Songs”.

Mary was also visited. She got the message that the babe in her belonged to the past, and belonged to the future. She would know the suffering of her people in the birth and death of the life in her womb. But with this bad news came also a strange and powerful joy that didn’t let her worry but provided an incredible, calm, trust in what was to come.
***
Maybe it was partly the story that had reached her of her sister’s recent delivery. Elizabeth had given birth to a boy. Months before, while they both carried, they had shared notions and intuitions of the Maker moving within them, certain intuitions of a season not seen for countless moons. They’d laughed it off as hormones and the crazed thoughts of pregnant women everywhere. What women didn’t feel that the child within them was special like no other?

But when Elizabeth’s husband had announced the baby’s name as “John” the babe started wailing and didn’t stop wailing. It had deafened them. Neighbours offered advice. Town nurses talked of sedatives. It was only during the naming ceremony – that everyone present got a story to tell. The ancient, croaking, hoarse-voiced midwife had interrupted – at the critical time when the parents were to provide the name – she’d cried out over the cries of the babe “his name is Trailbreaker”. And the babe was quiet. Hadn’t cried since – Mary had been told.

***
Not everyone was going to the new location. Despite the sales job they’d been given about the new place – better schools, better healthcare, better sanitation and water and work – many had decided it was time to try city life. Many had decided to join family in other northern fringe towns.

Mary, watching from the Otter’s small window, saw the homes she’d grown up in, the school she’d trained in, the church she’d prayed in, all shrink small and smaller as the plane rose off the ground, made one last arc over the town, and it was all left – memories drowned –behind her.
***
So, Mary and Joe boarded the Otter and headed south with the others. The weather was supposed to be clear. But the storms had become more and more unpredictable with every passing year. Before they’d been in the air an hour, the pilot had announced that they were in for some rough riding. Mary worried that the jumps and jerks might bring her labour on. But one look at Joseph’s strained face changed that. She’d let him do the worrying. She’d be strong and calm – claiming the gift the visitor had offered.

It got a lot worse before it got better. And it only got better when the pilot gave up and decided to land at the power dam construction site. He knew there’d be empty barracks there for his passengers. He’d flown the crew out for the holidays just days before.

There was still a skeleton crew left behind to run the place. They’d stayed for the double overtime pay – to keep the heat on and fuel in the machines – keep them running so the whole place wouldn’t freeze solid.

The shift boss met the travelers in the mess hall and assigned them barracks. The cooks got busy putting on coffee and chili and sandwiches. Then the boss got a look at Mary – doubled up in pain – and Joseph’s pleading gaze. He got the dishwashers to go clear some space in the food storage shed. It was the cleanest place in the camp – and there was room because supplies were low. Only trouble was – the camp nurse and company doctor had left on the last flight out. He apologized to the couple and showed them to their digs. Maybe the baby would wait?

There happened to be an international team of scientists at the station. They were passing through on their way to the arctic – studying frequency variations in the aurora borealis as indicators of global warming. They offered up their emergency first aid supplies. Pain killers, sterile swabs, and a heart monitor. Totally unnecessary as it turned out- but the family accepted their gifts.

At the station that night there also happened to be an Innu hunting party blown in by the storm. Further south than they usually traveled they didn’t really need the shelter or supplies. They were accustomed to getting by with few comforts. But they’d decided to go see the construction site. They wanted to be able to tell their children about the place where everything changed. About the place where the river’s power was sold to the south in exchange for the last of their memories. They were old. Their children didn’t know what they knew. Their grandchildren would never know. They wanted to see the place where this final change would happen.

What they found instead was a couple in need. The grandmother with them had been at many births and she took things in hand. As she worked to prepare she sang songs in a dialect from which Mary and Joe could only catch a word or two – the odd phase rang familiar – but the comfort of the woman’s song ran deep within them. An old man, her husband sat on a milk crate in the corner keeping rhythm with a shaker he’d produced from deep parka pockets.

Not many in the camp slept that night. The winds howled and everyone was sure that it was Mary’s cries they heard. No one dared break in on them until finally they could stand it no longer. The storm was raging. They woke the shift boss to go find out. “We’re worried about how they’re doing out there in that shack in this storm!” they explained.
“What storm?” he asked stumbling over to his office window. There was a luminous glow – green, blue, white, orange filling the pane. They all crowded to the window in wonder.

The wind had blown the storm over – and now a still quiet had descended upon the camp. The stars pierced the black night like high trumpet notes while the sky danced with colour celebrating the limitless universe filling their eyes to overflowing, making their hearts jump up and their guts boom deep – all without a sound.

They knew. As if with one mind, their gaze now turned to the storage shed where they saw a dull low light in the window. Without a word they all – every one of them – headed for the door – without stopping for parkas they walked out into the night and to the door of the shed where they froze stiff – still – for a century – until finally the shift boss reached out and turned the handle and they one by one filed into the room.

It was no room. It had become a sanctuary. In the dim light the ceiling seemed to soar above them. The crates and boxes were ancient stone pillars rising in grandeur. The four people priests at an altar where something new lay quietly breathing among blankets in an empty banana box. You could almost hear her tiny breath – the whispered awe was so thick among them.
***
They way they explained it later – to friends and family and strangers who might listen – “it was like the baby was aware of my presence. I felt like the child was mine. Like I felt when my own kids were born. This child – whose parents I’d never met before that night – gave me such a sense of belonging in that room. Gave me a sense that time had stopped and the whole universe was spinning around us – with us standing there at its centre.

It’s crazy talk I know. But the funny thing was – over breakfast when we talked it over – we all felt the same. We all just knew that something had happened that would change everything. We were changed. Don’t ask me how. I just know that now – since that night – I’m watching and searching and aware of things I’d never noticed before that night. There’s something new inside me I never knew before – or had long forgotten. I know we’ll be hearing good news coming about that girl one day.”

For Roxanne
With thanks for the riff to John Bird’s story of the same name

Justice and Creation:

a double book launch for

“The Justice Project” (Ed. Brian McLaren et. al.)
“The Gift of Creation” (Ed. Norman Wirzba)

with contributor Dr. Sylvia C. Keesmaat

Commentaries by:
Bruxy Cavey (The Meeting House)
Ron Kuipers (Institute for Christian Studies)

Music by Michael Iafrate, Alison Hari Singh, and Zoe Thiessen and The Hildegard Project (featuring Billy Gekas).

Facebook event info here.

It’s a feast today – and oh what a feast it will be. A feast of rich food, and of well-matured wines will be served, and all are invited to this table. Rich and poor, young and old, from every tribe and tongue and nation. All are invited to this table.

This ain’t no ordinary feast. This isn’t your run of the mill celebration. With this feast, on this day, we rejoice at the greatest victory ever witnessed. We rejoice in our very hearts - for the pall of death, the shroud cast over all peoples, the sheet spread over all nations – all of it has been destroyed.

Done away with forever. Death has been swallowed up, and all tears will be wiped away.

It’s time to stop our crying, to let loose, to dance, to gyrate in victory and celebration. To dance, like David danced, with a wild sense of abandon, with a sense that victory is here, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing for which we must be ashamed. But that could have been the wine talking. I’m not normally one for wild abandon. In fact, all too often I’m one for stoic or detached reflection. When’s the last time any of us got up to dance at church of an Easter Sunday?

I find myself trying to live it, and yet, all too often reducing it to words on a page, not letting the reality take hold of me, to reinvigorate me, and to run around screaming in disbelief. Why are people more excited to become contestants on the Price is Right than I find myself on Easter Morning?

Surely there’s a diference of scale here.

What have I done? What have we done? Reduced it all to a tale? A disconnected history? Does it have any relevance at all, and power to get me to my feet, and to proclaim that Thing Are Different Because of This?

What if it is true, this incredible story of redemption and resurrection, after such a period of fasting, of emptiness, of sorrow?

If indeed it is true that in this day, and in this God, then we have found not only comfort, but one who has conquered death (at last!). We have been found by and chosen by the one who will wipe away our tears. The one who will wipe away the tears we shed, if we shed them at all.

Perhaps we are numb. Perhaps lent and the walk through Holy week have gotten to us. Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s been such a harried week at home, at work, at school that we’re numb to it all. For students in University, this past week has another name that starts with the letter H, and it ain’t holy. Exams have begun, there’s studying to be done. Papers to write, exams to take, and maybe even that last ditch attempt to find a summer job.

And so while some may be crying out in celebration:

Where, O death, is your victory?
   Where, O death, is your sting?

There are others of us too exhausted to ask such rhetorical questions. Home for Easter, well, for some it’s just like Christmas with all of the attendant conflict of families that just don’t work. Home for Easter, and there’s much more to the dynamic than simply proclaiming “He is risen, He is risen indeed!” “Hallelujah” Oh if it were only so simple. Easter is here, but the distress of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday still remain with us.

And yet, today, this day, even in the midst of the most bleak, or the most numbing of our personal and corporate hells, Christ arrives. Christ has come. And Christ has come victorious. To break through the haze. To break through the numbness, the pain, the grief, to shatter the powers of sin and of death.

“It will be on that day,” says the prophet, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.”

This is the day. Our God, mighty to save, has come, is coming, is breaking in through the clouds, is breaking in through the busy-ness of the week, and calling us to revel, in the reality that has broken into our lives, today. Victory is here. It is risen. And we too are called to practice resurrection in the midst of our sometimes Good Friday lives.

So this day. Today. Rejoice, for this is the Lord we have waited for. Let us be glad, as the prophet suggests, let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Get on your dancing shoes, folks. This is a good day indeed!

Well, it looks as though the long awaited iPhone will finally be making its way to Canada.

Oh joy. Oh bliss. The saviour has finally come (tongue is now firmly planted in cheek).

How did we manage before its long awaited arrival? We had to carry our bulky iPods, PDA’s, and phones as separate entities. One doesn’t have enough pockets in one outfit to be able to safely and conveniantly handle all of those toys.

But thankfully, those days are over. Our troubles have been taken from us. We thought the Blackberry was the Redeemer but Mac is truly the King.

So when iIheard the announcement, out of curiosity I went online to find out how much the thing will cost.
The first thing that I realized was that finding out pricing online was going to be quite the challenge. I’m still pretty inept at finding exactly where I want to go when I do Google searches, but I did surf quite a few sites before I could find the slightest hint of its cost

The fact is, the advertisers were adamant that I read every possible spec of this thing in hopes that I’d be completely swept away by its majesty that no matter how much they wanted for it, it wouldn’t be too much.

(I must admit, I love this toy. it truly is amazing and has all of the things I like on it. Were I someone to give in to the whims of the doomsday prophet ad-man, he’d have me by the short and curlys on this one)

After too much time online, I think I figured out the pricing. Rogers will be the sole provider in Canada (monopoly?). You can get the 8G iPhone for the low price of $199 or the 16G iPhone for just $299. Oh, did I mention you need to sign your life away for three years on top of that? No other options available.

Then there’s the monthly fees that you commit to paying for those next 3 years (with the occasional letter from Rogers telling you that they’ll be generously raising your prices so they can better serve you). $69 + applicable taxes and random arbitrary fees per month for voice services. Then $20 + applicable taxes and random arbitrary fees for data. so $89 + … per month; for THREE years. So this inexpensive toy will run each user in the course of three years over $4000.

What else might $4000 pay for?

• It would cover close to 2000 meals in the shelter I work at for folks who live on the street
• If you don’t believe that people locally need to be going hungry and don’t deserve your charity then
• It would allow you to sponsor 3 children per month for three years through World Vision
• It could purchase 50 school kits per month through the Mennonite Central Committee, each school kit helps one child in Bangladesh get through school for one year
• It could provide the necessary labour and materials needed to provide 10 families the clean drinking water they need for the rest of their lives, for THREE years totalling 360 familes.

Or, you could buy a toy that you will fill a void in you for a few weeks or months until you grow tired of it and feel empty again or until someone makes a better toy.

I think i’m feeling grumpy about this. Forgive me for sounding pious, but the world is falling apart and we need to stop being seduced by the man and start waking up to the needs of people who are dying all around us.

Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh (Eerdmans; $24.00) is a book that I can safely say will be one of the most important works of the year, a major contribution to Christian social analysis and cultural reformation. I’ve followed these friends a bit as they’ve worked out this material. I’ve had an early draft and have been awaiting this published copy for a year; I couldn’t be more excited that it has arrived. Thanks be to God, the ever-faithful home-making and Earth-restoring God who comes to us in Jesus not, as they ably show, to take us away to heaven only to leave behind a burning planet, but to help us image the God of creation here, now, in creation-caring stewardship, until that great day when Christ returns to consummate his covenantal ways in a new Earth.

Walsh has written widely as co-author about the shape of a Christian way of living, based on a Biblical worldview informed by the grand story of creation-fall-redemption (Transforming Vision, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be, Subversive Christianity , The Advent of Justice, and, with his wife Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed.) How this has transfigured—through, among other things, forming a friendship and working relationship with environmental studies scholar (and author of the brilliant For the Beauty of the Earth) Steven Bouma-Prediger, reading a lot of Walter Brueggemann and Wendell Berry and the new urbanists like James Howard Kunstler, and moving into a sustainable agricultural community farm)—to the metaphor and images of home-making/exile/home-coming, is itself quite an amazing part of the story of this book. The grand drama of Scripture is still the heart of this book, but the new insights about land and place and the hope (in Revelation 21 and 22) of a “gardened city” are fresh and generative. I do not say this lightly, I really don’t: this is brilliant.

The Biblical studies are profound (and there are creative Bible interludes between each longer chapter that will bring the insightful and provocative reflections of Colossians Remixed to mind.) The scholarly breadth is prodigious, the cultural awareness just amazing. From the stories to the science, the cultural criticism to the theological proposals, from the song quotes to the incredible footnotes, this is one really interesting read.

It has deep integrity, too, remarkably so. From their work in classrooms and homeless shelters, to their work in homesteading and sustainable agriculture, they have lived out faithful and creative ways of being agents of God’s great homecoming. They’ve studied the meanings of home and homelessness, both among the very rich (who may have houses, but not homes in any meaningful sense) and the literally homeless (who may have homes in the sense of a community of belonging, even without houses.) They explored how the high modern culture displaces us, metaphorically and sometimes literally, from our “sense of place.” They’ve related the cultural angst and upward mobility culture with our disregard for the creation itself, related (as has their friend Bob Goudzwaard) the relationships between some of the key social problems of our time, from climate change to global poverty.

The insight of this important work is urgently needed, and I will be exploring Beyond Homelessness in greater detail in a longer book review over at our monthly column at the website. For now, please know of our very sincere gratitude for this remarkable work, our commitment to try to explain it well to folks so our readers purchase it, read it, discuss it, and deepen their ties to communities and places, living out the transforming vision that underlies this profound gift of insight, courage and hope.