Friday in the Second Week

Genesis 37:3-4, 12-28; Psalm 105:16-22; Matthew 21:33-43

One of my favorite images for God is the Great Recycler, who uses our garbage for fuel for good.  Today, Joseph’s story is exhibit A for this process.  His brothers envy and resent him, and conspire to get rid of him.  They barely avoid killing him.  The decision to sell him is not merciful, but mercenary.  They think that’s the end of the story.  But the story continues, through Joseph’s rise to power and wisdom, through the famine that brings his brothers begging, through to reconciliation.  (Of course, the story continues; this chapter ends happily, but the recycling is perennial.)

When Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants, he doesn’t include a happy ending (unless you love scenes of vengeance, which many of us do).  This time the hero is indeed killed, and the tenants are destroyed in turn.  The recycling here consists of new tenants being given the land when the former ones are gone.

Together, the two stories remind us that recycling never ends short of the realized kingdom.  We foul our nest, and God uses the filth for compost.  We rejoice, we turn back to God - for a while.  Then we forget how we got this fabulous new nest, and we foul it again.  And sometimes, it seems that our destruction is greater than God’s recycling capability.  How is genocide to be recycled?  What will we do when we’ve destroyed our fragile earth?

Like our planet, God has huge resources for renewal.  On the macro scale we might see new growth.  Still, this growth does not eliminate our responsibility for caring for creation.  We can’t just keep throwing spiritual and material garbage at one another and expect God to clean up the mess.  We each die a bit when someone is tortured, enslaved, brutalized.  We endanger our spiritual resources when we refuse the path of transformation and healing.  Like our planet, God’s world never holds still.  We are either making garbage or working to recycle, every minute.

Where can you be part of the cleanup of our spiritual and social environment today?  Where is your perception blocked or distorted, leading you to be part of the problem rather than the solution?  Pray for humility and clarity, for all of us.