Isaac Villegas – Page 5 – Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship

Exiles in prison

If we’re committed to the welfare of this country, to the people around us, to the people exiled from us in prisons, in detention centers—if we find our welfare in their welfare, how do we make sense of the contradictions? The contradiction that to be for the welfare of prisoners involves being against the welfare of the society that builds prisons, a way of life that depends on incarceration. What does it mean for us to be committed to peace, here, in this place where God has put us, when sinister violences hold it all together?

The potter’s wheel

Repentance is how we say yes to God’s vision for our lives—to let go of all the ways we try to be something we are not, to release our grip on visions for life that aren’t good for us, visions that aren’t good for our neighbors, and instead entrust ourselves into God’s care, to trust that God will remake us and our world with the goodness we need. Jeremiah’s prophecy about the potter’s house is a word of judgment, a call to say no to what causes destruction in our lives and in our communities, in order to say yes to God’s goodness, to say yes to God’s grace.

to plant

There’s a tree in my backyard, actually a neighbor’s yard, but it’s branches reach above our house, a canopy of leaves over our backyard. A month ago there was a tree guy doing work on it, cutting away a dead branch that stretched toward our house. I asked him how old he thought the tree was. At least 150 years, he said. I stared at it from my backyard office for the rest of the day, thinking about what it’s seen. In it’s early years, it would have watched as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation set enslaved people free, free from their Southern masters. Maybe the tree was planted in celebration of that liberation. An oak tree bearing witness to the end of slavery.

Let us argue

This stuff weights me down—for you it could be the situation in Kashmir or all the ice melting in Alaska’s seas, or all of this and more. I feel it in my shoulders, the tightness in my neck. Each body carries weight that pulls at us in different ways. I’ve named public trauma here, but I know each of us, each of you, have very personal traumas and heartaches, intimate anxieties that mess with your head, that affect your day to day life.

The earth shall answer

The Scriptures aren’t so much worried about the salvation of this person or that person, but in a collective future for the people as a whole. God saves a community, a people, God’s people, not just individuals, which means each person’s fate is bound up with all the others, my salvation is bound up with yours, and yours with mine.

Prophecies of exile

Here’s the thing I learned from Amos this week, after reading through his prophecy. There’s so little concern with all the things I’ve obsessed about, as a Christian, for most of my life. God doesn’t waste time with the stuff I’ve always thought about as so important for my life, for my faith—all my conceptions about faithfulness, about what it means to love God, to live according to God’s will.

Lovesick

Jesus doesn’t pray for himself by himself. Instead he prays for his friends in their company. “I am asking on their behalf… protect them from the evil one” (13:9, 15). Jesus is single-hearted, wholly for his disciples, worried about their future, desperate for God to watch over them. Life seems unbearable, unimaginable, without them.

Peace I leave with you

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Jesus offers these words to his friends on his last night with him. Their evening together began with Jesus, taking the feet of his disciples into his hands, pouring water over each one and scrubbing them clean, then with a towel massaging them dry. As they ate their last supper, Jesus tells them that he loves them, that he will miss them, that he will always be with them, in their hearts, in their love, in their lives together, through the Holy Spirit, the divine comforter, the divine advocate, the presence of God.

Do not be troubled

We hope for a world where he can thrive, where our neighbors and the children of our neighbors experience the fullness of life. We believe in the God of life, in a world held in God’s hands, like Jesus holding his disciples close, Jesus holding us close, washing us with love, refreshing us with peace.

Breakfast

I dream of other worlds, ones like this one, with all of you there, but there’s something different, one difference that changes everything, the collapse of the old and a beginning for the new, like, for example, a world without guns, with no more weapons, without arms manufacturers and dealers, without rockets flying in and out of Gaza, a world without border fences and prison walls, a world without corporations making money off of detention centers and ankle monitors and bail bonds, a world without pollution, without factory waste dumped into rivers, without fossil fuel emissions, without the slow violence of environmental racism, a world without cancer, without disease, without sicknesses that sneak up on the young and lead to their death. I dream of worlds that still have all the people we’ve lost—your people and my people, your friends and mine, all our loved ones, even the ancestors we never met.