07 25 11 Messianic Time-Messianic Hope

I have been grateful for help Cindee and I have received this summer from family and friends. Re-developing our bioshelter home and its lands according to the principles of permaculture has been particularly difficult for me because it has required entering into an extended season of visible messiness. I complain about this periodically in this blog, so clearly it does bother me. On the other hand, I have been trying to allow at least some of the messiness to become symbolic to me of what we are doing. We are deconstructing our old lives and reconstructing new lives. Construction (and deconstruction) is always messy.


Some of the obvious messiness includes

  • my garden boxes, only half of which are built,
  • my garage workshop ,which I will not properly clean until all the garden boxes are built,
  • Cindee’s composting and soil building equipment,
  • the cut cottonwood logs and branches, which will require a week of hard labor for two people to clean up before we can think about planting fruits,
  • wood piles that need to be split and stacked for winter heat,
  • gardening paraphernalia
  • various tools and paraphernalia laying around because this is the season for making quick jaunts to gather and preserve salmon and berries—food we will need later.
  • Not to mention some of the regular, year-round chores

In short, we have so many projects underway that we have to live in the clutter until those projects move toward completion.


It is a bit tiring (even overwhelming) to look at sometimes. I have been grateful to our neighbor, Matt, who cut some of my old trees for me to provide lumber for the boxes. I have also been gratefully to my two children and their spouses, who have generously donated some of their precious vacation time to helping with some of the heavy work. We couldn’t do it alone. Relationships make all the difference.


Today, as I was meditating on all this from my own perspective as a Christian, I realized how symbolic all this is to what I understand real life to be about. By my way of thinking, real life is about understanding the times in which we live as times shaped by Jesus Christ, the Messiah. As Jürgen Moltmann put it, we live in messianic time. This is the time in which the Messiah is at work through the Spirit in creation. Messianic time is “directed toward the liberation of men and women, peace and nature, and the redemption of the community of human beings and nature from negative powers, and from the forces of death (Moltmann, God in Creation, 1985, p. 5).”


The work of liberation from what holds us back,[1] and the work of redemption[2] for what can be, is about deconstruction and reconstruction. When we see what is not working now, and we see what God is doing about bringing forth something better for the future, we are called to get involved in a way adds momentum to what God is doing. Always this is a messy process because it includes deconstruction of the status quo; but always this is also an experience of spiritual journeying and growth, if we have eyes to see.


Honestly, spiritual journeying is also emotional journeying. When I see the messiness and the amazing amount of effort it will take to “clean up,” my first reaction is a sense of frustration and overwhelm. It takes a conscious effort to stop fretting and remember the plan—that is, to remember our best understanding of what we are doing and why. Reshaping life to become a participation in the “liberation of creation and redemption of human communities” is big stuff, and important stuff. Ultimately, it is God who brings these things about, but we get the privilege of seeing God at work and responding as a part of our relationship to God. It is a privilege, and it good work to be involved in.


So, I need to take time daily to remember such things, and choose. Today, do I choose to live with a sense of overwhelm? Or do I choose to live with a sense of participating in the adventure of it all? Or to put it another way, do I live in the awareness of the redeeming work of the Messiah, or get stuck by the magnitude of what is needed, as if it were all up to poor me without the Messiah?


Actually, what is needed is Messiah work—the work of God. What a privilege to be set free just to do what I can and leave the rest in God’s hands. There is a Messiah, and the real times we live in are about participating (in our own, small-but-important way) in what the Messiah is doing through the Spirit. As the Scriptures put it, “…Jesus Christ is our living hope (1 Timothy 1:1).”When I remember that, I can put up with the messiness of living in a reconstruction zone, and I rediscover my energy for working in it. I can’t wait to see how it will all take shape!


[1] Among other things the work of liberation includes liberation from patterns of thinking and living that contribute to un-sustainability.

[2] Among other things redemption is always about the bringing forth of the good that God put in us at creation.

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