LENT 2020: Day 25

• Lent 2020: Day 25 Wednesday, March 25, 2020:
  Psalm 146; Isaiah 60:17-22; Matthew 9:27-34

     No more shall your sun set,
          your moon shall not go down,
    But the LORD shall be your everlasting light,
          and your mourning days shall be done.

“At the beginning of the poem,” writes Robert Alter in his commentary on Isaiah, “Israel’s radiance lit up the world.”

This is very familiar to us, as Americans. It was not that long ago that America’s radiance lit up the world.

But not any more.

That is regrettable, but it also opens our eyes to the truth that has always been there: America is not a Christian nation.

In their book, Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon lean on Philippians 3.20 to write that “it is the nature of the church, at any time and any situation, to be a colony.”

The good news, according to Isaiah, is that, despite the fact that we can no longer provide our own light, we are not left in the dark.

As Alter observes, “Now, the heavenly luminaries are to be replaced by God, as an everlasting source of light.”

Hauerwas and Willimon, though, rightly caution: “To be resident but alien is a formula for loneliness that few of us can sustain.”

And so they offer that “Christians can survive only by supporting one another through the countless small acts through which we tell one another we are not alone, that God is with us.”

In case you didn’t catch that, we know God is with us because of our own acts of community.

“Friendship,” they say, “is not, therefore, accidental to the Christian life.”