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this is what it means…

October 19, 2009

Posted in: global, justice, the gathering

This is a poem we used last night at the CWJ Gathering.  I think it really summarizes, in so many ways, where we are moving as a community and how we are discovering that we can really encounter God among the Stranger, the Tortured, the Wretched, the Abandoned, and the Fatherless ones.  Alicia helped us discover the important truth that when we welcome, sit beside, bathe, bear up, and raise up the least, “that we are offered the grace to heal the suffering of our King.”  I have pictured more and more recently how in serving the suffering, we are literal serving Jesus.  But to heal the suffering of our King?  Are we in some ways bringing healing to The Suffering Servant?  I’d love to hear some response to that idea…

“Don’t palm me off with your civil religion and your politely murmured prayers,
don’t hand me your filthy mammon or your barns of laundered cash.

Don’t flatter me with your pious words catechisms so crisp and clean.
I hate your victory chants in praise of what I’m not:
your oh so personal idol, middle class and mute.

But I am not silent to those with ears to hear:
I weep, I groan, I scream, and I am so weary
of your all too clever words your rituals and your rhymes;
your meaningless slick tokens of power-point and song.

So once more I’m going to tell you (if you really want to hear),
now this is what it means, now this is what it means to know me:

Go love the Hungry One with whom you must share your bread,
go welcome The Stranger who soils your silken bed,
go sit still beside the Tortured One and hear his anguished  cries,
go bathe the disfigured, Wretched One caress His weeping skin,
bear up the abused, Abandoned One bent beneath Her grief,
raise up the Fatherless One eating scraps from beneath your feet,

for this is what it means, for this is what it means to know me.

Look! to those with eyes to see
I hide my face, buried broken in the bodies of the least,
and offer you the grace to heal the suffering of your King,
for this is what it means, this is what it means,
this is what it means to know me.”

by Kristin Jack (Servants Asia Coordinator)

inspired by Jer 22:13-17; Isa 1:1-20; 58:1-14; Amos 5:21-24; Mat 25:31-46