outWORD by Matte Downey

Prepare the way of the Lord. These are rather familiar words in the Christian tradition. In the gospels, they refer to the ministry of John the Baptist, a prophet proclaiming the coming Messiah, but the original context is a promise of deliverance found in Isaiah 40. "A voice is wailing, 'In the wilderness, get it ready! Prepare the way; make it a straight shot. The Eternal would have it so. Straighten the way in the wandering desert to make the crooked road wide and straight for our God. Where there are steep valleys, treacherous descents, raise the highway; lift it up; bring down the dizzying heights. Fill in the potholes and gullies, the rough places. Iron out the shoulders flat and wide. The Lord will be, really be, among us. The radiant glory of the Lord will be revealed. All flesh together will take it in. Believe it. None other than God, the Eternal, has spoken.'" (Isaiah 40, The Voice) This section of Isaiah (chapters 40-48) was written ...

We go through doorways and openings every day, stepping across thresholds as we do, and seldom think much about it. But thresholds and doorways and gates are significant places, liminal spaces which tie two realms together. Thresholds are places of transition and decision. They are entrances and openings to new worlds, offering promise and invitation, but they are also places of ambiguity and disorientation. Open the door of your warm, cozy home during a blistering blizzard in the dead of winter and you know what I mean. Or step through the doorway of a plane after you land in a foreign country and you know the feeling. Gates are important places in the biblical text. We read about certain events happening "in the gate." This makes little sense unless we know something about ancient cities. A city usually had a wall around it and where there was a gate into the city, an outer gate would be built around it, providing a second line of defence. Between the inner and the ou...

Image from bestcoloringpagesforkids.com Words which we use a lot can sometimes become divested of their depth of meaning. In the Christian tradition, we talk about the cross a lot. We see visual representations of the cross in prominent places in our gathering spaces, we wear crosses around our necks, some get crosses tattooed on their bodies. The cross is a ubiquitous symbol in Christianity, so lately I have been asking myself, what exactly does the cross mean? For the most part, the cross as portrayed in contemporary Christianity is a beautiful thing, festooned with flowers and sunsets and radiant beams of light (just google  cross  or  cross coloring page ). But in the first century, the cross was a symbol of disgrace. To the Roman empire, this ignoble instrument of death was for those who were traitors and enemies of the state. We are many centuries removed from this view of the cross as the locus of torture and death and shame. The fact that Christianity h...