outWORD by Matte Downey

Exile by Shelby McQuilkin These are unsettling times in which to live. We are home more than ever due to the pandemic, yet less at home in our lives in many ways. Upheaval seems a constant in social and political realms. What do we name this sense of being displaced from what we assumed was normal? Who can be our guides in navigating everchanging landscapes? In the past few weeks, I have been drawn to the biblical stories of exile. Here we find people who know what it is like to live with uncertainty. And here we also find hope in unexpected places. What does it mean to be in exile? There are many ways people experience some degree of displacement.  1) prolonged separation from one's home by circumstances or authoritative decree 2) banishment 3) loss of control over where you live or belong 4) dislocation and separation from what is familiar (voluntary or involuntary) 5) physical exile (removed from home and land) 6) exile in your own home (under foreign occupation, travel restric...

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 find many names for Jesus in the witness of Scripture. There are names which Jesus gave himself (Son of Man, bread of life, good shepherd, the way, the truth, the life, etc.) and there are names which others bestowed on Jesus. I want to look a little closer at the latter. We find three of them in the account of his birth in Matthew 1:18-23. Here Jesus is identified as the Messiah (v. 18), Jesus (v. 20), and Immanuel (v. 23). In the Hebrew culture, names did not simply identify or distinguish a person; they expressed something about their character and nature. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Hebrew Bible contains more than sixty names for the God of Israel ( Names of God ). Names also reflected the time or context into which a child was born. Though Jesus was given a rather unremarkable first-century Hebrew name, it reflected the prophetic cry of the people at the time. The Jews were longing for God to intervene, to rescue them from Roman occupation and oppressive circum...

Christmas is a time of year when we see traditions being enacted all around us. Traditions, at their best, tell a story. They are meant to be reminders of identity, history, and hard-won values. Unfortunately, traditions can easily become unmoored from their stories. When this happens, the tradition morphs into something else: it may become a hollow act practically devoid of meaning, or it may become associated with a different story, or the story may be revised to reflect a more convenient story. About a month ago, I heard aboriginal women telling the heart-wrenching story of the slaughter and conquest which accompanied the original celebrations of Thanksgiving in America. This inconvenient story has been removed from the tradition in favour of a more sentimental, Euro-centric tale. The tradition changes when the story changes, and we must resist whitewashing the stories associated with our traditions, for doing so causes us to lose our way. Jesus encountered some very devout tra...