Today’s Word: Poetic

“The Church must be a poetic community,” theologian Walter Brueggemann once wrote, meaning — in my mind anyway — that if we are going to reach the people around us with the Gospel, we’re going to have to move beyond the standard rhetoric and capture their imaginations through our creativity, poetry, music, and art. We must be able to offer more them more than dogma and argument. We must be able to show and tell them who Jesus is in new and creative ways, following the lead of Jesus himself, who taught most effectively not with shouts of indignation but rather with simple parables and gentle acts of hospitality and healing. Jesus taught by feeding people and by looking them in the eye when he spoke. In the Beatitudes, he reached them by giving them a beautifully poetic list of ways they could live more blessed lives. Like a good rabbi, Jesus taught using the power of story.

Jesus can be hard to see and find in our busy, self-centered world. So it’s the job of the Church — that’s us — to prayerfully, gently and clearly bring him into the light of day in the midst of darkness. By telling his story in new ways and by relating the stories of our own lives and the movement of God in them, we stand as poetic, creative witnesses to the life of Christ, professing a loving, forgiving God who is Immanuel, who is “God with us,” who is the Incarnate, living, creative and creating Word.

Ask yourself in silence: How can I tell the story of Jesus in a fresh, creative, artistic way? How can I make Jesus and his good news understandable and attractive to someone who desperately needs to hear the story?