Make Them Hear You
Advent. The season of longing and hope for a brighter tomorrow. The celebration of the light of the world entering creation to save humankind from itself. At the same time that we experience this glimmer of anticipation, we are also hit with a healthy dose of reality. We realize that things don’t seem to change very much and that the world is in this constant cycle as history repeats itself again and again never really coming to redemption. I wonder why. Einstein said that the definition of insanity was to do something over and over again expecting different results.
Let’s take economics for instance. This is a perfect time to talk about it with Black Friday just behind us. The financial sector says spend, spend, spend. Let’s spend as much as we can and show that consumer confidence is up. Let’s maximize revenues and do what we need to in order to make sure the bottom line is as fat as possible. This way companies will be able to hire more people and unemployment will drop and the economy will improve. The social sectors says, “Are you kidding me?” This mentality is what has been costing us all along. You’re telling me that it’s good for the economy for people to go out and buy things that they don’t need at prices that defy logic and have them go deeper in debt as they put it on their credit cards? So now they will have to pay the interest on those cards on top of the debt they already had and will decrease their disposable income. Yeah, that makes sense. As long as nobody reverses this cycle, it will continue to repeat itself from generation to generation as it always has. Somebody has to take a stand and start teaching a better way.
What about foreign policy? If the leader(s) of a nation or people group do something that we disagree with, we should threaten force and the taking of lives. If they do not obey us, we have to carry through with our threats lest we be deemed as weak. It doesn’t matter what the ideology is behind their actions, either way they are wrong and we are right and such should be asserted. What the heck? If we spend some dough on these campaigns it will just improve the economy anyway. This cycle has been in place ever since humans discovered fire. 2500 years ago Isaiah said that a day would come when war is taught no more. He said that nations “shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” I guess we just keep waiting. Or is there another way?
Jesus entered the world as our hope. He was the one that came to teach a better way. We Christians want him to hurry up and do something to make the world a better pace. We want him to eradicate all of the foolishness and bring peace, but unfortunately we keep waiting. In the meantime, we need to tell the world that there is a better way than the one that we have been following. We need to bring to fruition this idea of teaching war no more. How do we make them hear us? How can we get them to listen? If actions speak louder than words . . . . Perhaps we have missed the point and Jesus didn’t come to do things for us, but instead came to show us how we were supposed to do them. If that’s the case, then let’s start living out what we have been taught. Make your actions speak loudly and make them hear you.
Apophatica 
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