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Linda L. Booth has been a member of the Council of Twelve Apostles since 1998 and serves as quorum secretary. Her current assignment includes the Southern USA Mission Field, Church Planting Ministries, and Contemporary Christian Ministries. |
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Doctrine and Covenants 163 Commentary Series
The Hope of Zion
by Linda L. Booth
“You are called to create pathways in the world for peace in Christ to be relationally and culturally incarnate. The hope of Zion is realized when the vision of Christ is embodied in communities of generosity, justice, and peacefulness.”—Doctrine and Covenants 163:3a
The Jesus story begins with a wonderful surprise. The almighty God of the universe came as a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manager. As an adult—Emmanuel, “God with us”—he proceeded to turn the world topsy-turvy. He brought peace, reconciliation, and healing of the spirit to all he touched. He ate with the sinners, visited in the hated tax collector’s home, and took water from an untouchable woman. He demanded justice for those who could not speak for themselves and proclaimed his vision of the peaceable kingdom—Zion.
Jesus also called ordinary people to embody him, to imitate his way of life in their lives, to share his peace on the pathways of their worlds, and to take his life and incorporate it into their being and doing. He commissioned them saying, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21).
Incarnation lies at the heart of Section 163:3a and calls us to intentionally center our inward and outward “pathways” or journeys in and for Christ’s peace. It calls us out of our apathy and comfort zones into the messiness of relationships and culture, where we are called to incarnationally live as Jesus.
Divine love is at the heart of an incarnational lifestyle. Divine love is “embodied in communities” and lived out in personal relationships and diverse cultures. In Section 163:2b we are reminded that “the restoring of persons to healthy or righteous relationships with God, others, themselves, and the earth is at the heart of the purpose of your journey as a people of faith.” Because we love as Jesus loved, we yearn for and actively strive to restore holistic relationships for us and all the people we meet and know, and for the earth that sustains us.
Sharon Thornton in her book Broken Yet Beloved says that love is the sacred movement that takes place between and among people in mutual relationships. Mutual relationships require that love be more than a feeling. It must be a powerful, life-changing action. “Mutual relationships are established,” Thornton wrote, “when the claims of justice are put into practice. The vision of just and compassionate environments in which mutual relationships are possible inspires the kind of pastoral practices that help people know just love.” Just love embodies Jesus and is something to be received and given.
Christ-like love becomes a holy, Zionic movement when Christ’s peace is central and shared between people who are motivated by their love for God and God’s people and committed to creating a just world for all of creation. They recognize that they are not to reflect culture’s distorted values but are instead to be immersed in culture and responsible partners with God to make the culture just in Christ’s image.
In the Humanity of God, Karl Barth wrote, “as creators or as beneficiaries of culture, we all participate in it as persons responsible for it. We can exercise no abstinence toward it, even if we want to. But we should not want to do that. Each of us has a place and a function in its history.”
Section 163:3a specifically and forcefully calls us into the world. There is an underlying urgency that calls us “to be relationally and culturally incarnate.” The “hope of Zion” becomes real when Christ’s vision is incarnationally lived and “embodied in communities of generosity, justice, and peacefulness.”
Theologians call this “the cultural mandate.” We cannot retreat from the “secular” world in hope of finding God elsewhere. God is visible with the people amid their struggles, conflicts, sin, and marginalization. We are called into that unsettled, difficult world as co-laborers with God to bring peace, reconciliation, and healing of the spirit just as Jesus did. As the “embodiment of God’s shalom” (163:2a) we are holy sanctuaries, experiencing God’s presence and sharing God’s presence— incarnation!
Richard Foster explained this concept in his book Streams of Living Water:
All of us are called to sacramental living. Redeemed by God through Christ, we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and experience a growing transformation of character as our bodies come into a working harmony with our spirit. Hence our embodied self becomes a habitation of the Holy—a tabernacle where we learn throughout our daily activities to function in cooperation with and in dependence upon God. Through time and experience we discover that everywhere we go is “holy ground” and everything we do is “sanctified action.” The jagged line dividing the sacred and the secular becomes very dim indeed, for we know that nothing is outside the realm of God’s purview and loving care.
When we live that reality, then we will not “be afraid to go where it beckons” (163:1) us to go. Like love, the “hope of Zion” is more than a feeling. It is a powerful, life-changing action.
Christ’s vision will “be embodied in communities of generosity, justice, and peacefulness.”
Henri Nouwen in his book The Road to Peace describes a Zionic community of “generosity, justice, and peacefulness”:
If we are to be peacemakers, it is essential that we take on what I would like to call a mentality of abundance and put away from us the mentality of scarcity. This sense of scarcity makes us desperate, and we turn to competition, hoarding, and a kind of parody of self-preservation. This greed extends not only to material goods but also to knowledge, friendships, and ideas. We worry that everything we possess is threatened.
Love and peace are more than feelings in Nouwen’s model. Love and peace are actions that are generously given, just as we willingly give our time, talents, and money rather than hoard them out of fear that there will not be enough for us. Nouwen reminds us that Jesus demonstrated on a hillside that a few loaves and fishes given by a poor child and taken and blessed by Jesus were a divine gift that became more than enough for a great crowd. “We must die to the self focused on scarcity so that we may enter into life trusting in God’s abundance,” Nouwen wrote. “This becomes the basis of real community. We each give what we have to one another. This fruitful life is not the same as a successful life, though. Fruitfulness is the gift that is given us as a result of our trust in God’s presence.”
In “real community,” generosity flows from our awareness of God’s presence and grace in our lives. As God’s grace flows through us to others, we are givers of “justice and peacefulness.” When we embody God’s grace we are freed from a selfish, scarcity mind-set and become passionate about giving ourselves to those who suffer injustice and have little or no peace in their lives. We live and act in solidarity with them and imitate the Christ, who loved people on the margins and chose to die on the cross in solidarity with those who suffered. His suffering, death, and resurrection point to the “hope of Zion,” allowing us to taste the peaceable kingdom in our midst as we reflect the living Christ through our lives.
Walter Wink, in Engaging the Powers, said:
As the Crucified, Jesus thus identifies with every victim of torture, incest or rape;…with every single one of the forty thousand children who die each day of starvation;…with every mother or father who cradles the lifeless body of a courageous son or daughter; with every Alzheimer’s patient slowly losing the capacity of recognition. In Jesus we see the suffering of God with and in suffering people.
In “communities of generosity, justice, and peacefulness” we, like Jesus, identify with those who are suffering. In Christ-centered community the cross is lifted up and we follow the risen Christ into the streets, offices, schools, home, villages, and hospitals to change those social structures that allow the inhuman and unjust treatment of people. We take part in the suffering of God in the world so peace, reconciliation, and healing of the spirit might be realized.
We love all of God’s people with a just love, just as Christ did. “To see the face of God,” Sharon Thornton said, “is a resurrection promise, a future-leaning hope…it means people will be brought down from the cross, and their tears, and then ours, will become beloved mirrors of the face of God.”
When our tears mingle with the tears of others, we cannot tolerate systems or actions that do not recognize their worth. And so we cry for the child who goes to bed hungry and we feed him. We reach out to the woman who doesn’t know Christ’s peace and we share our witness. We get angry when our local government doesn’t clean up the vacant lot next to our elderly friend’s home and we petition them. We look at all the clothes in our closet and think about those who have little and we box them up and give them to Salvation Army. We think about the ministry that is needed in the world and we spend less so we can give more in mission tithes. We give generously because “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Dorothee Soelle in her book Choosing Life wrote: “The only possible proof of Christ’s resurrection and our own would be a changed world, a world a little closer to the kingdom of God.” Section 163:3a calls us to risk in new ways and create a new world order to show the world that Christ lives. There is a promise inherent in the call and the risk: If we are dependent on God, trust in the Spirit’s presence, allow Christ to live in and through us, then Zion will be “realized.”
When we live the promise, our daily prayers and actions will mirror the words of this hymn:
Make us, O God, a church that dares courageously to act;
That clothes with flesh its fervent prayers and makes the Gospel fact.
Now thrust us from the cloistered halls where we may want to hide
And send us forth where duty calls to serve the Crucified!