Where Righteousness is at Home

You know how sometimes a phrase from the Sunday lessons hits you a certain way, and stays in your head for the rest of the week?

All this week I've been "inwardly digesting" the line in Sunday's epistle lesson, also a lectionary reading for December 8th, from 2 Peter chapter 3: "But in accordance with [God's] promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home." Where righteousness is at home.

It sprang to mind when I read this essay in Slate magazine, written by a homeless Katrina evacuee who, against all odds and his own diminishing expectations, was suddenly offered not one but three homes.

It's a story that's certainly heartwarming; but there's also a bittersweetness about it, because the outcome is so unusual, so unexpected. We live in a world where righteousness isn't at home; where acts of kindness and courageous risk-taking and justice-making strike us, simultaneously, as "the right thing to do," yet as something out of the ordinary. For instance, most hurricane victims aren't being showered with offers of housing by caring others. Many of them are, in fact, losing the leases on their rented apartments; being evicted by landlords or defaulting on their mortgages back home; wearing out their welcome in their adoptive communities; at the mercy of others' fickle attentions and sympathies, and overwhelmed, befuddled bureaucracies. Who is your neighbor, if your home's been blown away and you've been relocated in some other city or even other state?

I remember, back in my young-adult religious formation, reading a C.S. Lewis book where he observed that one of the evidences in his mind for the veracity of the Christian story was our sense of living as broken people in a broken world, mingled with our longing for the wrong things to be made right. Where does this tension between our dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and ourselves as we are, and the vision of something better come from if "what you see is what you get"? Lewis would have argued that it comes from God; that it speaks to the initial disconnect between ourselves and God that Christ has come to us to mend.

What would it look like -- a world where righteousness is at home? What would I look like? What would we all look like?