Also For The Feast Day of Adam And Eve - That is what Israel means to confess in its stories of creation

Continuing on with Chapter 5 of Walter Brueggemann's book, The Bible Makes Sense

God Is The Live-Bringer

That is what Israel means to confess in its stories of creation,  that God has the power and the will to turn chaos to creation and empty darkness to vibrant light,  to deal with the forces of death, and to bring life.  And he does this, not by magic or by mystification, but by his powerful lordly word which calls into being creatures designed to listen and answer and to live in faithful covenant with him.  He is precisely the one who has the authority to “call into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).

It is especially in Jesus that God the life-bringer is evident.  Peculiarly in the stories of Easter is life granted to a world of death.  The Events of Good Friday were the last desperate efforts of death to have its way with Jesus.  Embodied in civil structures,  the power of death caused its moment of darkness and its time of earthquake (Mark 15:33-38).  But it could not finally have its way because the life-bringer raised the dead Jesus and in him created an alternative for his entire creation.   In the risen Jesus the church came to know that the power of death is not the only possible conqueror.  There is one who is stronger (Mark 3:21-27).

But Jesus as the presence of the life-bringer in a world of death is known not only in the resurrection.  Each of his actions is shaped as the triumph of life over death.  So he dealt with Zacchaeus, as good as dead, and restored him to joyous life (Luke 19:1-10) 

I'll break in to remind you that Zacchaeus was a tax collector for Rome, a traitor to his own people, or at least the poor of his people.    Tax collectors made their money not primarily from shaking down peasants and people of the artisan class for Rome - who, as in Republican-fascist America paid the most in taxes - but, like the financial institutions of Republican-fascist America, cheat and swindle and rob and con the lower economic class on behalf of the same billionaires Republican tax policy serves.  And not just a tax collector but a CHIEF tax collector - you know, the guys who didn't get fired from Wells Fargo when the CEO and other fat cats ordered them to rob their customers.  When the Supreme Court hands billionaires the power to con the country into voting for their servants, there's no difference between Wells Fargo and Congress - if you don't think that's true, look up how much the Republican-fascists gave Wells Fargo even in comparison to the other crooked mega-banks - , the big fat-cats' law firms and the Supreme Court.  That's where we are now.   Just in case you don't think any of that is relevant to our times and conditions.   In the story, Jesus inspired Zacchaeus to change his life, which he told him he would, including paying back those he cheated 4 times more.  It's a story that's telling those in our analogous class of rich crooks to cut it out.  You can do that with religion, even atheists who say that have to borrow the ideas and words to say it from somewhere alien to atheism because there is nothing in atheism to identify what they do at Wells Fargo is wrong.

He told the story of the son restored to   father, the one “who was dead and is alive” (Luke 15:24).  He had compassion on the hungry crowds and by feeding them brought life where hunger had held sway (Mark 8:1-10).   Indeed,  he not only gives life but he redefines it in terms of joyous obedience to the gather and joyous caring for the brother and sister.   He manages to invert definitions so that what the world had thought was the way of death is the celebrative gift of life and what the world calls life he showed to be deathly existence.  So he calls into question all the coercive arrangements which squeeze the life out of God's creation (Matthew 23:1-36).

In response to a question by John, he summarizes all his actions as life-giving:

. . . The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed,  and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good new preached to them (Luke 7:22).  

Note:  I'd intended to post the passage from Marilynne Robinson's essay, "Darwinism" today but posted it last night in case we lost our electricity today.   We didn't but you might want to read the post, below if you haven't already.