Landless and Yearning to be Landed

I recently read Walter Brueggemann's book The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith. Here's an excerpt from the book that I found particularly profound:

"The sense of being lost, displaced, and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture. The yearning to belong somewhere, to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit. Loss of place and yearning for place are dominant images. They may be understood in terms of sociological displacement, as Americans have become a "nation of strangers", highly mobile and rootless, as our entire social fabric becomes an artifact designed for obsolescence, and the design inclues even us consumers! They may be understood in terms of psychological dislocation, as increasing numbers of person are disoriented, characterized as possessors of "the homeless mind"...Those whom we imagine to be secure and invested with "turf" in our time experience profound dislocation...The Bible itself is primarily concerned with the issue of being displaced and yearning for a place"

He goes on to develop a theology of the "Land" - connecting what God promised Israel to our deep human longings to be "landed" - secure and rooted, a place of continual blessing, free from the fear of a world that often seems set against us. Ever since humankind was kicked out of the garden, we have been longing for Land. The promise of the Bible is that in Jesus, God acted decisively to "land us" - through his renewal of heaven and earth. Thinking through the lens of being "landless" and longing to be "landed", many seemingly divergent issues come into focus - border issues in Palestine, homelessness, environmental degradation. My question is this: What images, issues, songs, movies, stories come to mind when you think about this issue of needing to be "landed"?

(I really do want responses to this - if what I'm asking isn't clear, let me know)

Prayer is a Political Act

Today's election has caused me to pause and think about the church's engagement with politics. Actually, framing the issue as the "church's engagement with politics" is deceptive - as if politics and the church are separate entities that only occasionally interact. If, however, the church's fundamental claim that shapes its identity is that "Jesus is Lord", then the church by its nature is an alternative politic. It's a politic because "Jesus is Lord" and its alternative because "Jesus is Lord". The implications for this are enormous, and I don't even want to try right now to explore some of them. Instead, I want to turn to something else that I've been thinking about recently.
As citizens of the American politic, perhaps a good case can be made that we have a responsibility to vote. Christians will often speak of voting as the way in which Christians need to engage with the "political sphere". However, since the church believes that God is the sovereign ruler of the world and the Lord of History, we have a more important political act - prayer. To not see prayer as a political act is to believe that Democrats and Republicans rule the world, and not God. The idea that prayer is simply a religious act reveals that we believe in a God whose role consists in nothing more than the maintenance of our souls - a good therapist, but not the God of the Bible. Praying is political because our God is the one who "brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing"(Is 40:23). The rulers of this age are mere pawns in His hand. So let us be political during this election time. Let us pray.