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What it isSunday, May 28, 2006
John 17:11-19 Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying: "Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one. When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me, and I guarded them, and none of them was lost except the son of destruction, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely. I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth."
The brittle legalism of those days has been replaced by the goosy open-ended freedom of New Age religion, but reaching for the stars still claims much human energy. "Be all that you can be" is the siren call of the US Army, for heaven's sake. Jesus tells his disciples they are "in the world" but not "of the world." This pragmatism lends his prayers and instructions a tone of grief and acceptance that encourages his disciples to live their lives as they are, not as they would have them to be. A ration of "basic training" might be necessary ... is necessary ... to open my eyes to my own faith and the strength it provides, but I must not pretend that earth is heaven. My citizenship is in heaven, not on earth. That foundational fact changes everything. I live here, I strive here, I reach for the stars. But I expect God to move my mountains, and when they do not move I do not despair of my own weakness. God's timing is God's timing. How can I wake up every morning, regardless of the suffering I encounter, and know it's new? "Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5). Life is what it is today. Tomorrow and yesterday all color my experience of course. But God's presence is here today. I know it's here, I know it's now, I know it's new. I do not have to think things should be better than they are. God is in charge of me, and I am a citizen in his world. Lord you are strong, you are invincible, you are God. Make my ears and eyes and hands and feet the instruments of your peace. Let me be. Yours. |
At New Harmony in southern Indiana the utopian aspirations of first Johann Rapp and later Robert Owen were cultivated and eventually abandoned. The historic celebrations acknowledge their failure but lift them up as idealists who believed men could reach for the stars.