(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for A Better Country, originally shared on June 25, 2020. It was the twenty-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
This
week, we have been trying to get our newly installed high speed internet to
perform up to its potential.
Our internet is faster, but our signal
strength around our home is weaker. We are still working out a few bugs in the
system.
We’re at a point in the coronavirus pandemic
where our economy is stronger, but our recovery from the virus is weaker. There
are a lot of bugs in the system
People we see being interviewed on the news
literally say, “I don’t care.” I don’t know if they have given this any
thought, but the consequence is that they don’t care if they give it to anybody
else.
Our governor reports scientists believe that
we are not even in the second wave; we’re still in the first.
We’ve been struggling with this virus and
its global consequences for at least four months. Why? Because human rebellion
against God messed things up.
Why is the curve becoming curvier? Because
of continuing human rebellion. And, we can’t always know the source of that
decadence. That is, decay. That’s what decadence means. It’s not indulgence, as
in a “decadent chocolate dessert?’ Would you eat a desert that is actually decaying?
It means decay.
For example, if a factory owner dumps toxic
waste into the stream behind his factory in order to save money, his bottom
line improves, the shareholders are happy and he sleeps well at night.
Meanwhile, downstream, if a child drinks water from that stream and someday gets
cancer, not knowing what caused it, it’s a disaster. That’s the way sin works.
It contaminates things in ways we don’t even know, it brings decay, and we
can’t always know the source of the decadence.
How does God address this sinful world?
He dies for it on the cross. He pays for it
with his life. He redeems it.
In the book of Revelation, the last book of
the Bible, near the very end, of the book, we read.
*Revelation
21:1-4
This is our word of hope. A new heaven and a
new earth.
This earth isn’t going away. It, too, will
be redeemed. The city of God will come, and God’s home will be among humans,
for we who accept God’s gift of faith, a living relationship with the one true
living God, made possible for us on the cross, have been redeemed and
reconciled to God.
Meanwhile, we live in this world, as it is, separated from God by its
rebellion, its sin. A world ever in decay, where people do not live the reality
of the Kingdom of God, under God’s reign in all things, doing God’s will, God’s
justice, but living in their self-guided way.
*Hebrews 11:13-16
This chapter, the faith chapter, begins with a recounting of the great figures
of the Bible, in what Christians call the Old Testament books.
Every one of the pivotal people of the Bible, except Jesus, the Son of
God, were flawed, sometimes deeply flawed. As Rick Warren has said, God does
not call the qualified, God qualifies the called.
The great men and women of the Bible were not great because they were
great in themselves, but because they had a great God.
And every one that Paul mentions died before the advent of the Kingdom
of God. Yet, they lived by faith.
Mother Theresa did not want her journals published. But, when she died, they were published as her autobiography. The book is filled with her laments, her cries to God for some sense of God’s presence, some connection, some affirmation. They did not come.
Her critics pointed to those passage as proof that she was a fraud, that
she had no relationship with God at all.
Others pointed out that this was proof of her saintliness. Some
psychologists point out that there is no such thing as true altruism, that people
to do good feel good and that they keep doing good because they get this inner
reward. Her supporters pointed out that Mother Theresa was a model of sacrificial
service to others, and she got nothing in return.
She acted only in response to God’s call. That was her spiritual
greatness.
We long for a better country, the new heaven and the new earth, yet we
live in this one, one in which the Kingdom of God already is, in this imperfect
sinful world, wherever God reigns.
We who have been baptized have been claimed by God forever, and have
been called, therefore, to make this world more like the one that is to come simply
in response to what we have first received in Jesus Christ.
We have been equipped to love as we have first been loved, to serve as
we have first been served, as a natural outcome of our relationship with the
one true living God, with no promise of a personal reward, simply because it is
in our new nature to do so.
I saw a cartoon many years ago in which a character was praying, “Lord
there is so much evil in the world. Why don’t you do something about it?”
And
a cartoon balloon voice came from heaven and said, “That’s funny, I was about
to ask you the same thing.”
That is the better country. That is the Kingdom of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment