Meditation
Excerpted from an interview with N.T. Wright on his book “God and the Pandemic.”
Western churches for the last few generations have been failing in living and announcing God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. The churches of late western modernity—including ‘conservative’ late western modernity—have been captive to a Platonic gospel of ‘going to heaven when you die’ which the younger generation has seen right through as the escapist nonsense it is. Fortunately the Bible offers something far more robust…Some younger people are drawn back to more traditional types of ‘institutional Christianity’—like meditative liturgical music, or Cathedral-style worship—because it gives the worshipers space to ponder and grow, without thrusting obvious and one-dimensional teachings at them all the time. My anxiety is that there may be a time-lag before our churches wake up to the truly biblical message, which is not that God wants us to go and live with him but that he wants to come and live with us, transforming, healing, and renewing the whole creation—and that he has decisively begun that in Jesus and is implementing it by his Spirit until Jesus comes again to complete the work. In that time-lag a generation may be lost. In particular, the western churches have cheerfully colluded with multiple divisions, so that Paul’s constant insistence on church unity is not even noticed, let alone preached on, let alone acted upon. If our churches even tried to be a bit more multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-generational, multi-colored, then more young people might just glimpse that this was always God’s intention for the church—to be a small working model of what God wants to do for the whole creation. This is simply an exposition of Ephesians 1-3.
Prayer
Written by Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596), an English sea captain and the second sailor to circumnavigate the globe.
Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim. Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wilder seas where storms will show Your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes; and to push back the future in strength, courage, hope, and love. This we ask in the name of our Captain, who is Jesus Christ. Amen.
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