MANY ARE CALLED…….
Last Sunday, I woke up with a start from my afternoon nap. My sudden thought was: churches are on the wrong track. Wrong? Why that immediate impulse? I then and there decided to pursue this. Inspired, perhaps?
My 800+ words blogs are the fruit of week-long thinking. They don’t flow out of my fingers through good fortune. No, they are the child of my brain working 24/7 all the time: they crowd my thinking and my going, my waking and my sleeping.
I look back many centuries.
For some 1800 years the church has been preoccupied with heaven. Their majestic worship edifices, the famous cathedrals in Europe, have
their spires perpendicularly pointing up high into the sky: They brazenly turn away from God’s earth, and aim directly at the heavens.
Their ultra-high ceilings are adorned with trumpeting troubadours, beckoning us, earthlings, to enter the heavenly realms, where ‘saints’ in glory stand, drawn from every nation, come from every land.
Is Heaven simply my obsession, my preoccupation, my distorted intuition?
I know: going to heaven at death, is still the overriding belief, assumed as God’s truth. The parting words of my older brother, at our 40th wedding dinner, were: “See you in heaven”. These beliefs are reflected in many church buildings, no matter which denomination, even Scottish Presbyterian, reinforced by the ancient hymns, silently or emphatically, and often blatantly expressed in sermons. Especially now, as the earth is gasping for breath, we long to escape to heaven. And escape it is!
Even now, the totality of the worship-setting exposes the ‘heaven’ desire. It’s not what we say that counts: it’s what we do. The parking lot surrounding the church buildings, tells the brutal tale.
Where do we go when we die?
God loves the world, says the Bible. How do we ‘live’ that love for the world?
We stay put: “Earth we are and to earth we shall return”, God reminds us in Genesis 3: 19. The Earth! Our place forever. The Earth! The world created by the Word and therefore constituting God’s Primary, His Direct Word. The Bible – a human book – is God’s indirect Word. That’s why we no longer can see God without the world, or the world without God. If we want to gain wisdom, then the simple rule is to see that God and the world are one. A sin against the earth is a sin against God.
No wonder: “Many are called………. but few are chosen,” Matthew 22: 14 tells us.
This begs the question: How then are we to live?
That should make us think. That has made me think. “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves”, Jesus reminds us. That tells us to look to creation, and always remember that a renewed creation is our future.
God loves the world. God loves us. He showed this by becoming human. Jesus is not simply ‘a’ man. Jesus ‘is’ man, is humanity. The name Jesus contains within itself the entirety of humanity, and the entirety of God. We, therefore, must love God, expressing that love by unconditionally loving the world. That’s why a large paved parking lot next to the church is a contradiction in terms.
Does the end – our carbon-rich life – justify the means? Was Luther right when he said “Sin Bravely”, in Latin – Pecca Fortiter? (Luther was fluent in Latin, then the main scientific language of his day, early 16th Century.)
What does my writing this week, try to say? It centers around Jesus’ words: “Many are called, and few are chosen.” Chosen to live in the New Creation.
Again, a general observation.
There is more and more talk about the earth being finite. There is more and more evidence that we are facing extreme weather conditions, so unusual, so hot, so dangerous, that 2 Peter 3: 10, is now within the realm of possibilities: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare”. Think about that. Arctic News repeatedly mentions the danger of the methane erupting in the shallow Arctic Ocean, the most potent of all Green House Gases,
How are we to live?
The new world to come will last forever. We can only live there ‘forever’ when we NOW love it. We cannot live without love. If God so loved the world, loved it more than anything else, including his son, should we not love it also, following God’s example? Only when we love the world with our heart, soul and mind, with every molecule we possess, then we too will inherit the earth.
Climate Change reflects our ‘sins against Creation’. It will give us ‘hell on earth’. Today we experience the perils, outlined in Matthew 24. Repent. Move into Metanoia, new thinking encompassing New Creation conditions. It is not too late, but remember: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Can today’s church still bring the New Creation Message in word and deed?