Seventh Sunday of Easter--May 13, 2018

This Sunday's Readings:
Acts 1:15-17, 20a, 20c-26
Ps 103:1-2, 11-12, 19-20
1 John 4:11-16
John 17:11b-19

In Jesus’ beautiful prayer to God the Father, he says some possibly disturbing things about the “world”. The “world” hated his followers, but he was not going to take them out of the “world”. Jesus points out that his followers do not belong to the “world”, any more than he does.

It is not the first time that most of us have had to stop and think about the “world”. What does Jesus mean when he refers to the “world”? The planet? Its mountains, oceans, plains, deserts, forests, and life? Everything that the first human beings were called upon to take care of?

Of course not. The “world” is the situation that we humans have created for ourselves—when we’ve put our ideas and priorities ahead of God’s. Not all of the things and activities that can be called worldly are necessarily bad. But they become bad when we put them above what God wants for us. When we are not the human beings that God intends for us to be.

When we put sports or entertainment or sightseeing ahead of what God wants us to do, we are being worldly. When we think that inevitable and give up on working for peace, we are being worldly. When we think that some among us deserve to be homeless and starving while others are entitled to enormous wealth and power, we are being worldly.

None of this is God’s will. God’s will for us is that we stay away from the evil one and live in God’s truth. As Christians we must go back to the teachings of Jesus and pray—as a community—for the wisdom to know what God wants us to do and to be, in our time and place. What is God’s truth for us now?