Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
February 16, 2022
Invitatory
Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come let us adore him.
Reading: I John 2:15-17
Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
I love the world. I should fess up about this. I love the world. The world is all I know. It’s all I can know. And I can’t imagine anything interesting about me or my life or any desires I could possibly have without the world somehow tagging along. So I am at odds with this short text from I John. And seriously so.
To be honest, when I encounter a sentence like the one which begins this excerpt, my first response is simply to not continue reading. I have no empathy whatsoever with its directive, which I can attribute, dismissively, to the fact that this is an ancient text. And, thus, quite literally, the writer of I John lived in a different world than mine. And my impulse, then, is simply to move on to something else. Something marvelously and beautifully worldly.
After all, one of the most quoted of all the verses in the Bible, comes from the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Which world is the one that God loves? And is it somehow completely other than the world about which the Epistle speaks?
There are, of course, aspects of the world-we-all-share that are annoying and troubling and often tragic. And I’ve lived long enough to experience the kind of world-weariness that comes from the recognition that some things about the world are irremediable. I can be terribly grumpy in declaring too bluntly at times that “if this is what the world is coming to, I don’t want to play along.” Things change; and they are changing at an ever-increasing pace. Well established standards can cease to have any sway. One can easily feel on the wrong side of all that is shifting. Something about the world itself can lose its allure because too much seems warped – evil. And it’s a great temptation, then, to call in a different kind of victory; to announce that one is with God over against the world. How righteous this sounds. Yet how wrong this is.
For more than all else, this text should serve not as an imperative, telling us what to reject. It should work in just the opposite direction, giving us a better sense of just how unimaginably resilient and passionate the love of God is. God doesn’t just love the best of us – the saints at the top of the heap. God loves the world. He who is eternal loves even the worst and most fleeting of what is mortal. Kierkegaard called this the infinite qualitative difference between God and us. Only God can truly love the unlovable. We ought to be humbled by this.
The writer of the Epistle fixed his view as one whose feet are too firmly planted on the earth while he dreamt of heaven. It’s helpful – it’s needful – to see the inevitable result – condemning everything about the world – if only to see anew how radical the Christian message is. God did what was unjustifiable, descending to the world, “emptying himself”, in order to show us what “the eternal” actually means – for us. God, through his infinite love, has determined to redeem all that was and is and ever will be.
This is the impetus to worship and a joy that has no bounds – which is the Gospel.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
