View as Webpage

Morning Devotion for the Season of Easter

April 19, 2023

Invitatory

On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

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.

Reading: I John 1:15-17

Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

Thornton Wilder said it better – at least for us. I’ve quoted the following soliloquy from his play Our Town many times, and I have yet to tire of it. For it speaks with less antagonism and much more invitation than the verses from First John quoted above. Wilder made this observation: “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars… everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived,” he said, “have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

There’s no trace of doubt in these lines about the finite nature of the world. All that we can see and touch and manage and possess – even things thousands of light years remote – will come to an end. This is a defining aspect of the world we know: forever does not apply.

And yet, equally inescapable is the intuition that not everything comes to nothing. A sense of the eternal follows us like a shadow. Wilder’s choice of words shows the depth of his understanding. Whatever it is that’s eternal cannot be directly named. It can be noticed, pondered, and explored but always within the limits that the term “something” elicits. Something intangible. Something slippery. Something incomprehensible. Something essential, yet mysterious. Something about… us.

Wilder didn’t presume to simply say that we ourselves are immortal (a common trait of so much loose talk around the time of someone’s death). He is unsurpassed in noting the loss of every little thing that our mortality entails… But in noting every little thing about us and about our lives something of the eternal also seems unavoidable. Amid a world of contingency there still persists a sense of abiding. And when we recognize this, we, uniquely, have the capacity to hallow the world (and this should be emphatically noted) as God does. Something about all that is here is indescribably holy.

What we don’t have, however, is the power to save the world, as God did. This eludes us. So we worship God and not the world.

A little religion can be a dangerous thing. Reading the text from First John too literally one might be inclined to declare that we should wholly reject the very thing that God loves eternally – the world. It’s a tragic legacy of the church that we have been and remain so easily persuaded to set God and the world in opposition, as if the material somehow, inevitably, obscures the spiritual. For the actual testimony of Scripture is that it is the material that, in fact, reveals the spiritual – but only something of it, only in part. And if we forget this, hallowing the world falls to our becoming insatiably greedy for it, trying to realize and capture in the world itself a value that it just cannot give. John warned against this hope in the world. Wilder chose, a bit differently, to allow that the world could be our prompt to hope in the God for whom the world can be the site of God’s infinite creating and redeeming. And something about our lives are part of that drama.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ.

You are the Alpha and the Omega

The beginning and the end. All times

And seasons are yours, and in you

All things hold together and are brought to completion.

Draw us by your Spirit into communion

With you and one another and make us and all things

Whole and free in the full force

Of your deathless love.

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold