Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“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.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, July 2, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
There is the world, and then there is the world. I draw a distinction between the world that God created out of God’s infinite beauty and love and “the world” which denotes the trappings of human society that fly in the face of God’s beautiful creation, including us—the beloved children made in God’s own image. I do this because it can be too easy to look at any natural thing and condemn it as the antithesis of things spiritual, which isn’t the case. Our embodiedness, for example, comes with physical needs including food, sex, and even altered states of consciousness. These in and of themselves are not an affront to God or a bar to spirituality. “Desire” in this case, is normal and healthy.
Where things get out of whack is when our human social order places far too much emphasis on the satisfaction of these desires as the end goal of life, rather than as a means of being whole and healthy. In the U.S., for example, there is a ridiculous emphasis on accumulating wealth far beyond what is needed for a full and satisfying life, on having a perfect body, on constant social validation through various media, and on this bizarre contradiction of hypersexualization and prudishness. These things do not come from God. We have created them, and perpetuate them by our willing participation in the narratives presented.
The writer of 1 John is calling us into awareness of those things that are clearly not from God, so that we can reject them and focus on the things that are from God which, I would strongly propose, includes the natural desires of our embodied flesh.
Where do I find myself sucked into the social norms of my culture even when they are counter to the way of Jesus?
