Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, May 14, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Everyone dies. For the early Christians, this fact was stark and ever-present, as so many believers were arrested and killed for their faith. For people throughout most of history, this fact was stark and ever-present as disease, war, and environmental factors led to astronomical infant mortality rates and low life expectancies. It’s only in recent decades (at least in the U.S.) when modern medical care, vaccines, clean water, a professional military, and sufficient nutrition have given most of us lives free of immediate worry about death. Thus these words of hope might fall flat for many of us, and they might be little comfort to those of us facing terminal or unsure medical diagnoses.
And yet we would do well to remember that “we are dust and to dust we shall return.” Fully accepting our mortality might make us more willing to put ourselves out there in the call to speak truth to power, to confront corruption and injustice, to stand up for the oppressed. In other words, to follow in the way of Jesus, willing to sacrifice as he and so many of the early Christians did, for the sake of the world. Especially if we can hear and take to heart these words of hope: that even if and when we do die, we have an eternal home with God.
How often do I contemplate my own mortality? How does it change the way I interact with the world?
