Engaging God s World: Longing & Hope This class will offer us a framework for living and engaging in God s World. Discuss: In what ways have our lives become increasingly complicated and complex? How does this make you feel? Our first challenge is to look carefully in our lives, and in the world for signs of God s Presence and activity. But this is not an easy thing to do. Sehnsucht In his novel called, A Separate Peace, John Knowles introduces us to a character named Gene Forrester. When he was 16, Forrester felt his soul coming alive. He would wake up in the beautiful New Hampshire mornings and feel something that is hard to describe. This is how he described it: One summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air, something hard to describe - an oxygen intoxicant some odour, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it.i wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because those mornings were too full of beauty for me. Sehnsucht: nostalgia, yearning and/or longing. It is that melancholic ache for something that you can t put your finger on. It involves seeking and searching for that from which we have been separated. So, here s the big idea: could it be that our desire to return to something, somewhere is God s design for our desire for HOME? That s why these desires are really unfulfillable. The truth of the matter is that nothing in this earth can fully satisfy us. We need to, therefore, pay attention to our heart, to our longings, and follow where they are ultimately leading us. Listen to what C.S. Lewis wrote: It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that the thing about joy is that it ultimately lies just beyond the walls of this world. We catch glimpses of it in our lives, but it remains out of our reach.
Lewis (again) describes it in this way: In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things the beauty, the memory of our own past are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. St. Augustine, in the 4th-Century, put it like this: O Lord, You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. This is what lies behind sehnsucht. It is a longing for a time, that no earthly time can meet. It is a longing for a place that no place can truly satisfy. At the end of the day, it is a longing for eternity, and a yearning for heaven. Discuss: Can you describe experiences of Sehnsucht in your own life? What (or Who) lies behind all this? It is God Himself, Who woos us to Himself. Sensus Divinitatis ( a sense of divinity ) A man knocking on the door of a brothel is knocking for God. G.K. Chesterton What does this mean for us living here and now?
Paying Attention to our Longings We need to learn to engage God s World by being attentive to our longings. Why? Because this is part of being human. It is part of being made in God s image. The world that we live in will try to squeeze God out of the equation and we need to do what we can to prevent this. Philippians 4:8 Engaging a Mixed World Matthew 13:24-30 Matthew 13:37-43 The "field is the world" Jesus tells us, and in the field we find a mixture of good seed and weeds. What this tells us is that the population consists of both the children of God and the children of the devil. And yet, they are so intertwined that to destroy the one would damage or destroy the other. So, in the course of history, we find both sets of inhabitants who become more fully what or who they are and this carries on until harvest time where both sets are uprooted, judged, and receive either a blessing or a curse. Discuss: Given this reality, what does this say about what to expect when we engage with the world? We should expect misplaced yearnings and desires. We should expect idolatry and injustice - expressed as stupidity, absurdity, tyranny, narcissism and sexual immorality. "Realism requires that we expect good results: Jesus is Lord. But until his Kingdom comes in glory, we do not expect perfect results, and we are not surprised or discouraged by bad results." We should expect obscurity. We should adjust our expectations for life in this world We should make the best of it Discuss: When you hear the phrases, "half a loaf is better than none," "pick your battles", "live to fight another day," is this the hill you want to die on? how do you feel? How do these phrases fit into the Christian life? Are they compromises?
Engaging God s World Today We need to ask ourselves, what kind of person am I and what kind of person do I need to be for Jesus Christ today? And what does this specifically require of me? What changes do I need to make? What do I need to do? We follow Jesus Christ...in the real world We take seriously the need to grow in our faith "To pray well is to cultivate holy patience and perseverance. It is to practice holy waiting, which means often to keep on praying in spite of the poor results." Mark Buchanan We need to know what happened before we arrived on the scene "For the most part, our schools from kindergarten to the doctorate are a vast waste-management operation, hauling the past away to be buried while passing out the flyers of social and antisocial fads. Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia We cultivate holy habits in our lives We follow Jesus in the particular world we find ourselves You and I need to pay attention to three things with regards to our circumstances. "We make the best of it - in concert with our fellow Christians, in cooperation with our other neighbours, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and in discipleship to Jesus Christ, to the glory of God." 1. What impact does this particular season of my life have upon how I grow spiritually? 2. How can I grow in following Jesus given my context? 3. How can I expand sehnsucht in my life? We engage God s World by keeping step with the Spirit who loves to interrupts "our lives" We engage with a complicated world which moves in complicated directions We resist the temptation to engage God s World by shouting loudly We engage God s World by being tolerant in a good way Part of living in the world today is the need to practice tolerance. What this means is that, as Christians, we recognize that there is a difference between "the right to do something" and "the
right thing to do." Not everyone will agree with us about how to live life. That is a reality in which we live. Tolerance does not mean tolerating egregious evils in our world Tolerance does not mean having to affirm as good something that I don't agree with. Tolerance is not affirming everyone else's difference [jeweller in the east coast] Tolerance means recognizing that there will be many things in my culture that I don't agree with but which I need to tolerate out of respect for our common humanity [What are some of these things?] Tolerance means allowing for conflict in ideas about how to live life. Conflict here is not a bad thing, but part of the public square. Tolerance means that before we get working too hard in making Jesus Lord over the nations, we should make sure He is Lord over our hearts We proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a pluralist world As we engage with God s World, we need to be a vanguard of cultural change...rather than lagging behind We need to (again) pay attention and listen "The challenge for the Christian church is indeed to be a bright city on a hill - a true city, a social organism of diversity in unity, of individuality and cooperation, of creativity and discipline, rather than an anarchy of self-centred and small-minded individuals and factions. In Engaging God s World, we must not succumb to worldliness We need to walk humbly with our Lord As Stackhouse puts it, Humility is, fundamentally, submitting gladly to God the Father and following joyfully his Son in the power of the Spirit. The world needs bold, enterprising, passionate, and persistent disciples of Christ who will see it for what it is, who will love it as God does, and who will care for it with creativity, realism, and hope. The whole world - God s world, our world - is at stake, and we must make the best of it.