If you are like I am, you spend most of your time doing things which have little outward connection with what we might call Religion. We have jobs, perhaps, which take up most of our time five days a week (or more), and family or other responsibilities which occupy us when we're not at our jobs, or if we don't have traditional jobs. We are caught up in a whirlpool of necessary activity. It's hard even to relax and take time for ourselves, for we can feel the things we've left undone piling up like drifts of snow, and we know that every moment spent in rest will be repaid with additional labor later on.
It's no wonder, then, that we are a society of compulsive compartmentalizers. We find ourselves faced with such a daily barrage of information and experience that we put tags and labels on each moment's phenomena. We have our work life, our home life, our educational life, our workout life, our thought life, our sex life, our social life, our religious life. We may have one life to live, but we live it in a revolving succession of “lives” which would make any adherent of reincarnation dizzy. We go to the Vision Center for our glasses, the Medical Center when we're sick, the Discount Center to shop, the Business Center to work, the Recreation Center to play, and the Worship Center to, well, listen to rock music and a Bible talk. And, to paraphrase a particular rock musician, a center in every direction is the same as no center at all.
“The world is too much with us”, Wordsworth wrote some 200 years ago at a time most of us would find positively un-worldly by comparison. But Wordsworth was pointing out a perennial problem of human-kind: the exclusiveness of focus upon what is unfolding in our lives in the world without reference to our source and destiny beyond the world. What is this “world” which is too much with us, and which we allow to obscure our view of Reality?
The Greek word of St. John's which we most frequently translate as “world” is “kosmos”, which is used for the orderly arrangement of creation. The “world” is the created, intelligible universe in which we live, and it is the creatures who live in it. But, St. John tells us, all is not well with the creation or with the creatures: he tells us a little further on in his epistle that “the whole world lieth in wickedness”, a word which carried with it the connotation of degeneracy and sickness.
Both degeneracy and sickness in turn imply that there was an original state of integration and health from which the world and its inhabitants have fallen, and if we are curious about this ancient calamity we have only to open our Bibles to the Book of Genesis to uncover the cause. The world in which we live is a fallen world, and we are ourselves fallen, and we must never allow ourselves to forget this when we reflect upon our lives in the world. We live in a world which leaves God out of its reckoning — or worse, actively works against Him.
The order, integration, and wholeness of the creation as it came from God's hand and which He pronounced “very good”, have become since the Fall the chaos, dis-integration, and brokenness which St. John describes as a world lying in wickedness. And yet this is the world we know, the world which is “too much with us”, the world with which we have grown so comfortable. And this is the world which St. John tells us we are to “overcome”: “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” (I John 5:4) We are not to be taken in by the world in its sickness, or by ourselves in our sickness. We must remember the state of health for which we were created. And we must do more than remember: we must return to the state of health which we were created to enjoy.
Jesus came not only (or even primarily) to tell us how to behave, but to offer Himself as a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world” (BCP p.80). He came to give Himself to us so that we, receiving His Body and Blood, “may evermore dwell in him, and he in us” as the Prayer Book says (BCP p.82). He came, in short, to unite us to Himself and to heal us of the sickness of sin which divides us from Him.
In order to accomplish this continuing mission, Jesus established the Church, the Hospital of Souls. It is here we receive the Medicine of Immortality. And what kind of doctor would give us medicine and tell us, “This will make you well, but only after you're dead”? St. John tells us that “[h]e who hath the Son hath life” (I John 5:12): not that he will have life, but that he has it now. The Saints are the testimonials that the Church's Medicine works. They are the patients whose healing has been manifest in this life and in this world. They are the living receptacles of the Life of Christ, a Life so powerful and so transforming that their very relics abound with grace as a coal abounds with the light and heat of the fire which transforms it.
And the Life which is offered is not a “religious life” which we may fit in amongst our social life and work life and hundred other lives, but the Life of Christ, eternal life, which longs to sweep away the compartments of our lives and make us whole and unified in God's love.
Our Faith is not primarily a system of thought or belief about God, but is the covenanted means of beholding God, of entering into the eternal Life of the Holy Trinity, and of manifesting that Life to a world which lies in darkness and in the shadow of death. If we cooperate in this work of grace, our Religion will be seen by the world to be what it is in fact: the overlap of Earth and Heaven, of Time and Eternity, a place where we sing praises to God, not only with one another, but with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven.
We can offer the world, and we ourselves can settle for, a religion, one among tens of thousands. But if we do so, if we settle for anything less than transformation in Christ, and if we offer anything less, we will not touch the sickness which lies at our hearts, and at the heart of the world. We must be careful of wanting to look too much like the world we should be overcoming. Our worship and our prayers will seem odd and unearthly to folk who happen by, and that is as it should be. Our praise band is the choir of angels and archangels, and if that music is difficult for our noise-shrouded ears to hear, once heard, its sweetness is not easily forgotten. Our worship center is not a place, but a Person. Our worship center is seated at the right hand of the Father, bearing in his glorified body the marks of the Passion which heals us. We should offer no less to ourselves, no less to the world.
