I used to be able to see the stars at night. For most of my life I have lived in or very close to urban areas, so my view of the universe has been limited by urban glare, but at least I was able to see a few of the stars. That is no longer the case. Urban glare has taken its toll on the city where I live. Now I can still see two or three planets, but I can no longer look up into the sky and see the stars. When did the stars disappear? Has anyone else noticed that the stars have gone missing, or am I the only one? I know that the stars are really still there and that I simply cannot see them because there is too much light in the sky, and that stars require a dark sky in order to be visible, and that the sky is not black where there is excessive urban glare. That explanation satisfies the scientist in me, but my soul still feels the loss. My view of the universe has been obscured by the growing glare of urban civilization. I can see the distant galaxies through the James Webb Space Telescope, but I can no longer see the closest stars from my own backyard, and there is something both sad and ironic about that. I want to see the stars again.
I used to live in world where people pursued the common good. I grew up in a town where neighbors looked after the safety and well-being of each other’s children, where parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and schoolteachers and community religious leaders worked together to teach children what is good and right and beautiful, and what is wrong and harmful and destructive. We kept an eye out for each other. Whether we were buying groceries or clothes or shoes, we knew the people who owned the stores, we knew the people who worked behind the counter, and we “gave them business”, because we knew that they had bills to pay, just as we had. We knew that if we helped them, then we were really helping us— the community— and that the only way that we could thrive was for all of us to thrive together. Now I live in a world where people are afraid of each other. I live in a world where the Conservatives and the Liberals and the various special interest groups each pull in their own direction, intent only upon their own agenda, even if at the expense of the other groups. Everyone is afraid of everyone else, so we hide from each other, and we throw stones at each other, and we pretend that the problems of the world are everyone’s fault but our own. I want to believe in the common good again. I used to live in a world where people believed in Truth. We might disagree on what was true and what was false, but at least we knew that Truth existed. Truth was something to be discovered, not to be created or designed or fabricated. The quest for Truth was like mining for gold, not like writing a good book of fiction and then convincing ourselves that what we wrote was true, just because we wanted it to be true. History was what happened; not what we wished to have happened. Now I am living in a world where Truth has been replaced by “my truth” and “your truth”, and we start with the agenda that we are trying to sell, and then we work backward to generate a story that will get us to our desired agenda, and we call that story “truth”. I want to believe in Truth again. I used to live in world where people worshipped God because He is God. Now I live in a world where people use God as a manipulative tool to accomplish an agenda. God has become a means to an end, rather than an end in Himself. If we want to convince people that they really ought to hold the position that we think they should hold, we simply try to convince them that God stands where we stand, so that if they oppose our position they must be opposing God. We try to convince the world that God is in favor of our political party, our denomination, our position, our agenda. We try to use God to justify injustices and to make America great again. Instead of encouraging each other to worship and honor and obey and love God, we grab onto God and try to use Him against each other as though He were a hammer, just one more tool in our tool chest. “You need to jump onto our bandwagon; After all, you wouldn’t want to oppose God, would you?” becomes our modern-day creed, despite our lip-service to the Nicene. I want to live in a world where people worship God because He is God. OK, my memories of how the world used to be are naive and overly simplistic, but after all these are childhood memories, so they bear the mark of childlike innocence. The world was never as simple and as straightforward as the one I am depicting, and the problems of our postmodern world are really no different than the problems of the ancient world, but something has gone awry. There’s been a quantum leap in the wrong direction. The pace of the societal implications of our common human dysfunction has accelerated. We’ve been distracted by too much noise, but it’s the noise of our own making. We’ve been distracted by too much glare, but it’s the glare that we’ve all created. We’ve created so much noise that we can no longer hear each other. We’ve created so much glare that we can no longer see each other. We’ve fabricated so many lies that we no longer seek or recognize or understand the Truth. We’ve become so politicized that we have a whole generation of young people who are afraid that if they dare to profess faith in God, they may become weaponized by someone’s political agenda. We need to stop and take a deep breath and admit that the world has lost its way before we can see and hear clearly enough to know what specifically has gone wrong. We’ve go to stop pointing the finger toward the Other and start looking at our own sin and weakness and dysfunction, for a world of sin and weakness and dysfunction is the only kind of world that can be built by people who are sinful and weak and dysfunctional. The problems of our world mirror the brokenness of our soul. Jesus said “And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). If Jesus is the Son of God who came to earth to show us God the Father, then where else would we find the solution to our common human dilemma, if not in Jesus? Our quest for truth must began and end with Jesus— not the Conservative Jesus, or the Liberal Jesus, or the Patriotic American Jesus, or the Black Jesus, or the White Jesus, or the Hippie Jesus, but Jesus the Son of God, who died for our sins, wearing our name tag, and who rose victorious over sin and death, and who is coming again to Earth to set up the kind of world we have been dreaming of. No one else can show us Truth but the One who is The Truth— but our dysfunction blocks our own healing. We try to make progress but we get in our own way, because we aren’t willing to face the Truth— and so we create more glare, and more noise, until we are so blind and deaf that we can no longer see and hear, because we would rather not see or hear. We would rather live in our own delusions. I want to live in a world where people worship God because He is God. I want to live in a world where people believe in Truth. I want to live in a world where people pursue the common good. I want to see the stars again.
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