The Real World

When I was in Senior High School and then in college, I struggled with a bifurcated world. There was religious history and there was secular history, and in my own developing mind there were virtually no tangential points. It was as if there were two important parallel universes that never intersected. It was in the last couple of years of college that the two independent universes made their first contact and even interpenetrated each other. It was an exciting time for me to make this integration.

It seems to me that many Christians have a similar problem in terms of living in their "religious world" and their "secular world." In fact I was just tempted to write "real world" in place of "secular world." For indeed the secular world has its own operating laws like the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, and the religious world has its set of laws like love your neighbor as yourself. The problem is that most people believe the laws of the religious world don't do very well in the secular world. Since most people experience that most of their life is lived in the real or secular world, the religious world is like a tidal pond, small and isolated until the tide--the real thing--returns.

For apprentices of Jesus, however, this dichotomy doesn't carry much weight, for they know that in Jesus God's world and the secular world have intersected, and that the secular world is in the process of being restored to the way it was originally meant to be. Actually the mission of Jesus is to restore the world into wholeness under God's reign. Disciples of Jesus are called to live in this world even though the world isn't particularly kind or accepting of God's reign. Indeed we are meant to be agents of this healed world. I will pick up on this theme in tomorrow's blog.