Guardian of the Galaxy
What's On My Desk

Resacralizing the Quotidian

Someone recently quipped to me that "None of this has eternal significance. It's all gonna burn up." I've heard it before.

Not so. While it's true that God will judge and radically reshape the earth, nothing of God will be lost. N.T. Wright captures the biblical sense of our hope so well here, in a bit from his Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church: "You are --- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself --- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of creation; every minute spent teaching a severely mentally handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care or nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world --- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God's recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God's people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God's new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there."

While there is discontinuity between the old and new earth (for example, there will be no sin or ability to sin in the new earth), we sometimes act as if we begin again from a blank slate. And yet what Wright is saying is that all that is good, true, and beautiful here is preserved and enhanced there --- even, I say, our memories. It's another one of saying that everything matters --- for eternity. That tends to resacralize the quotidian, renovate the mundane, and animate the pilgrim --- in short, make life worth living. (And, by the way, N.T. Wright rivals the Apostle Paul in sentence length.)

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