One of the big dilemma’s parent’s face is how to enable their children to become independent and make their own way in the world. At the point that their children ’leave the nest,’ parents have understandable worries about the extent to which their children will cope in the ‘real world’ and what the world will do to their children. While we know that life in the ‘real world’ involves confronting challenges and, at times, dangers, we know too that children cannot be kept ‘wrapped in cotton wool’; they have to be enabled to mature into adults and developing independence from those who have nurtured them as children is an important element in maturing.
In Acts 20.28–end and John 17.11–19, we hear Jesus and Paul expressing similar anxieties in relation to the disciples and churches that they are leaving behind. Jesus prays for God the Father to protect the disciples in a world which may hate them and to which they do not fully belong. Similarly, Paul commends his churches to God expecting that, at times, they will be attacked by savage wolves.
Their sense is that the world can be a conflicted place for Christians and we might therefore expect them to pray that we should be kept entirely away from danger. Instead, just as parents can ultimately do more harm to their children by keeping them cooped up at home, so the place Jesus and Paul want Christians to be is in the world, despite its dangers, but for us to be shaped by God there, and not by the world. That seems to be what Jesus means when he says that his disciples do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.
Eugene Petersen, in his paraphrase of this passage, puts it like this: “I gave them your word; the godless world hated them because of it, because they didn’t join the world’s ways, just as I didn’t join the world’s ways. I’m not asking that you take them out of the world but that you guard them from the Evil One. They are no more defined by the world than I am defined by the world. Make them holy—consecrated—with the truth; your word is consecrating truth.”
In these passages, both Jesus and Paul spoke of Christians as sanctified. To be sanctified, as Eugene Peterson, makes clear is to be shaped and defined by God (his word and the message of his grace), rather than shaped and defined by the world. If Christianity means anything and makes any difference in the world then it must be because we live and act differently as a result of its influence.
In the Diocese of Chelmsford, where I ministered before coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Diocesan strategy is called ‘Transforming Presence’ and is based on that same thought that “there should be something distinctive and attractive about the way we live our lives,” as, “if our lives are indistinguishable from anyone else’s it is little wonder that people conclude that the Christian faith is our hobby; a fascinating and exhausting pastime, but not the life changing transformation that is evident in the lives we lead Monday to Saturday.”
That is the prayer of Jesus and Paul, in these passages, that we grow as Christians by living in the ‘real world’ but shaped and defined (consecrated) by the Spirit and words of Jesus as we do so. As a result, instead of our lives being shaped and defined by the world, we become a transforming presence for Christ within the world.
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Delirious? - Paint The Town Red.
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