I know that many of you suffer from the same obsession with the news that I do. I check it almost compulsively several times a day. Unfortunately, of late it’s like a steady diet of heartbreak and despair. I mean, many days it seems like there is not a single good thing happening in the world. Actually, I laughed out loud this morning when I read a Facebook post about hearing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and feeling that we can easily write an updated version that only features events from the last nine months.
Well, I am no social scientist, but I know that this diet of tragedy and fear cannot be doing anything good for our souls. As Christians, we are called to compassionate, generous, and hopeful lives, trusting in the goodness of God and the power of God’s love to change and heal the world. But we cannot be hopeful if every day we feed on a steady diet of despair. And we cannot be generous if the only stories we ever hear are stories that make us cynical. And we cannot be compassionate if everything we watch or read makes us angry. No, it is next to impossible to do hard things, brave things, Gospely things, if all we take in to our minds and hearts is negative.
The Apostle Paul may have written his letter to the Philippians 2,000 years ago, but it’s like he knew all about the year 2017. Because his advice to them is advice we need to hear and heed today, so that we can preserve hope and faith in this strange, cynical age. Here is the bit of the letter that we’ll hear in church this weekend, in the version of the Bible called The Message: “Friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies (Phil 4:7-9).”
It’s like my grandmother once told me years ago: bad in, bad out. Good in, good out.” If all we ever do is stew in anger at the news cycle, we will become angry, bitter people, and we will have lost the essential joy that is inherent to life in and with Jesus Christ.
If we are going to bear witness to the Gospel, if we are going to do the hard and eternal work of seeking and serving Christ in all persons, we need to follow Paul’s instruction. We need to meditate on all that is good and noble and true: “the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly.” In order to do that, it may just require a change in diet. Not food, necessarily, but all the other things we ingest in the course of a day. Do you hear stories about goodness and mercy to balance stories of cruelty and violence? Do you ponder the beauty of God’s world to balance images of war and disaster? Do you listen to music or words that uplift and encourage to balance all the shouting and hate that permeates the airwaves?
My dear friends, think on things that are honorable and just and pure, things that are commendable and excellent and worthy of praise, because they will remind you of the goodness of creation, and that God is busily redeeming and restoring all things. The Kingdom has come near, and even now it’s breaking in to our lives…if we would just turn down the volume on our televisions, turn off Facebook, and look for it.
-Casey+