Message For Earth

Jesus said to his disciples: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy. When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world. So you also are now in anguish. 

But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. On that day you will not question me about anything. Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you.” (John 16:20-23)

Today’s Gospel speaks of hope and better times ahead.  Our grief will become joy that will help erase the memory of pain and anguish.  John cites Jesus’ use of the birth of a child and a mother forgetting that pain of childbirth.   It’s a good example, but for many of us bad memories don’t fade and go away.  Joy isn’t the outcome.  Our long siege from the coronavirus gives evidence of our joy being taken away especially for those having lost loved ones.

I suppose we hope that once our world opens up and concern about the virus lessens, we will as a society learn from this dreadful experience.  We’ve asked the Father in Jesus’ name for new attitudes and changed behavior enabling us to deal with a likely resurgence and more waves of this virus.  We’ve asked the Father to stop the weeping and mourning.  We long to rejoice – and we will.

We have confidence our world will be reborn.   We hope that world with those children to be born – will witness peace, tolerance, and love (or at least respect) between nations now acting more like wolves than lambs.

It seems like we’re in the 1951 movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”  A UFO landed in Washington, D.C., bearing a message for Earth's leaders: choose peace or destruction.  To make his point, an alien emissary, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) backed up by his robot Gort, made all of humanity stand still through a world-wide power outage.  Cold War-era nuclear proliferation on Earth prompted the alien visit for fear that Earth’s inhabitants eventually would venture into space bearing our war-like, destructive behavior.

We don’t face Klaatu and Gort, but we do face each other (although masked) wondering if our common viral “enemy” will convince us to come to our senses and face the question of peace or destruction.   Humanity is quite capable of either.  It's in our hands.

Deacon David Pierce