They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. (John 17:15)

In 1990 theVoyager 1 spacecraft had just passed the planet Saturn and was about to hurl itself out of the Solar System. Before it did it looked back to take one final photograph. Through the dust and ice of one of Saturn’s faintest rings it captured a tiny blue dot, barely the size of a pinhead on the photograph. It was Earth - this planet s- at a distance of about four billion miles. It moved the astronomer Carl Sagan to say, “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” A tiny speck in the darkness. That’s the world. Our world. Sagan mused, for a moment, that this meant that we are insignificant. A speck of dust in the empty vastness of the Cosmos. You might think that means that nothing we do matters. That wasn’t Sagan’s view. Nor is it mine. Nor was it Jesus’s.

John’s Gospel is structured around five long passages of teaching by Jesus. The bit we heard this morning is from the last of those passages. According to John these were Jesus’s last words to his followers before he went to the Cross. These were the things he really wanted them to remember and to understand. This is the passage where he explains to them everything that’s been going on for the last few years: where he calls them friends because they now know all that he knows. Here he addresses God, speaking of his followers, saying “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”

It’s tempting to think that, from God’s perspective, this world, this planet, is just a tiny blue dot - a speck of dust lost in the empty vastness of the Cosmos. Or maybe it’s tempting to think that what Jesus is getting at here is that the world is an evil place and that he and his followers have no place in it. Folk have taken both positions over the years. I think both are wrong. 

Let’s take the tiny blue dot thing first. Sure, astronomy can be a humbling experience. You go out on a clear dark moonless night and you see that the sky is full of stars - millions of them, each a sun with, perhaps planets. Look through a telescope and you see hazy patches of light called nebulae and some of them are galaxies; each containing millions upon millions more stars. Against such a scale you might get to think that this world just doesn’t matter. That it’s insignificant. The problem with that is, if you follow it through, if this world doesn’t matter then I don’t matter. You don’t matter. Nobody and nothing matters. The way we treat each other doesn’t matter so, as all we have are a few years on this tiny mote of dust, then get as much as you can for yourself and the devil take the hindmost.

I don’t think that’s what Jesus means. Do you? Maybe what Jesus is getting at is that the world can be an evil place. Terrible things happen in it. War, poverty, crime, suffering - all the stuff we think about in our prayers of intercession. That probably is part of what Jesus is getting at when he says that his followers do not belong to the world. But we can’t push that too far. In the centuries following Jesus there were people who insisted that matter - the physical world around us - is irredeemably evil and that all that is really good is spirit. They also insisted that our bodies - the flesh - was irredeemably corrupt and that we should focus only on spiritual life.

There are some Christians today who aren’t a million miles from that. There are those who say that we should not be concerned with hunger or poverty or war or the pain that others are going through. They will say that religion is a private thing - a spiritual thing - that should not involve itself with politics because that is a worldly thing and, as Jesus says, “my followers do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to it.”

So, then, we are to imagine Jesus walking past somebody in pain and reminding them that it’s just pain of the body and that what matters is his soul? Or standing in the midst of five thousand hungry people and saying, “Yeah, but it’s just an empty stomach. If we give them food we’ll simply be feeding their bodies”? I don’t think that’s what Jesus means. Do you?

I don’t think that’s what Jesus means because it contradicts one of the most important principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: that God so loved the world that he gave his own Son that we need not die but have eternal life. God doesn’t despise the world. God loves the world - it is his creation. More, God came into this world in the life of a human being like you and me, to share the kind of life that human beings lead and to endure the kinds of pain and suffering that human beings endure out of sheer, pure love.

And that love is what Jesus is getting at. It’s a love that the world doesn’t always reflect. And when the world is unloving then that’s where a lot of those rotten things I talked about earlier come from. When the world decides that some human lives matter more than others - or that some don’t matter at all - that’s when this tiny blue dot we live on gets just a little darker and colder. In those times, when the world hardens its heart let us show that we do not belong to that world.

When the world wreaths itself in banners and colours and beats the drums of war; when it marches to battle over a patch of land, or a creed, or reserves of oil or gold, let us show that we do not belong to that world and keep alive the hope for peace.

When the world tells tales of economics that insist that, for a few to live in outrageous wealth, others must go hungry, others must be homeless, others must be poor, let us show that we do not belong to that world and keep alive the hope for justice.

When the world turns its back on those fleeing hunger or war, when it weeps a few empty tears for a small body washed up on the shores of the lands of plenty before getting on with buying more and more stuff that it really doesn’t need, let us show that we do not belong to that world and keep alive the hope for common bonds of love for humanity.

We do not belong to this world. We belong to another world - the Kingdom of Heaven, yes, but in another sense too. We belong to hope - the hope that God offers the world in Jesus Christ: the hope of redemption. The hope that one day the world will come right - that we will learn to live with one another as brothers and sisters. That one day there will be no more war. There will be no more hunger or poverty. There will be no more racism or bigotry. That the sins of the world be washed away and we will love one another as God loves us - that is the world we belong to.

We live on a tiny blue dot. But it may be the only blue dot in the whole of this vast Cosmos where one being can turn to another with love and compassion or with hatred or disinterest. That choice is God’s gift to us and it’s a choice of one world over another. Which one do we belong to?

Lord, we live in this world. May we belong to you in the world and reflect your love for your children and offer them hope of a world remade in the image of your love: in the image of Christ

Preached at Liddesdale Parish Church and at Canonbie United Parish Church