Text: John 14:25-31

Speaker: Joel Miller

How are you feeling about the world these days?  Hold that thought. 

For the last several weeks I’ve been thinking about 1968.  This started before the assassination attempt on the former President, which makes the reference almost too on the nose.  1968 is a year I’ve seen discussed in multiple essays in recent years, the gist of which all go something like: “If you feel like the world is falling apart now, just remember 1968.”

For those of you old enough to remember, and for the rest of us who have learned the stories, it was indeed a time of upheaval and instability.

In 1968 the US and Russia were well into the deep freeze of the Cold War.  The Korean War was “over,” but in January North Korea captured a US Navy ship and held its 83 crew members in a POW camp.  The War in Vietnam was raging, with the Tet Offensive from the North also in January, and the US-led My Lai massacre in March, in which over 500 South Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered.  TV footage made the war increasingly unpopular.  As did the cries against it by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.  One year to the day after he publicly spoke out against Vietnam, King was assassinated while leading a Poor People’s Campaign for local sanitation workers.  Memphis, Tennessee, April 4, 1968.  Riots, uprisings, erupted in over 100 cities across the country.  Two months later, Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.  The assassin later said he was motivated by outrage with how Kennedy approached the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. 

All that in just the first half of the year.

In October, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked off the US Olympic Team for raising their fists in solidary with the Black Power movement while receiving their medals for the 200 meter sprint in the Mexico City Summer Olympics.  In November, Richard Nixon won the US Presidential election.

That year has some added significance for me this year as my Dad and Mom were the same age that year as our two oldest daughters, Eve and Lily, are this year.

But the thing that had me thinking about 1968 wasn’t a feeble attempt to feel better about the world by finding a really bad year in the past we survived.  It wasn’t just the uncanny parallels with 2024.  It’s been through reading several of the final essays written by someone who also died an early death in 1968. 

In December of that year a 53 year old monk from Kentucky, of all places, was found dead in his hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand, of all places.  He had become a bridge between the ancient insights of Eastern philosophies, and the West.  And he too had spoken forcefully against the Vietnam War, for Black civil rights, and for ecological awareness. 

This was Father Thomas Merton. 

A collection of his late essays was published after his death in a book titled Contemplation in a World of Action.  I’ll draw from one of those essays this morning to speak to one of the topics that came up in the congregational survey about summer worship themes: the relationship between the inward journey and outward journey.  Or, put another way, the relationship between spirituality and our engagement with the world.  Merton, here writing just a bit before that fateful year, titled the essay “Is the World a Problem?”

But first, the gospel of John.

Of the four gospels, John is by far the most interested in discussing “the world.”  By my count, the word translated as “the world” shows up in 9 verses in Matthew, 3 verses in Mark, 3 verses in Luke.  And in John, 57 different verses.  Here’s a flavor of some of those mentions in John, all from the mouth of Jesus:

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” John 8:12

“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. John 15:18

“If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.” John 15:19.

That’s one of John’s 57 “world” verses, which in itself mentions “the world” almost as much as the entirety of Mark and Luke combined. 

Jesus speaking about the disciples: “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” John 17:16

Jesus on trial before Pilate: “My kingdom is not from this world.” John 18:36

And from today’s reading: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you.  But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you all that I have said to you.  Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

In these and many other references in John, “the world” does not come out looking so good.  And yet “good” is exactly what the world is proclaimed to be in the Creation story of Genesis chapter 1.  So often, it’s almost as if that was one of the main points of the story.  World = good.  World = good.  World, the material fleshy, soil and sunshine reality in which we live and move and breath = very good.

This difference raises good questions about what John is actually referring to when he speaks of “the world.”  Is this good world of God’s making now something to be escaped, as if abandoning a sinking ship?  Is there now a good world – spiritual heavenly reality, and an evil world – bodily, mortal, sinful existence.  The one where there are wars and cancer and murders and political protests?  

One of the most fruitful suggestions I’ve come across that avoids this dualistic split is that John uses “the world,” much like we today speak of “the system.” 

Which would sound something like this:

(You) do not belong to the system, just as I do not belong to the system.

Hey Pilate, my kingdom is not from this system.

My friends, If you belonged to the system,^a the system would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the system, but I have chosen you out of the system—therefore the system hates you.

It’s pretty likely Thomas Merton didn’t know his final writings were his final writings, but they can come across as if he’s saying things that must be said before he can no longer say them.  He opens his essay “Is the World a Problem?” with a confessional tone.  His most popular writing, by far, then and now, was his early autobiography called The Seven Storey Mountain.  It has sold millions of copies and has been translated into 15 different languages.  In it, he tells how his search for God led him out of the secular world as a bound-for-success young man and into the patterned life of prayer and contemplation in the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, a set-apart place he refers to in the book as “the four walls of my new freedom.” 

After posing the question “Is the world a problem,” he confesses:

“Perhaps, too, I am personally involved in the absurdity of the question; due to a book I wrote 30 years ago, I have myself become a sort of stereotype of the world-denying contemplative – the man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross  in another, and holding the Bible open to the Apocalypse.  This personal stereotype…is something I have to demolish on occasion.  This is one of the occasions….I want to make clear that I speak not as the author of The Seven Storey Mountain¸which seemingly a lot of people have read, but as the author of more recent essays and poems which apparently very few people have read.”

To give away the punchline, the older, wiser Merton found it as absurd to try to escape the world, as he had once tried to do, as it would be to try to escape oneself.

He writes: “Where am I going to look for the world first of all if not in myself?… (p. 146)

After naming some of the past events in his era much the same way as we might name the horrors of 1968 – for him Auschwitz, Hiroshima, he writes:

“The ‘world’ is not just a physical space traversed by jet planes and full of people running in all directions.  It is a complex of responsibilities, and options made out of the loves, the hates, the fears, the joys, the hopes, the greed, the cruelty, the kindness, the faith, the trust, the suspicion of all…If there is war because nobody trusts anybody, this is part because I myself am defensive, suspicious, untrusting, and intent on making other people conform themselves to my particular brand of death wish” (p. 147). 

Throughout the essay, Merton the Monk wrestles with a necessary “turning to the world,” (p. 146) and the reality of choice.

“To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing.” He continues: “It has now become transparently obvious that mere ‘rejection of the world’ is in fact not a choice but the evasion of choice” (p. 147).

And when it comes to choice, he sees in the philosophy of Karl Marx that was such a heated debate of his time, the great conundrum of modern life.  It was Marx, Merton writes who had the insight that “after a long precarious evolution, matter has reached the point in man, where it can become fully aware of itself, take itself in hand, control its own destiny.”  And yet, as Merton observed, the societies that had most adopted Marx’s philosophy, ironically experienced few personal choices.

Merton laments, “now is not the time of freedom but of obedience, authority, power, control.” 

The confounding relationship between our quest for freedom, and an eager willingness to surrender our freedom to an authoritarian figure who supposedly guarantees to protect that freedom has not gone away.

Merton’s great concern is that we have freed ourselves from the bounds of traditional structures – that we have made great scientific and technological progress – without having freed ourselves from an age-old illusion that we can better the world without first bettering ourselves.

Merton answers his own question by writing “The world itself is no problem, but we are a problem to ourselves because we are alienated from ourselves….Do we really renounce ourselves and the world in order to find Christ, or do we renounce our alienated and false selves in order to choose Christ our own deepest truth in choosing both the world and Christ at the same time?  If the deepest ground of my being is love, then in that very love itself and nowhere else will I find myself, and the world, and my brother (and sister) and Christ.  It is not a question of either-or but of all-in-one” p. 153.

It’s a dense essay, one I’ve read several times over and slowly these past couple weeks.  I did find an online version of the full essay at Commonweal Magazine where it was originally published, and will link to that on our website if you want to spend more time with it.  For today. if you only remember a few phrases or ideas, hopefully “the deepest ground of my being is love” is one of them.

Merton doesn’t mention John’s gospel in the essay, but we can’t mention “the world” and John’s gospel without recalling what has become the most famous verse of that book, and for some, the whole Bible.  John does speak of “the world” much the same way we speak of “the system,” and it’s quite helpful to re-read those passages in that light.

But in John 3:16, It also says, “For God so loved the world…”  The world, for all its problems and complexities and terrifying and beautiful possibilities, is something God loves.  Love is the deepest ground of Divine existence.  And, as Thomas Merton wrote, “the deepest ground of my being is love.”  When we love, we participate in the Divine life.  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, which Jesus announced, is the presence of love abiding among us.  And because we are in the world and the world is in us, when we choose to love, the world becomes more free, even more itself, as we become more ourselves.