Rest assured that we trust in a God who is reconciling the world to himself.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
Rest assured that we trust in a God who is reconciling the world to himself. Even in the time of COVID, Christ is at work.
Guess what—it’s “Ordinary Time.” Why you might ask? Aren’t the times we are in anything but ordinary?
The “ordinary” in the name derives from the “ordinal” numbers—first, second, third, etc.—used to count up all these weeks. So, there is the first Sunday after Pentecost a second Sunday after Pentecost, etc. all the way up to a possible twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, depending on when the date of Easter was.
So, that’s an awful lot of math. Why does Ordinary Time matter?
It is when we live out the lessons we learned from Jesus and tell others about his life, death, and resurrection—now that we have received his Holy Spirit and been sent out into mission in the world.
The verse is part of a longer passage that talks about how we are to be agents of Christ’s reconciliation in the world, preaching the Gospel of Christ who has made everything new.
When COVID first started, many of us dreamed of quickly returning to the way things had been before. We longed to gather in restaurants and at movies, to worship together and sing with gusto, to travel and visit relatives and see new things—and even to go to the grocery store and buy whatever we wanted without wondering if it would be out of stock.
Perhaps if the pandemic had lasted only a few weeks or a month or two, the world we came back to might have looked more like the world we left. But after fifteen months, we’ve formed new habits. We’ve disconnected from some things we were connected to and connected to other things we might never have considered being connected to before. The economy has changed. Relationships have changed. Churches have changed. We’re used to doing some things very differently. And over all of us hangs the tragedy of those we have lost—3.7 million worldwide, approximately six hundred thousand in the U.S.
There have been beautiful moments of connection, to be sure, but there has also been so much death and destruction. For those of us who believe in a good God who is at work to redeem the world, it can seem awfully hard to see that good God at work right now. What about Jesus? Where is he? Where is the new creation?
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