“...in accordance with God’s promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.”  2 Peter 3:13, NRSV, (emphasis added.)

Righteousness understood as “justice, peace, compassion, right relationships with neighbor and with God” definitely does NOT seem to be at home in today’s world.

Read the morning paper. Although I am writing this four months before you read it, I am safe in saying it will report all manner of unrighteous behavior in legislatures, in corporate governance, in political campaigns, in the violence of our wars and on the streets of our big cities, in our entertainments, in the cheapening of culture and language, and in the church with its pandering to success. I could go on with all this confessing of other people’s sins!

Yet, to such a world, to such a people, to such a society, came this Jesus, who made himself at home among them.  Righteousness incarnate in this young rabbi was at home with the people who were suffering the violence and injustice and poverty and sickness and oppression of that time and place.

“The light shined in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”  (John 1:5)

It shines still, incarnate among those in whom and through whom the living Christ of our time dwells, imperfectly, intermittently, flickeringly, but “the darkness has not overcome it.” In countless lives, only a handful of them “celebrities,” most known only to the people they encounter each day, righteousness is at home. 

There are peacemakers, reconcilers, bridge-builders. There are those who work for justice on behalf of those who suffer injustice. There are those whose compassion is at work every day in hospitals and nursing homes, in food pantries and homeless shelters, in prisons and jails, in quiet pastoral care, in standing by those who grieve great personal loss. There are those gifted and courageous people who stand up and speak the truth to power and bring light where darkness is but ought not to be.

Our times are not more unrighteous than Jesus times. The times in which we live and move and have our being are a great struggle for us as Jesus’ people.  Really being Jesus’ people is the great challenge for us as it has always been.

In this struggle and of the challenge of our times, I choose to put my trust in the One Whose unconditional love will not let me go, no matter how much I stumble and waver.