Do you remember the movie “Selma,” about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights March? My wife and I were talking about it the other day and had trouble remembering when and where we saw it. Turns out it was in Cleveland, TN, because that was the closest showing we could find. As we talked, I also remembered that afterwards we went to Cracker Barrel and had a late dinner. (Depending on how you take the word “cracker,” it was, on reflection, a somewhat ironic choice.) Oftentimes when I go there to eat, I enjoy looking around at the old pictures and knick-knacks that Cracker Barrel collects to decorate the walls. And I always remember a line from 1 Corinthians 7:31. “For the present form of the world is passing away.”
The world reflected in those old family portraits, and advertising signs, and farm implements, is pretty much long gone. There were living echoes of it when I was a child – like my Great-Grandfather Watson. He was born in 1866 and died in 1960 when I was six years old. The world he was born into and grew up in was almost completely gone by the time he died. Or the world of white domination and black subjugation that the white people of Selma, and other places all across this country, tried to hold onto has mostly slipped away. For good or ill, Paul is right, “the PRESENT form of this world is passing away.” It always has and it always will.
Scripture encourages us to hold onto God and the good, and to be willing to let everything else go, because it will go whether we let it or not. Sometimes we humans foolishly think that the world that we create – the political structures, the economic systems, the cultural norms and more, the art and science and definitions of truth and value - will last forever. But they don’t. Even our ideas about how to be church are transitory, here today and gone tomorrow. Indeed, “the present FORM of the world is passing away.”
The “present form,” but not the world itself. The world is God’s precious creation. Remember, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” and “The Son came not to condemn the world, but that the world, through him, might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)
In his letter to Corinthians, Paul’s advice about “let those who have wives be as though they had none,” etc. can be a bit confusing, but notice – he doesn’t say quit marrying, and mourning, and rejoicing, and buying, and selling, and otherwise dealing with the world. He does say to remember that all those things, including our very lives, are a part of the present form of the world that is passing away; here today and gone tomorrow. The only thing eternally permanent is God and our relationship with the holy – and we don’t have to worry about that passing away, for God has claimed us and will never let us go.
Peace, Delmer