What lenses are we using?

Luke 11:33-36

33 “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar, but on the lampstand so that those who enter may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. 35 Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be as full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays.”

What lens do we use to reflect on the world? Is the lens one that helps us recognize truth from falsehood, good from evil, that which is life-giving from that which is soul destroying. The lens we use will profoundly shape the way in which we live our lives, and the attitude with which we approach life and other people.

Some of the lenses offered to us make ourselves the centre of everything, everything gets measured by how we see it. What do I think, what do I feel – these become the measures. Such a set of lenses produces a very self-centred understanding of life, very inward focussed, very limited. With such lenses the needs and concerns of others become hidden, our vision is not complete. 

Another set of lenses suggest that material things – money, the economy, personal financial security – these are the measures to be used in reflecting on the world and what is happening. Such a set of lenses produces an understanding of life puts things and the material before people. With such lenses our understanding of the world is distorted, meaning we do not see accurately.  

Jesus invites us to use lenses that allow us to reflect clearly on what is taking place, to take the set of lenses Jesus offers and to use them to see the world as Jesus sees it. As a place that is being changed bit by bit, piece by piece into the kingdom that he is building. Such lenses help us see the grander truth of what God is doing in the world. And they cause us to live in hope, hope that the kingdom we can only catch glimpses of is actually on its way.

PRAYER:

Lord God, help us to accept the lenses you offer us, that we might see the world as you do. Change our understandings that we might measure the world by the patterns of your Son Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.