Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A

Cast all your anxiety on God, because God cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering…
~1 Peter 5:7-9
 
Anxiety can be understood as the state of being alert to all the wrong things—a constant state of concern on what might happen…around the next corner, over the next week, in the next generation. Not everything is a lion.
 
The wonder of these scriptures is how, even as they were written in another time with different circumstances, they continue to capture the human experience, and the hope we have as we look to the skies and the stars. Or maybe we don’t even have to look that far.
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The Celtic Christians of Ireland believed the distance between heaven and earth was thin. It started “one foot above your head.” To help them remember, they built large stone crosses right in the middle of fields where they worked. What helps us to be steadfast, to attend to what deserves our attention and our concern, not just what demands it?
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings:  Acts 1:6-14 † Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35 † 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11 † John 17:1-11
 
About the Art: Whelan, Brian, 1957-. In the Beginning, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57418 [retrieved May 9, 2023]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iin_the_beginning_34x28_by_Brian_Whelan.jpg - photographed by Wendy Roseberry with permission from Brian Whelan.

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