2022-09-30 A Meditation on Peeking Out
“Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” (Ro 13:11 ESV)
In this corner, reclusive, gaping, jaw dropped, waiting for a good word.
“It wasn’t the angel of the Lord struck these down.”
Again: in this corner, witness, sentimentalist, awaiting common cause with the neighbor. “If you see what I saw, let me just be one to say, this changes everything!”
Wasted words, infectious slander, why the doubting assessment of something ill or devilish at play when we are those who see the Lord at work? Why, when we as creatures of community, internalize the accusations and the doubts: I supported this one, until so-and-so reminded me they are a head case?
The entire project of human existence, even when exasperated; even when taken down, hindered, inhibited, is a project of maintaining just cause. It is a project of knowing, though we were no haters, we did miss the boat that set sail when Jesus went to the Cross. I know: today I had other things I wanted to be my nurture. Today I had projects and important deals. Today. Yet hours ago something changed the world we inhabit, a forced experience, an appalling concession, a slanderous license. We are those against whom the devil feels license and frustrated enmity, for we are not easily spooked nor easily overwhelmed. We believe, that these reside in a better place. We believe each one had their fair chance in life, only that unlike us their lives were a little more abbreviated by way of contrast. We believe in the thief on the cross going with Jesus heavenward. We believe life throws genuine pain and unsolvable hatred our way; faith healing is also spirit healed, for we know that the common creed of our faith is a high point but no easy cakewalk. It is a high point of the things we hold to be real, but the practice of them remains difficult, trust-requiring, some notion of in the by-and-by, on a better day, we will have full resolution. But, today, we have the certainty: that God hears prayer, that all the things in Man that are unimaginable to us who are cleansed or removed or hidden modestly, with shyness, in our corner, are still things we have kept in mind, that we might properly pray and properly understand where our lashing-out neighbor is coming from.
Yet we refuse to be lumped with the sinners. We are simply in this case too appalled. We are weary. We thought and depended and jonesed for life to continue forth according to how we had come to know it and been inducted in and been acclimated. We didn’t feel the knock at our door: “It’s Jesus; do you have a moment?” We are now like those whom a patient father has allowed our proper investigation of life, our proper learning and experimentation; whom a loving mother, a patient parent, has allowed to read and to follow and to differ from oneself in regards to a few things; and the mother or father is now saying, it may be time to wrap things up; this one is no prophet nor prince or royal, but instead we as a family follow this other. So there are generational differences at work. There is the plain fact that the holy words of Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, were from a world without the connected (worldwide) internet, and without a few other things that come to mind. So we long, from our safe corner, to understand and to reckon with what Scripture truly is saying of eternal import. Something in it still convicts us and still shows us the path of reconciliation (is that what it’s all about?). Something allows us to be those removed from the slander (“head case!”) and not to tarry: salvation is neared today than when we first believed.
