2022-10-15 A Meditation on Being Ready

“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:5 ESV)

To be ready for the Christ is in some way to be one or two steps away from conversion. Only God knows our heart and how close it is to that meeker place; our eyes that glisten with tears, the strange way He saves heroically people from all walks of life, income levels, and apparent obstinance towards any goodness or usefulness to society.

So the decision, the step, is all-important; it is no measured nor stage-managed change that He effects, but rather we see all organizations and arrangements of Man’s daily rhythms, employment, service, themselves Christ-like: the organization is persecuted as a whole entity, and all of us, in synchrony or in our own time, are troubled and hated and it is no simple matter simply of hiding behind a job title, behind a notion of backing or having friends in the world. For the best amongst us must hide. The secretly laboring among us must keep their cover. The soldier must bend over backwards to love, even when—especially when—employed by the most powerful nations on earth. The soldier is not a killing machine, nor can she or he make irreverent fear-mongering the currency of the day.

So the Call ourselves to design and live into Holy Callings, secret to a point but also increasingly believed on, plausible, juice to keep us fighting and resilient in spiritual matters, while also knowing the ensign’s mission to be the front line and to wear his or her flag proudly and always to represent something of the blood that lies behind said flag.

To be ready for the Christ is a waking vision of a locale passed over, where judgment has rendered those who make the successful transition, receptive and joyous, simply joyous because they rely no longer on themselves but on Christ who raises the dead. It is us learning to discern with our palate the difference between Law and Gospel, and to murmur and enjoin ourselves, our hearts, to the latter. We are opposed by the simplistic explanations of those blithely, blandly, holding on to power, that is, those for whom faith originates in a perennial guilt trip or a notion that we haven’t met the match, haven’t passed the bar, haven’t risen to the works-based occasion.

Grace is our simple peace in believing, whether a fisherman like Peter or a tax collector like Matthew. It is the strange design of our lives, wherein rest and gentlemanly and gentlewomanly employment is celebrated; we are not meant to burn the candle at both ends; we are intended to spare time for prayer and fellowship; we are created to be mini-gods (Ps 82:6; Ps 8:5), useful in all the readiness and the preparation of those undistracted and focused on our proper efforts and communal work.

Yet life asks for more; we are bogged down precisely as these our higher aspirations begin to ferment. Thus we develop a theology of instant decisions, of being spirit-led, of no longer fussing over hours of thought or preparation; we are doing the Christian thing in our houses of employment and offices precisely in ways we don’t quite mean to or intend, in some mystery of how that good Gospel message has touched our own hearts. So we fear not to be lumped with sinners, with those of unclean lips, with the lustful and the bragging. In unseen ways, true Christianity is a faith for the disenfranchised and those on the periphery; all efforts to design our spiritual homes must cope with this power of the unseen and the unpurchasable. We cannot purchase some of the finest cloth for the temple construction, little things we cannot lie about nor invent nor make up. Truth is stranger than fiction, and our dedication to what is true and experiential, may be what makes our spiritual home functional, capable of witness, a beacon in the community, an unpretentious and simple house of worship and of respite, two words for that same calling unto Grace that we have discerned and dropped everything to follow.