2022-12-25 A Meditation on a Lean Understanding

“And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me.” (Ga 2:6 ESV)

Prize concession is a Church at large that rightly recognizes that to each there is their own culture and location, circumstance and mindset. The Church as a whole has adopted a lean fascination with Statement: its assets are the Statements of faith, or the embodiment of faith, or the overcoming of faith.

For the Church rightly seeing itself, sees that it is too provincial and too close-minded for the vast varieties of “Christian” out there. Out there are people poor, yet we cannot fault the poor for just living. Their sins are no different from our own, though they cause us to take offense and to retch. Out there are people of atheistic beginnings, though they can explain exactly what that great contra-religious leader Jesus was saying. Out there are people branded by a new generation of wealth, internet savvy or collateral to a new generation, though they mystify and grate against our totems, our explanations of whom and how submission and loyalty is to be shown.

Therefore the Church strives to be more sophisticated in its worldview, that is, humble in its outlook, expecting truth to the claim that brother is set against brother and father against son. Truth to these claims, sister against sister, mother against daughter, is no force but rather a delight in coming together for the sake of coming together. People are really quite different from us, when we get down to it. People really are quite offensive to good order and yawning acquiescence.

The Church’s assets are a divinely imbued sense of gifting: we long simply to give away what wealth accumulates in the recesses and shadowy corners of the church edifice. We long not long to sit on what pomp and officialdom does begin to arise. We see this proselyte as good as the next one, against whom to measure our sense of charity and against whom to test the faith that says, the Prodigal is to be blessed; the errant soul is to be forgiven; the wandering light is to be accepted. Meanwhile, each of us become the prodigal, the errant, the wanderer: we do not “own” these temporary titles.