2023-04-16 A Meditation on Missionary Relevance

“Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also complete it. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you. For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. “These seven are the eyes of the Lord, which range through the whole earth.”” (Zec 4:8–10 ESV)

To take upon ourselves a place in the community, is to find missionary zeal, yet so often not in the places that we look for it. Sure: I must write, or preach, or practice holy virtues, or spend hours in prayer. But we enter upon an exchange wherein prayer is up against the impossible, where we are called simply to be willing to put aside our focused projects and hear someone out, where the copacetic nature of things, the community’s peace, imposes even on productive us, to make the prayer of the impossible wall met.

The prayer of to answers, to a new scourge, potent stuff, a frightful self-removal now unjustifiable: we must pray, we must communicate love, we must take a moment just now to give thanks for the communal spirit, the peace, the open exchange, the compliments, the shared respect one for another, just for each other’s “space” and honesty.

Finding our place in the community therefore is that missionary zeal that does not have all the answers. That is masked in very simple tasks that nonetheless remind us: do not forget your bread-winner mindset, but also know this: no rule nor “Law” nor “project” quite matches the narrow way that has been found. No prospectus stands aloof from the genuine ownership of the Spirit in our lives. We can be both productive, but also relevant to the community, whatever brand of community that is. We can keep eye focused on a peace-driven peace-riven peace-announcing overarching view. Our view is towards a calling and a relevance to the winner, yes, in each of us, but to the loser as well: to those ways that we are scrambling and just scraping by. To those ways we wish upon a star for an end to the ghost expressions and mug shots and harrowing inebriation of a friend or a peer.