2023-10-22 A Meditation on Lockstep

“15 Now I urge you, brothers—you know that the household of Stephanas were the first converts in Achaia, and that they have devoted themselves to the service of the saints— 16 be subject to such as these, and to every fellow worker and laborer. 17 I rejoice at the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaicus, because they have made up for your absence, 18 for they refreshed my spirit as well as yours. Give recognition to such people.” (1 Co 16:15–18 ESV)

To maneuver boldly in the Christian’s war is to stay in lockstep, in binary form, in tertiary form, with our brethren and sistren. Naturally we reach some kind of escape velocity, where prior there was simply the litany, age-old, of our sins and ambitions. No, but today we stick like glue, friendly-wise, to the fellowship because, though we are warriors and war is joined, we are gladsome and healthsome: we bolster, not slink away; we dwell near and familiar to that friendly corporation called the Church. We are, after all, inspired folk, brandishing or listening, in all things just amazement at this seventh heaven, this repartee, this adjointment, this morning sympathy for one another. For it outlasts the terror of the weather. It outlasts the malignancy of the times. It outlasts the trauma of curt endings.

And what better terms of engagement, of endearment, than to quote Christ, whose simplicity speaks volumes so easily forgotten in the professionally developed and cultivated sermon. Christ is unfancy, unadorned, unsophisticated; if aged, if cured, it is His fasting and simplicity of monastic life, life not sensible according to any earthly ambitions, but unbelievably sensible in heavenly ones.

What better than to see despite the curtains drawn, a Tiananmen Square of our wide scope and liberal education, that we hunker down and look just through a peephole or a lens called salutary, called healthsome words, called evolved unto war. We are evolved unto war because our nursemaid, the Christian entire witness in Scripture, in martyr, in sympathetic voice, is winnowed. Instead we have turned a corner called Steel, called War. Instead the matter is up in the air, not ours to know just where this war will lead, but known by the Lord, who understands and boldly suits up such that we are One. Such that we dwell in our psychological experience, in tune and in joint work with the Christ of Scripture; who am I? Who are you? People, through whom a flawed self-suspicion or self-doubt, nonetheless races to the finish line in the Spirit: we have perfect stories told to us in dream or in dying words of a unity, a binary form, a tertiary form, wherein Jesus is present where two or three are gathered in His name.