2023-10-29 A Meditation on Meeting the Lord

“11 To the choirmaster. Of David. 1 In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain, 2 for behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; 3 if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” 4 The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. 5 The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. 6 Let him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. 7 For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.” (Ps 11:1–7 ESV).

Everyone meets the Lord on their own gently-loved journey. We are loved and met in a way and a place hardly calling for boasting: we were leery, until His abiding love for us transcended our creature comforts. We had all manner of psychological holdouts, places we reiterated and repeated and used as testbed simply to Experience, to Encounter, to Cogitate. We saw, in moments of taking a step back, of clarity, how beholden we were, beside all our reasoned and communicable deeds, how beholden we were to action-response, unwitting, unplanned, haphazard deeds of rebellion, of repugnance, of retribution, of inner turmoil and outer frantic or urgent actions.

Then came the patient Call, that we are to become Prayer Warrior, that we are to take up a sword and a shield this same day. We interpreted deeds border-line, close to denouncement by church body, as deeds of Grace; we were loved through a romantic bout or a friendly lark, a friendly tour of the city streets, of its saloons and its entertainments, of its human element. Somehow the call to be pundits for the Law met with a half-in, half-out sense of Call: we were called to move beyond the punditry and to rise up Anointed and Consecrated, by an incommunicable Experience, an Experience we simply laud and marvel at in our heart of hearts.

That is, Jesus is in the big business of Man’s deepest designs. Not just man’s “religiosity”, but his and her very center of being. That center strives and designs and urges after Goodness, after Strength, after Moral Code, yet the gig of our Lord and Savior is a wide-eyed startled and stunning sense of the Unknown, the day when we may take safely for granted that morality and ethics will take care of themselves, but we… we are in the business of Encounter, of Milk, of Unearned zeal. We are zealous for the complete reversal of all our code of ethics and our structure erected of morality. Somehow, we can of a sudden afford to be bright in the face and hopeful in the heart, that we have enough collateral “goodness” to pass muster on the church scene… no, that is cynical. Instead, we never stop affirming it is for the sake of Another that we are here and present, accounted for and forgiven Today.

This meets with bewilderment. This meets with a lazy attempt to drag us down into the morass. This meets with the stunning realization: we are a step post- these church-folk, in some hours, at some times; they are habitually Christian from youth, and we… we arrived by way of a special delivery of Experience, that transformed in ways these youth-in-the-spirit are eager themselves to Experience. We have a treasure in jars of clay. We are simply to rehearse that age-old liturgy that welcomes and that murmurs, appealing to the better angels of fallen man. We are to know that the weaned child of God is a beloved child of God, not faulted for their crying nor for their addiction to creature comforts, to the fabric that enshrouds them, to the motherly, fatherly hold and caress; we are in the business both of soldiering with a hardened steel, and sensitizing with a deep reverence. We are reverent for what Universe is spinning inside any one heart. We are reverent for what symbolism does speak volumes to the would-be believer. We are reverent for what this day may be a more sane and Aware walk with God, aware of our foibles and reactivity. Aware of our more slummy comforts and hang-ups, yet in all this Aware that God has already gone a greater distance, and we are not forgiven because of our Cognisant In-touchedness with true reality, but because we were weaned and coddled, we were held and solemnly consigned unto this Service. We were eager, yet not on our own sense of personal strength, but because as One Body we fought for the ministry of Another. Of Him who loved us and made us into the Image Bearers we have become, spouting Knowledge of a Divine Imprint; portraying innocence as a Holy Goalpost; Lauding Fellowship as a warming mystery.