2023-12-14 A Meditation on A Knack for Mercy

“19 The churches of Asia send you greetings. Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, send you hearty greetings in the Lord. 20 All the brothers send you greetings. Greet one another with a holy kiss.” (1 Co 16:19–20 ESV)

The Christian Church has built into it some healing or ointment preventive of its own sins and faults. The Christian Church preaches to all, and sometimes sincerely means it: that sins are forgiven, that all that is done in Love is done in Christ, that the strong arm of Faith shall not return with its harvest empty. The Christian Church itself is like an errant child, near to our hearts, implicit in fact in all of society, a mightily bespeckled and sin-fraught reality, yet calling all brave and self-giving souls to its ranks to serve.

The Christian Church is not that twin variant church, which church lumbers along out of touch with its own flaws. The twin variant that has all manner of inexperienced yet eager would-be sophists or pundits or preachers experiment and act out their big “What if’s?”. Manifest sin, and those persons so needed, whose ministry is seasoned by experience or by anointed chosenness, to testify to the Grace of the Lord, are scarcely to be found except in cisterns and tied down. But this is the mighty movement of the Spirit underway in our time, where the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

God invests time. If all the world is on edge, wondering who is saved, then it is no reason of His unwillingness, it is just that healing takes an investment of Time, and Time there is only so much of. He longs for each of us to know the experience of being Forgiven. He longs for each of us to know how and why the Faith Healer comes alongside and draws healing pictures of those who torment, those who reside so near to our daily thought project as to be nearly indiscernible, inextricable, complementary and intertwined. A good healer anticipates and Understands: if they did thus to the prophets who came before, how much more will they do unto this our friend?

The service, then, is a little braver to focus on honor before life and death, to focus on those executive decisions that someone has to make, even as we sit pretty being innocent of blood on our hands. We sit pretty, but it is no longer a flaw: we have arrived at the Mercy shed from Jesus’ side, and know our Gospel is like so many marching orders, unto the salvation of some of its hearers, and the ruin of some others. So we do not judge, only know that if there was time sufficient in the day, all would be saved.

Front and forward, the battalion is a little more prophetic than the slumbering general public, yet out of whom awakens this very morning some inkling or inclination to poetry or to stark Orders Received: today if you hear His voice… Today, if you long for a peace before a lie, a peace even costing many lives, but no matter, our future City of God is designed with room for the saints who have preceded, our City on High is walled to the salvific joy of all its laborers, in uniform or in civilian costume, abuzz, patient to allow bland life together in the Good Name of a few flashpoints of inspiration and genius, which genius is gifted to the community rather than being secreted away and hoarded. Others have paved a way before us; others have heard the church bells ringing and hastened to the Friendship, to the Bare Bones Fellowship, to our special times stored up in a bottle that we might with confidence approach the throne of grace.

Therefore our sister, our home, our theology saved up and rationed out, as though it were something finite; this day, our burdens may be greater than so many others who walk along half awake, but we know: we know the peacetime embellishments or laziness and unobserved complacencies, the ease and the distance from horrifying homelessness and addiction. These we can repent of, if only we know: Jesus did not deny the expensive ointment to His body, rather discerned a time for loving the poor, and a time for working generally on the Gospel. Which Gospel applies to poor and rich alike. To any who know: your wealth is forgiven you, and perhaps we shall see some Gospel indication or preaching concomitant to that forgiveness. Or perhaps simple reverence. But know that any and all flailing about in rebellion and angst, is forgiven and patiently accommodated. Not that we accommodate sin, but our labors of addressing the shunning or what-have-you have finally paid off with a concession. Laughing concession, as though we were imagining it all perhaps, but in any case a concession. Such is the mutual pat on the back, the willingness when being absolved suddenly to seek to bear additional sins on our own back, as though we had Jesus’ own blood in our veins. We long to know that copacetic music of the spheres, the pastor’s office, the reminder of all-in, all-hands-on-deck, churchmanship, yet never to concede to the banal abuse, the charges of insanity for what is Gospel, these endless discipleships; in principle, we have a reason to stand strong, that the edgy and angular nature of the Gospel that confronts, “who” does confront, all sin with structure and elegance, borne pattern and bedrock, awakens, distills, brews and preaches juice to the parched tongue, wine to the despicable, bread and water to the self-ruined.

The Christian Church is our own beloved at-a-distance hope, that the rumors will be true, that at the last we shall, if nothing else, have her mutuality, our sister our home our pew. Mutual because the best ointment is for the dutifully laboring. The silence, the secretive nature of her Place and Name, helps to remind us it is fellowship we build up to together. It is eagerness to receive our own personal marching orders. It is a holiness of holies, that is no woman or man but is the heart’s delight and fancy. The heart speaks of deep rumblings from a Lord on High, who hears our prayers spoken or silent, which thing is a mystery yet a mystery True to any advocate of our New Religion, a religion which replaced the reigning blood-bought Judaism of that day. Our feast day will come. Our gratitude is known to all. Our own hopes become the hopes of a wide contingent, a cohort and a crew, who have seen that Love is the ticket to Change.

If anything shall change, it will be a miracle. To overcome the addiction or drunkenness. To make peace where there was exasperated but safe denial. To long for Something shared, in a community of shouting distances across the gentle crowd, across so much fuss and errors past, simply to Assure that our submission is to the Most High, not to any man or woman, but to God Himself, who chose the vesture of Man to approach, patiently to approach and to reassure and to accept in return some window of time earned by the friendship and prayers of His people, His Church. Some time to live and teach, to preach and bake bread and catch fish by way of miracle, to press wine and press souls for that longing they’ve always secretly held, now to know it In the Body, In the Flesh, In His Mercies, In Him.

Two treks in the night. Two parallel spirits. Two different and incommunicado yet choreographed souls. Such is the marching order, to be our best and our noblest selves. Each to abide near to the frenzied passion, but no matter, to do it on our solo crossing, our solo journey. There we know of loved ones we wish to see again. There we know the ecstatic music of those spheres that does encourage us and brace us even for death in His Service. We have felt the love. We have ceased to judge. We have accepted that the physical church is something circumscribed, and perhaps our life experience is a little broader, making it a bit abhorrent the thought of submitting “unconditionally” to this juggernaut: for we have our own marching orders and an invisible Authority to bless our own discernment and prognosis. Yet see, dear friend, that all this is without ego, and where ego has slipped in, may we hear each other’s repentance. Yes, to repent is to enter upon a world of color and discovery, a world of group mind almost, insofar as we “In Christ” are blessed and enabled. To overcome with loving gestures, the frigidity or the fear of falling “into sin” (men, women, it is no sin to date, or to fellowship across gender lines!). To overcome easily the unspeakable binds, the forbidden cities of the heart, those “no-go” zones, which eventually became “all-systems-go” in the Name of Him who Arrived to bear our infamy and sin.