2024-03-13 A Meditation on Testimony

“8 “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, 9 but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God. 10 And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. 11 And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious about how you should defend yourself or what you should say, 12 for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”” (Lk 12:8-12 ESV)

In a perfect world, go so many efforts to explain our faith, it would be so simple as to say “before I went astray, but now I am peace in the Lord”. In fact, even that much is rare to come by: sincerity lacks the courage to take on plausibility, reason, cause and effect. We are sincere to say Something Changed, but it simply isn’t true that we magically ceased to be sinners. It simply isn’t true that we stopped having neuroses or senses of inadequacy, futility, longing, emptiness.

Yet something is indeed true. It is indeed true that a short-circuiting occurred, some wires flaming up and burning out, meet the tinkerer’s toolkit and a bandage, an Ace wrap, a fix-me-up pick-me-up Resolve covered the shame, made softer and gentler the flare-up, gave us at least the inspiration in our hour of need, if not the right words always or in recollection lazily years later, to say that Something has Occurred.

That Something has literally caused us to cease to judge others. That Something has literally ended the quest for the perfect friend, us now believing and having joy in that belief, in whomsoever is before us. That Christ-like testimony no longer masking some sense of Expectation, of Rules and Obligatory Stands. The words they are True, yet so easily conformed to what “makes sense”, or “denies the Gospel, denies we are sinners”. The lonesome soul meets the cliffhanger soul, the trapeze artist soul, the strange walk-on-water of the soul set aright. The soul set leaning and embracing a bit of shaking off the presuppositions, making of no account the mad dash after any self-deprecating Truth: our Strength put forth and on display has no chinks in its armor, even if humble words invite immediate scorn and hatred of the person so eloquent as to evoke them. Those humble words are not invite to shear and to chuckle at someone, as though they were less than fit (by it would seem their own testimony). The professional wears a professional suit and coat of armor, lest any chink multiply, grow in haste and exponentially, swarm and consume the Saint, the Soldier, the Long-Sufferer. For so they did to Christ, and so they shall do to us His people.

The perfect words are nonetheless up against a theology that claims it is the Word that is True, that is coming into the world, that heals and exorcises, that spells Goodness and Communicated Love. So our words do dance around and evoke something Divine that has occurred, even if we try to make it all reasonable and unapologetic. It is called an Apologia for a reason, that we are not taking it as common-sense or practically-minded. Therefore it was the Lord who heard our plaintive cry for help, only this I propose to you my friend: that we were less reasoned and capable to ask after His help at that time; something intervened and some Grace came from Above. Some fact-of-the-matter was that we did not see our own salvation all the way through at that time: we doubted, or we wrestled with God, or we lacked enough faith to climb up from the depression. From the self-hatred, sometimes a thing more active and evasive than any melancholia. From the rough stature. And then to speak a language New, shared by people of all mainline branches of the Religion of Christ and the Apostles. To keep repeating the same truth claim, no thought of it being presumptuous or misleading, but rather to work out our salvation with fear and trembling: to the one struggling, your struggles are Now and This Day, not of yesteryear. Your struggles are your Invite to join at the marriage feast of the Lamb. Your struggles are because you were called and set apart to experience the inexplicable, that which brings laughter and delight to our inquisitive and purposed minds. That we were insanely lost, and insanely saved. That all our judgment of others went out the window, because we knew and became solvent around our own sin and misdirection. That a Come to Jesus moment showed us our spoiled circumstances or wealth or unease, as things really capable of tempting, of separating in the negative sense for us, as things that bring about dastardly courses of action. Until a peace reigns. Until a finger-tip touches that of the gods. Until we understand one another, and see through the malaise. Until we are losing no one, but bringing all, if grabbed by the ear or hands-off to heal from the trauma, to the Feast and to the Home and to the Testimony.