2024-04-03 A Meditation on Expectations

“26 “Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation. 27 For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. 28 And though they found in him no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. 29 And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. 30 But God raised him from the dead, 31 and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people. 32 And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, 33 this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, “ ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’ 34 And as for the fact that he raised him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way, “ ‘I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David.’ 35 Therefore he says also in another psalm, “ ‘You will not let your Holy One see corruption.’ 36 For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption, 37 but he whom God raised up did not see corruption.” (Acts 13:26-37 ESV)

Expectations sometimes brought to surface: what we expect and whom we lean on, how we anticipate some ideological “contract with life”; all these things invite a mature growth, what the cynic calls sanity but what the Christian knows as All Things.

Ultimate Things, the fact that our veneer of Christ-talk, of creeds and crosses, of prayers and thanksgiving, burrow deep and broadly relate itself to our actual situation. To our actual weird or child-like trust that somehow and in some wise we will be rewarded if we show the right pluck and persistence and purpose and upright demeanor. Our weird child-like sense of belovedness, as children in the King’s courts, as strangely invested in, with weird and wonderful Hope, that a hands-off approach does spell miraculous stars and constellations, miraculous stripes and teachings, miraculous self-sufficiency, that is, sufficient in the Lamb, in the Name, in those things that do not buckle under pressure but that invite Calm Action-Response: no one and in no ways do we need make a cut, a sacrifice, of the Name. In no sense do we need to be masters alone, of our domain and of our small worlds. It no longer suits us to be sternly cynical or demeaning or diminutive towards what Souls and Learned Authority we have had instilled in our lives. We are right to believe in King Jesus. We are right to acknowledge expectations, a false even allowance or contract or imagined fairness. Nothing is fair. Life throws us, all the more when we believe, to the dogs, to the lions’ den, to the martyrs’ huddled posterity and eternal life as facing the cusp of dying.

It can feel we wrassle and negotiate; it can feel we are perennially a few steps shy of completion; it can feel we are always tardy or unable to bring the mission to its successful announcement and letters home. Yet to pray is to succeed; to pray is to Believe in some perfectibility, were it not tempting to us, of Good Outlay and Progeny. God produces, using our measured tasks, tasks designed by Holy Spirit strength to make us of a shining example of humility deserved by Christ. Christ deserves our humility. Christ lives in our self-emptying. Christ belongs in our whispered plea. Do you hear, how I say I can go not onward, yet onward I go? Do you hear, the stark Encounter with nothingness, as a relic of a youth and education that taught existential horrors faced squarely and immediately and in the News we are loved? We are loved, and we are inducted into a doctor of the Church mindset, that much accumulates in the environs of Cruciform life, life together, life stark, today seeing utter compromised and lugubrious wretched sinful estates, but Power to go on, in the Name, in the King’s Call, in the Kingdom Come, in the Spirit Alive though all else be death and decay.

Today the sense of fair play, of rewards for upright moral life, for yes the fruit even of an hour of nothing prayer, nothing visible, that is, is ours to lay claim to. We are valued for our prospects on some fronts while cause for concern perhaps on other fronts. All told, we know that Christ is our homestead, our letters of acceptance, of recommendation; it is His duty we rise up to, His war we prepare to fight, His Cause we already are knee-deep in; these things are pan-religious by some accounts, as the sincere prophet or speaker is respected across church-lines, across mosque-lines, across temple-lines, across public-square-lines. We respect the woman or the man more than the stated logic of the matter; we see Conviction and rise up ourselves Healed and Holy because of sanity and of Belonging; we see Christ-like, Child-Like trust, and arise Reminded and Invested in, and promissory notes unto a Tomorrow together and held in Trust.