2024-06-16 A Meditation on Social Beings

“13 For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.” (Gal 5:13-15 ESV)

“34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”” (Jn 13:34-35 ESV)

Part of us being social creatures, things like exclusion and shunning can be a bit overwhelming; we can indeed help the adversary in demoting ourselves, through our expectation level, through our self-image, through us pattern-matching and trying to see how this would-be fellow tribesperson actually views us. That is, Christ doles out strong medicine in His overturning of such judgments. For such judgments, after all, are a weak boast of this world. They are an unfortunate confluence, and would you only look, see again what it is to be surrounded by love as though it all were a dream.

Our duty therefore to the brothers and sisters is a duty perhaps as not elite but pragmatic, simply choosing one reaction over another. And God keeps us hungering in this regard, sometimes, so we might be ready in our Hour, to do that subtle shining thing. To shine bright. To confront the spirit of devilish worldliness. To confront the spiritual heft of that same devil, who it is true has beguiled our very acts of devotion as to feeling “incongruous”, “just not me, today”, as though alarm bells only we respond to, are off in the distance.

But to that submission, that errant faulty way we as socialized beings try to “make it work”. And its as if that persecutor wouldn’t be halved or decimated just by a strong response, a bark like a tamed-but-ferocious pet, an insistence, we fight over every yard; we are not “too good” to enter your game; we are not appealing to a Judge who shall never manifest her or himself. We are consecrated precisely because like those on strong medicine, we insist: no, this avenue is ours to take Together; I’m part of the admixture; see me, don’t neglect to remember the human brand of spirit I represent.

See, all of us a little astonished when it becomes bedrock and political. We after all do not boast in ourselves, but in a God who knows our past is riddled with deeds that these our partners in the Gospel never partook of. But what gets us going each day is a Gospel they indeed do partake of; people in short, in the churches, are horribly hindered, surprising us with a friendship, but only then revealing some resentment or debt perhaps. Or maybe that is just us not having Faith: good people, good ideas, good churches, these are things not perfect but that we can work with. It is a Calling and something Dire: it demands a Response.