2024-07-19 A Meditation on Origins Stories
“3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” (Philip 1:3-11 ESV)
With origins stories to rival the best of them, Christian locus of being is not found in the pomp and circumstance, but so often precisely where we were looking elsewhere. Precisely where we were oppressing—yes, it is oppressive, the assumption around Christian “discipline”—each other in the name of Love and Patience. The oppression is in that we fail to look outwards at a large world of difficulty, and instead zero in on something we can “solve”, forgetting that all things are up for imaginative grab, even our best moralities, our excessive cleanness of living compared to most of our peers, our servant-mindset and duties discharged.
The church literally Fails on all moral fronts, because it flatters itself (these are sleepwalkers talking) that morality requires a “loving confrontation”, forgetting the judicious assessment and plain measurement that reminds, of what Paul talked of, of the scandal of the Gospel, of the harsh opposition towards all legalistic “love” and “patience”: “discipline”.
No matter, the fellowship is intact, offended not and discouraged not, because we have not the time nor place to allow our intention of All Submission to mess with our brains. We submit, yet do not deny the place of the Gospel. We submit, but do not get disgusted with the lugubrious heavy-breathing or loserdom in the sense of socially rude and socially selfish, mindsets of the other half. That is, to discipline without sincere Love, is rude and selfish, it flatters the doer that their deeds are simple to understand and “Obvious”.
All this to say, Christ is alive today because somehow He exceeded Death; we almost say patently that He is safe now, removed from the scandalous world that crucifies Him. Yet He is not quite that kind of safe: we crucify Christ anew daily. All that is safe is the knowledge that if it didn’t work the first time around, it won’t work now. It won’t hurt the child who prays in Trust that He hears. It won’t hurt the housewife who prays in Trust that He listens. It won’t hurt the leader male or female who prays the task is too great for them. It, simply put, will not bring to an end any thoughts that Christ is not reliable, not One we can heartily lean on, not One offloading all our fears and self-loathing or confusion or regret.
Emerging, then, grateful, we have come upon the Big Leagues: church life holding nothing to covet but much to safeguard. We hold in Trust the fact of a new breed of friend, measured in single utterances rather than long days of schmoozing and shooting the breeze. We take these healthsome individuals as Worthy of All Things, and know that as the excitement occurs first here and then there—away from the pomp and circumstance—it is no tinny drumbeat but a Clarion Call to Celebrate so much we revel in in times of inspiration. We revel: they may despise, who knows, but the Gospel is Heard and Found in the child’s attempt at imitating the big boys and big girls in meting out Discipline, a Discipline we do not allow to surpass in importance the Gospel of Christ. For, if only we dared to imagine what they imagine about us, we would have sympathy. We would take a moment to correct the record: my life is not a festival of indulgence nor a Denial: if I deny Moral Cause, it is no denial but rather a plea we hear it as an enemy of Him who alone can do what we ask and imagine, who alone can give that revelry even to the jailed or poor in spirit, that revelry that makes all things New. And frustrates the cynic who maybe even wants others to be miserable. Their misery is not ours to obsess over or to adopt ourselves: if in this at least we can plead no submission, then we are freed to submit gladly to genuine Discipline and Hearty Appeals to serve the Risen, Moral, King.
Is it too excited? Too winsome? Too much fighting Chutzpah and strategic gladsome Invite? We invite all to the table, each a beloved soul if only for having had that Christ-Encounter. Tomorrow again we will have the wealth of our first principles, a wealth never excessive nor lazy but sharp and still to this day kept sharp as iron sharpens iron. We never bask nor revel in the Scope of our Enterprise, but rather in the pockets of Escape allotted us, pockets having nothing to do with anything jealousy-inspiring nor covetous nor taking from us the Everyman Relevance. We are relevant, and servant-minded, and sacrificially-minded, and all this as inspired only by that Revelry of the Cross and of our Patient Evocation of Sin and its consequence, fallen nature and broken estate.