2024-08-21 A Meditation on Prosperous Times
“11 But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, 14 to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” (1 Tim 6:11-16 ESV)
The call to prosper is the call to a solemn awareness that true are the sad stories, true are the class-based distinctions, true are the rare circumstances: more, not less, of the leveled-up Contribution would only that we lived all Free. Would only that we lived all judiciously assessed, met, encouraged, beloved on the basis of repping Life in and of itself, no summary judgments, no so-called accurate assessments of measurable traits. We are called to prosper and also to take This Day as Invite for dutiful breath of life into, actions into, service unto, things we otherwise assume others, no less capable, would do in our place.
For it is a strange world we wake to, spied out and assessed, summarily judged, more, not less, measured artificiality and so-called metrics or impatience for the growing pains, the awkward years, the nearness of a Christ or Buddha, a Mohammed or Nietzsche, to that wilderness time of Trial. It is no strange day that greets the prophet, the man or woman of good deeds, the service-minded fellow or girl. All this, because we are in strange stead, strangely Allotted time and circumstance to go boldly, to minister, to listen, to Act as though evolution’s taken-for-granted supersession of each of us, is a distant end game, no cause for despair, no mechanical middling. We shall be superceded, as Christ Himself prophesied He would come again. Another Mary, another Joseph; another childhood romp unwritten, except that He spoke in church; another Peter and John, James and Matthew, all twelve names writ in the stars because Man is of an estate more Tender and more Circumstantial, furtively eeking out a fellowship and living amongst the big fish of the day; even just the big fish one meets at the market, huddling, hunched over, fast and elite to go about one’s own business.
The spark is there to be Celebrated: today, not in the by-and-by; we are citizens of no strange state, but of a Heavenly wedding banquet, the stuff dreams and progeny are made of; they shall increase, and we decrease, in the Morrow. So to the healthsome backdrop, the environs plentiful, the state exhibited: we are kin and citizen of no strange place, but of God’s own Righteousness Revealed; His intention is not to muddle nor to humiliate, but to evoke and inspire a distant God-head in the Man, in the Woman. Hear, no longer fallen upon the fearsome frantic thought of a day of failure on the horizon, or worse, a day of mediocrity or middling calling, a day of the sublime Fact of time as it elapses, being all that we are aware of. No: we are Grafted Into, Gifted Upon, Summarily Summonsed, to reach high and broad, to do for that one soul under hardship, what they only wish and dream were possible. We are to see a Christ live the Blessed Life for us, even though it involved a Cross. Even though it broke hearts and hurt the disciples thus to see their Master, and thus even to ignore or say blase and go back to fishing, to denying Him, to forgetting or disbelieving Something Substantial could be beneath the whole get-up. Yes, our theology is circumspect, a bit too much for some: for those who would that we accept Jesus even apart from His Rising from Death; or rather, that the upstanding of the corpse would be metaphorical and a comment on Him returning to our thoughtspace and dreamscape, of a world of Tomorrow as Prophesied and as Promised. All this to we the henchmen of no small milieu but of a rank and name for ones Called, Consecrated, Bequeathed, to be His people.