2025-02-10 A Meditation on Calm Appraisal

“17 Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. 2 And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, 3 explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” 4 And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. 5 But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. 6 And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, 7 and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” 8 And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. 9 And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.” (Acts 17:1-9 ESV)

Painstakingly, step-by-step, the sheer scope of what Christ and His people are endeavoring to accomplish, is only refuted by the tragic but out-of-hand, determined, flailing response of some greater disunity or discord or dissolution or plain plight of Mankind: we would rather have the mountains fall on us then to endeavor around a gentler sheen of Gospel Truth in the community.

Hear O man, O woman, and be calmed, be rational, be even-handed: those in their own lost Sphere… do not let these distract or spoil. There is a market and a hearing for the sincere Penitence, for the sincere Change of Ways, for the sincere Beggarly but Confident claim. We are beggarly only insofar as we test that Christ is for us: and He, He says, “Man, Woman, stand firm”. His Cross showed not only an innocent man betrayed, punished, but showed that all of us can be seen to be Sinners: the Cross is going to hound even the most Deserving in our midst. And if for once we glean that joy of the thought we might be seen to be the Righteous, then immediately we are again willing to be that one Penitent. The giddy reward is too great.

See, then, the infantry move into the neighborhood. See the Principled stand, because heft and might can at times be with the Visionary, with the Righteous, with the Apologetica and the Strange Duality of Christ for us, Christ with us, Christ before us, Christ beneath us: Christ in us.

Yet too the heft and the might, the infantry baldly Courageous, Principled, this melds with a personal prayer time or front-line availability (vulnerability) that Discovers and says it ain’t worth nothing if the personal Experience is lost. We have not lost the exuberance of that day of heightened alert. We have not lost that personal ecstasy around the shared Mission. We have not lost the self-sacrificial Giving around the other half, the disbelieving half, the opportunistic half who simply look to make a buck, those we refuse to condemn to the column called Damned, but fight for, sadly even so, but laying down the entire battalion if it means this One Unloved is now caught up in Paul’s third heaven. Of conversion. Of repentance. Of real strength.

So to the perverse fascination or jesting cat-calls for “More conversion!” “More beggarliness!” “More repentance!” We finally, call it a decade, call it a day, have the authorization from within our own soul, to strike out all on our own. To go for broke around a Gospel Truth that makes no bones about a former lifestyle. That forgets: no time to be complacent and go-with-the-flow, unless that is, the flow includes a teaching of Grace. Grace for the ecstatic realite of embracing, loving, reaching an excited Answer around, the past faults. Our faults become the non-negotiables: I insist! I was different! I walked to a different Tune! And I shan’t forget to Testify, not in hope that you my listener will absolve me, but that you my listener can hear the full monty of top-to-bottom Redemption, Renewal, New Life in Christ: because you, too, need it! You, too, have the demons of your own inner thought life. You, too, scoff at the claim on your attention span, at the request you Forgive, that you take a moment to Induct and Acclimate this new soul to the milieu. So all of us are one with another, formed and changed even by those few whom we tried to distance ourselves from. We no longer fault this New Believer for the imposition on the community. We become them! We learn their Doctrine! We adhere to their Joy!