“8 Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. 9 But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” 10 But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. 11 Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error and perished in Korah’s rebellion. 12 These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; 13 wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.” (Jude 8-13 ESV)

Cheap membership: Bonhoeffer wrote an entire book called The Cost of Discipleship. Cheap membership means some weird set of easy associations or lessons, that differentiate the one from the other. So you know about x, y, and z: you’re in. Contrast to the average person on the street and, subtle or not, you ain’t got it. You ain’t in.

One example of a knowledge point that is a bit rich or easy, is the fact that allegedly the church is—name your branch here—the final arbiter and head honcho in the community. Not everyone “knows” this, and witness the pride or let’s face it provinciality of those who do know it. Rather, let’s note that the “haves” (as opposed to the “have nots”) could use a little lesson in geopolitics, in local circumstances, in national interests. And they claim an intervention is needed: “so-and-so is completely inept, completely failing to threaten or impose or legislate, mocking the handling of ‘wealth’”. 

So to that person on the street, to the soldier of the nation’s flag, to the hardworking evangelist: do these, too, err in the other direction? Too cautious, meek, self-hemmed-up? But to that person: have they nonetheless a bit more subtlety or, what’s good, collegiality? The sense, sure, we can be just as tough-nuts as you, but we are operating a bit more globally, broadly, we do it here or there but also have a brainstem, a sensitive zone of give and take, of chess games and gladiator fights, of frustrations not turned into murderous sprees but rather swallowed and gulped up, a little verite or life lesson or chance to say touchee.

Some folks haven’t the patience or sinister nature to sit around a plot or scheme murderous rampages. Do thus descend would be to betray a certain jollity or gravitas that has been of late appreciated a bit more: we are, after all, the upper crust on some levels, levels of education, of wealth as compared to the third world (the “two-thirds world”), and true, we are not so “hungry” as to protect and shelter and antagonize all takers, all opposition. We are, unfit for the management of this wealth which—to some eyes—should be corporately held wealth. But that is only because of subtlety underappreciated, that the soldier in the trenches, his or hers is a more real experience than that of the child now in place called Leadership. 

We don’t have all the answers. Those who sell Answers, are on some level lying if they go a smidgeon beyond Christ and His Kingdom. When they say, “All will be better if only we have a King, a Queen…”. When they offer to coach, to shout down, to decide on our behalf. Some fetish is involved. When they steal and extort, and ask us to say “Thank you”. Thank you for this experience of… of Majesty? Of Christ’s Decisiveness? Of top-down control and Authority?

Where are the Poor in this exchange? Where is the proselyte’s own life experience and set of Custodial relationships? Where are the things you and I have lived through that differentiate us? The military-minded man or woman cannot wave their hands and make it all easier to stomach. He or she cannot answer all your life’s existential questions, except via Christ and His Kingdom. But too, he or she is willing to serve on behalf of your right to be a citizen of the world, and on your neighbor’s right.

The fear factor of someone flashy, someone with laud and honor preceding them, this is Real and this requires some legwork, some apologies, some plain refusal to be that “Exalted One” and instead to humble ourselves and say, we too Cry, we too make mistakes, we too have a few things up our sleeve, but not All Things. More, the educational litany is almost—it can seem—reversed, that some learn things exactly in the opposite order, for them starting with thuggery and ending with the more subtle things of the spirit. Etc. And more, we too started with the cold streets of the soldier’s permanently wandering status, but in this we attained to an Opposite reality: make peace! Make shook-no-longer life in community! Make space for your friends to bond, around avoiding the trouble zones and the no-go streets you don’t walk down.