“16 “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 17 Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, 18 and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. 19 When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. 20 For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. 21 Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, 22 and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. 23 When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. 24 “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.” (Matt 10:16-25 ESV)

Betrayal, treason: some strange accelerant causes normally rational people to act hastily, without consideration, forgetful of a couple of things. First, forgetful that only God reigns, and He has a plan for the prosperity of the saints and the reign of Goodness one day to come true. Second, that we are decent folk, of good import, gently pleading or patiently revisiting, querying rather than gossiping.

It is cataclysmic shakes, transitions, comings-about, that harp painfully on the souls of the less initiated, on the novitiate, on the Child in adult clothing. And gently as it is posited, the “lesser of two evils” is rationalized, people forget “our kind” were there all along, trusted to go to the enemy’s camps perhaps even. And then the gossip: who and what are we to believe, except this: that our Friend Christ is enveloped with a kind of Love that proceeds innately and naturally from those trusting encounters of youth, that hegemony or cataclysmic Fight of junior life in community, parents sending their kids off to school with a prayer, to summer camps, to sleepovers, and leaving the house vacant to be occupied by partying tribes.

Therefore the Agent of Christ, His unit of Getting Things Done ‘Round Here, has a religionist’s perspective Illegal for the non-theocratic politician: Agents of the Crown, we are people who can do a few things unique to our stations in life. And that includes the seeding of hope (don’t just be cynical that like culprits we seed doubts), it includes the laying on of hands to Heal, it includes the nirvana of prayer circles and Ecstatic utterances because Christ is literally Owning up to His people, literally Putting into Place a hope and a future, literally getting our minds out of the gutters, out of the pettiness, out of the punch-counterpunch, and Dreaming Big, Hoping like as for a beloved Child.

Our training in this regard is according to Law, after all: because it isn’t rational, that we shouldn’t be more directed or led; the Law states, however, that this Solo Actor or that Solo Actor or Actress is to be a human, a made-over, self-made, owned Man or Woman first, and a resource to be tapped second. Therefore the War is always personal, it always is the agent’s emerging from a long period of training, basic warfare, basic intelligence-speak, basic rules almost like for any in the public eye. It is Personal, because an enemy hates our Freedoms most of all, our chutzpah, our Owned outlay. Most of all, the enemy wants us subdued, corporately bought and sold for mullah, because the Enemy, he or she cannot fathom a life any more precocious or precious than this life. This subjugated life. This frustrated, making-do life.

But we have the mind of Christ. We have the exuberance of a day in His courts, strangely taken in stride, “Oh, let us build three tents” here spoken, because we are not yet those two millennia later when still it is remembered, Christ came and dwelt among us. We are just as exuberant in Peace outlay as the enemy is in betrayal and treason. And we harbor no grudge, reflecting mightily on the plenteous Invite to be part of the Witnessing Community, the Theologically profound in academic sense as well as street-wisdom sense.