2022-10-22 A Meditation on Strange Days

“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”” (Jn 6:40 ESV)

With vision and steadfastness, apocalyptic scenes play out even in our patient and at-the-ready worldview. That is, a four horsemen trope dallies with basic calls to repentance and new faith. Basic appeals to take an “Aha!” moment of stepping back from what joys and sorrows life consists of, to find ourselves enraptured with parable and image, mirages and similitudes, do nurture and succor us.

There is a dynamic spirit, and a frightful spirit, one the proper outpouring of Grace in our law-bound, rigged, idolatrous lives, and the other said Law and straitjacket. It is a straitjacket from which we cry and beg for a proper Religion, no concession to frightful lessenings of what Spirit is in Man, no concession to forgetting what expansive dreams and learnings and ideologies we have experimented in and bound up into our persona: an educated persona, an experiential persona, a trustee of the music of the spheres, persona, and what common education is meted out just in growing up in this countryside with its culture and its parentage, tutelage, equipment for the journey.

So we are the near victims, nearly victim to an outpouring of Spirit (judgment), if only it weren’t that all that is by way of saving us. If only it weren’t that all that is bridling us and prepping us to walk the straight and narrow, to cross the haphazard world that hates our decisions and life choices, that is no respecter of the created Spirit of Man. For we have been given a Respect from above, God horrified by what Creation has come up with, and sending His own Son, lest there be any blame game going on, to take the burden. If it was His error, well let it be His Son; but this we know: each of us is gratitude and glad child of the Most High, and each of us is servant and soldier to take up that mantle called indebtedness and called Mercy. For we see absence of guile in the Son. We see thoroughgoing Love and a game at play wherein even our worst selves, God is willing to take on and with burgeoning, outpouring Spirit, to redeem. And in this light, we are those eager to Rise, to take the Blame, to restore ourselves as proper dialoguers with the Most High in His garden for us.

One day, each will hear the apocalyptic currents overhead and strange outlays and notions—why not just of an acre of land and a mule?—that intercept and dally with the plain-headed, plainspoken outpouring of civic love and belonging, heaven no pie-in-the-sky but a redemption of this world and these skies, of this earth and this civic assembly.

That is a message difficult to hear; we were outgoing and plethoric in experience and in this wide world, then faith came and with it near spirits and apocalyptic. With it came a narrow path of our God-given proper self restored and redeemed, passionate pursuits now given back to we who turned all over to Him, who asked Him into our hearts, who were willing to be content with our little giftings in life; now we receive back a hundredfold. We are better people; former friends say there is continuity (“This is the same woman or man I knew”) while also being refreshment (“You now understand what we already knew to be your faultlines, your sin”). So we do not delay, trying to hoard what we have been given, but invest and race to the societal wells and highways and byways to be His healing hand and His apocalyptic Sign, preacher-man or -woman to those who happen to gather, layer-on of hands to the infirm, prophet to the near family and kinfolk, to the street people and the passerby; prophets in word and in style and in deed, silence being a prophecy along with praise and thanksgiving.

The visions persist and the great host of the faithful, the company of Heaven, come down now, is a host unimpressed with worldly shows of power for it has known Divine Power, power come down from the mountain, power to meld and shape our dear hearts, power to enrapture us in salvation and ecstasy, power to be for His people a proper sense of belonging, perhaps because of life’s burdens too great for us, or perhaps because in those burdens was a new channel of communication and of purpose.

We were trained and we were agent, soldier, of a melting pot of Grace, a place of hearts overrun and properly at home in the successful, unbiased, church gathering. That gathering is sacrosanct, yet not fussed over; we find it everywhere we go, but also on that special gathering Sunday morn. So there is translation: the one who fights, fights for this; the one who prays, does so outfitted as a soldier, in order to make sober and sane their actual experience of heavenly battle; the one who serves, with gladness; the one who teaches, with hope whilst staring down dire straits. Each of us is caught up in something scarcely understood and even less appreciated: a divinity and real miracle of sustenance, of business, of motoring along, merrily, by the Spirit, by Grace, by Faith, by a life unconstrained and not knocked down. For our words are fighting words, and we should expect opposition, yet forget and fail to worship the God who has Overcome and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, of overcoming division.

Each division is a talking point to illustrate what He came to accomplish; each of us has our special hour of delightful presence and being together, with each other and regularly with Him on High. So we have no time nor space for code words and moments of questioning what are the partisanships, what the divisions: those are a real product and outpouring of a shared Spirit who loves, who keeps us as church-folk properly entertained and busy, who recognizes weaker hangups and hardships, giving us respect for the battles we choose and we fight, but also simply making certain that all shall be well at the last day, in some coming and present apocalyptic.

So to us is given sign and wonder, the better to illuminate dear hearts open and waiting for the Lord. Spiritual wickedness and bondage in high places is unshrouded, named, given similitude to a Host called Salvation, the horsemen, the wedding banquet, the armageddon when armies seem to be clamoring after one another, yet is there war or only longstanding inheritance of peace, wars unfought, insults and injuries unavenged? All that is that we might recognize the first birth pains. All that is in the hands of a God who is overturning so much in order that we might all be New Creations in a world transfixed, transposed unto salvific Cause, Healed, Made New, Transformed, the lesser concerns being lesser because we have seen the future, and it works. Whatsoever happens in that future, it will not be less dramatic than what has happened in our own hearts, who were inimical and antagonistic but today are nurtured and kept peaceable, malleable, giving, and receptive to our fellow Man.