2022-10-21 A Meditation on Positive Faith

“Answer me, O Lord, for your steadfast love is good; according to your abundant mercy, turn to me.” (Ps 69:16 ESV)

One remnant of a Christian faith that has been exercised by the mind, is the end of pessimism. Too easily, we try to moderate everything happening with a sooth caveat: this too, shall pass. This too, shall end in betrayal or imposition or falling out.

Yet the Christian story is one of positives. It is one of, even the admittedly evil nature of humanity, being the strike point and the target of all that God has to offer. So we marry our pessimism to Jesus’ Cross, and accept the aspect called “faith worked out” as our marching orders, our mind’s jungle gym, our overturning of doubt and suspicion and fears of there coming a day when all shall judge their fellow Man with evil intent.

Such evil intent is what Jesus so lovingly and patiently healed us of. Such evil intent is the “religion of man”, the humanistic farthest reaches, where humanism ends and Divinity proceeds to carry forth a torch of Resurrection, of bonding together such as the disciples did in the locked room after their leader’s Cross (Jn 20:19), of whispering in excited hush as to all things being restored to us, the family we have left behind replaced with a hundred-fold of new associates (“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” (Mt 19:29)).

Therefore we are peace with aging parents, as our generation has their own proper Cause: we say to them that today we go to the plate, today we enlist in the fight, today we honor their basic morality passed on and their glimmer-in-the-eye faith that, amongst the myriad angles and beauty of this Scripture passed down to us, from the settlers’ family tome on stand and central to the house, to our plentiful distribution of Scriptures, one for each rucksack and each bedside table; these are our guarantors of a Revealed Light, a strange sensation, a near sickness if only it weren’t coupled with Jesus’ Divine deliverance and instilled Hope.

So we pray, and we delight in New Scripture, Newfound Glory, as the bible properly heals and lures and nurtures and is our home base. No longer masters of our own composure, we await the hour when all things blossom in the heart, when we are not agents of our own salvation, but dance a cosmic dance of composure and peace with our fellow or gal. The sign-up couples us with an Inspired organization, we find in military guise of the church triumphant—one day, triumphant yet today “militant”, as the Reformers taught—and do gape, delighting in, floating amidst, delighting upon, the Spirit of pessimism Resurrected; friends momentarily tested, and we concede, sometimes failing said test as Peter the Apostle did, but all that in order that the wider Body would be healed. Rather, all that, not so some cosmic balancing out can occur, tit-for-tat, mathematically-speaking, but that an Eternal Spirit can bear witness to the wounds real but resurrected from, eternal now and peace in being our undying residence.

We also are those educated and experienced, so that we pity or at least nurture our weaker fellow man or woman, who it is true parades about a judgment day a little different from that of our own. When they make long excuses for intolerant or uncouth behaviors—I’m thinking sexuality, here—it is a walk we are willing to go down with them, to a point: we understand, that Scripture has it’s naysaying words. We also understand Scripture leaves such judgment out of many summaries of the Law: the Ten Commandments; the blessings and curses from the mountaintops; Jesus own entire earthly ministry. So we are peace in the assurance that our neighbor’s judgmental stance is simply their effort to be faithful to Scripture, particularly, to Paul, not any internally-rooted hatred or intolerant miscommunication as to what constitutes Grace: for you, for me, for each of us, in a bible study and in the streets of our loving community. We are peace in understanding that it is easy to make Law the primary message, and to forget that whilst for us it is plain and simple to say this way and not that way, to others, that is a heard sticking point, and we must drop it whilst we find the common ground our Savior does want us to find.

Perhaps. Perhaps we can deal in such impossibilities, and have faith that Love is the change agent, which makes each other in our view already acceptable to God, and gives the sage observer peace in the matter-of-fact of what life and society and peace does create in the heart of Man. We approach with Joy, knowing that people’s thoughts go deeper than we might assume, whilst they also are of simpler concerns than what our apologia and errata does concede. Am I loved? Am I seen as a bad influence? Horrors: it is their own pattern and modus operandi of ministering Law rather than Gospel, that they fear will reach its end. So we go back to the mild acceptance of wheresoever someone is coming from, in certainty Jesus works through the least and the lost in our midst, and that these might just be us, who judged as we observed.