2022-09-16 A Meditation on Waking Up

“Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you.” (Ga 5:2 ESV)

Finding material to work with is a bit of a joke, as there is war and material and onslaught on all sides. Yet each of us can feel empty, or uninspired, bored to a point of breaching the natural and gifted walls of who we are, our identity in Christ, our determination to be no-time-to-delay witnesses. We can want something, anything, that will be offensive to the heavy-handed, boring tenets of established religion, devolved religion, works-based religion. Are you so “holy” and “pure”? Well I for one am going to announce I disagree, feeling as I do uninvited to the party.

So we brandish a sword called Spirit. We wield all our energies around overcoming the tendency to divide, a tendency found in any society, and the tendency to heal. Healing would be unkosher and ugly were it not that we have found the divisions are within ourselves, not division between Christian and, as it were, Jew (that is, what today we mean by the religion of good works, as Paul and others so distinguished and used that name to distinguish). We are in the muck and mire, in the unpretty and ramshackle, all hands on deck, messiness of life. We are not isolating from “those kind of people” so much as we are preaching a Gospel that says, not the holy in life but rather the contrite and meek and spiritually questioning, are where our Lord properly finds and spells forth His love.

That is, the material is in our natural tendencies to be gregarious and bent on loving with joy those we see walking fashionably down the streets or near to us by some coincidence of momentary life. If we ourselves have found mercy and forgiveness, then we are the odd and inspired, the artistic and excluded from polite society; we are the visionaries and workers in a broad vineyard, a loving vineyard defined, in part, by its love for Jesus, a rascally and yet wondrous boast to make. So they say, you must accept suffering, but meanwhile we are too busy praying for those whom the Lord has given us, to get entangled in that debate.

We love Jesus, the very One whom society divided itself from and labeled a sinner and cast down from His deserved position—all deserve this—of dignity and respectability. We called Him uncouth and deserving of death, because He was the healthy church amidst a society that divided temple authority and plebeian; it is no joke for real that strange and mysterious outcomes surround such a figure. We literally find ourselves entrenched, going to war over things that screw up our facial expression for a moment: are they really doing such-and-such? Yes, they are. All this, because the message of forgiveness is hated most of all. It is too good for some miscreants they say, of which some of us once were, yet too menial for the authorities themselves to boast in. Please and gladly we will accept our role in this edifice, if only some understanding and blessing each other’s hardships and confessions, were underway.

So back to finding material to work with. It is the soldier’s resolve and now duty not to isolate from civilian society, but to bring them up in the faith, to teach that working woman or working man’s desire to serve, to be heroic, to sacrifice, to fight for a shared cause. That is, the alternates in society have done their best to alienate us from them, to hate them for something they’ve lorded over us or some self-identification we shy away from. Yet today we are the prayerful and the servant, seeing the fruits of a free and liberated society as immediate Call to serve and brandish our swords and shields of faith; back to the basics; back to all holy things being questioned, and us each of us serving in a capacity to be the change agent. Each of us miraculously held as we speak forth, depression and doubt crashing down the moment we finish what we have to say, yet then the firm and bold invite to cast our self-corrections and efforts onto the Lord.