2023-12-02 A Meditation on All Systems Go

“27 “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! 28 Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O Lord my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day, 29 that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which you have said, ‘My name shall be there,’ that you may listen to the prayer that your servant offers toward this place. 30 And listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.” (1 Ki 8:27–30 ESV)

“19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Mt 6:19–21 ESV)

The rightly built-up soldier has in his character, in his constitution, a proper embrace of even those things deemed “weak”, “childish”, “pedantic”, “tired”. That is, the metric of one’s race to the throne room of Grace, is a metric leaning down, bending over, really Coping, as all manners of mania or depression, all anxieties and personal “getting by with a little help from our friends” replaces the former theology, a theology of aspiring after “heavenly” strength and things. That former theology wants to lord over the former self some down pat conclusion, while in fact we still are astonished to break out of the rut and simply try to say “I love you”. In a fraught situation. In a compromised battle scenario. In a war games or situational awareness. When we try our bestest to be our True Empowered Self, only then are we in a miasma, a shooting range, a starfield racing by our nobly lifted-up visages. A starfield of anything undealt with, anything hidden that shall now be seen, anything unrepented of; anything, in short, that was formerly blotted out in haste or caused the soul to compromise.

Therefore the Saved citizen or fighter is all the more strong on behalf of a comprehensive viewport, an all-in mentality, a surround-sound modality. To once and for all understand: yes, the battle is nigh, and yet yes God is patient for every last scraggly morsel of our former self to be brought before the Throne. For the laggard to come in. For the patient expressed sense of “I love you” finally undoing our exasperated or tearful Encounter with the madness of a foe or nearby criminal mind. The mind of the sinner, criminal in divine measurements, fighting not for tangible, measurable income, but for our very coexistence, our very shared pain, our very offloaded madness, insanity, frustrated guile or pained denial.

The soldier is awake, alert to a patient and near Spirit who reads the expressions on our faces as being those of a people crucified yet too strong. Servant, yet unappreciated. Pastoral yet made atheistic. Tempted to self-judge and hate, all because of a public image of judgment rather than of mercy. For, in the final run of things, that is the measuring rod most Divine: is it a case of joy and celebration of a victory, or is it a panicky or cold-hearted assertion that Someone Out There is still in sin? For, we pause but then celebrate: if so, if someone is in sin, let it be hereby known that theirs shall be the latest and most beloved Confession of Faith. Faith in a final reckoning that holds as beloved any and all variants of the Human Sinful Experience. That takes a selfish myopia and turns it extravagantly outwards. Towards the plebeian and the sinner. Towards the hungry and the naked. Towards the sin-wrecked and adulterous. Towards the hateful hideout, afraid as it is to “sin” vis-a-vis saying “I care”. That is in denial: all activity brings us nigh unto our broken estate, our lust, our impatience, our greed, our covetous desire; and we must motor forward, not retreat into so-called sanctuary modalities and cities, eras presumed to be “blessed” but instead characterized by their addiction to ease. Blame it on someone else. Refuse to hear any penitential thought. See not the lives given over, counting only the material cost of those elements called sacramental, the water company billed for the baptism rather than the People of God; the bakery billed for the sacramental elements rather than the priesthood, that is, rather than the one’s praying as Christ prayed, for the Church, for the healing, for the atoning Presence of something that reboots and delights in the savory knowledge of one another, which knowledge is locked up and held in high esteem, never giving in for even a moment to any false dichotomy between the “Saved” and the “Gentile”. So we pray. So we labor yet again to be found confessing Christ and not ourselves. To be confessing gladly, as would-be sinners were we not a la Romans Eight living by the spirit and not by the flesh. With time on our hands even though the battle is Here and Now, on our front doorstep, calling all willing and able bodies to make heavenly sacrifice and postpone the accolades or pleasures to a fine future estate, in Heaven, in a place we all cherish just as we take joy in our sufferings and hardships, take joy in our tithe and our other feelings of being “good folk”, in the privilege to hear that coin in the collection plate drop, that blessing unto that poverty-wrecked person who greets us on the street, that sense that no, Jesus did not heal every demon-possessed He met perhaps, but chose with Divine Inspiration how to make a franchisable message. The Jesus franchise. The Holy Church, One, True, and Faithful. The invite especially today for the non-church goer to hear a broad message and choose assent, nod along with it, pick and take apart any apparent Law or Judgment as something roundly to be refused, for it only guilts us into self-judgment and further sin. It only faults us, and ends the plain voyage on rivers and oceans of needful Mercy. That Mercy, from the ones we are late to love, from the ones we are this day forgetful of, from the actual and literal Church; we need a mother and father’s knee, a patient mercy, and endless Goodness, until that Day.