2025-03-15 A Meditation on Class Warfare

“5 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. 3 But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. 4 Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. 5 For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. 7 Therefore do not become partners with them; 8 for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10 and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. 13 But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, 14 for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”” (Eph 5:1-14 ESV)

The Christian does not see themselves as superior, in any class-based sense, except in this: that morality invents a class warfare around points of personal pride: I’m better than that; I would never do such-and-such; that ain’t “my kind of people”. However, any length of time spent on this terrestrial ball called Earth, and the “Slow stain of sin” creeps in. And here, the innate differential: I’m different. But, as we judge others, so too we fail to see our own moral decrepitude. The crew may be “branching out” a bit into illegal terrain: that “slow stain of sin”. But see that we, too, though flattered and built up as righteous, see us too do things on paper quite outlandish; a bit rare or undercooked to be presenting to a solid church folk. A bit precious. A bit outlandish.

And here is the genesis of the Doctrine: the Nehemiah, the Ezra, the Phinehas and Reformer of Morals; these say loudly where Man, Woman, has gone astray, thinking the gospel too quaint or soft as a starting point. But do we hear? Do we sit down and set out to Vote, amongst ourselves: should we “shape up” and “clean up” and “make do”? Probably not. Because our status, our class warfare, as those now morally compromised by the slow stain, is neither here nor there. It is neither seen rationally (for in that case we’d not need a Reformer) nor seen even as Factual, quite. What you speak of… this is something I natively distance myself from any applicability to my own sphere. Who are you, to correct and to judge? Let’s all have a laugh at our friend here!

The hope, then, is that the gangster mindset, the soldier’s mindset, the Reformer’s mindset, around something a bit more sly: this just might be Grace, the “weak” teaching that captivates, with visions of its prowess and—here’s the key—without “judging” anyone. Grace literally enables the church man or woman to speak a word inoffensive to the downtown streetwalker or the pusher or the criminal enterprise man or woman. Inoffensive? Because we do not any longer think ourselves in a morally superior class. We—and people will hear this in our testimony—literally mean that God forgives, and forgives in ways any healthsome—or diseased, for that matter, for what isn’t in some way compromised, to the pain of many—social structure, academy, corporation can benefit from. The dealer who is a godfather to many lost souls. The arms dealer who is inevitably or surreptitiously adjudicating civil warfares. The international man or woman of mystery, who is dabbling in so much that they’ve long since given up on pleasing the uptight, “I’m of a morally superior class than you”, churchgoer.

What is this, then, but the Faith that morals invent themselves, but on the flipside of a Gospel mandate. And we make no promises therein, either: we ourselves at one time did try everything to please and be perfected in sinlessness for the Father in Heaven. Now it feels a bit corrupted or precious: that we indulge a few “things around here”. Yet we can and do preach to ourselves up a new Moral Age, to recall all that we may overlook: that as we age we become a bit more elder in our voice to the youth; that folks are trained-up (in their personal avenues of study) via contemplating our own sins and lacks thereof. That we mean something, and make a difference, to the neighbor in the pew: no matter surface interpretations, is this person willing to engage that Class Warfare around the righteousness of the Saints? To limit our sins to a new Category. A new imperative. So we may rub shoulders with the Saints? So we may Learn of a credo wherein the abundant sinner, the streetwalker and addict, is mightily knowledgeable, so much so that it convicts us: they are capable, smart, and socialized even beyond we ourselves, it can seem. So where is our explanatory device, that some “Sin” must be running things… and by sin we mean something beneath our social class. We mean something we’d know better and avoid. We forget: see our lazy or laissez faire attitude now to being Holy, to Holiness, to Fasting, to Aiding the poor, to Healing the sick, and more.