2024-09-28 A Meditation on Faith and the Lack Thereof

“31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:31-39 ESV)

Life preaches a better word: religious or non, the fellowship motors along, because to be alive and to live into genuine fraternity, sorority, meets a better word, one eluding the preacher’s diatribe. The true Preacher, Christ, saves with one word, after a lifetime of infamy or confused wandering. The true Preacher, Jesus, sees peace where a religionist sees atheism, sees fruitful work where a theologian sees faulty wiring. The true Preacher, our Holy Spirit, sees patient survival where the crusader sees cause to find fault.

For we, crusaders of a different lilt, bear it up under Truth: that Man, Woman, is tied up in sin, that we want it all, want it now, and then the prayerful hour or two spent working up to a Christian Thought: patience, dear preacher, your early thought is no less holy than your later thought. The thought of mechanisms and pragmatics, is itself preaching a Word as to God’s Creation and our Relationship to Created Order. The thought on self-despondency and introspection, our elation—uncontrolled, not hidden—upon a victory and our woe—licensing all manner of complaint—upon a failure: these are themselves Words Spoken. We are lightened in our sojourn by the Certainty that all puzzles and enigmas, all simple gladsome greeting of the beauteous early day, our alert Joy at this soul or that soul who is getting up to a bunch of deeds in service to her or his fellows and gals, our complete Peace and Unimposing Friendship, who dares question those alter-ego Vices if first light of morning came with a confession: “You will hear that I…”; “I already heard.”; “I messed up”; “That’s okay”.

Life preaches a Word in that plain Early Day courage that afflicts, infects, adjoins to the soldier’s overall situation, in place, in reach, in circumference and perimeter. Courage is a Word. Rest is a peaceful Word. No-time-to-delay is a beguiled mesmerized lancing forth: we Serve, we Soldier, we had no time to mourn what-all is in the rearview, today it is Life at Service, Souls Readied with a Courage that infects and instills, that is amped and fortified; we have become, as it were, super-agents of the Cross, of that thorn-ridden Crown: we are stronger for the journey, our gentler embrace of those back home is an embrace with a deadly weapon by now; yet if it weren’t for such affections met out, then where would we be? Where, if the spirit in the air can’t Speak of the warfront and of the battleground, to say nothing of Her, His Heroes and torch-bearers? The allegorical Story is in certainty that Bravery, Courage, Persistent Alert, is found in inhuman proportions at that event-horizon called War.

Encounter with War. Encounter with Peace. Encounter with Lordship. The last of these being our uncalculating Final Bargain, that in light of this Theistic Reality we can be those brave and encouraged to lance forth. We are not like those who dispel all good deeds because of a fascination with the alternative, with absence of Lordship, with atheistic—in the sense of devil-worshiping, as opposed to merely atheistic in the sense of law-based, moralizer—destruction of those things: “If God were real, He’d intervene.” Good man, good woman, you know nothing of God’s ways: God cannot blindly provide for us, for that would make automatons of we His Creation. God wants, He dreams of, a conversion story for you, too. Because life isn’t the final arbiter: ask the soldier. Life on the line, no matter, He will in full faith of a second life, an afterword, will not budge, not reveal His techniques, not loan His legitimacy to any legalistic emulation, pattern-matching, imitation. No, if we were to announce who and why we believe, it must remain in Spiritual Terms. To say, here is my license to operate, well, no, the greedy and doubting have long since made that Illegal. The greedy and atheistic have long since been the fly in the ointment. Yet we have a sustenance that has seen Total Destruction, Satanic forces at work, yet remains Happy, Joyful too, because our Work is for generations to come to learn from and to have in their day their own Christ-Event. Maybe by then we will have learned not to sin.