2023-01-24 A Meditation on Laboring in the Vineyard

““For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.” (Mt 20:1 ESV)

Sluggish and painstaking, there is nonetheless a flipside to despair: infinite return-on-investment, wild spirit-matters grasped, astonishing, excellent to the carrier of good tidings, who has sought true religion. Simple innocence towards greater spiritual sins, does accompany the pilgrim. Innocence of making self-righteousness the main thing. Innocence of forgetting why we went down this path in the first place.

The soldier is charged with being that salt and light upon the homecoming, upon the step away from soldiering duties, the basic vote each of us has as to what is good and wise and true, society-wise. The soldier, when so possessed of good doctrine, is a tank, an adversary to evil, a sponsor of peace, a cage-fighter of polite entreaties. Polite yet urgent, polite yet instructive and guiding. Polite, yet militant.

For the Christian spirit in a woman, in a man, is stark raving clean. It is bouncing about, bobbling over former places of rot and decrepitude. Good ROI (return-on-investment) is the first high caliber response, the high caliber reaction and showing up. We show up to grant shade and meaning to the down time, just as much as to the up, electrified time. We have myriad depths to mine, of this thing called Faith. We have a buoyant sailing forward. We only question this: is my faith centered? Is it instructive in all goodness and purity? Is it capable of educating the weak, supporting the curious, representing my own Encounter with holiness?

For we have need for grounding; Christ the sure foundation, means something dynamic. He means a dynamic wherein we attain to insight and to purity via some aspect of confession answered. He answers our meager creaturely plea. He swoops in, in all that cleanness and purity, when we abide in His Spirit, His Word, His embrace. No longer do we need worry, “Hey, who around here is responsible for keeping the doctrine pure?” We need worry no longer, “Hey, who around here is responsible for the heart of his or her fellow man? For the centering? For the appropriate immunity from what dangles before us?” For we seek immunity to things that swoop over like a storm cloud, hard to reason ourselves out of, if reason were all that we had. We cannot stay immune from the ravaging temptations. We cannot either build ourselves up by the patient avoidance; we are tempted. We cannot build ourselves up by a litany of good deeds: those warp, and tempt with greater spiritual sins, also difficult to avoid, so pervasive are they.