2022-12-22 A Meditation on Leaning In

“We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.” (Jn 9:4 ESV)

Ideas go from being fondly juggled and experimented upon, held in mind and bandied about to friend or interlocutor, to being crux and Meaning of whom we are in the Lord. That is, day is fine time to absorb and to labor, but night is coming when “no one can work” (Jn 9:4). I translate this and apply to our present plight by saying, night is coming when we must operate from previous learning. We no longer have the luxury of saying “what if… ? Do I believe this…?”. We must be creatures of programmatic instinct and ideas well-absorbed by now.

The Gospel is a fine idea, and yet to make it something we live and die for, that properly we fight over, is really to couch ourself in the creed we’ve learned. It is really to sign up for the cause. It is really to let the day’s education be sufficient: I need no more than my one year in graduate education; I need no more than last night’s fireside chat with the men, with the women; I need no more than the fascinating, Peter-like, call of Jesus to Come and Follow Him. I drop everything, and allow room in my heart for this newly educated bent, an angle I shall indeed fight for.

Patterned, designed, we make strange advancements when we’ve let go. We let go of former creature comforts; we go “all in “; we had freedom and license to learn in former times, but now that landscape has become our clear and present frame of mind. The whole world pivots around creed absorbed, around life’s Purpose found, around a happenchance idea that has now become Life and Verity and Cause. For the Gospel, framed in peacetime, is so much Alpha courses and worldview studies and discipleship cohorts and sermon series, but in truth it isn’t the gospel if it doesn’t immediately take us to a wilderness experience, a wartime challenge, a spiritual disputation. That takes many forms, but it is why we pray for one another.

This is no cynicism but the tried and true experiences of our forebearers and forefathers. Strangely comforted, we are immediately strangely attacked; we are lightning rod for miserable ideas and that deep awareness of inimical others out there, people who out of frustration mutter curses towards us or hate the clear sailing and advancement we thought all people would applaud. We thought that these are good ideas, good for me, good for my neighbor; but they are ideas absorbed only through direct attack on the former Man; they are ideas dangerous and trying. They are ideas that are not met with open arms by all, notwithstanding our own eager new energy.

So we marvel, and we puzzle, and we self-humble, looking to Christ the Author and Mediator of a Treatise called “New Covenant”. It is new and refreshing to all under the banality of the Law. All who in former times were good Jews, are now challenged to be Inspired Believers in the New Picture of the Lord. This is Jesus taking over, it is Him stealing all spiritual unction from the temple authorities; it is a game with dire straits yet also with joy and peace in believing, a militant walk meets a loving, gentle, and beloved place for us to occupy, without presumption, without asking for higher place, without jealousies or frustrations. We simply get down to business, cynical doubts notwithstanding. We simply see the assembly, the march, of vested clergy and observant parishioners, carrying Cross through community, carrying candle and proclamation, white-attired and robed, colorfully decked out for the liturgical season, a march nonetheless, militant in precisely that manner that bodes physical peace and spiritual invitation.

We strike a fine pose against the demons and hangups of the community. We do these outward processions because we have, no joke, met with the spiritual war. We stammar and murmur until realizing we have a station to occupy, a fighting pose, a real spiritual war within (according to what we imagine to be happening to our cause) and a spiritual war without (plain challenge to speak the good word or friendly testimony in season). We go all in, because we know we’ll make mistakes, and we know also that we’ll delay accepting forgiveness until we meet Him for real, and know there is no time to quibble and fuss as to whether we’ll do “better next time”. Son, daughter, you are already perfected in the Lord, already belonging in that fine procession, already sign and portent to a pivoting and wildly changing world on all sides; and internally you have your education, your invitation, your ideas formerly approached curiously but now depended upon as sign and substance of what holds all life together.