2024-06-27 A Meditation on Making Mint
“6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (1 Cor 5:6-8 ESV)
Options, avenues, the crisis that teaches, the lesson that surmounts, the basic Employ in a place of calling, does wonder at times at the strange question as to our suitability for a day of Reckoning, Judgment, the Spotlight peering in this way and that, seemingly random or at surprising times.
The soldier is no fool but still does plainly, unapologetically, mint his or her life’s sustenance, avenues, options, out of the poor trappings of his or her world. We mint: we go deep rather than letting ennui make us wander. We are not against those avenues or options, but we don’t wander. We accept a day Plain and Personal, to make of our simple savings and accomplishments something to be a bit proud about.
When some ill-birthed decision tacks Knowledge upon our mortal frame, that Knowledge we pray gets turned to Holiness. That is, decision is breakage is ill-invite. We have wrongly invited a brand of Knowledge into our lives which brand is then not easily forgotten. We do not easily forget our bad habits. We do not easily say no, or hope like those we meet in simpler circles, to glide hither and thither, yes sinner, but mightily preserved simply because of Innocence of greater evils.
So the measured, or thoughtful self-Presentation. God has made it a level playing field, this one’s proclivity or easy glide into a sinful stance, is still also this one’s better sense of Right and Wrong; we have learned both are beyond the ken of our intentional thought: outsiders to the repentant crowd, the average pewsitter, in fact feels that morality is simply a matter of knowing right from wrong, and the rest goes Presto. But the sinner is always walking a precipice. The sinner is frazzled or rather a broken-but-repaired jar. The sinner is dried out, or forgetful of all that they’ve done past, all that precedes them by way of Reputation; and then memory brings penitence which brings rejoicing.
Thus no time to debate, rather, time to man the battle walls. Time to find that Equality that preaches a better word than ten good deeds: equal under sin; equal under God’s love; equal under Belonging and Duty. We await a day when our Avenues, Options, will be a solemn Investment the Spirit makes in teaching us via choice, via good and ill, via circumspect Decision to mine the more basic fellowship, to mine the basic vocation, to apologize where we have been abrupt, but also to plead for a forgetfulness that makes One Avenue, One Option, paramount: Jesus for us, Jesus mocking our proud boasts, Jesus outfitting us to fight and to serve, because and only if that route somehow reassures us of what we already Own, calling and Personhood, Friend and fellow, Christ and Church, Spirit and Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Paschal sacrifice and Tomorrow-Hope.