2024-11-06 A Meditation on Mission

“12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.” (John 15:12-17 ESV)

Alignment of mission, the emerging shape through the fog; it is a sickly camaraderie at times and yet a subsistence mentality: we make pleasantries, have a party, with those friends and loved-upon enemies in any daily mix.

Alignment of mission, the emerging shape through the fog, battles winsome, encouraging the body, head-shaking compromises made by others being no longer game-changers: we are those soldiers Bold and Missional; alignment, then, is a triune Faith that speaks calm resolve into the enterprise.

But wouldn’t we have preferred some blessing? Some certainty that there is joy in heaven and some reason to celebrate? To others it may seem we are still flying high as a kite, but that has a name: Christian Joy! We are indeed called moreover to love our enemies, but the simplest love is simply to call some of them Friends. Only please this much: that such friendship not be substratum for a sudden knockout punch of some Intervention worded, some Correction mouthed, some “just thought all that was a bit out of line” spoken. Please: do not use the friendship for such purposes, or make conversation if you are doing so in order to toe the line around your own “love”, “good deeds”, “doing the right Christian thing”.

Whatsoever the “spirit of the times” may be, so much of Scripture speaks up matter-of-factly in precise support of our mission and in precise antagonism against the hate.

That is, it is a sadder day, some several days with a near set of tears, crying outright seemingly on the agenda if not now then soon, yet will these be tears of joy, of arrival, of gladsome report, shaking hands and moving into Phase Two, or will these be losses impossible to bear up under? We have the strength of Christ’s own Confrontation with pained humanity.

Alignment, then, is a triune Faith that speaks calm resolve into the enterprise. The enterprise, seemingly losing its way, calls for some basic Creedal Acknowledgments: we are the merrier for the journey, all statesmen and heads no autocrats but themselves—yes even themselves—subject to Higher Powers. The ebb and flow, the morning and night, these things sweep up in their patient and God-given Resolve, all souls.

People make mistakes; people are alternately Inspired; people are none to be thrown out with the trash, because God has made Authentic Souls, for an inauthentic hour in history. Yet our History, our Creedal Acknowledgments, take excitement and buzz in the air as being the best replacement for outright horror and an invisible very real War. What public pronouncements have only made murkier the sides in this conflict? What divisions have gone against time-tested first Beginnings of a New Way? God’s Way? Christ’s refusal to call the signs of the times things Apocalyptic, but rather “the end has not yet come” (Mk 13:7).

We have this faith stored up in alabaster jars, that our Faith is even cause for contagion: no matter, that half won’t speak to us, and the other half try and program us to take on a different line of attack. Our Faith will flourish and spread like wildfire, wildflowers and straight-laced pundits all equal in the faith-against-faith that These Things Too shall pass. That is, that to have a newfound conversion in our midst, is literally something to bank on and to celebrate for its gumption and potential. Nevermind the “horrifying bad” preaching or things some just didn’t hear quite aright. We are stronger for the trials, and we accept criticisms in light of an absolutely Divine Gospel unheard by these our critics. Yet, again, to love our so-called enemies (their choice to be an enemy not ours!) is simply to see them—some of them—as friends. We’re all in this together! Something will lift the deadening Weight that has descended on those gathered. The utter over reliance on being sweet and sensitive: man, I don’t need your prayer for the communal “angst”: that is you being too smart; I need immediately just some sincerity and genuine awareness of our divisions. I need a party, yes a party sounds about right right about now!

Alignment of mission, for all our flawed words, is found in learning to let Experience take the lead, by which we refer to more fragile experience and sensitive experience, the very kind a militant mind might call “weakness”. It is to “Walk on water”. It is to make plain overtures unto the milieu, on no stronger claim than that our words are born in our own lived experience.

We are those assigned a perch in life, and our fragile plea is some strange way God makes men and women out of children: we ate at the master’s table; we adopted the Love from a dying man or a person giving their self-denying testimony; all this, for all that we bulk up in materially and physically, is a stronger Word. We have seen the company as it has gone frantic, but no not today. We have seen the company as it has gone uninspired, but not today. We have seen the company as it has gone self-made, but it is still God who makes us.

Alignment of mission means hazardous shelter even as the skies turn dark and the earth quakes. It means Hope: that tomorrow somehow the gentler Nazarene of two millennia past, will be at the Head. It means a Celebration that needs no change in His demeanor: if once He came as a servant, what’s wrong with coming this way a second time? We do well to be scriptural and to insist on His descent in a mighty show of power, but after all, these things may be, but first let us be accustomed to His blood let out for us, His transfusion of the stuff, His feeding the early rising Soldier with good exercises to do, rather, with Witnessing of undying Love for us. Such love as which carries with it all sudden induction into a world of Miracles, such love as which carries with it true Joy and Delight, such joy and delight as our Christian friends do try to impart to us. The patient love simply of creating a career or entrance for each and every minor character in the cast. Designing some fun kind of enactment of their career or calling. We are called thus to think on each other, but not to mitigate nor diminish each other’s bold courage. To work is to be courageous. To soldier is to work. To soldier is to be courageous. And in some flighty or passing Moment of Grace, we do see all our lives as caught up in that Sign from Heaven, if only for this passing hour.