2024-06-02 A Meditation on Planting a Gospel Flag

“4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. 5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; 6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Php 4:4-9 ESV)

The soldier who plants a flag, no time to ponder, no time for irony, no time for hypocrisy, asks: what are some genuine, what are some sincere, what are some Obvious deeds Christian and loving? That is, if Christ is real, then hasten to know: He shall be persecuted; He shall cause duplicity in would-be followers, Judas-like; He shall be avoided; He shall be unfriended. None of us deserves the title, but still, giving the honorarium to one in our midst, we then go no-irony mode. We go full throttle. We try and deliver a cohort sublime, most deserved of God’s purr and affection, most accomplished, most sincere. We are sincere around trying our bestest to learn for ourselves that trials shall come, if only we for a moment indulge in the love feast. If only we put down our scoffing and wild cries, those cries that emerge when we are taken a bit outside our comfort zone.

No, the easy yoke and light burden of His service, is offensive only to the one habitually ironic, habitually cynical, habitually insincere, habitually hypocritical. We as those today planting a flag, envision no boring: “Christ bore all the punishment, and my job is just to say yes and amen…” No! We are ourselves to bear the bruises of a suffering, a persecution, an immediate Vanguard of Duty: Duty unto the King, Duty most sublime, Duty to dream Big and Envision, in trust and in faith that we each of us are gifted with a decisive and unique Insight into the holiness of Friendship, of Holy Submission, of learning on our feet to Serve the Lord and to Seek His Ways.

The soldier who plants a flag takes pause to reconcile a life in which sin can be called what it is: we no longer feel indebted nor burdened with crime, but at the same time we observe the True Record of things: that each of us may be called publicly to make our confession for something particular. Maybe… even though in our worldview and mind, God has used our illicit companionship the better to befriend each other in the Resurrection Life and in the Forgiven Mindset. But, no: today we are willing to come out, to plant our flag, with that harrowing flight through past life record, even if some things wrongly “stick”, aren’t “absolved”. Only this: that in doing so we make sure the honorarium is not to our “shipshape”, not our “no longer do this thing”, but rather it is Grace. That is, no self-righteous avoidance of that whispered-about topic, but still also not making it our final locus of Judgment: for more than merely this is God my Friend and Deliverer; for more crimes of conscience is He my Sustenance and Absolution.

So they take offense at the flag thus planted, but we are in Master’s Business Mode. We did confess to those things, but it was lost in the shuffle. More than that, the sleepwalker shouts patently obvious lies or mischaracterizations: “See! He ain’t doing nothing for those people he pleads to be allowed to serve!” Oh? Oh yeah? And then the long list… that is, we overlook plain facts when caught—like the demon-possessed man in the temple who, hitherto silent, shouted out in fright when Jesus appeared. So we are those mightily absolved—Really! Truly!—and we are those mightily glad happy that our flight landed before those deeds were any more writ on stone.