2023-11-21 A Meditation on Radical Otherness

“12 Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Ti 3:12–15 ESV)

To say Christians occupy a liminal plane is to cope with that easy conceit, the one that presumes it is some morality or code of living that makes us worthy. For, the heathen have their own culture and code, their own means of getting by in this world, their own innocence and principles, their own courts of popular justice and parental approvals. No, our code begins in a solemn story at once sad and at once joyous. It begins in a rather despised or ridiculed or lambasted Guide named Jesus. It is the hope that we, tempted as we are even by religion itself, will emerge no fools but fools for Christ. We are fools around His code and morality, namely that code that caused Him to take up His Cause, His Principle, His All-on-the-line to go to the Cross.

It is every soldier’s assurance that they are once again peace and no stranger to the moral uprightness, but only insofar as they believe it is a freely-given gift and no earned stand. The soldier lives in a topsy-turvy, upside-down reality precisely because their cross is an Old Tale, a Seasoned Story, a Winning Gambit. God made the gambit of sacrificing His Son. God did this to prove His love for each of us. God did this so that the winner would be the winner not through exasperated betterment of themselves, but by reckoning with the danger zones, with the images that tempt as though all is good vibes and pleasantries, with the constantly accumulating thoughts of the pewsitter, that today they are a better form of themselves than yesterday.

Indeed, better we are, but for the sake of a humiliation we’d never choose. For the sake of a calm repose, a march to the tomb, a knowledge that God uses all things towards His Glory, including the ignorance or spectacle of the unbeliever. Upon some distant glory day, when said unbeliever repents, then nothing shall have been wasted but rather to God’s glory and not our own, shall time and circumstance, effort and down-time, be testimony unto God’s Glory.

So to the news, and to the sharp distinction, that it is no sliding scale quite, but either you got it or you don’t. Either you got the Call to be less moral not more piggishly moral (insofar as we are against the law of self-righteousness), the call to boast in decrepitude and sentencing by a court of law, the call to honor our beleaguered or endemically-hated-upon brethren, sistren. The words are careful and true, in the church service’s reading of the day’s gospel, etc., that if you desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus you will be persecuted.

Owning the land, then, the Christian sphere occupied by tenants, lights left on for the outsider perhaps, but today the call is also to wake up and share, to wake up and stop being curmudgeonly: we own a land earned by a Man stoned, that is, Crucified. The first out of that gate of gifting to a peer or neighbor, we are proud to expect every good turn will one day, perhaps not until the hereafter, be rewarded. So to the easy digs, the lazy pewsitter: wake up, do not hoard your spiritual possessions; listen, in faith that God is doing a mighty thing. That God is using even these despicable ones to His glory. Who have a morality or code or culture all their own, yet meet in that pan- environs called Meeting Place, called Church, called Home.