“13  Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar. Go in, pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God! Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God. 14  Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord. 15  Alas for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes. 16  Is not the food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God? 17  The seed shrivels under the clods; the storehouses are desolate; the granaries are torn down because the grain has dried up. 18  How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer. 19  To you, O Lord, I call. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flame has burned all the trees of the field. 20  Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.” (Joe 1:13–20 ESV)

Ravenous wolves amongst the sheep, recognized notwithstanding as sheep themselves; the duty of the Soldier, however, is to mind one’s own household and attribute the best to the rest of the flock. The duty of the soldier is to win hearts by her or his patient and simple Faith. Faith that is far more than window-dressing of a life otherwise no different than life outside of church community, outside of surrendering one’s life to the Lord. Life that is however Aware the moral normatives, these can be severely violated and transgressed. Yet we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling: those who have gone “so holy” as to have a little wiggle room: that ain’t us. We are nerved and abrupt, curtailed and stark, to walk this fine tightrope called Chaste, called Sober, called Un-addicted.

Because when we disagree with someone’s moralizing tone, the response isn’t to say, “Christ is the answer, not your moral code or ‘works righteousness’” and to use that argument to go full-throttle Opposite Mode against the moralizing. No, we somehow retain the Moral Normatives, while making certain our salvation is by faith alone, through Christ alone.

But to the battle, yes, when we seen what Compromises the enemy has made, or what our own familiarity with the unknown, with the immoral, with the sexualized or legalistic, the capitalistically ambitious or the means-justify-ends agency, has left us insecure around, we suddenly go Fasted and Prayerful: such a cancer, it will eat away at the entire edifice. Whether it is an idea originating in us, or a rebellious “too holy for their own good” reflection of those so certain their long years of faithful living do justify a little levity or joking “falls” to compensate for the new believer and her or his seeming “works righteousness”.

As a soldier to the front does race, so we to the Cross do march. The Cross, it is found in the New Testament and particularly the Pauline epistles, as so richly theological, as to shake heads. That Christ Himself became the shame and sacrificial Lamb, that Christ Himself was abandoned by the Father for that hour, that Christ Himself knew a better message than “Shape up, O sinner”. He knew, to go full-hog Love, to go full-on Passion, to go full-throttle Ecstatic dying, is to appease the demon in each of us, which demon goes radically violently Opposite Day upon any attempt truly to Love on us. Yet in Christ’s case, it is all Okay, O sinner: He has Risen. He has borne the sought-after punishment (sought either by the Father in all bookkeeping rectitude, or sought out by us in masochistic desire to make sense of moral juggernauts). We almost get angry at Christ for forgiving us: No! Something impossible must remain! But what is Impossible, that He has made Possible, a free and immediate Forgiveness even as we are already toeing the line of yet another Fast.

Nerves of steel, then hitch first into some deep point of Affinity and Similitude between the would-be Christ and the mark, the one Forgiven. Yes, the Christian dated without always dating the most beautiful woman or man in the room; yet we punish him or her for contributing, allegedly, to our own past experiences with Rejection. We know ourselves, however, to be “Good enough” for Christ, right?

The bunker mates, these form a Cohort who perhaps witnessed but did not all outright Reject or themselves Kill Christ. Such is a departure from the traditional theology that “all abandoned Him”. That is, the entire cohort, the bunker mates, these are ebbing and warping and woofing and flowing in one Serpentine Dance, one Transcendental Melding, one Life-Giving crusade: these soldiers, they will Die, either of old age or more likely in Service to their country called Christian. Time will come, they will feel even abandoned, or rather the opposite, deeply held and Reassured, “I ain’t here for them, only for you”. Because their lives are negotiating tokens and tactical mesh, to rise up an Army of Victors, with the unnamed soldier not forgotten.

Therefore to the Mission we race, drafted or recruited you decide, but in the buoyant hot seat and bouncing house of a society gone Blatant Peace, gone Aggressive Militant, gone Reflective Bellicose. We lamp and we high five and we wrassle and pat on the back, we make small talk but O the tragedy were we ever to forget our Marching Orders, our litany of Lives to save, our Reflection on those brethren, sistren, “out there” on the front lines.

The Father loves the Son, and any Love the sons and daughters reciprocate, replicate, even to the unline-item, unworthy, unneeded, non-valuable shopkeeper or simple poor citizen, this is worth Christ’s life. It will percolate, perhaps, but in this lifetime or the next it will be an unbroken Thread of Peace Passed, of Love Lanced forth, of Compassion Courageously held high.

Times have thrown their worst at us, but the Call to Fast, the lead-up soon underway, to Christmas time, is an Advent chastened and strangely finally found Aggressive curtailed and fasted. We finally have the threat-level, the self-assessing threat level, quite to Fast again. Like we did long ago. Why? Because of pattern-matching, you might say: if I can recognize this hunger for a sweet, then I can recognize the other longings and lusts. But also the fasting warrior faces the opposite: if I eat the sweet, well I will be sugar rush and full of good Ideas to implement. However, fasting is precisely about the chastened and hungry Ideas that proceed. You will see in the gaunt face of a man or woman, that they are tapping in to a Deeper Mystery.