“2 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (1 Peter 2:1-12 ESV)

The numb factor, the awakened factor, the sails-to-the-wind factor: Christian witness both simplifies life and challenges it. We are existentially encountering shock factor, such shock that we go cool and calm, we preach of just a few things ‘round here, we discourse on a third eye awareness, a cogent but reckless platform. We do Christ, whose own existential parry was with Dying for a Cause, more, Dying to be the Sin Bearer.

Christ found in His Calling an encounter brief but salient: God, why have you forsaken me? God, people, I thirst. God, bear witness, this one is son and this one mother. Christ’s calling was out of this world, and if we as image-bearers seem fraught, shook up, searching, wandering, it is precisely because we teamed up with a Contradiction against all things having to do with Life.

Christ’s contradiction means that we stay way attuned to the simpler facets of life such as distract us from the Cause. Any sins unforgiven, we have a sacramental encounter, with a kind of High Art or something youthful, recalled, present in our lives. And such sacrament pronounces a kind of forgiveness: we see life finally notched up to our salient expectant level, and go brave, go calm, go Forward, in the Spirit who raised Christ—high art—from the dead.

The soldier relates and the soldier goes sublime, goes undercover, goes brave. To have hidden in plain sight a Creed and Doctrine utterly ruinous to the powers-that-be, to false authority, to works-based or corrupt authority. The would-be potentate who overlooks his or her own debt to Christ, misses not a weakening but a spontaneously celebrating strengthening. Christ has challenged all comers to be Blessed on behalf of having accomplished a thing or two ‘round here in the Good Name, a silent pouring out of a beverage over the dirt, an honorarium Paid.