2024-07-11 A Meditation on Service

“10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’ ” 11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.” (Matt 4:10-11 ESV)

Serving the King, the responsibility for any and all caution, any and all fright, any and all dopey deliberation, is a responsibility no longer ours. This sounds blasphemous to those who serve a different Lord; we also wonder, what if the Christian story is as full-bodied as it claims to be: that Christ was abandoned on the Cross; that it was His duty to work, even on the Sabbath, because of no time to delay; that the God He served would need be sought in long bouts of strife-filled prayer, seeking, hoping, confessing, drawing near but on whose permission, whose Gift, whose blood shed to make a way?

Serving the King, it isn’t a gamesmanship of “my Way is better than your way”, but rather we are coached in the manners and propriety of the most basic self-uncovering, no unraveling but self-oblivious to pride and angst, to the sins of too much and those of too little, to the sin of being angsty or neurotic, of refusing to Stand Up: it is a high King we serve. It is time and circumstance for some righteous exchange, sincerity discovered even though it at times is scary: we become ironic or doubtful out of a fear of being one-upped, ridiculed, hated or dismissed for our Faith. Yet all of us dare a bit to venture: that was a friendly deed; that was a fine gesture; where two people are together, there is occasion for engaging service to one another.

Thus well to work through those shells, those cages, those traumatized zones, to live into God’s plan not our own, to rely on God’s prerogative not our own, to be legitimized by God’s post not our own: all this before breakfast. All this as leaps and bounds we surpass curious dawdlers and pundits of a compromised Concern. They are compromised, aching—if actually for once shown love—to divest of so much accumulated Detritus and be One and the same friends now. There are vast leases on space and time and lifeblood to Own and Proprietate. We can serve in a radical hope of Tomorrow Newness redux. It will happen again, what happened on the sad afternoon, and it will happen again, what happened on the joy-filled morning. We do not brace ourselves too hard or too much, that we can’t invite the Experience, the Encounter, the Embrace of sadder days: those instead of mastering we hope around, hope that it will be with similar Assurances that we soldier on through the sad pain and loss, the regret and the theft.

And when it all seems blase, poorly monitored, poorly watched, when boredom strikes, then we ask for an additional serving of the truth: more recollection of what things are so impossible to me that they are actually occasions to begin anew in Faith. Recollection of yes that war that is just as real as any pundits diatribe or monolog. It is Real, and we are the first to Rise Up to the occasion, because we learnt Truth with a good friend, we learnt Hazard with a mighty companion, we learnt Style with a perfect acquaintance, we learnt Existential Belief with a patient agent of intrigue. With whom we call “Friend” and “Lover”, Jesus lover of my soul, and Jesus sad negotiator through the dimmed lights of life, even as they are our new way to Live Up and Into the future.