2025-03-05 A Meditation on Strange Affinities

“42 And when it was day, he departed and went into a desolate place. And the people sought him and came to him, and would have kept him from leaving them, 43 but he said to them, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.” 44 And he was preaching in the synagogues of Judea.” (Luke 4:42-44 ESV)

“6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Is 11:6-9 ESV)

The ups and downs of Faith: any pragmatic assessment and it’s impossible! For, faith is the tears of the saints. Faith is the impossibility of accepting one’s plight, that is, one’s existential angst, desire, longing unfulfilled, affinity with the hopeless one on the beggarly, addicted, street corner. Faith strangely acts the Emergency Room and heavy medicine, but all this just as it is desired and upheld by the largely “Sane” or “Composed” or “Put together” ones in our midst.

And such were some of us, who spelt Success via Careerism, that is, via the looking glass, outward perspective, that obtained via heads-down hard work. Why, if we Can do something, would we acknowledge a Savior who by and large is interested in those who on some level suffer, who fail? Yet thus we say and do. Thus we cease the polite enterprises called offshoot ministries. Thus we cease the half-way introductions to the faith. Thus we cease ninety percent of what constitutes “church”, and cultivate holy Longing for a Gospel that does not deny the Man, the Person, the Woman, the God-with-us, the gaze into each other’s eyes just for that instant wherein we saw Christ.

So we are helter-skelter mad and illustrious about the friends, the kids from around-the-way, for whom it is no compromise to adore like the Magi, that is to have the adoration of a Magi, to adore what and whom they adore. We are not cynical, not compromised, not selling out, not going weak: Ma needed Christ; Pa needed Christ; sis and bro needed Christ; I saw firsthand, and I wept, and I believed: that in an instant we are translated to a place urgent to Name and Call Out our own dependencies and crutches: “Oh, if only I could go blotto”. This is heavy medicine being called for. No time to make polite prayers and such; yet even in those polite introductions, the Alpha course, the newcomer’s dinner: even in these spiritual War commences, as to One Witness or One Vocalized Prayer, that saves the entire operation. If the host won’t rise up and answer, then the people will. And so the vocalized, “I believe”.

Therefore together we Adore—like those magi—a Gospel that isn’t a soup-to-nuts coherent Plan or Promise of worldly success; our families… they may remain jaundiced and leaving something absently longed for. Our own lives… these may remain subject of mockery and the feeling that any step up is immediately curtailed. God is not giving us a prosperity Gospel, only this, too: like the Alpha course… it is maligned and denigrated, but even we dare believe it in part, that God by accident almost allows His wisdom-taught people to Rise Up wealthy and Capable. They had the wisdom. They had the day job to distract from the night’s longings. In all these things we were more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Ro 8:37).

But, no: it all came down to a Trust Fall, that the bottomed-out response would in fact be something we—like Christ—could rebound from, could Resurrect from. We went full hog in, and this with tears, this with heavy medicine doled out in our direction: God, I am helpless. Help me, help my unbelief, help my longing for earthly escape. And all that, so glum, so boring, until we add on the step: Help me energize and enliven around Your sacrifice, Your peaceful capacity that you both Recognize my faultlines, you Relate to them yourself (you… in you I hear a friend, whether acting out the temptations or sane of those), you are Trustworthy and good for the crew.

We can indeed have faith in this sinless Nazarene, because He did not use His aspects of sinlessness to fault us, rather He without patronizing or talking down to us, became a worthy Friend. A maligned Friend. Hated precisely because He aped the self-righteousness of the Pharisees. Who were aloof. Him with a few thoughts intended in the direction of the newcomer to the faith, to the plucky or beleaguered saint, to the heads-down Resolve: this religion… if it didn’t exist then would we invent it? That the poor are Heard; that the decrepit are Healed; that the Personal Trials are Incorporated? So, rest easy, O faith-filled one. Our society is and long shall be Honestly appraised and Reflectively sober, Hope-filled and Promissory of a note most unpresentable in where and how it is discovered. We are broken and limping about, but in the light of the Gospel all that is already behind us, and we rocket into the blotto realms of aware Acceptance, that God is for us and we… please, we plead, let us in that case suffer for you! As if, as if we could earn our salvation. But: I can do it! And His ways are to end the end-of-one’s-rope inability to suffer even a moment longer: Rescue us! And so He does. So is heard the radical Testimony. So is felt the Coming Together speaking. So is shared the Leaf-Turned-Over vocalization.