2024-10-22 A Meditation on Style That Saves

“16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:16-21 ESV)

Knack, model-theoretic ideal, calm and all-sufficiency: we live around our hopes and potentials because these become composure and peace to us. Our lives are a back-and-forth between discovered Ideal Form and manifest played-out Encounter. Our style points warm our hearts, rewards us with the home base unsullied, angular and diametric, in this key point: that we are literally at logger-heads with what passes today for “Christian”. Our battle is proven in the details by the Word, incarnate Word called Encounter with Christ, written Word called Holy Scriptures, ethereal Word called abuzz, Holy Spirit aflame, coaching us, correcting or assuring we who only hear the affirmation or negation, and long for the former.

Therefore to be Ambassadors is to motor right through so many dubious assertions: you, you are not applying yourself to Christian end-purposes (no, my good man, good woman, unless we count the betterment of society, of social outreach, of knowledge gained, a Christian endeavor); you are not grateful (no, my good man, good woman, unless we allow some in-between words, words of attestation rather than only plain gratitude); you are not “getting it” (cue exasperation, and no, my good man, good woman, if we are on different wavelengths, let the Spirit and the Word realign us and cause heads to nod).

That is, the style points are a hair-raising soldier’s encounter with mensch-like reactivity to a world helter-skelter: the world a mess, even basic social encounters following no good capital-oriented measuring, but a mess; we long for those rubrics, such as the capitalistic award to any who strive; we long for the plain-as-day fighting cause; we long simply to be told what to do, sometimes. Tell me, and let that be the measure of my fitness for salvation! But no, we are armies of One, and ambassadors already, even though discovered in our swaddling clothes. We have that angular formation, style, of ones deeply aware of the Law and its claims, and therefore deeply Grace-filled: not just in polite terms, but all the way through. We made decisions, and then lived with the self-hate or with the proud boast, so endemic to past choices. In all cases, however, we learned to see ourselves equal to the Chief of Sinners, and therefore Formed and Styled around the Blood. Horrors! Around the Grace: our partners in that Word that unites, these partners they put in a good day’s work, laboring around Christ’s injunctions with such fidelity, it is truly a holy Trust we’ve come into, a Heavenly Estate. And these precious children, they still do not know the Gospel; they still come and go in the steely-eyed gaze into each other’s souls. Eye-to-eye, mano a mano, our windswept and cleansed Framework, our Edifice and Architected Spirit, these at once appealed to us, but today Save us: our sense of what is “Good Fashion”, our ability to dress always on the simple themes of a few givens, yet thereby to be the poor man Stylized and Glamorous; our friends in that quality who do know Style does Matter, and yours may be outward or it may be inward. But when we judge someone else, whether poor and in rags or rich and in couture, to be unstylish, well then Here, good man, good woman, is the call to be Ambassador.