2023-06-02 A Meditation on the Church Fray

“7 Therefore do not become partners with them; 8 for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10 and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. 13 But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, 14 for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Eph 5:7–14 ESV)

The church fray brings with it suited armies, individuals helmeted and suited, to crash land in situ, to get down to the business of discerning just what is meant by this narrative or those archives of Experience: the simply physical not a point of contention when a person named is saved: God with them prior to, and after, coming to know Christ. The jealousy spelt, is dismissed, for some grew up with a sort of grace if that is understood patiently to have been married to a sort of lawlessness, a set of deeds branded kosher, yet in all this—they plea, we plea on their behalf—lacking in the wealth of Christian assurance, the Sunday get up, the joy of a voluntary walk with the Lord, the parents fond of their progeny, the church elders glad to have these few who adhere to what all is pent up in the elders’ hearts regarding right living and morality.

Therefore, it is complicated. We ask for that helmet of prayer and salvation, to go forth boldly and courageously into another’s life experience, not emphasizing the writ of physical engagements without emphasizing the strange kind of camaraderie, love, patience, hurt, vulnerability; shared trespass that is early, fledgling, honorarium of what trespass Christ did to the Law and to the Cross. So to project, even the grace warrior can do this, to project onto others that they are pent up and married to a physicality devoid of any sacramental backing or context, is to call all of them “addicts of the flesh” and fail to discern that life is flourishing here, flowers bursting through concrete cracks there; that all have some method of dealing with, yes, the abuse of a law-ridden church so harped upon by our friends among those elders, and the homeside togetherness of the outsider to church environs, who longs for parenting or longs for answers, towards life-and-death (it can seem) urgency of those youthful years, to find oneself in a safe crowd, not picked on or mocked, safe for now in these fleeting hours of time together.

So the fray calls for real willingness to allow that our best intentions are insufficient to save; sometimes it is a habit or a mild morality, that in hindsight has preserved us through the danger zones. We shared an evening together but, what do you know, played games of dialog rather than saluted that totem called flesh and called empty desire. We no longer think that all people face the same bondage unto Law: some are in this kind of church, and some in that kind; in any case, the physical writ is too weak an explanatory device, and too easy a non-surmountable sin; we should be glad, and know ourselves patron and obliged, as the wealthy, both in bank and in spirit, welcome in our church homes, for all their flaws, and therefore premature to label this one or that, too, persecuted by the Law: let us dialog together, and we now the outsider, those totemed to the flesh, do recognize a Church floral, multitudinous, and adopt said Church’s problem zones of mere legalistic interpretations: the photo thought to be fleshly invite, the depictions of tempting scenarios, the individual facts of life: each of us have needs, and have personality distinct and desirous to express itself; each of us loves the sense of belonging, and heals amidst the sense of being able to express ourselves. As lovers. As the unbound and married unto Grace. As those post-Law, up to and including our new friends in the wide world “out there”.