2024-07-27 A Meditation on Trials Shall Come

“19 And when your people say, ‘Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?’ you shall say to them, ‘As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours.’ ”” (Jer 5:18-19 ESV)

“3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. 5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. 10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. 11 For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Pet 1:3-15 ESV)

When war lands upon us, it remains important to know that our faith is not up for grabs. The spirit of Compromise comes with it little inclinations or reminders: on the Gospel we will not compromise. There is nothing “up for grabs”: instead, daily, hourly, there is an Existential Decision for or against… Christ.

For or against the unapologetic rejoinder unto a sequence of ill dreams: they serve only to remind us, do not compromise. They serve only to remind us, be not—here’s the rub—self-righteous; do not try to “Prove” yourself a more clean-living and cleanly-minded soul. Be gnarly. Be inquisitive. Be all these things, but only because we have not averted our Gaze: Tomorrow’s War is in fact is Here Today. Tomorrow’s Concerns are indeed our decision against compromise Today.

Too true, that all can be tempted. In some beleaguered frame of mind, it all just “feels good”. Yet this is to remind us we are messy and compromised each of us individually. There is no level-headed stature or bliss or safe perch. The illness cannot take from us the Consecration, the Duty, the Service, the Reflective Mentalism. We reflect: we emerge: we pony up, all the more healed for having been thus Accused and subliminally Suggested Upon: you are no moral actor, you are a scoundrel; worse than a scoundrel, one possessed of illness and flagrant perversity. To say these are our deepest fears is to say we are still sailing and Above the Waters. We are Above the inquisitional explication, exposition, invocation, exploration, undoing and emerging high above the Water. No, that pitying, that mercy, that sympathy, indeed is for someone else: I have only had the slight infection of proximity’s awareness, and that in all cleanliness, and the compromising stretching out of not Warring, not Dutifully Resisting, trying to please all comers, is a compromise I no longer make. The sickness is endemic to those most in denial of the Gospel, not to the homeless on the street corner. The sickness is precisely because we who juggle in holy things, are most to be Pitied, Emergency Flashing Lights descending upon us, most worked over unto Healing. It is when we emote the Moral Code vis-a-vis it being the Gospel’s cousin, that we find the perversion and the hypocrisy and the faux-composure: these are the legions of sickly living. These are the barely-making-it faux-composed pitiable ones. These are the church-folk who cannot make solemn Confession, for the fact of an Inquisitional Spirit that would show no mercy, and that prompts the very thing it claims to address. Our deepest fears. Our ministerial reminder: God gives us insight and wisdom of the plight of others. But only when we are bold to call out the Acceptable Ones, as Hypocrites, and as Legions of Unmercy.