2022-11-24 A Meditation on True Colors

“Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, but when they became fully awake they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.” (Lk 9:32 ESV)

Sleepily walk into the unknown: does it resonate with us the repetition of a mentality evoked, a mindset woke, a heart laid bare. We are sinners. We have the most unsympathetic, rather, creaturely, soundtracks and hopes and wants driving us through the day. We simply are broken machines of idealism, that is, our higher powers within are pleasantly thinking deep thoughts about love for our fellow man or woman, about righteous deeds, about reasoned submission to a God Above, whilst right there front and center is a soundtrack lame, a beat machine faulty, a lightshow impenitent, impatient aspects of a soul fondly dreaming whilst stubbornly clutching, grabbing, holding on to relics of a bygone day, an unredeemed day, an uncontrite day, a morose and hideous day. A former self, that is, who no measured nor doled out medicine can cure; we are not at “fifty percent” good, “seventy percent” righteous, “thirty percent” on the make. Rather, we race to and invite in a Cross Here and Now, that doubles over the layers of life: layered, is our sin, and layered, is our righteousness, one simultaneous with the other, in faith, that if there is any hope for mankind, any salve for her or his wound, and enticement unto better instincts, it is if we be already credited with said goodness. If we be already credited as beloved, as held, as righteous and plainspeaking. All these things then are ours through Him who loved us.

It is enough to be loved. It is enough wistfully to suppose things were better off, a brighter show of ourselves, the end of things we are embarrassed of, the beginning of plain talk: making plans, the end of feelers and beginning of cogent talk. We can speak couraged, of a sort, not because we are in charge, but because in our courage the Spirit of God is batted around, and our Vision is heard, our bravado listened to excitedly or for its excitement, our dispensing of stage one penitence and beginning of living on that plane and that level stage two where we are truly founding the edifice on a repentance Complete.

It is therefore our hope to see plainly Jesus when He is shown, when He draws beside us, when He tells us His day’s plan: to heal the sick, to preach to the gathered, to feed the hungry, to have so battled His own demons as to put forth a portrait of Man redeemed, that we might, gaping, in awe, in befuddled amazement, hope new things for ourselves. We might first of all feel, if not quite guilt—since that would be heavy and lugubrious—then gifted Awareness. We are gifted with a bemused, instinctual, pang of remorse, of the plain and humored portraiture of we ourselves in the shadow of demonstrative patient prudence, prudence to know each and every one of us, when we aren’t navel-gazing in heavenly supposed places, do have simple—if we be humble—ways to live on some level perfectly.

We are perfect when we say our prayers. We are perfect when we let heart roam in the worship service. We are perfect when we feed the beggar or speak kindly to a broken kinship or relationship. We are perfect in the frame of His soul that is in service and Employed in getting things done and living perfectly in an imperfect and delayed Kingdom. And the opposite claim can be made as well (this is the “layers”): in each of these, we are imperfect.

So we become though faulty nonetheless reliable, and we become known by the testimony of just who are our friends. The Kingdom becomes Now, for it is an abiding greeting, an abiding peace, an abiding solution, to so much we simply laugh about in ourselves. Such is Jesus’ humility, that in facing the strangest demons we are also invited to do so without worry, peaceably, in friendship that—instead of being horrified or glum or with mediocre courage—knows but that does not condemn, in sensitivity to others before ourselves, because we have seen what and whom we are, and have been bored with a life revolving just around ourselves.

We reach out, we desire friendship, we desire to be something for someone else one day. And these things we learn through the wringer of an imperfect life, but a life allowing those higher ideals and dreams to ferment near to things in all honesty more beautiful and healing than what we do imagine; the tangibles, the concrete, the postponed hopes, are wrapped up in an earthly ministry Complete and Efficacious to save. Such were we in Jesus’ vision when He walked with us.