2023-12-05 A Meditation on Two Types

19 You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 20 But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? 22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— 24 even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? 25 As indeed he says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ ” 26 “And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’ ”” (Ro 9:19–29 ESV)

Two types, both the types who never lose, adore a certain infamy that need not cause division. The plain facts of life are there for all to see, that life does its worst to drive us mad. The refusal to knock heads together surrounding this event or that traumatizing event, is a refusal that makes eventual rapprochement ever more elusive, drifting silently by the by-and-by. Yet we suppose it all to be rational discipline or our own “obvious” life lessons.

For we languish under artificial constraints that forbid the spiritual check-in. What we intend, we cannot vocalize. The alternative is too nefarious. Too dismal. Too capable of driving mad. Our relationship with many-a-person falls down to this, that to think on them is to go a bit crazy. Call it exasperation. Call it frustration. Call it confusion. And in turn we are expected to be the ones taking up Jesus’ mantle, to be the ones unapologetically speaking love, penning love letters to the soul, receiving that permission to court that Jesus Himself earned by way of our own conversion story. He earned the permission to let us repose and He take the lead. In the divine Dance. In the divine Showcase, Teamwork, unto a world gone mad. In the divine future war averted. In the many souls saved just by the willingness to accept an easy yoke and experimental burden. Our sins, mutually, are forgiven. Our Christ has arrived, and we are His people.

Our master at arms is resting the war in one place, that being the family hearth. Because confraternity can be strictly on the love affair level, no dastardly half-way dip of the finger. And this feels so good. It feels good to reflect on ways we’ve stared down love and emerged submitted: to the loving affair, to the copacetic confraternity, to the unknown dive. We wish only to hold up the banner of Love, and see what comes of it. We have a Vision, yet it is a tired vision, one long suppressed or guiding into different climes. We dared once upon a time to say “I love”: all this preparation is for you. We, in the seat of Christ to one another, dare to say such words. Words of evangelistic hope. Words of healing. Words undeserved yet with power to illumine and inspire. Words that dry the sad tears and heal the embedded and embattled soul. Come, accept sanctuary. Come, talk into the wee hours of dawn. Come, know your deeds in faith are not in vain. Thus Jesus appealed to His people, inspired by tangibles to deduce an aura around the intangibles, God making His appeal through material scenarios, unto an immaterial salvation.