2022-11-30 A Meditation on Unlikely Support

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Co 4:7 ESV)

Harrowing support: we know we were friends for a reason. A person of any inclination or disposition, any state-of-the-soul before the Lord, or before the congregation, may just by their own diligent walk of life, be in a position to offer that kind word, that upbuilding compliment, that sincere height called Care.

For we do not major in words of judgment and condemnation any longer; we have learnt, discovered, that words cannot assuage the situation called Life. Words cannot get to the heart of a discordant matter, a frightening head-butting around creed and doctrinal living. Words we pray focus on the person, not the awful dismissals nor the thought of this one being a mere ornament in life. Each matters. Each hears a fellow life and soul on the line, and does love. Each heals. Each is our remedy against the “borg”, against the status quo, against the chill in the air, against the gestapo, against the friend-at-a-distance solitary at times walk.

So we learn thankfully to approach any and all, the trials of some not being wasted in the courts of the Almighty, who uses us with utmost precision and diligence, with the greatest broken heart of compassion, with a no-time-to-fuss race to the recipe for commiseration, this evening being our one chance together, or this week, or this season. So we are thus kept warm. We thus have these treasures in jars of clay (2 Co 4:7), for it was a breakable encounter, a vulnerable sighting of the Spirit at work, an easily canceled appointment, a million-dollar move amidst a seemingly paltry sum exchanged.

Then the question, how can I serve the Lord? How, indeed? For our service is for us to discern, whether to speak of affection for a Lord whose love had no dependence on more simple demonstrations of physical utility; that is, who met us how and why we wanted. He healed so many, by becoming that forbidden thing: in His day, Sabbath-breaking being worse perhaps than so many passing sins of the Hebrew Scriptures. So He met us how and why we wished, knowing our desire and our human love, not for the physical deeds of love but for the heart so willing and so consigned. Our hearts root all human experience in experience of Love, not of empty utility, not of mindless advantages taken, but of a Presence True and unadulterated, how and why we can—in safety (caution?)—love simply the gentleness exchanged, something in the Spirit, something beyond any forced maneuver or mindless laying on of hands, something with prescience to encourage and to heal, for we are on some level nervous and wrecked. We on some level do find friendship right off the bat, as sympathetic souls. On some level, we Trust, the gentle touch, the listening ear, the pain of you writ in the sky for me to benefit from, for this is a safe space, and this is a divine hour.

So each and every one of us can serve by loving the brethren and the sistren, in howsoever one has found themselves outfitted this day. We can moreover not be ashamed of the Gospel (and of “me, it’s prisoner” (2 Ti 1:8)), and stark new horizons open up if we, in that same whispered trust that earned our first compassion for each other, do announce a Reliance and a Hope, in the Resurrection of one crucified, hated, unable to assuage and fix things. Our hope is in a gender curious God, a queer curious God, insofar as He is closer to the leper and the sinful “woman” (we add, “man”) than to the upright temple teachers and scribes and Pharisees. And He knew that the question, the longing, the angst, the missing picture, in those “outside” was not blind physicality, but a way to overcome stigma through confessions of who in fact we each are, through plain affectionate desire, not forced, through willingness to accept each as friend and confidante, minus “sealing the deal” with any adulterous sins against our creed. So we have hope, that love will ecstatically be there for us, and will seal our words spoken of the Fellowship, and of its Jesus, in faith.