2024-07-14 A Meditation on Vision

“17 “And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18 But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. 19 Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, 20 that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, 21 whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.” (Acts 3:17-21 ESV)

Vision is neither proud nor compromised, not demon-possessed, not outlandish in its ambition, not scarecrow-haunted. Vision is the mad prophet announcing a pained reality, an intervention or inspired platform that demands to be spoken about. It demands, not to glamorize the vessel but to lift High Up the King. The Regal One, who alights first on this one and then on that one, operating via human channels, human corridors, human institutions, human relationships. No more than this do we ask of our God, but to be known in the careful attentive Relationship and Exchange. To envision all manner of Next Steps, even if always we are by now reluctantly accustomed to waking up to the same old, to the unprogressed malaise, to the retreats and hideouts each of us create in our little world, our corner, our idols and angsty or needy reliances: we need, so we adopt, we long, so we idolize, we hope, so we look in the wrong places. In all things, the madness is a liminal existence that dares—because status quo is proven elusive, insufficient, empty—to take a risk and be Outlandish.

We are outlandish in the Name of gatherings and accompaniment, to have those facts of our dreams in fact occurring somehow and somewhere, in God’s perfect timing and on His glory road. It is no crime thus for God to operate, because His aggrandizement is His People’s shield and armor and boast.

The facile observation, then, is of how little appreciation we sometimes show when things do come together: we are grumpy and forgetful of the Impasse mysteriously bridged. It’s as though we don’t value Modernity, Upbringing, Growth, Future-Thought, though it is all the rage in our moan sessions. It is all the tantalizing Never-Gonna-Happen of our animated frustrations, our anger at a fellow or gal, at a peer. So we see the matter coming to a point, and in that point it inviting us no longer to rest on our clever own laurels but to be Fully-Realized as His Healed and Made-Over People. Something bigger begs us adopt it. Something grander mocks and chastens in a friend’s loving way our idols. Something grand Infiltrates our perimeters and caution zones, the slow-down, the half-throttle, the twenty-percent living, the ten percent fruitful.

All this is ours to Claim and to Master, because we should be unashamed to be that Authority in ourselves unto our peers, who look to us but also in a way that shall never wither or expire. We need not fear to go in the other ninety-percent, because that will spell a Fructifying Word to the morass of assembled people. It dares to reach escape velocity, the pastor’s hope of entering to a spirit realm, becomes real in the ecstatic naming of demons, demonology Brave and Experienced, to see those scarecrows and haunted regions and Know: this one is Blessed to be Capable and Enlivened, so do make room for her or him to Flourish. Do be those untired souls, eager at an Elijah or Isaiah, a Jeremiah or an Amos, a biblical friend or citizen of a post-scriptural reality.