2025-01-01 A Meditation on Winning the Heart

“4 Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, 2 so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. 3 For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. 4 With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; 5 but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.” (1 Peter 4:1-6 ESV)

“But it was so much fun!” Let’s take a step back. Our “fun”, today the soldier in each of us is called to methodical work, to gruntwork, basically to go back to first principles, to first introductions: Oh. The insinuations were real. Oh. The cross-purposes severe. My own giddy delight in, say, preaching the Gospel… this needs be sobered with the news: we all of us intuit and conjecture, read minds. We all of us meld with those we Encounter, reluctantly in some cases, gladsomely in others. We all of us start to “see” how “they” see, when first we engaged upon what is called common decency, common enterprise, common mission.

And no time to delay, our sickened inner soul can spin optimistic all day long, around what a purported “Enemy” is really all about. The boy scout in us, the foreign way of doing things in them, the plain existential hayride, colors here, shapes and figures there, a divine sense that one should focus solely (they are wrong!) on a church’s pronouncements, and ignore the more common fare, the street corner evangel, the parental unit, the familial or friendly crisis: all this is occasion for an Invite, to be firm, to stick to Decisions Made, to understand that Converted crisis most central, that all our gestures are sin-sickened by pride and avarice, by conjectures as to “their” motives, conjectures most cynical.

We thus learned to be methodological: our earned rest, that will come. But first, we must re-introduce ourselves, having left wide gaps that an inimical spirit has lauded and pointed out as evidence of our lazy enterprise or our friendless nature. We were “made” most publicly with nary a week’s notice, and that only in the wrong circles. That is, the church learns that the Gospel is hidden, elusive, and very close to it are gaping financiers of the spirit, those astonished by the potency of an entrepreneurial or perhaps elder prayer warrior. A woman, a man, whose intentions are most sublime; this, the greedy calculator wishes to understand.

And we, we are indeed called to the street-sweeper mentality, first principles once more, never an off-hand joke that might compromise our posture, our positioned, our Gospel held high. As they say, leave no room for any suspicion as to your honesty. They will invent fables. They will buck and jolt on the backs of their steeds, horrified to know that in fact an Alternative Reality is ascendant: the reality of a weaker class, not the “boy scouts” or “girl scouts”, not the Entitled heirs, but rather a weaker class is already made meek by Life: and our dreamy supposition, that “those people” we aim to convert, are likeable and innocent… falls hard against the reality that when we finally do meet, it will not be so sympathetically. “Those people”, they had their outlets. They had their sins. They were not so “likeable” unless we learned a wider horizon, and saw the Church’s Mission as more idealistic, something to invest in, something to hold aloft and entrust to faithful stewards most visionary and methodical.