2023-11-07 A Meditation on Word Signs

“30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (Jn 20:30–31 ESV)

Signs and semaphores, God’s word insists it has power to save. Power to feed. Power to heal. Power to lift. Power to calm frantic nerves. The signage is of a Kingdom Now means an altar to which we can bring our headaches and our depressive spirits. To which we can see blood shed if nothing else will prove that God cares. He longs for our emergence, healed and fit, sound of mind and service-gifted. Gifted to serve, we know the brunt of the work is already done; if we get up to anything service-wise, that is a plus one, a bonus, and a broadside.

Whistle away the quiet persuasion, determination, perfectionist harping on those semaphores, God’s Real outlay, His Real bargain in terms offensive to civilized society, His Real wordsmithing as far as cultivating tangible Progress right out of the box, out of the contrary thoughts spelt out: He draws nigh unto quandaries, in order to Create. He is Creating a place and way and means for Grace to be the Word of the hour.

For the great hymns of the Church Militant refuse to back down in this claim: that God is Love, that His citizenship is in Heaven, that His good cheer is contagious and ruinous to sin. Some wanted a more rational word. Some wanted a more benign spiritualism. Some wanted anything except this Religion we hearken unto.

Our religion begins in the failure to do well on our own instincts and efforts. It leaves, however, that plus one invention in our own heart and mind and soul: we fill in the gaps. We invite a Holy Spirit into the breach. We bring to the altar of the Lamb our frightful inner turmoil. God, I am a mess this day: help me to see that as something you have normalized. Something that you have walked through, intentionally finding not the dismissal of hard truths, but rather a decision to walk those hard paths because we are not insane nor strange nor uncouth: you love, and you decorate the heart with brandishings divine, that we can hold fast to and embrace tenderly. That we can experience as the Real Thing. God with us, God for us. God the sheepfold entrance unto a world to discover, by way of research and professional prowess, of academia and business, of a hundred-fold repeated words of our Savior, glimpsed in a sermon or a Bible study with friends. But hold on, let us have just a sane moment to ourselves: we are Loved, we are Nurtured, we are meant to Thrive. And to do this, we must divest of all things that in former times we loved and clutched, the addiction to self-hate, the addiction to empty feasts and bouts of drink, the addiction to what cannot spell out the sequencing and temporal line items of Real Life. Our lives are sequenced by His signs and semaphores, by His feasting-unto-the-Great-Feast, by His Arrival zones, time points puncturing the monotony, Kingdom Now, because He listened not to our frantic or innocent frightful words, but immediately was at work getting us cleaned up and Made into a man or a woman of the guild and of the cloth that all believers share.