"To give of your life and to, finally, give your life”

H,

We had that old joke about forty years in the wilderness before the promised land. The funny thing is that it is not a joke at all. It is the heart of Christian pilgrimage. We are hyped on the idea, frequently, that the lesson from the story of the wilderness is; do not be stubborn, do not be sinful, do not doubt God and eat your manna with gratitude. Those old pilgrims of old did all that evil and look how they ended up. The truth is we are stubborn, we are sinful, we doubt frequently and we spit our manna out. We are not better because we cannot be better. We are not better pilgrims. We are just the present pilgrims.

The eons we have spent in fallen state is not so easily erased. It is the full work of the sacrifice of Christ. It is God’s blood on wood. The human problem has divine implications and, yes, a divine solution. We cannot speed up the process though. We hide in the make up of the faith when this is about nature not looks. It is about desperate honesty and not putting your best foot forward. It is about dancing with two sore feet.

There is a standard, a line, a heft of holiness and truth that is the rule across the universe. We fall way below that. We cannot attain it. It has to be given to us. It was given to us. It does not mean we have to change the way we speak, the way we move or the clothes we wear. It does not mean we represent anything central to the faith when we make it look fun or clean or whole. It is all those things but we are not. The faith is working in us, if we let it, and then working out of us. It is not our nature. This is why we are being reborn. It is not that the holy spirit transforms by rote. The work is much more serious than that. It will take a lifetime. It is complete upon death. And the in-between is more dying.

Death and dying, in this context, are synonyms to life and living. The resurrection speaks to this. We are dying to someone and living to someone else. We are giving up the feckless wonders of the world to believe in the ethereal benefits of the forever spirit. We are making choices up and down the narrow road. Yet all those choices are really just on choice: who will you serve?

Right before us, we have always known, is the direct choice between the light and the dark. If we dwell in the light as He is in the light, then we are transformed. The world may be on fire. We may feel that we are utter failures at living up to it. We may be more fallen than risen but we are in the light. And we are changing.

Amen.