Posted Saturday night, the call continues into Sunday and Monday.
Incarnational embodiment of the missional cross-call of Jesus requires a movement through the laments of Saturday and a daily dying to again take up the cross of the burdens of suffering humanity.
There is no room for an ethic of self-preservation and self-satisfaction at the cost of the marginalized, the wounded, the sinner, or those who most represent that ugliness from which we most desperately hide our eyes.
It demands that we seek to hear the voices of those whose attitudes and arguments we believe we have processed and refuted.
It is a call to stand beside the discredited, the disenfranchised, the disinherited, and yes, the disrespectful as well as the disrespected.
It requires of those who would follow Jesus, something more.
We cannot be satisfied to be right.
We cannot be comfortable that we are justified, sanctified, verified, certified, or codified in the validity of our positional righteousness.
We must step into the sorrow of another and go beyond what is expected.
We must become vulnerable enough to stand beside those whose presence may place us in danger of being misunderstood and maligned.
Our chief identification on this earth must be with whom Jesus sympathized, empathized, and called to be brothers and sisters. We must stand with compassion before the Syro-Phoenician, the leper, the tax collector, the adulterer, the demoniac, the Samaritan, the woman of questionable standing, the enemy centurion, and unclean woman with an issue of blood – the hungry, imprisoned, poor, and naked – the company of beloved souls, the lost and found of the Kingdom of God.
It is a bias of the highest order and the most radical sort.
It is the demand of discipleship, the cost paid by one crucified between two thieves to enter into the dark realms of death and lead captivity captive.
Despised, rejected, and defiled and we ask to be excused in favor of a more respectable, dignified, and comfortable religion.
And what of truth telling?
I have nothing to say to my neighbor from afar that is worth saying or hearing.
But if I stand with him or her and can look into that one's eye, soul to soul, there is no truth I cannot speak in love. And if I weep over my neighbor, my neighbor can hear and perhaps, receive.
We are called to have the mind of Christ, the compassion of Christ in these closing hours of Dark Saturday as we lament and sit and wait through the Requiem of supreme sacrifice.
Amen.
Pastor Tom's Community 
Leave a comment