No Small Role

What is it about days upon days of busyness that steal so much of what it means to really live? I'm always amazed at how long I can go on fumes, coasting in my most important relationships – with God, with my wife, with friends.

One of the most astounding works or results of the Cross is that the veil was torn away. Nothing separates us any longer from that most treasured and long-desired place of intimate communion with Christ. He came to seek and to save what was lost – what was lost between us and Him, what was lost in ourselves, and what was lost between each of us. He came to rescue and restore all of the lost fellowship of heart that we gave away at the Fall. It has been more than restored, but we must act on that deep work. We must appropriate it and enter into it and ask the Spirit of God to bring it into and over us daily. Otherwise, we end up living in a kind of casual agnosticism where we begin to think of the world as a disappointing but benign place to live and of God as a distant Sovereign King but not an Intimate Friend.

The Invitation of Christ has snapped me back into reality, back into the recognition that there are only two kingdoms in this world, and they are both fiercely opposed to each other, (Colossians 1:13 - For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves…) and back into the reality of our place in it. (You might call the gospel of Christ simply Reality, capital R, in line with Brennan Manning's reference to Christ Himself as "the Really Real.")

This Invitation is an invitation to watch and be confounded by the way Jesus loves, and then be broken by our call to love the same, knowing that to walk where Jesus walks is to inhabit a far more dangerous and far more glorious (and sometimes far less noticeable) role in this world than we ever dared fear or hope for. And it is a role we share.

I recently watched the new X-Men movie. I'm not a huge fan of Marvel comics and all of that, but here's something that blew me away about the story. Essentially there were two factions (or kingdoms) in the X-Men world – those who supported the mutants and those who wanted to oppress them. And you had to be on one side or the other. Those who weren't were sort of just pawns, really, or extras to make the cities fuller and seem more lifelike. They were not important characters. The movie builds to a final battle, one to end all battles. Ultimately, it came down to (no surprise here) the "good mutants" fighting the "bad mutants," but neither side fought alone. Each character had his or her skill or specialty or gifting, and each needed the gifting and call of the others in the battle. Each had their own sphere of influence and authority over certain things in the world – one could manipulate metal, one could manipulate the weather, one could manipulate fire, one could run through walls… you get the picture. To watch any one of these figures you begin to think, "Wow. I'd want that power." And then you see another one and you think, "No, I'd want that one." But then there would be another. Soon enough you begin to realize that, as glorious as each of these characters were in living out their identities, and as powerful as they could be, they are humbled by the giftings of others. The ultimate reason, you see, that each of them had these powers to begin with is because they were needed.

What a picture of our place in the Kingdom of God. Our roles are not small. And neither are they solitary. We will be taken out so quickly if we begin to think they are. Casual agnosticism is a deadly poison, and our Enemy will use the subtle erosion of busyness and distraction (the two greatest weapons used against us in our culture) to slowly euthanize us away from Reality.
"We must reawaken and learn to remain awake," warned Henry David Thoreau, and he couldn't have been more right. How? He finishes with a call away from the busyness and distraction that our modern world offers and into the hope that is the gospel: "Not by mechanical aid [or we might say by the aid of technology or entertainment or programs], but by the infinite expectation of the dawn."

The dawn is coming, sooner than most of us think, when all will be set right, when all manner of things will finally be well. Until then, we walk before the Lord in the land of the living (not the sleeping or the dead, Psalm 116:9) with our eyes firmly fixed on the Rescuing One, whose life is our light in this dark place (John 1:4).