NOT ON THEIR WATCH
t's a great Story! There are no losers or useless among Christ's chosen. None at all! They're
all on the walls keeping watch and playing their part. They come in
different sizes, shapes, genders, ages, degree of giftedness,
particularity of giftedness, social status, color, ethnicity, physical
and mental health—but they all serve! Their service is flawed, it's
true, but nobody knows that better than they do and no union or
government, club or community criticizes itself more severely or more
consistently than the chosen People. .
They're very often happy but not always "happy" due to their life’s
circumstances— they haven't been given exemption from humanity's awful
pain, they're called to share it; besides, it isn't only the happy
people that serve God's gracious purposes. People in the world might “go
down” despite the presence of the Story people in it, but they won't go
down without their taking note of it. They can't themselves take away
all the world's pain but just by their very existence as the Story and
Storied people, in their physical presence they offer an alternative to a
sad and harrassed human family—an alternative to its sinking without
trace.
The walls they guard are not just the “church” walls. These “chosen
in Christ” are not just “church patriots”—they’re “cosmic patriots” (to
borrow GK Chesterton’s phrase). They maintain a presence in the world
and they do it for the world! Their enemies are not flesh and blood;
their enemies are everything that is an enemy of flesh and blood, all
that insinuates itself into flesh and blood as a parasite and a
destroyer of the human family.
In their better moments these chosen ones have no sense of
superiority; they are as sick and beaten-up as the peoples of the world
around them. If you cut them they bleed, if you cheat them they feel
betrayed, they weep at the graves of their dead ones and groan at a
child that has gone astray or a marriage that has fallen apart. They
have no personal charisma that the world should admire them but what
they have (by God’s good and sustaining grace) is a Story and a place in
that Story and as the prophetic embodiment of that Story—the Story that
says there is a God who will right all wrongs and that he
has given the assurance of that by raising Jesus Christ from the dead.
This chosen People in their sacraments, their Story and their embodied
preaching at its best proclaim the rejected Jesus who stands for all
throughout the world who experience rejection and oppression. Their
embodied message is that entrenched evil, enforced poverty and ignorance
and brutal oppression are not the end of the Story. After suffering
and rejection there was the resurrection and vindication of the rejected
One. Believe that, they say, think noble things of God who puts his
honor at stake and offers the resurrected Jesus as his assurance that he
will keep his word.
Poor souls might go down to oblivion but they won’t go down unnoticed or unmourned—not on their watch!