Hey, Cobblestone,
The story was related to me as factual, and it came from a
man in whom I had found no guile at all in the many years we worked together.
I’ll relate it to you as accurately as I’m able. My coworker had helped a
relative, his brother-in-law, work on the brother-in-law’s car. For the sake of
not writing “brother-in-law” another 50 times, let’s call him the owner. They
had done what’s known as a brake job, and after replacing the friction
materials and a caliper or two, it was time to “bleed” the system. Every last
pocket of air must come out, or the hydraulics won’t work, and the system is no
good. Alas, bleed as they would, some air remained. More bleeding, no better
results. As the night wore on, the owner became more agitated. At some critical
moment, he snapped.
The storyteller wasn’t surprised to see the owner start
circling the car, shouting profanities. Nor did his eyebrows raise much when
the owner began kicking the defenseless vehicle. But his attention was fully
arrested once the owner had ducked into the garage, returned with a can of
spray paint in each hand, and launched into creating visual expressions of the
verbal explosions. And I can still remember the puzzlement on the storyteller’s
face – a thoughtful and even-keeled man, mind you – as he told how the owner,
having spewed the last of his paint, commenced to urinating on every fender and
door at least once. I didn’t ask how much beer had been involved in this brake
job – didn’t want to know – but we could make a good guess, couldn’t we?
What, exactly, was the vehicle owner up against? Was it
thoughtless engineering, a bad design? Was it a sudden reversal of the laws of
physics, in which gases no longer move upward in fluids? Was it too much beer?
Well, maybe the last thing. But essentially, he was up against the one or two
things he didn’t know about how to properly bleed that particular hydraulic
braking system.
I’m going to scooch out onto a limb here and say that the
owner and I are not the only two people who have ever fought the wrong enemy. I
believe it’s common in the human experience to expend vast amounts of strength
and passion on the wrong battlefield. Victory is unattainable because the enemy
is laughing from the bushes next door.
For we do not
wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the
authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).
If you’ve been in churches more than a tiny bit, you’ve heard
that verse preached – both well and poorly. Among Bible verses, this one lands
somewhere in the Top Ten Most Likely to Become Trite. I can still picture some
of the old-timers in my life saying, “Now, ya know, we wrassle not against flesh and blood…” followed by a tilt
of the head and a crinkling of the crow’s feet on one side. Brace yourself,
brother; brace yourself, sister; I’m about to ask a few sobering questions
about this cosmic wrestling match.
Did those first-century Ephesians have any better access to
truth than we do right now? In the interest of saving time, the answer is No.
Is the statement encapsulated in Ephesians 6:12 any less true than when it was
first penned? No again. And since the end of the story is still in our future,
is there any reason to think that the
present darkness of long-ago Asia Minor isn’t THIS present darkness? Stick
with a No, Church, it’ll help you be ready for what comes next.
Everything perceivable in the natural is animated by a
spiritual reality. God, who is spirit according to Jesus, created all things
out of nothing. He spoke the dust into existence, then formed the first man out
of the dust. Without a spiritual origin, nothing happens. Why, then, do we
focus our life’s force on what is cultural, social, political – anything but
spiritual? I’ll present a hypothesis.
We have educated ourselves into delusion. Ever since the
Enlightenment, there’s been a growing disdain for whatever is spiritual, even
among Christians. We favor what we think we can control, and marginalize what
we can’t. And again, the Church is not exempt. We shine artificial light into
dark places, and call them no longer dark. But speaking as an old electrician,
I can tell you for a fact that those bright artificial lights are exactly one
missing electron away from going out.
“What spiritual reality is animating what’s happening in the
natural right now?” Put that question up front, and we are well on our way to
knowing how to pray, how to do battle. God helping me, I’m done fighting the
wrong enemies for the wrong reasons. Throughout my childhood, it was in my
family and schools; through the first half of adulthood, it was mainly in the
workplace; through forty years as a Christian, it’s been in various churches;
lately, it’s been as a public servant. There’s been much flailing and wailing,
every shred of it in vain – unless. Unless the spiritual origin was considered
first, and considered foremost.
I’m finding myself in a lot of meetings lately that don’t
seem to be spiritual at all. I’ll be in another one soon after finishing this
letter. You can be sure: the spiritual aspects will be at the top of my agenda. If the other attendees don’t
take those into consideration, then they won’t have any explanation for what
God will accomplish through our time together. They’ll have to find out on the
tail end. Oh, well.
I get it, Church: our natural methods are familiar to us, and
they usually make something happen –
for better or worse – right away. But if we step back to see the full range of
human suffering and the mountains that seem impossible to move, can this be
anything less than spiritually dark and cosmic, just as God said through the
apostle?
Jesus, teach us to engage at the spiritual first. Oh, and
increase our faith… please!
I like to get to a car show when I can. The story I told you
up front is so old that, even if the car in view was late-model at the time,
it’s an antique by now. I’m going to keep my ears open for the new story, the
one that goes: “Picked ‘er up for next-to-nothing, but – Good Lord, the smell!
Anyways, the brakes weren’t hard to fix, and with plenty o’ EL-bow grease, we
got the graffiti off, and here she is!” That’s the kind of story I like: the
right effort in the right places for the right reasons.
Grace and Peace (for all the right work),
John
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