Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Reading from Second Kings today, the deadly might of the Assyrian Empire has assembled at the doorstep of the Kingdom of Judah…and is getting ready to demolish it. Over the past couple days, we’ve read about how the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), carting its inhabitants away into exile. Today, we hear the voice of the Rabshakeh, an Assyrian ambassador who (if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan) is kind of like an ancient and in-real-life version of the Mouth of Sauron, the human representative of a powerful, demonic, supernatural malice. That’s not to say that King Sennacherib of Assyria and Sauron are functionally interchangeable, but that the Mouth and the Rabshakeh, who spoke on behalf of a death machine unlike the world had ever seen to that point, are more uncomfortably alike than we might at first imagine. The Rabshakeh’s job is to undermine the people of Judah’s confidence in the possibility of deliverance, to demoralize the people, to wear them down with promises that exile won’t be so bad after all: that losing your home, your identity, your customs, your culture, will be well-compensated for by the ability to experience the wealth and splendor of the Empire as an exile, and that really, given that the alternative is complete obliteration, choosing exile is a much better choice…it’ll only feel like death, but really, it’ll be grand.

It’s staggering, sometimes, the compromises we can find ourselves willing to make with exile, oppression, falsehood, sin and death. It’s rare that we actually want those things…it’s just that it so often seems easier to accept them than resist them. They seem so ubiquitous, so overwhelmingly powerful, how is it that we can really resist or fight against them?

Well the reality is: we can’t. Not on our own steam, at any rate. Left to our own devices, we might find ourselves able to do a thing or two for the cause of the good, for life, for love, but it’s never enough. And it’s exhausting how endless it all is. And we can become discouraged. And we can find ourselves right where we started, wrestling with the Rabshakehs of our own day, and of our own psyches.

But with God, all things are possible. We can’t do the good we ought, but God can do it in and through us. God can be our goodness, God can be our life, God can be our love. And in Jesus Christ, that reality of divine goodness, life and love is really ours, can really live and be and grow and work and energize us and blaze up in us and set this present darkness on fire with the very love that gave the stars their spark and every heart their beat.

We may not see the end of the struggle in this life, but that doesn’t mean there is no end to it. The love that can work in us, the Love that can actually transform us into Love, that Love empowers us to imagine the recreation and restoration of all things, allows us to hope for it, allows us to work for it, knowing that we’re working, hoping, imagining alongside generations of people of Love, followers of Christ, from ages past and for ages to come. Our work continues and completes a work of Love begun long before us and that will be continued and completed by others after us.

And yet, it’s not we who work, but God who works in us. When we’re baptized, when we affirm our baptismal covenant, we promise to continue the apostle’s work and prayer (a work that is prayer, a prayer that is work); we promise to resist evil; we promise to proclaim the Good News, to seek and serve Christ, to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of all human beings…and we make each of these promises by saying, “I will, with God’s help.” At Evening Prayer, when the shadows lengthen and darkness seems to swallow up and threaten light’s flame, we begin by saying, “O God make speed to save us, O Lord make haste to help us,” and we hymn the Divine Light of Christ which burns bright in us by grace, illuminating and scattering the darkness even as the sun’s natural light fades. We hymn the Light that the darkness cannot overcome.

One thing that can stop us from allowing God to work in us is that we don’t necessarily trust, believe, or really know that, by virtue of being the Church, we are truly members of the Body of Christ. Because being the Body really does mean something, not only in that it requires something of us and simultaneously empowers us, by grace, to meet that requirement (to do good, to love, to live rightly)—it means that Jesus is truly alive in us, truly working in the world and through us, that we can be transparent to the life of God, that the life of God is really and truly who we are.

How might you, dear Friend, yield to God's help and salvation and let God work in you today? How might you live into your identity as the Body of Christ? How might you be the Church in the world, the dawning New Creation, today? How might Love live in you and be you today?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+