Thursday, August 5, 2010

Watching Signals

Luke 12:32-40

Eugene Peterson has written:

It is habitual for us to imagine salvation as something either momentary or occasional – a special intervention in which God makes sure of the eternal disposition of our souls. But it is total. It is comprehensive. It is world embracing, history girdling, life penetrating.

- from Answering God: the Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Harper, San Francisco, pg. 114.

The “life penetrating” character of salvation is precisely that which catches us unawares. We tend to bracket off our existence under the illusion there is a part of us and our world that is not of God - certain “compartments” that are the dominion of other things. Things like, say, defending our personal interests (12:13: the guy who came to Jesus with a complaint against his brother over inheritance), maximizing our net worth (12:16: the parable of the guy with the barns), bracketing off God in religious rites (the case against Israel in the Isaiah passage) -- to name a few. But if salvation penetrates all of life, it demands our attention. Just common sense wakefulness. You might say the Lord is in a situation like a frustrated driver behind the idiot sitting texting at the wheel when the traffic light has turned green. I can hear God's big “HeLLO?”. Even traffic lights channel the salvation of the universe. Every crossing is an act of faith -- love negotiated for everyone for the sake of whom two cars cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Nothing metaphysical or abstract about it. Just basic traffic Torah, altogether praiseworthy.

Life is shot through with the signals of our deliverance that show us up on God's radar. Those signals can get us through the tough passages. With experience (prayer) we learn to negotiate all kinds of intersections. We learn what matters and what does not. What helps and what hinders. What joins our hearts to our neighbors' and what cuts us off. The philosopher Emmanual Levinas developed his thought around the premise that human being, at root, consists in our utter responsibility for the people whose faces confront us at every juncture of our existence. As Jesus pounds home in parable after parable, we are never “off the clock”. We are best advised never to stop watching for the signs of creation with all of its arrivals, since they are mostly unannounced. Paying attention is therefore a salvation issue - distraction its antithesis. Failure to catch the signals, in fact, can kill you. 

At one level we do well to imagine that the “owner of the house” (let us presume he is our judge and author of our salvation) is on his way, at the very door. At another level we no longer need to imagine it: he is everywhere we look. He always was, even at the light.

© 2010 Andy Gay