Defender of the Faith, Against Our Instincts
I strongly suspect no single individual has been shaped by every single rite of passage he or she assumes everyone else has been through. The tendency, then, is to consign the answers or comfort in life we don't have to the experiences, or the books, or the movies we missed along the way.
As a person with a lifelong disability which has precluded some common experiences, I'm assigning a lot of missing cohesion to the life lessons passed on as one learns to be comfortable guiding thousands of pounds of metal among the likewise conditioned to intrepidity. I'm convinced a lot of life's secrets were passed on in the fellowship of the fast-food workers, and that weighty truth was conveyed among waitstaff.
The formative value of military experience holds a similar allure for me. Since that option was precluded, I'm ready to consign whatever answers of ideal manhood I don't embody yet to missed time in olive drab or dress blues. So when Philip Roth's narrator in the short story "Defender of the Faith" starts to bark the cadence of this notion, I'm inclined to fall in behind. A veteran of recent World War II combat, steeled First Sgt. Nathan Marks approaches training duty a transformed man. "I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of the old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant." That, the soldiering I didn't do, the real peril I didn't endure and for which I unrealistically intensify everyday drama, must be the bypassed source of more maturity.
The beginning of Luke 17 sounds off similarly. Jesus is toughening His troops against the tendency to impose their narrow civilian experience on everyone else. Luke 16 has been His Technicolor training film for what goes wrong when the Word is used to justify a prickly, prideful distortion of leadership under the old traditions, and the next chapter insists that the same thing can, and must not, happen among His followers in this momentarily novel movement.
The first two verses of the chapter warn ominously on behalf of those His disciples will lead, "It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea then that he should offend one of these little ones." He and First Sgt. Marx are tracking with one another. Veterans of real combat, they say together, are less inclined to sort humans according to our emotions or maturity at a moment in time. Roth's blooded sergeant concludes his approach to training with the bridge between perspective and apathy, "I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing."
As the Christian's Captain of the Host also doubling as our Sergeant, Jesus has other plans for His than developing calloused hearts of indifference. As boot camp has its share of surprises, as I understand, to keep enlistees from putting too much trust in their nascent martial instincts, so Jesus affronts with Luke 17:3 like a midnight bugle call. Like the men in the barracks, we have collapsed in temporary rest in the first two verses, telling ourselves we have adjusted if we show grace to our fellow humans by not condemning them. Weary from our own ordeals, we absorb that the reality of Christian enlistment excuses, even enforces, avoiding involvement. Not so.
"Take heed to yourselves," barks Christ purposefully unsettling, transitioning us sometimes by shocks from the old culture to the new one. "If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him." Manipulating, don't do that. Discipling, do that. Question the difference? Of course, you will, insists Jesus with His battle-tested assurance in contrast to our upheaval as our definitions of self and others are tossed about with purpose like a poorly made bed now serving as an example to others in our unit. The raw recruit might hesitate to approach First Sgt. Marx, despite his philosophical maturity, but we need never fear to approach Jesus for guidance and power in how to approach relationships His way rather than ours. Our new identity in Him is proven, is conditioned into our new instincts, in the uncertain terrain of relationships with one another colliding with varying emotions and experience.
As a person with a lifelong disability which has precluded some common experiences, I'm assigning a lot of missing cohesion to the life lessons passed on as one learns to be comfortable guiding thousands of pounds of metal among the likewise conditioned to intrepidity. I'm convinced a lot of life's secrets were passed on in the fellowship of the fast-food workers, and that weighty truth was conveyed among waitstaff.
The formative value of military experience holds a similar allure for me. Since that option was precluded, I'm ready to consign whatever answers of ideal manhood I don't embody yet to missed time in olive drab or dress blues. So when Philip Roth's narrator in the short story "Defender of the Faith" starts to bark the cadence of this notion, I'm inclined to fall in behind. A veteran of recent World War II combat, steeled First Sgt. Nathan Marks approaches training duty a transformed man. "I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of the old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant." That, the soldiering I didn't do, the real peril I didn't endure and for which I unrealistically intensify everyday drama, must be the bypassed source of more maturity.
The beginning of Luke 17 sounds off similarly. Jesus is toughening His troops against the tendency to impose their narrow civilian experience on everyone else. Luke 16 has been His Technicolor training film for what goes wrong when the Word is used to justify a prickly, prideful distortion of leadership under the old traditions, and the next chapter insists that the same thing can, and must not, happen among His followers in this momentarily novel movement.
The first two verses of the chapter warn ominously on behalf of those His disciples will lead, "It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea then that he should offend one of these little ones." He and First Sgt. Marx are tracking with one another. Veterans of real combat, they say together, are less inclined to sort humans according to our emotions or maturity at a moment in time. Roth's blooded sergeant concludes his approach to training with the bridge between perspective and apathy, "I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing."
As the Christian's Captain of the Host also doubling as our Sergeant, Jesus has other plans for His than developing calloused hearts of indifference. As boot camp has its share of surprises, as I understand, to keep enlistees from putting too much trust in their nascent martial instincts, so Jesus affronts with Luke 17:3 like a midnight bugle call. Like the men in the barracks, we have collapsed in temporary rest in the first two verses, telling ourselves we have adjusted if we show grace to our fellow humans by not condemning them. Weary from our own ordeals, we absorb that the reality of Christian enlistment excuses, even enforces, avoiding involvement. Not so.
"Take heed to yourselves," barks Christ purposefully unsettling, transitioning us sometimes by shocks from the old culture to the new one. "If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him." Manipulating, don't do that. Discipling, do that. Question the difference? Of course, you will, insists Jesus with His battle-tested assurance in contrast to our upheaval as our definitions of self and others are tossed about with purpose like a poorly made bed now serving as an example to others in our unit. The raw recruit might hesitate to approach First Sgt. Marx, despite his philosophical maturity, but we need never fear to approach Jesus for guidance and power in how to approach relationships His way rather than ours. Our new identity in Him is proven, is conditioned into our new instincts, in the uncertain terrain of relationships with one another colliding with varying emotions and experience.
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