and enjoy great peace.” Psalm 37:11
Christian piety is, by the standards of traditional orthodoxy, never good enough. “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Jesus told a rich young CEO. The guy, Harvard-trained, returned to his laptop.
The injunction to righteousness can be crippling because the heart-felt desire to do good is, in plain fact, never good enough anyway, as Luther himself observed, knees bloodied. We’re saved by grace, not works, and the combined good deeds of all the Boy Scouts on the planet won’t make a difference. Thus saith the good news.
I find lines like the 11th verse of Psalm 37 disconcerting, declarations of the glories of a piety that’s unattainable. Maybe it’s all the fault of my Aunt Meek.
Physically, she was, like all the Schaaps, small and square. Like most of my father’s brothers and sisters, she had an adolescent giggle, a little warble that eventually rose into an off-key falsetto so that sitting in a room of Schaaps was like being surrounded by seagulls. Her name was Marie, but everyone called her “Meek.” As a child I knew her before the biblical word meek, so I thought of her as it—“blessed are the meek.”.
My father’s family were all good, good people. A cousin of mine told me that a marriage counselor once told her the problems she felt in her marriage was caused by having too good of a father—my uncle. What a blessing.
Aunt Meek’s children—and they are themselves retired today—can likely recount moments when she fumed or flashed hot bolts of anger. She could not have been always as soft and gentle as I knew her. But if Aunt Meek is the model for biblical meek, then I feel crippled by a standard I can never reach. Humble, kind, and sweet, she had to be among the kindest of human souls. An elementary school teacher—that makes sense too, doesn’t it?
Not long ago, frustrated by the honchos at work, I stood up in a faculty meeting and accused the brass of lack of leadership. Some lauded the speech; others disliked it a ton. But what’s clear to me is that I wasn’t acting like Aunt Meek. I was clearly abrasive and, some might judge, more than a little arrogant in my desire to slap up my superiors.
When it comes to inheriting the land, I’m out of the will.
Will peace be the blessing only for those who don’t rock the boat? Does “servanthood” imply servility? I know this much: that speech of mine did not grant me peace. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I’d said too much, gone too far. It happens.
If rising temperatures and volcanic behavior is created by pride—my desire, my will, my personal sense of injury—then I’ll be a renter and never inherit God’s land or its bountiful blessings.
The $64,000 question: was it? That’s for me—prayerfully—to determine, I guess. Perhaps I should say too, that’s for me, meekly, to determine. Strange as it may seem, it has to be possible to fight injustice meekly, and that phrase is not oxymoronic. It can’t be. How do I know? The Bible tells me so.
Pride, however, always goeth before the fall. That truth I need to bring home into my heart--meekly, methinks.
1 comment:
Several years ago, a person in a leadership position in our church left his wife (and children) to shack up with a partner half his age. It was stunning. But so, too, was the way (male )church leaders dealt with the individual. They were afraid of him, so they tip-toed around him. It was a number of women who got angry, called the behaviour in public for what it was, denounced it, condemned it. One of them said to me, "I'd had enough of this nonsense, so I spoke out with anger." That made a difference. I get the "meek" thing...but there may be times when it is not helpful. (BTW, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when you critized the Dordt administration.) - DS
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