Blessed Assurance
Running throughout Apostle Paul’s ministry was the call to live in the assurance of Jesus and the foolishness of the Gospel. Paul embodied this assurance in his lived experience as a follower of the Way who spent a large chunk of his public ministry in prison. But it was only from his assurance in Jesus that he could write Philippians - the epistle of joy as some would call it - from behind closed bars. He had assurance that Jesus would ground and guide him. He had assurance that Christ would sustain him even in prison. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Paul knew that the world had its haunts and allures, but could offer no deep assurance, not like the kind Jesus could give. And so Paul insisted to this church at Philippi to live inside the assurance of Jesus and thus exude the joy that God has for us in Christ.
Part of the haunt of modernity is to rob you of any assurance. Our news cycles and hyper-capitalism mirror each other in this way. The onslaught of macabre across your timelines everyday challenges any sense of assurance you might have. Indeed, even many of the wealthy won’t be able to outlast the ravaging havoc of ecological change that modernity hath wrought. And capitalism is no better. For it encourages us to constantly buy our way into contentment. But whatever assurance your product of yesterday gave you, you should be able to buy more now.
The carrot dangled in front of our face is never catchable; it was never supposed to be.
But this isn’t our story. This isn’t our song. Jesus is. “Oh what a foretaste of glory divine,” the song says! This is the good news that I play for you quietly. Your “perfect submission” doesn’t need to be a loud, blaring stampede of news. It can be that quiet news that lives deep in your heart, the kind that grounds Grandma in church as she prays yet again for her family, the kind that has grounded enslaved persons in the Americas for centuries as they have lived through the hell of settler colonialism, the kind that draws you into quiet when you survey the praise of the trees.
What assurance grounds you? Does it run deeper than the anxieties of our age? What kind of holy quiet might it bring about in the church? Who notices that this is your song?
Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash