Good News and Bad News

So which do you want first? The good news? Well, there's this saint - he's not in this life anymore, you understand. He died in the year 373AD - he's called Athanasius.

He's a staunch defender of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and he's the Bishop of Alexandria, and he is impervious to pressures to change his teaching. And by "pressure," I mean something a whole heckuva lot closer to persecution. There were Arians, you see. They were convinced that the man who was called Jesus could not possibly have been the very Godhead enfleshed for us. If he was a Man, he was not God. They were sure of it.

So ... here's the bad news. (Bad news for Athanasius, I mean.) He kept getting exiled. He was driving the Arians nuts. I mean, people followed him, and they listened to him, and they believed his teaching, and he wouldn't shut up. Jesus is God. He just kept insisting that this statement was the truly Christian teaching, and had been since the time of Christ himself, and that it's at the center of the Christian Faith. So he had to move. A lot. Often. Frequently. And not down the street ... down the globe. So that was the bad news - for Athanasius.

But it was good news for Christianity. Everywhere this holy (very stubborn) man went, he kept on teaching the Orthodox, Catholic, Faith delivered once for all, and so every time he was ... uh ... well, moved along, the Orthodox teaching spread. And eventually the Church came down on the side of Orthodoxy, and the Arians were declared to be the heretics. (Not that this heresy disappeared. We're in more of a Gnostic phase as a culture at the moment, but Arianism never really goes away.) It was Athanasius's bad news (and serious inconvenience) that he was hounded from town to town, only to be reinstated as Bishop of Alexandria again, and then exiled again. What a life!

But this was our good news. It was good news for the Christian Church that in the age of Heresies (which means: in the age when the very few basic heresies first raised their Hydra Heads of multi-mouthed attack and injury on Christian people everywhere, apparently until the Age to Come), Athanasius went all over the known world, and everywhere he went he fulfilled his office as a Bishop and defender of the Faith. We needed him. We still do.

So what's my point?

My point is this. We have no clue how our own "bad news" looks from the vantage point of Heaven.

None. Not the first clue. We can't know because we can't stand up there and see it while we're in the middle of being hounded from town to town (either literally or metaphorically). We live in our lives - not outside of them. We live in time - not beyond it. From here, where we stand, our only perspective is our own perspective.

But here, where we are, we do know a few important things. We know what we're supposed to do. You don't believe me? Well, here's the list. (hint: It hasn't changed for awhile.) And here's the short-hand for the list. The first four are our duty toward God, the last six are our duty to our neighbors, and they don't change.

They are:

Love, Worship, Reverence, Diligence,

Discipline, Kindness, Self-control, Honesty, Truthfulness, Contentment.

That's it. That's our job. Those are the Ten Commandments, and that's all there is to it. It doesn't matter where we are - at home in Alexandria, or exiled to parts unknown. (Did he take a cook? What about his clothes? His books? Who did his laundry? What if he got sick?)

And this isn't a lesson unique to Christianity either. No matter where we are, if we will just do the work that is in front of us, in our own hands, right now, and stop (for heaven's sake, just stop!) trying to manage the stage set, the direction, the lighting, and the sound, and just play the part we have, living "the dream that will need all the love you can give, every day of your life, for as long as you live," then we will be able to turn around someday and see what it meant. Athanasius didn't know, back then. How could he? And we can't know either. Not yet.

But we will.