The Strange Walk

     Many of us are being shaped, quietly and steadily, by a media diet that treats fear as the default posture for Christian engagement. Another piece of legislation that supposedly threatens the church. A headline insisting the country is one election away from outlawing the gospel. The cumulative effect is a low-grade bracing, a chronic readiness to be attacked, and it leaks into everything else, into how we read a message from a friend, how we listen to a coworker who voted differently, how we walk into our own small group with the tension already in our shoulders. The loudest voices in our orbit tell us that our religious freedoms are slipping away, and that the right Christian response is to clench, to defend, to power up.
     Then in Ephesians 4, Paul wrote these verses from inside a Roman cell. He had spent three chapters telling the church what God has done for us in Christ, the blessings, the resurrection from death in trespasses, the new humanity made from Jew and Gentile, the prayer that we would be filled with God's fullness. When he finally turns to call the church into a life that matches all of that, the first thing he does is remind us that he is a prisoner. As an identity. "I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you" (4:1). He calls himself a prisoner "in the Lord," so bound to Christ that even his Roman chains have been reframed as belonging to God. He could have led with apostolic authority. He led with his chains instead.
     What he asks for, when he finally asks, is not a war. It is a walk. "To walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called" (4:1). The picture Paul gives us is that of a balanced scale. The calling sits on one side, already set in place by God. Our daily life is supposed to come into balance with it, one foot in front of the other. And the walk Paul names does not look like the kind of strength I am tempted to chase when I close that feed. He lists humility first. The word he uses (tapeinophrosyne) was a slave's word in the Greek world, the disposition respectable people refused to claim. The cross turned it into the marker of Christlikeness, because the Lord who emptied Himself and took the form of a servant is the One who redefined the word. He names gentleness next, which is regularly misread as weakness. It is not. It is the word ancient writers used for a war horse broken to the rein, all of its strength still present, none of it spent on panic. Then patience, a "long temper," the opposite of the short fuse, the same word used of God's patience toward sinners. Then "bearing with one another in love," which assumes that life together will involve weights we have to carry on each other's behalf. And then the fifth, the one that gathers up the other four, "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (4:3). The verb for "maintain" means to guard, to keep, to protect. The unity is not something we build. It is something we are asked to guard.
     That single distinction reorganizes a lot of how I think about life inside the church. I have spent more time than I would like trying to construct a unity that I assumed did not yet exist, as if compatibility were the project and personality differences were the obstacle. Paul flips it. The unity is "of the Spirit." The Spirit has already made it. The brother and sister sitting next to me on Sunday already belong to the same body, breathe by the same Spirit, lean into the same hope, confess the same Lord, hold the same faith, wear the same baptism, and have been adopted by the same Father. Seven "ones" stacked into three verses (4:4-6), arranged in a Trinitarian shape, and not one of them is up for us to invent. The person across the aisle whose politics make my chest tighten, the small group member whose tone last Tuesday made me consider leaving the room, the friend whose theology drifted somewhere I would not go, every one of them, if they confess Jesus, has been bound to me by every one of those seven. The right question, when I am tempted to write someone off, is not "How do I build unity with this person?" but "What unity has the Spirit already given that I am about to grieve?"
     This is the place I keep tripping. Most of the time when I want to go to war with another Christian, I have a case. I can defend it. They were wrong. They were unkind. They drifted on a doctrine that mattered to me. I could line up the argument for why I am right and they are not, and I could win the argument. The trouble is that winning the argument has never once produced what the gospel actually asks for, and most of the time the very act of preparing my case has hardened me against the person I was supposed to love. The Holy Spirit has already joined me to them. The same Lord I confess they confess. The same baptism they received I received. Going on offense against them does not advance the kingdom, it grieves the One who made the unity in the first place. Sometimes the call is not to win, it is to love. Humility does not rejoice in evil, and gentleness does not surrender to truth, but the worthy walk refuses to make the kingdom about being right.
     There are two postures the church is being tempted into right now, and they are mirror images of each other. The first is the aggressive one, the one that believes the kingdom advances by attacking, by hardening, by being right at every cost. The second is the fearful one, the one that believes our religious freedoms are slipping away and the answer is to clench, to defend, to power up. They sound very different on the outside. They are the same mistake on the inside. Both assume the kingdom rests on what we do under threat. Paul, threatened with execution, says the kingdom rests on what God has already done. Our task is not to defend the kingdom from a Roman cell. Our task is to walk like the people God has already made us to be.
     Consider Paul at the writing desk, chained at the wrist, putting down some of the most exalted ecclesiology in the New Testament, and telling the church that the first thing it needs to do is walk humbly. He did not write a defense of his rights. He did not draft a strategy to retake his freedom. He wrote a pastoral letter, and the application section opened with a quiet identification of himself as a prisoner. The Lord he served was led to a cross. The walk Paul calls for has always looked strange to a watching world. It will look like patience where the world expects fury. It will look like bearing with one another where the world expects cancellation. It will look like an eagerness to preserve unity where the world rewards the loudest division. And the engine of that strange walk is not our effort. The engine is one Spirit, one Lord, one God, who has already made us one, and who is calling us this week to walk like it.
     When the next news cycle comes for us, and it will, I want to remember Paul at that writing desk. He was in chains when he wrote it, and the chains did not panic him into a strategy. They settled him into a posture. The first move he asked the church to make was not to clench. It was to walk. May the Lord give us the grace to walk like Him this week, slowly, humbly, together, while the world keeps insisting we run.