unaccustomed quiet

The phones are down at work. Some idiot driving a car transport ignored the two large signs saying NO THRU TRUCKS and, having further neglected to lower the top rack on his truck, attempted to drive down our small street and ripped all the phone lines down. He managed, somehow, to avoid the power lines. I attribute this to sheer luck.

So for the past twenty-four hours we have had no phone service, and the office is strangely quiet. It feels like a holiday. I'm trying to get a tonne of work done around the office as far as cleaning things up and getting to my neglected piles of papers is concerned, because I know that once the phones are back on line, all hell will break loose. But in the meantime, the peace is nice.

Reminds me of a verse I read on Sunday as I was enjoying devotions on the porch, more rarely quiet than has become, sadly, usual (the shiftless no-good ne'er-do-well son of my neighbor likes to blast his horrible music out of his "room," which opens onto the porch, right behind my chair). The verse kind of took me by surprise, like a lot of things have lately. 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 (NIV) says, "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody."

These are the reasons why I love Paul. In our ladder-climbing world of politics and the American dream of rags-to-riches, we tend connect ambition with greatness -- it goes back, for me, to studying Julius Caesar in tenth grade, to memorizing Mark Antony's incredible speech (and later in college to watching the young Marlon Brando give it...mmm): "But...Brutus hath said Caesar was ambitious, and, sure, Brutus is an honorable man."

Ambition. Brutus worried over Caesar's ambition, called it the serpent in the egg that would eventually hatch and become something evil, and so he rationalized the murder of his friend so that he could crush the serpent in its shell.

And yet here, as with many things in Christianity, Paul takes the concept of ambition and turns it into a paradox. "Make it your ambition," he says, and I imagine the listeners of the letter, as it was being read aloud, were preparing themselves to hear some great declamation on great and holy living; the passage immediately preceding this verse is full of exhortations about sexual morality and encouragements to live in purity. "Make it your ambition," he says, and, instead of telling them to shine like stars, as he says in Philippians, instead of telling them to press on to the goal, instead of telling them to resist sin to the point of shedding their own blood (all of which matter and are necessary and good), he says, "...to lead a quiet life."

Make it your ambition to be quiet. Take this drive called ambition, this pulsion to excel, to be great and to stand above and beyond everyone else, inborn in nearly every person...and turn it inward. Use it to tone things down. Use it simply, to win the honest respect of those who don't belong to the church.

And mind your own business. Work with your hands. Your daily life matters.

Love it. Reading through the New Testament has given me an appreciation of just how often Paul writes to the churches, Remember how, when I lived with you, I didn't ask you for anything; I worked to earn my keep. I wasn't a burden. Do you the same.

I remember the late-nineties emphasis that my home church and youth group put on rejecting the "worldly" notion of "being a good person." "That's not enough!" my youth pastor would thunder. Well, of course it isn't, as far as salvation is concerned; but it matters hugely in the impact a person has on his or her small sphere of influence. That's the thing that makes people sit up and take notice. Not how many Scriptures you can rattle off with a wild Ancient Mariner glitter in your eye, or how involved you are in church, or how self-consciously holier your aura is than everyone else's. What people notice is whether or not you're a decent sort of person. And didn't Jesus Himself point that out when he said "you will recognize a tree by its fruit"? That's not a complicated concept. Good fruit = good tree = good person = belongs to God; bad fruit = bad tree = bad person = doesn't belong to God. Nobody's perfect, but which way do the scales tip? The way you live your life matters. The Apostle John took it a step further when he wrote (and here I quote the King James Version, because that's the one I know best from Psalty the Singing Songbook), "Beloved, let us love one another, for everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love" (1 John 4:7-8, emphasis mine). And, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan points out, isn't love how you treat your neighbor? And isn't that by treating your neighbor just plain decently?

I think in particular, when the argument of "being a good person is/isn't enough" comes up, about my grandfather. He died seven years ago this past March. You never saw him rocketing Scripture at people, never saw him immersed in the newest Brennan Manning or Max Lucado book, never saw him lead a Bible study or take an apologetics class at church. But you've never met a better man. My grandfather lived by very simple, straightforward rules of decency. He was honest. He treated his neighbors well. He worked hard. He minded his own business. He loved his family. He went to church. He lived that quiet life, and all of it honored God in the best way possible. He didn't need to prove anything by his words; his life spoke his faith for itself.

So when I hear people mutter against "being a good person," I have to try hard not to laugh. What, we're not supposed to be good people? The contrapositive of James' "faith without works is dead" is that a living faith comes with works. And sure, yes, granted, Christ comes first, but isn't goodness one of the fruits of the Spirit of Christ? So when one comes into the body of Christ, goodness can be expected to follow.

And that's what Paul's saying here. Be thou decent.

I like this passage, because it underscores some of the things I've been working toward the past few years. It's not that I don't have my own ambitions along less humble lines -- those are most assuredly there, especially in the writing arena, and I'm resurrecting those ambitions from their own ash-bed once again -- but what I've fallen in love with lately has been the quietude and simplicity of the life I've stumbled into here, in my job, my apartment, my friends, my cat, my family, my pastimes, the landscape. I love it all, and I'm glad the great Apostle Paul has given me the go-ahead to enjoy it...as quietly, as simply, and as decently as possible.