This morning I read Stephen's speech, the part where Israel turns to Aaron and says make us a god who will go before us, for this Moses who led us out of Egypt, we do not know what happened to him. And almost as a reflex, before I had decided to, I started laying the pattern over other people. Over the ones outside the church, the ones I have learned to think of as the out group. It took only a second to catch it, but the reflex was there and it was fast, and the speed of it is the part worth attending to.

Because the reflex is wrong, and Scripture is fairly relentless about why. The bulk of what we read about God's pleasure and displeasure with human beings is not addressed to the world. It is addressed to His own people. There are real acts of God against those outside the covenant, but they tend to come either in defense of His people or when sin has grown so abominable that judgment is the only honest response to it. The golden calf is not a photograph of the pagans down the road. It is a portrait of the called. The sin, and the mercy too, belong characteristically to the ones who were brought out of Egypt and saw the sea part and still asked for something they could see.

That should give a serious believer pause, and what it should produce is not a finger pointed outward but a moment of introspection. If this is the pattern God has identified, and the pattern is His own people, then the question is not where do they do this. The question is where do I.

That recognition should also produce humility, because the repeated identification of sin and the rejection of God in Scripture is not incidental to His people. It is their characterization. The modern believer is not exempt from this mode of living, and he should not be surprised to find himself exactly where his fathers were found, sinful, blind to Christ when He stands in front of him, a worshiper of idols, a rejector of God. That is the catalog, and it is not a catalog of the world. It is the recurring portrait of the called. To read it honestly is to forfeit the right to be surprised when you find your own face in it, because surprise would mean you thought yourself the exception to the thing Scripture spends most of its pages documenting.

Of those four, one unsettles me more than the rest, and it is the quietest. Idolatry announces itself. So does open rejection. But the failure to recognize Christ when He is standing in front of me does not announce anything, and Stephen's audience is the proof of it. They were the religious ones. They were literate in the Scriptures. They were precisely the people who should have known. And here is the part that should stop a religious person cold, because their blindness was not in spite of their religion. It came through it. They carried a settled picture of where God was permitted to be, what holiness looked like, which places were clean and which were not, and Christ kept arriving in the wrong places by that measure. He was found among the unclean and the sinful and the out of place. Their religion had taught them God lived in the smooth places, the temple, the law kept spotless, the company of the respectable. So when He stood in front of them out of place by their reckoning, the very framework that made them devout is what made Him unrecognizable. That is the sin that frightens me, because it makes the other three ancillary, and because I carry the same framework. If I cannot recognize God when I come face to face with Him, everything else is just the predictable result.

So the real question is how a person steels himself against that particular failure, and I think the answer is in the sorting of the sheep and the goats. We tend to read that parable as an ethics of charity, be kind to the hungry, visit the imprisoned. But that is not quite what Christ says. He says He is the hungry one. He is the prisoner, the beggar, the sick man, the stranger. The identification is not sympathy, it is location. To reject them is to reject Him because He is actually there. And that is the same indictment the religious leaders fell under, only turned toward me. A settled sense of where God is allowed to be is precisely what blinds a person to where He actually is. Failure to recognize the reality of the incarnation is itself the failure to recognize God. The two are the same failure wearing different clothes.

The incarnation says that God is in the textured parts of the world. Not the smooth parts, not the places that are easily conformed and kept clean, but the parts that resist. The places of blood and filth and shit, where people hurt and bleed and die. And yes, I used that word, because that is the texture of where we are actually called to be, and if it revolts you then you should sit with the revulsion and ask where it comes from, because it is the same flinch that kept the devout from seeing God in a leper and a criminal. That is the world Christ came into. That is the life He embraced and the world He embedded Himself in. So it should not surprise me at all that when He tells us where to find Him, He points to exactly those people in exactly those places. He is not asking us to go somewhere He is reluctant to be. He is telling us where He already is.

Which means the way you steel yourself against the core sin, and I will be honest that this makes me anxious to write down, is to run into the world rather than away from it. Not to approach it missionally, holding a clean line and going out and coming back. To indwell it. To embed yourself in it the way He did, to become one of them insofar as humanity is concerned. That is the only posture that puts you in the place where He can be recognized, because it is the place where He is.

And here is the thing I keep returning to, the part that takes a little of the pressure off the anxiety without lowering the cost of the going. The sheep in the parable were surprised. They did not know they had been seeing Him. When did we see you hungry, they ask, when did we see you a stranger. They were not recognizing Him on purpose. They were simply in the place where He was, doing the ordinary thing the place required, and the recognition turned out to have already happened without their managing it. So maybe recognition is not finally something I achieve by sufficient embedding. Maybe it is something given, once I am standing where He already stands. That does not make the going any cheaper. But it does mean the recognizing is not one more performance to get right. It is what happens when you are finally in the room.