Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky
Philippians 2:14-15 (NIV)
Stars in a Crooked Generation
The court is packed clay in a board frame, in the corner of the park where the sycamores keep it shaded all afternoon, and there are enough of them on it most days. Every throw gets measured. They keep a folding rule and a length of string in a bag under the bench, and the string has started three separate arguments this summer about whether string stretches.
He came on foot again today, the one who argues the most. It’s twenty-five minutes each way and he’s done it every day for two weeks, since the doctor took his license over his eyes, and he arrives angry and spends the anger on the measuring. He called a throw for himself this morning that four people saw go long. They gave him the point and they’ve been on it with each other ever since, and he knows where he stands with them now.
Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky. Paul asks for a small thing and aims it at something the size of a night sky.
Men arguing about whether string stretches aren’t going to get anywhere near blameless and pure, and the afternoon doesn’t have to. That church had an argument running through it too, and Paul asks two women in it by name to agree. He asks the whole congregation to put down the grumbling as the way into a name: children of God without fault, in the middle of a generation that had gone crooked. They get the name, and the shining happens where they already are, down inside the crooked generation itself.
He says, going for his jacket on the bench, that he isn’t coming Thursday. Nobody answers him. Somebody calls it four to four and says whose pallino it is.
A Prayer to Remember
Father, children of God without fault. Paul wrote that over a church with two women in it who couldn’t agree, and he asked one small thing of them and aimed it that high. Thank you for the name. Thank you for the place he put it, down in the middle of the warped and crooked generation, where the people who need it live.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
