Matthew: On Discipleship

On Discipleship in Matthew

The aspects of the disciple that appear in Matthew and still signify today are precisely those traits that correlate to the heart of Christian discipleship itself.

The first of these is leadership. This essentially describes the tension that Carter articulates: that the disciples have both “an existence on the social margins” and participation “in the reign of God revealed by God’s actions in Jesus.” The disciple is neither isolated nor conforming but beginning as an agent of God’s present and coming kingdom.

The point of following Jesus is not to draw other disciples in your wake. It is not even enough to simply live on the margins because that is not the purpose. What is the purpose is bringing and proclaiming God’s reign. This was once thought to overturn God’s law but, as Hanger notes, more consideration and careful scholarship leads us to believe that the leadership of the disciple is leadership in the righteousness, mercy, and justice that the law referred to.

That has always been God’s reign. Love is the fulfillment of the law and not its overthrow.

“Disciples are called to a life of greater righteousness and justice” describes the trait corollary to the first: disciples are to be just. Contained within God’s reign is a disclosure of God’s own nature. It disciples must then be reconciling, faithful, honoring, non-violent, loving, praying, integral, and fair servants of God. They will neither conform to nor abandon this world but bless and transform it through their presence, as the examples of salt and yeast would indicate. Disciples will even bless their enemies and will not be intimidated by the powers and terrors of this world.

The righteousness of God’s rule, after all, has been revealed to them. Disciples understand that their leadership, because it comes from following Jesus of Nazareth, is not that of the Gentiles ‘who lord it over’ those beneath them but is instead a life of self-sacrificing service. The purpose is not to seek out positions of authority for oneself, but to exercise the authority of God in whatever place Jesus leads the disciple to. The righteousness of God is first for the disciple; from this all else follows.

This implies the third trait of the disciple: fidelity. Allegiance to God’s will and reign is paramount, not in order to secure one’s own salvation but precisely because of it and in response to it. Matthew contains stern admonitions for those torn between loyalties and those of impure motives. They have no place in the kingdom because they have one foot securely in this world.

When the disciples fail it is either becomes fear overcomes their best instincts toward fidelity or because their thinking is still tainted by the structures and expectations of the world. And those two failures are intimately related. The expectation of the world is that if Jesus dies his kingdom will not endure. The expectation of the world is that securing a place in anyone’s kingdom is seeking out power and authority for oneself.

But fidelity to God indicates quite differently.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust X

Chapter Four

September 2, 440 Y.A.

“What happened?” I asked when I awoke. The room I found myself in was plain and simple, but different from the stone flats in Ariel; these walls were wooden planks stained dark, as was all the furniture I saw, though that was only the bed itself, a small table of the kind best used for playing cards, and the chair in which sat my master, Ryn Batyst. I don’t know that the room could have fit another soul.

“Where am I?” I asked again – and, when I noted the dimness of the light washing through the room’s wood-framed window, “What time is it?”

Ryn nodded. “We were worried: not everyone lives through river fugue, and your head took enough of a blow to cause real damage. But now you wake, in the last hour of the afternoon. The sun is setting.”

I guessed, then, and half-sat up. “The farmer and his wife?”

“Heru and Triske. You must learn all the names, Del. No one else knows anyone. That is for our safety. But the Blooded will depend on you.”

My vision swam when I tried to shake my head, and I was nearly sick. “All I do is fail. I failed the examination. I brought an un-Blooded to our meeting, and couldn’t even escape on my own when she brought the Greens upon us.”

Batyst raised his eyes to meet my own; he had been looking at the floor – lost, I suppose, within his own thoughts even as he answered my questions. “To infiltrate the Temple always was unlikely; what happened was exactly what I expected,” he said. “The girl was a surprise, but she warned us that the guards were coming. We would not have known. We should have taken the smuggler’s gate rather than the stair. We drew attention to ourselves. But the Greens did not catch anyone. We have all dispersed or returned to the city. The Blooded are safe.”

“But the call of the Well of the Dead,” I said. “It stopped.” When I realized that my arms could not hold my upper body above the bed any longer, I fell back, exhausted.


Ryn smiled. “Each day we learn anew. Now we know that either the Wells of the Dead are not unconcerned for us, or that the Blood is not as indifferent as we suppose.”

“Where is she?” I asked. “What were those ships, those spheres? Are they still there?”

“She is safe. I thought you would know about the ships. You have spent far more time with the Historians than I. The whole world is talking about them. And I doubt that they will go away as soon as we might like.”

I closed my eyes and thought. “They are Orchids,” I said. “the greatest engines of the Profusion. The gods gave them to humanity so that they might leave the Earth, and when all the worlds had been colonized, the Profusion used them first against the heretics, then in the long losing wars against the winds of the void. They were thought utterly destroyed.”

“Nine of them now circle our own world.”

“The Profusion is beginning anew, then. Other humans have come to trade and talk with us, and we have much to learn. They can be our allies, our friends.”

“No,” Batyst shook his head. “Friends seldom come in force. And I do not feel the grace of the Profusion being restored. True, Historian Senre did say their shrouds matched the colors of the shield worlds, of our ancient sister planets beside the nearest stars.”

“Then that’s why the Faith went up to the Needles, because he had heard that they were coming. The Needles must be observatories! It wasn’t about that relic ship at all. But that means the Needles knew those ships were coming, and their veilmen told the Faith. But why didn’t he tell us that? Why didn’t you know? Have the crews of the Orchids said anything? And how has all this happened since last night?”

Batyst reached over and grasped my shoulder. “Rest, Del,” he said. “You’ve been ill for three days. I’ve met with the Public of Guilds and returned. You are still recovering, though it seems the Blood has perhaps helped you fight the river virus. But the concerns of the world are too big for all of us. What is not too big for us is that through all of this there has been good news. No, not good news – great news.”

I stopped staring at the ceiling and turned to look at him. “Three days? I’ve missed the payment, then. I’ve lost my stall. I’ll be demoted in the guild. It’ll be months before I can afford another one.”

Now Batyst reached up and covered my eyes with his palm. “Rest, Del Tanich of Ariel. I’ve spoken with your guild and loaned you money from my account. You’ll have a booth to sell your seeds. But that is not important. What is important is that the High Historian Salaan, the great Head of all the Order of the Children of History, has washed up, even more ill than you. on friendly Sepiran shores. The Guardian there reports that he is on death’s own door.”

Instead of risking the nausea of shaking my head again, this time I merely sighed. “But what has that to do with us? Even if he dies, another Historian will just replace him. Senre, probably, and someone worse will just come here to take his place.”

Ryn’s laughter boomed through the little room. “No, Del, no one will replace Salaan. Because someone already has! He has been exiled, without due procedure. It was a palace revolution in Kasora that’s kept it silent. A rogue power sits in the Jade Temple now. But our Senre already contests their authority. He’s sent couriers to every city and Temple on this continent. The Order of the Historians is crumbling. Their house fights against itself— just as we prepare to strike it down.”

With a grin that held all the confidence of a sun, Batyst stood up and put his hand upon my shoulder, “ Rest, Del,” he said softly. “You’re going to need it.” With that, and with his typical resounding stride, he left.

And I shall admit, dear reader, I did sleep more soundly for knowledge of the High Historian. Batyst and I have both thought much on the effects of our insurrection, whenever it succeeds, and how the Order of History itself would respond. Now it seemed that they might not be able to.

When I woke again, it was morning and I felt quite well. I ate whole bowls of Heru’s simple and splendid soup before spending the rest of the day strolling through Triske’s broad fields. The earth was soft and rich and I wondered if perhaps there might be business in selling that to people in the city, right alongside my seeds. Every gardener in Ariel complains of the soil they must dig up from their basements. But how in the grace of the Profusion would I ever convince a farmer to sacrifice even a gram of it?

Then I chanced to look at the sky and chastised myself for such concerns: five of the Orchids, large as they were, still showed during the day, the dark black of their sides not quite absorbing all the sun that chanced to strike them. They’ve said nothing, Heru assured me.

She also related the Faith’s full statement on the issue: we will await further developments. Whereas the Orchids have taken no action against Thaeron itself, we will take no action beyond calling the Guardian to double their patrols. Whereas recent activity within particular Needles coincides with the orbital proximity of an Orchid ship, and whereas the crews of the Orchids remain silent and inactive, we have reason to believe that the Needles themselves possess significant defensive capabilities. On them all Thaeron will rely. Such is the thinking of our elected bureaucrat.

It was nightfall and I was still considering all of this – and wondering how I could discreetly return to the city, and sitting down to write these pages – when a great knock pounded my door. I knew it instantly, as kind Triske had but tapped gently when he came with my breakfast, and as I’d heard Ryn’s knock so many times upon my own door in Ariel. He is the only Blooded, too, who knows where each Blooded lives. The rest of us are left with the chance knowledge of friendship and association – and more than one of us has been surprised to see a tavern chum pass naked through the earth and into the Blood’s particular bliss. I suppose he will tell me these things, too, whenever he believes I’m ready.

But he came in as though I were in my own room, with the bravado and sincerity of an autumn squall, and I noted that that first chill of that season had descended on Ariel. Soon I will change over to selling winter seeds, those that do with less light and warmth in the year-round gardens. Though those sell more cheaply, I have always preferred the autumn of the year. That is the season that feels most like living to me, as we all of us inhabit that time when our summer’s grace can only be remembered on certain afternoons, and when the nights tell us of darkness and death to come. The Feasts of Present Days in the fall of the year have always been my favorites, though they remind everyone what will happen when the Historians, machines, and histories all fade into collapse or obsolescence, as inevitably they must.

“Come now, Del!” boomed Batyst. “The revolution will be joyous! We should be, too.”

“She said it would be boring, if we’re the ones who do it.” I snorted.

He raised his eyebrows at this, but said nothing. Instead he walked over beside the window to stand with his back toward me and said, “I want you to come with me, Del.”

Christology: On Brock & Parker's Feminist Critique

I couldn’t help but wonder, reading this, if the authors had actually encountered the same kind of Christianity I had. To be sure, the abuses of Christian doctrine to pin suffering on the victims and to minimize, sacrilize, or obfuscate the suffering of the disenfranchised is itself a long and unfortunately storied history. They are without doubt right in their analysis concerning the ways Christian teaching have been used as a weapon throughout the ages, and I agree and sympathize with them on many counts in that regard.

Where I think I would depart from those readings is 1) understanding ‘the tradition’ or ‘the Church’ as a monolithic entity without much apparent complexity or redeeming value and 2) understanding the abuse of church dogma as necessarily indicative of the nature of that dogma itself. For instance, ‘the central image of Christ on the cross as the savior of the world communicates the message that suffering is redemptive’ could just as plausibly be said, within Christian tradition, to communicate the message that Jesus’s suffering is redemptive.

To what degree and in what manner Christians are to follow that act has been subject to a great diversity of opinion and interpretation; I am not aware of any dogmatic formulation that puts anyone back up on the cross with Jesus. Nor I am aware of anyone ever saying that ‘imitation of Christ is first and foremost obedient willingness to endure pain.’ It’s simply something I’ve never heard outside of a few extreme ascetics that the Church has by and large abandoned anyway. Perhaps I have not been told that because I am a man; I do not know. But it’s certainly nothing within my own experience.

What is within the realm of the Christianity I have encountered is something like ‘imitation of Christ is first and foremost obedient willingness to love.’ So much of Christianity makes no sense whatsoever outside of that cornerstone – and so much of it makes enormous sense within it. Christ’s suffering was great because it was for love. Christ’s suffering was efficacious because it was for love. To love in this life is to experience pain. That is unavoidable. That is inevitable. The modernist, just utopia free of all suffering whatsoever isn’t going to happen in this life. That’s no endorsement of suffering, that doesn’t mean it’s all okay. It just means we’re going to have to deal with it.

God was saying in Christ that we love anyway, because God loves anyway. Even God doesn’t love without pain. Even God isn’t ‘safe.’ That might not have been articulated in any atonement theology as such, and I believe this an error that tradition has indeed made. But certainly anyone who knows John 3:16 ought at least to have the principle of love in mind. Brown and Parker posit that their approach is theological, not biblical. And I’m sorry for that. So much of their concerns could be addressed simply by an ethic genuinely and steadfastly grounded in biblical love. That’s both more and less revolutionary than anything they propose, and an element that both they and their oppressors have overlooked.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust XIX

I sighed. “We would overthrow the Temple,” I said. “We would slaughter all the Order of the Children of History in Ariel, and burn the Temple of the History to the ground. We would not leave one jade stone atop another.”

She looked to see that I was serious, then quite unapologetically laughed. “Ha! Del, they are priests and tax collectors all in one! Of course you want to kill them. Every mother in the Flats, I think, has a knife hidden in her skirts, just waiting for an opportunity! But this perhaps is only what everyone tells themselves. Nothing ever happens.”

I scowled. “You think we are afraid? Pseudonymous has been building our campaign for twenty years! There are hundreds of us, soon a thousand, and any one of us would give our lives to see that Temple come burning down. We’ve infiltrated the People’s Public of Guilds, and –”

“Wait, did you say Pseudonymous? The propagandist?” She clapped her hands and I drew her close, to stifle the sound. “I adore his broadsides! ‘Revelation is revolution’ and ‘Murder is their mortar’ and ‘Beware despair.’ I have to meet him! But I asked what you’d done, not who you were. And I think you didn’t say anything.”

I stopped her utterly; we had neared the thicket anyway. “It’s not an adventure,” I flared. “It will kill you, and you won’t be happy until it does, because that’s the way it works! I shouldn’t have brought you. It was stupid and selfish. You’ll endanger us – and the Temple was looking for you already! No. Don’t follow. Stay here. Hide in the bushes until I go in, then go back along the shore alone and up the stairs and forget everything you saw. Because you’re never coming back.”

Her face wanted to crumple in the way that women’s sometimes do, but she held it back with a steel set to her jaw and eyes flashed brightly in the moonlight. “Idiot!” she whispered, fierce. “The Historians found me the day before I came to you – that was why I did it! And I didn’t tell them anything because I didn’t know. I was still just following rumors!”

I motioned her to silence, but she continued. “I think the Temple flatters you. You perhaps have not done anything. The Historians are fine, the Temple is fine. The taxes, I think, are doing just fine as well. No one’s been kidnapped or extorted, you haven’t even tried to bribe the veilmen over to your side. Perhaps your revolution will be dull.”

“Adlasola, listen – it’s not a game! Historians will die, and the Temple will come down.”
She snorted. “I think perhaps it won’t. Perhaps you are those people who plan forever and give speeches and have meetings and never accomplish anything whatsoever. I think that makes you worse, because your rhetoric only encourages the Historians to oppress us more.”

I pushed her down before I turned away; I had heard more Blooded coming. I walked over to where those who’d already come stood in a circle in the center of the wood – there was barely even a clearing here, only a small space a span or so across where the trees had failed to grow, and ferns and grasses had come up. I could hear other Blooded picking their way through the woods behind me; I prayed that Adlasola stayed well hidden. Sensing my presence, the call of the Well of the Dead faded to mere anticipation, another trick that Ryn uses to magnificent effect.

But he didn’t say anything to the rest. Instead, Ryn turned to face me from the near the center, his face showing that he had quite expected me. “Del,” he said, “We need –”

Whatever he was about to say, I did not hear it then. Instead, a shrill cry cut the quiet.

“Guards!” Adlasola screamed, from precisely where we had last spoken, Torches flared just outside the clearing, someone was almost entirely upon us. “The Green Guard!”

Batyst eyes shot wide as he glanced around the clearing.

“Run, Blooded! To the river! Swim for the other side!”

And there indeed was our escape. Not thinking that we would dare the strong currents, the Green Guard, the Temple’s own independent police, had failed to surrounded the copse of woods entirely. The way to the river was quite clear.

With everyone else, I ran, thinking constantly of Adlasola. I could not call her name, or the guards would know to look for her. And the only danger she had brought tonight had been that upon herself. They would have been nearly upon her when she called out, only a pace or two away in the darkness, torches still unlit.

But I could not turn; the crowd of the Blooded pressed shoulder to shoulder to the river as the guards tried to close their trap around us. I tripped over rocks. Branches scratched my face and bitter fear burned my mouth and throat. Dead, I thought, dead if any of us are caught.

But the first of us reached the river’s edge, splashing into it. On either side burned the torches of the guards, pressing, their torches weaving spots of orange like fireflies at night. The first cold waters of the river soaked through my shoes.

Then some gap between the rocks on the shore grabbed my foot and wrenched all balance from me. I fell so quickly I could not use my hands to stop. M y head hit a patch of that shell rock that is common to the shoreline, and the whole dark world bloomed with color. I was uncertain at first what had happened; I was quite dazed. I rolled over on my back. I saw strange things, and decided to lay down there in the cool water, where perhaps the guards would fail to see me.

But, dear reader, a great broad hand reached to grab my shoulder picked me up as though I were a smallish sack of seed. It forced my shoulder against some great broad side, and I knew immediately who held me. Ryn Batyst’s great hand always grabbed my shoulder so, and I have been with him through the many depths of night. My feet barely touched the sand again before we reached water deep enough to swim. With all the rest of the Blooded, we swam together for the western shore, though he half-carried me.

Ryn laughed midstroke. “Their armor,” he said. “They can’t follow us. They’ll have to run back for the boats. They’ll be a watch just getting back.”

I wanted to laugh, too. It was that ridiculousness one feels whenever great danger has passed one over. I wanted to laugh, I wanted to flirt, I wanted to run for three straight days, but that was only my body speaking. My mind was quite distracted, as I fear it always will be now.

For, dear reader, when that stone had tripped me and I had turned over on the shoreside sand, I had looked up for a moment into the night, and I’d seen the leafy tops of the summer trees, and I’d seen the stars on a cloudless night, and I’d seen the loathsome blackness of the void.

But in the midst of those heavens, which must surely hold all the wonder and horrors of the gods, I also saw: three great spheres, round and large as moons. They were no satellites, not natural ones at least. They were not relics; their lights shone and blinked as brightly as those of the sentient torches in our city, and even from so far I could see the jade haze of their energy shrouds warding them against disaster. The spheres did not burn, because they did not fall from orbit. They did not fall, because those ships were crewed.

Thus I became the first person, so far as I know, to see the great change that has come to Thaeron. For the first time in a thousand thousand years, our world is not alone.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust VIII

“By day, the common,” she said, her knuckles still pressed against the frame. I could hardly see more of her, that hand alone being lit by that strange white fire of the sentient torches.

“In truth, the people,” I replied, still somewhat breathless from the walk.

Then she stepped out into the street, and I said no more. She wore only a simple taught wrap precisely the color of furrowed earth and a coal gray chemise snug beneath – and was more alluring than I dare express. Her pale round face shone in the moonlight, and her hair in the night could have been painter’s red itself, though I knew it much lighter by day. She has the eyes of a child both in roundness and in life, though her expression in that instant was of someone twice our age – and I guess we are very close in that. Her cheeks hold the high thin bones of a waif, but are fuller now than they must once have been, and the effect is as though she is always starting to smile about something she isn’t ever going to tell you, but is all in good humor anyway.

Of the rest, dear reader, I tell little, because her effects must be particular to me, else she would have been taken up into the merchant houses long ago. But suffice it to say that the wrap showed that, far from emaciation, she curved precisely as a woman ought to curve – and if she overshot the mark, it was stylishly so, her form all of one accord. Her beauty is not, I should take care to note, obvious, but rather natural, undeniable, and infectious, the sort you find yourself thinking about much later.

More specifics, dear reader, I must leave to your imagination, if for no other reason than that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her stand quite still. Her self-portrait turns out to be quite accurate: she is quite the opposite of any possible pose.

She crossed the street and took my arm in hers. “It’s the best a girl from the farms might wear, yes? You can walk me home, I think. We are leaving the plateau? I suppose we’ll take the Portage Stair.”

I nodded. “We usually don’t, but tonight we will, yes.”

We started walking south; the call of the Wells of the Dead increased to that point that feels an itch inside the skull. I decided that I absolutely could not let it be distracting.

“Then how do you possibly descend, without the guards noticing?” she asked. “Is there a tunnel?” Her eyes glimmered merrily. “Or is it perhaps a secret stair?”

“The smuggler’s gate,” I said, averting my eyes from a patrolling guard walking in the opposite direction. “They hide rope, hundreds of feet of it, all throughout the city. Boats come up the Profuse River each night, past the docks, to prearranged points around the plateau. The smugglers hammer a pulley into the cliff and tie off one after the other to carry up and down. A big crew and it’s done in less than a watch, the wares in a fence-house, the men in taverns, the rope recoiled, and nothing left but the little rock-hole the pulley made.”

Though all this we kept walking; I was glad to see when our steps fell in time together. “And of course,” I said, trying to anticipate her questions, “any petty criminal worth his salt memorizes the routes of the patrols.”

“The Blooded are brigands, then?” she asked. “Marvelous!”

“Some of us are, yes,” I said. “Enough to know that you shouldn’t leave your door open when you’re in your place alone.”

“Was it?” she asked, and I looked at her to see if she was serious.

“Yes!” I said, seeing that she was. “It’s dangerous. What were you doing in there?”

“Waiting. Not for you – how could I have known? And I think I don’t stay alone every night. But waiting. Do you ever listen to the city? Simply sit with it and listen?”

We neared that circle that marks the center of Ariel, the locus of all its power. It was of course nearly empty, with the great ashen doors of Speaking Hall closed to public petitioners after dusk, the Temple services of Dusk and Night’s Watch long ago concluded, and the White’s barracks not yet changing out the guard for those that specialize in vice and theft. Only some few pedestrians walked coupled just as we were, and two solitary petitioners made prayers over the Healing Well.

“I believe,” I said smiling, “that I more often smell it.”

She laughed, and this quite naturally was my reward. “No! I mean, we all do that, though the Faiths have been quite clever, channeling down through the rocks. Thank the Profusion for indoor pipes! Though perhaps the River does not thank us. But I mean: the people in this city live nowhere else, and work happens that is particular to here. Each city has a tone that is utterly unique.”

I frowned. “I have never been outside this city.” We had crossed the circle and were walking through that desultory district that comes between Ariel’s center and the Portage Stairs. The Gates, citizens call it, because it is there that Ariel welcomes its visitors with moneychangers and taverns, taxmen, customhouses and brothels, inns and the houses of the bondsmen who for a fee might orchestrate a friend’s release from prison.

She turned to me, her face all a mimicry of a sham-prophet’s shrewdness. “You will, young man,” she said. “You perhaps will go very far from here. And old I think! You will endure much longer than anyone has ever thought to live. And wisdom, good sir! Travel and great wisdom will you gain!”

I laughed. “Well done! But no Blooded expect to live so long, or even leave this valley.”

“Yet you are so cavalier! You say such serious things and then you laugh about them. One wonders if perhaps you do not believe, or if you are not honest with yourself.”

We reached the top of the Portage Stair together; it stretched far away from us on either side. “It is, I think, that we feel more sadness than anyone else could hope to imagine, and we’ve grieved for so long that it all becomes frivolity. I’m doing you a great disservice by taking you.”

She grew quiet at this and we paused, looking out over the valley. The moon was bright and shining on the lake the Profuse River makes at the docks, and on the snows of the peaks and on the glaciers of the mountain passes – and, far overhead, yet looming very near, on the twinned silver spikes of the Needles, which I have not yet introduced. I’ve neglected to include those incredible towers, perhaps, precisely because they are so inescapably apparent, from every street and corner of Ariel. But these are not buildings in the sense that humans make them. Our edifices bear faults of caulk and seam, evidence of mortar and wear and flawed or rough construction.

But the spires that stand atop the cliffs of the gap where the Profuse River slides southward through the mountains – their artifice shows no fault at all. The Needles are remnant towers of the Profusion, crafted by the gods themselves. They rear like great slivered fangs from either side of that gap for thousands of feet, meeting in height even the peaks of local mountains, and their tips, the Historians say, are no wider than a finger. Yet their great round bases, broad as the Temple itself at sixty strides across, are so much a part of the cliffs that one wonders how they might ever have been separate, that the Needles did not spring wholesale from the mountainside. They have no sides, because their bases and heights are circular, to what the Historians say is geometric perfection. And on all the thousands of such Needles scattered throughout the continents and seas of Thaeron, no one has ever found so much as a solitary crack.

One truly wishes that someone knew what all of them were for.

“Did you hear,” I said, lest Aldasola not be entertained, “that the Faith went up to wake one today? To wake a Needle.”

“What?” she laughed. “That’s absurd. They choose the Faiths precisely because they can’t wake machinery at all. They’re why Profusionist technology’s prohibited here, and why the city’s sacred. And why, in all the Profusion, would the Faith go up and wake something that no one knows how to actually use?”


She took the first step down, and I followed. There were eight hundred more, the Portage Stair being, besides the Needles and the Speaking Hall, the great outstanding feature of Ariel. They span nearly fifty paces, with a great broad ramp running up the middle between two sections, for the teams of oxen and bullocks to pull their carts. And all, of course, in the smooth crushed and polished white stone of Ariel, quarried up out of the Profuse River’s bed. It is a stone unique in all Thaeron – not even the jewel city Kasora can claim to have it – and the stair was built to be Ariel’s great welcome to the world.

“Oh, you should hear the rumors,” I said, to her delight. “The Faith went up to contact the great fleet that relic ship fell away from. The Faith went up to ask the Needles why the High Temple in Kasora does not answer his inquiries. The Faith went up to ask the veilmen what precisely it is that Needles do! How could you have missed all that?”

Even going down the stair we stepped as though we were one soul, though I feared I could not take her where she wanted.

“Well,” she sighed. “I’m afraid I am quite bored by politics.” It took me a long time, even after that, to make up my mind, and longer still to speak it.

“You can’t follow me,” I finally said, when we had reached the bottom of the stair and strode along the boardwalk that joins them to the docks. “Not the whole way. Not yet. I have not spoken with our master. The Blooded will be suspicious. Your presence would disrupt the ceremony. But observe, and you’ll see more of the ceremony than I will, though I have not told you enough to understand it.”

I led her to the left along the quay, and toward that long stretch of shore that squeezes between the Dock Lake and the base of the southern Gidwinn Mountains; in some places, it was barely broader then a cart. But just before the base of those cliffs upon whose tops the Needles stand, the shore flares out again into a peninsula, where there grows a dense copse of trees. From there, the Blood of History called.

“Well?” she asked, when I suppose my silence had gone on long enough. “What are you all about? What is it that the Blooded actually do?”

Matthew: On the Pastoral Tone of the Sermon on the Mount

This was for me the most valuable/enjoyable of the readings of the class so far, though at first I wandered where Lischer was going with it. Yet the second half really shone. “The Sermon seems strangely bereft of a pastor; yet what it offers can best be characterized as radical pastoral care...its chief actor is not a chosen professional but the people themselves.”

Amen! In my brief time (as a non-Lutheran) here, I’ve been amused whenever people talk about clergy being “pastoral” in their care for people; my thought has always been “But they’re just being human.” Which is not to go on some kind of personal rant, but it is to say that if people took the Sermon on the Mount seriously we might move toward a Christian version of the Jewish understanding that rabbis are professional Jews. Pastors are professional Christians. They do what we’re all supposed to be doing anyway.

Perhaps that is what people meant, and I just haven’t been hearing it?

Beyond that, it’s interesting how empowering the Sermon on the Mount can be if taken in the manner Lischer suggests. “Pastoral care in this sense can no longer be separated from ‘administration’ but now, instead of training Christians to be committees, the church will train them to be pastors, those who care for their brothers and sisters in the stress and conflict of daily life.”

The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a sermon at all. It’s not a moral purity code to whose lofty aspirations we cannot possibly rise. It’s a guide for how to live, as humans and as Christians and as Christians in community, much the same as the Decalogue was for the Hebrews, and without all the legalistic consequences.

Perhaps that’s what all sermons are meant to be, and I just haven’t been hearing them?

The eschatological nature of the Sermon is less easy to discern; the language certainly isn’t eschatological. But “an indicative with the force of a promise” doesn’t require stars falling from heaven to address the already/ not yet of God’s coming and present kingdom. All it has to do is direct and exhort communities of people into God’s vision for humanity – and there is the Sermon on the Mount. It’s promises, made by God, are so certain that we already have their benefits. “What we do now is a downpayment on the perfect peace, harmony, love, purity and worship that will characterize the End.”

Indeed. What all sounds so impractical – and the Sermon certainly sounds that way to us – is at bottom eminently pragmatic, and that’s the wisdom of taking the Sermon pastorally, and, I would add, the value of taking Scripture seriously to start with. To interpret Scripture is to apply it. To apply it is to live with its considerations foremost in one’s heart and mind, to be ‘shocked’ into a transformed way of life. The Sermon on the Mount addresses itself specifically to this purpose.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust VII

Chapter Three

July 41, 440 Y.A.

“The Blooded do not proselytize,” once said Ryn Batyst. “Those who come are called. Those who are called, come. And they come alone. The Wells of the Dead do not make exceptions.”

We spoke in the urchin’s tongue I had learned long before the Temple found me; this pidgin language has the great virtue of sounding like nonsense that only simpletons might understand. It has been of great service to the Blooded.

“But how does that work?” I asked, still exuberant after my first successful Blooding. “The Wells of the Dead have slept for a thousand years. How can they elect a single soul at a specific time and know that it’s the right one? And how in all the Profusion do they possibly agree?”

Batyst laughed. It was spring and the cormorants cried out upon the lake – that is, where the docks reach out into the broad deep waters of the Profuse River to greet the Profusionist and common ships. We were standing atop the Portage Stair, where we had agreed to meet, because the crowds would ensure our anonymity.

“That,” said Ryn Batyst, “neither the Blood of History nor the Wells of the Dead have ever deigned to say. Nor do they say who does the choosing, or how they cooperate. It is not for nothing that we call them our mystery.”

I started to object, but Batyst raised a finger to caution me.

“But it is no mystery why we do not ourselves reach out. The Blood ensures our loyalty. We ourselves cannot. And simply failing to report recovered Profusionist technology to our dear Temple carries the penalty of death. Can you imagine if the Historians knew we were using it ourselves? Never forget, Del – we are dead if we’re discovered. It’s not worth the risk.”

Then he turned to look me in the eye – we both had been admiring the westward view over the lake and up the hills on the other side and up, up into the snows and glaciers of the Gidwinn Mountains – and did what Ryn Batyst always does. He promised more.

“The Blood of History, Del, proselytizes more capably than you or I could ever hope to do. The Wells of the Dead have safely expanded our ranks for decades. And it is the beginning. It is only the beginning. Today there are hundreds. There will soon be thousands. And by the time the Blood of History is done there will not be a soul in this city who will not hearken to the Wells of the Dead of Ariel!”

His hand upon my shoulder felt like the weight of truth itself. “Only,” he said. “We must be patient. We live on truth’s time, not our own. The Blood of History decides who becomes Blooded. We ourselves do not.”

So on the day that she came to me, Adlasola Oso waited as I slowly measured out her seed. While my hand remained steady as a mason’s, I do not know how it did not shake.

“You must be patient,” I whispered, peering down into my sacks so that none could read my lips. “We serve the Blood of History, and we come only when it calls. In a few nights or a week, probably no more than two, I will come for you. Can you tell me where you live? Quietly, you are still my customer.”

She nodded, “Corin’s Row in the Flats, beside the shrine to the sixteenth Faith, number seven.” She slid her coin toward me across my counter. I stood up again, settling the larger bags again behind me.

She lived but ten blocks from me – and little better. I nodded too, and handed her the paper pouch carrying her small cupful of seeds, my eyes still fixed upon the ground.

“I know it.” I said, pocketing her shilling. “I’ll knock before midnight. I’ll say ‘By day, the common.’ If you are ready and alone, answer ‘In truth, the people.’ If you say anything else, or if you say nothing, or if you are not alone, I will leave. But if you say that, I will take you to the Blood. Wear loose dark clothing and shoes for long walking, and do not expect to return before the dawn. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide. Already, I thought, she goes deeper than she expected. I felt suddenly that if she went with me, then she would surely die.

“You’ll gain nothing,” I said, low and quiet. “The night I enter, no one dares to paint.”

She flared, and was devastating in her beauty. “Then I think perhaps you all are cowards,” she said, and in a whirl of robes – I remember she was wearing blue that day, the azure of the summer sky – she was gone within a crowd of masseuses, those women who wear their own sleeves shortened to show their oiled hands.

It was precisely, I imagine, the sort of exit she always makes: abrupt and without any kind of explanation. Even in that first encounter she seemed one of those who lacks that otherwise ubiquitous capacity which men call self-regard.

I stood for ten minutes shuffling through my sacks and did not call out a price. I remember very little else which occurred that day, and profited almost nothing for the afternoon. I’ll never know if the morrow would have returned my mind to normal; the Blood of History called me again that very night.

I have hesitated to describe this summons. The closest approximation is that it starts as appetite. One begins to look forward to the Wells of the Dead as one anticipates satiating hunger, or satisfying other attractions of the flesh – that same warm tingling, a sort of low dull fire. But it does not stop at this; rather, the burn becomes an itch, the crawling becomes particular, and then one feels as though a worm burrows within one’s skull, and it is only walking toward the acting Well of the Dead the relieves of that particular discomfort. If you still do not come – in some few hours it feels as though every cell within your skull has utterly combusted, and the worm within your brain is digging out through one’s own head.

The way to the Well of the Dead is the way, the only way, into coolness and relief. Most Blooded come as soon as they are able. Few have fought it very long. And no one has ever dared discover what happens if one resists entirely.

I say all this, dear reader, because for Adlasola Oso I delayed. The call of the Well of the Dead came to me from the south and west, near the Needle Stair; I knew this as clearly as I knew that her apartment lay to the north and east, near the tip of the plateau. The walk would add an hour to the journey; a wiser soul would have picked a better night.

But to the north and east I went, as soon as I had closed and locked my door. As I did, I hid my key inside my boot, loosening my rough cloth trousers over their tops, so that no pickpocket could reach it, but Lud the stevedore would find it readily. I worried already about Adlasola – who would see her to her rooms, if I was to be unconscious? Whom could I trust? And what could I tell Batyst, if I could not avoid him?

Such thoughts carried me to her door; I do not remember precisely how I got there, and it does not matter – all the little streets of the Flats crook and meet alike, one block of rooms very much undistinguished from another, even to those like myself who once called the alleys of Ariel our home. But I was warmer than I should have been and sweating by the time I reached the shrine of the sixteenth Faith, and paused there to take my breath.

Unnamed, undistinguished and only dimly remembered, a shrine is all he gets, a marble statue of a man kneeling, as all the Faiths have knelt, to drink the vial of Letherium by which he forsakes his previous life entirely, and forgets everything he has done before that day. Thus each Faith can serve the world selflessly for another forty years or more – if the grace of the Profusion grants it, though of course it seldom does.

Her door was open, a possibility I had not anticipated. There was no light inside, and I wondered suddenly if she had gone or never lived there at all. But a knocking sound came from just inside.