Moroni 10

Moroni again. This will probably be my last post on these plates. A will and testament of sorts. A dispatch from the skull territory I live in.

This is year 420 since Christ’s sign dawned on the landscape. And now I’m burying this record of it with a sacred sermon for its epitaph.

If you read this, it’s God letting you. He’s the champion of mercy when justice is beating his face. That’s how it’s been since the first man stood up in a garden and will be when the last man sits down to read the final word of earth’s story.

If you read these words, mounds of them like the mounds where we heap our dead, I ask one thing of you: ask God what’s not to believe in them. If you do that, not on the cheap, but with the most expensive feelings your heart can afford, God will tell you it’s all true.

It’s a law of truth: it’s gauged by the aerial view of God’s ahistorical spirit.

Goodness tells the truth. And truth tells of goodness, sometimes trapped in the layers you have to pull back: there it is. And when you find it, you find the Great Reconciliation.

God is love. But to get to that love you have to go through the gate of faith. It’s a gate that, when you go through it, the exhaustion you earned to find it starts to blow away like leaves in a strong wind. That wind is God’s spirit. It started when the hot, fresh earth began to cool. And it just keeps blowing.

You fight about diversity. That’s half of what’s grinding you down to extinction. We have a thousand different gifts. But only one Giver. We travel a thousand roads with our gifts. But we crisscross the landscape of faith to beautify it, not distort it.

God gives wisdom here, knowledge there, faith here, curative powers there, unforeseen illogical happenstances here, visionary illuminations about character and hidden agendas there, sight of invisibility here, deft oratory there, exegesis of the spells and incantations we live by here, and … do you follow me?

God gives all this wondrous assortment of treasure and bafflement to whomever he wants, genetics be damned, privilege be damned, even authority be damned. Don’t dare fence it in.

This is how the world works, hallelujah, from the first seed of it till the last blossom dies. It’s only doubt that puts any of it in check.

But what makes it all grow is faith, hope, and love, as my dad taught. Each leads to the next. All are prerequisites to the advanced studies in which we enroll at death.

Don’t prioritize too much. Without hope the mind collapses into itself. That’s what we call “the wages of sin.”

On the other hand, faith enables everything else you will ever want to do, especially the good deeds Jesus commands.

I know, I’m rambling. But think of my circumstance. How do you keep a clear head when people are on the hunt to cut it off?

Still, I keep going on this theme: if God’s gifts ever dry up and wither it will be because doubt sucked the life from them.

Someone will be to blame for every molecule of that death. Blessed is the man who transcends that blame. Cursed is every blameworthy heart. Hell is gaping at it and for it.

Jesus is telling me these things. Don’t dismiss them. Because I’ll die soon—but in God’s time it’s not long before you do, too. And we’ll both be sitting on the bench in the hall waiting for our courtroom appearance. When we go into that room the judge will ask you, “Didn’t you hear what he said? Didn’t you read it, that voice, once thought silenced, that keeps hissing from the ground?”

Someday they’ll call it “white noise,” that hissing that floods your ears when you think you’re in a silent place. That hissing, the electricity of your body’s nerve endings, is God whispering, gasping out his all-generational thoughts. If you listen hard enough, it will say, “Believe.” And, I believe, believe me.

Come to Jesus and take your gift. Don’t steal gifts that aren’t yours, or start to unwrap any that smell bad. Those are counterfeit.

Get up Jerusalem—I speak in metaphor—get up Zion, prop yourself up like a tent, stretch the fabric, drive the tent stakes as far apart as you can. Shun confusion, but open your minds to new explanations of your lives. Make promises to God and keep them, as if you were daring him to keep his.

Come to Jesus and ripen at last. Push away anti-divinity. If you do, attempting the grandest love you can conceive—the love of the hidden owner of the universe—then grace, the unearned favor of a son or daughter, will suffice. You will ripen and, with that transformation, exclude any further dispute about who and what is behind it.

If you let God’s grace bring you to full maturity, like the fat white fruit Lehi plucked from the tree and devoured, then you understand the Great Reconciliation, the new deal God handed the planet when his son flushed from Mary’s womb. The blood of his birth, the blood of his death—all of it is the ink God signs his name with to protect his children and declare them as holy as he is. Not for human consumption.

I’m spent now. I’m over. I’m headed for that courtroom I told you about. And when I get there the Great Reconciliation will turn into the Great Acquittal. Look up. I’ll be the clouds parting over the courthouse. Amen.