Category: Through a Glass Darkly

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Diary of a Plain Pastor: Dirty

The mistake she made wasn’t to fight dirt, sure enough, but to try and do away with it altogether. As if that were possible! A parish is bound to be dirty.                                                                                                                                     {Diary of a Country Priest}

If you were to take a quick tour of our home, you’d find an upstairs door with a hole, crushed by a seven-year-old known as “our little hurricane.” You’d discover swaths of blue (or is it green now?) goo permanently melded into our nine-year-old’s bomb shelter (aka “room”). You’d find sketches scribbled across their (previously white) ceilings, just above their loft beds. And their bathroom – please, for the love of all that is holy and true, do not go into their bathroom – brings their mother to tears.

But of course, each of these scuffs and smells marks the presence of a boy we love, a son that has come, in such inexplicable ways, to mark our own life, our own hopes. The one thing worse than having all this chaos would be not having this chaos.

Churches are too enamored with cleaning up the chaos. Pastors, myself included, are too bent on getting the family (and this is what a church is, of course – a family) polished and scrubbed clean. A parish is bound to be dirty, at least if it’s going to have any life happening within it. Living always kicks up the dust.

The work of the church — the life of the church, that’s better — is to be a place where all the things we hide, all the things that undo us, all the things that frighten us have space to come out into the open. The church is the community where people discover what it means to live well, to love well – to be loved well. But this takes time. Rarely does it happen with a 40 Days Toward Cleanliness campaign. If my pastoral aims point at getting our church to have the right image, then I’ve abandoned my call – and I guarantee I’ve also run roughshod over people in making it happen. I’ve missed their stories. I’ve manipulated friendship. I may have managed a crusade, but I haven’t been a pastor.

Shame gets results. Brute force gets results. So does a cattle-prod. But grace and prayers and true questions (ones that say I want to know you, not I want to work you) offer the possibility of more than a sparkling clean image. Grace transforms us; but it’s a messy thing getting there.

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Diary of a Plain Pastor: Carried

You can’t go offering the truth to human beings as though it were a sort of insurance policy, or a dose of salts. It’s the Way and the Life. God’s truth is the Life. We only look as though we were bringing it to mankind; really it brings us, my lad.

{Diary of a Country Priest}

If I believe anything, it’s this: a pastor is not a huckster.

Hucksters harangue, they prod. They flash a grin and slap your back and tell a story or two to work their charm. But they don’t show a broken heart. They don’t sit with you in your questions, adding their questions to the mix. They don’t want any complications. They’ve got a product to unload, a point to make. They’re working the vision.

Somewhere along the way, Christianity became a brand. And we pastors became the chief peddlers. It’s a shame. Hucksterism may work to build a corporate identity, a crowd, some momentum. But it’s still a shame, a sham.

I don’t trust a pastor who’s selling something. I don’t trust a pastor who doesn’t know his own story and her own wounds. But show me a pastor who wrestles with the truth and who’s full aware that some answers are hard won, over a life of faith and sweat and laughter and tears – show me that pastor, and I’ll listen, I’ll follow. I long for a pastor who’s living the good life, honest and good.

My hope is that I might be the kind of pastor I’m looking for, the kind of pastor I’d trust. And as I see it, this begins with me owning the fact that my wisdom and leadership acumen is mildly helpful, at best. I don’t have any grace to hand out that hasn’t first been handed to me. I didn’t die on a cross or rise from the dead. I’ve got nothing to sell, nothing worth buying at least. My vocation has nothing to do with hawking Jesus-ware.

My work is to be brought along, to be carried by the Story. I’m to listen and then to retell the Story as best I know – and to never pretend that I’ve got the golden keys to either mercy or mystery. Whatever I know, whatever I’ve been given, it’s been done to me. Grace carries me here and there, and washes me up on the bank wherever, whenever, she has the urge.

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Diary of a Plain Pastor: Blessing

‘You’re in trouble,’ he said. ‘You must bless me.’ And he took my hand and raised it quickly to his brow. Then he was gone. There was certainly a strong wind blowing, but for the first time I saw he hadn’t straightened his tall figure: he walked bowed.

{The Diary of a Country Priest}



Each Sunday, after our church has heard the Gospel and sung our hymns and conversed around a text, after we have passed the peace with kisses, handshakes and hugs, after we have confessed ours sins and received Jesus’ forgiveness, after we have gathered as hungry people around the Table, received our fill and then prayed our prayers of thanksgiving and intercession — after all these movements telling and enacting God’s story – we prepare to leave our space where we have been together. But we are not ready to leave just yet.

We wait for a blessing.

This has come to be one of the moments I most cherish as a pastor. In this holy space, I invite the people to cup their hands, in a Hebrew posture of receiving. Then, with all the authority I can muster, I speak a word of blessing over all who are gathered, our community of sinners and saints.

A blessing is a direct word. It is spoken to a person. I grab as many eyes as I can. A blessing, done right, will not allow the pastor to live in the abstract. I pray the blessing over a mom who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep for ages. I’m blessing the dad who’s getting the screws turned on him at work. I’m blessing the student who cuts herself. I’m blessing the guy who’s slept through our entire worship, the same way he’s sleeping through his life. I’m blessing the couple about to split up and the guy who thinks God’s a bunch of hooey.

But it’s not really my blessing. I am standing there, simply offering Gospel words. I’m reminding my people who they are and how loved they are – and I’m reminding them of their God and of the true story their God is writing for them. I’m blessing my people because I believe with all my heart that God loves them – and because I love them.

Some Sundays labor on, the sermon barely registering or my emotions flat. Some days have all the life of an old, whipped hound. I wish it weren’t so, but so be it. Still, I’ve been granted the sacred opportunity to bless. I raise my hands and raise my voice. People of God, I begin. And then I tell them who they are, and as I tell them, I tell myself. God knows I need a blessing.

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Divine Therapy

Recently, I enjoyed a conversation between Krista Tippet (on her NPR program On Being) and Vigen Guroian, Orthodox theologian and professor at the University of Virginia. Guroian narrated the various Biblical metaphors for the work Jesus Christ did for the redemption of humanity — though Jesus’ life, cross and resurrection.

Western Christianity, Guroian said, emphasized a “judicial” forgiveness, with the emphasis on debts paid, accounts settled, etc. Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, emphasizes the “divine therapeutic” aspects to Jesus’ work on our behalf. Through Jesus, our senses are restored, our body is healed, our mind made new. Through Jesus, we are given wholeness. Then, the question becomes (and this is more my question) how does the Christian walk into, appropriate and act upon this wholeness that, quite frankly, still seems like quite the pipe dream?

While Guroian contrasts the two theologies perhaps too starkly, his point has traction. Modern Christian theology has at times been too reticent to preach the this-world, very present message of Gospel wholeness, God’s intentions (and enactment in Jesus) to heal emotions, neighborhoods, wounds, families, systems of power, histories. Forgiveness and new creation is more than forensic and future but immediate, personal, now. It is now and it is also not yet. This is the mystery. This is the faith we are invited to experience as well as the faith toward which we hope.

The image centers on the Lord’s Table, the Eucharistic moment where the mysterious Kingdom of God breaks into the now, where our senses are touched, our hunger is sated with bread and our thirst filled with wine. This moment is not only for our memory, to recount what God has done, but for our encounter, to experience in that very meal the healing and restoration, the “divine therapy” if you will, of our Redeemer. Jesus, the Son of God, surrendered all the rights and prerogatives of being King of the Universe to come and heal us. God bled, died and rose again, to restore us to our full humanity, to joy, to life. Life with God. Life with ourselves. Life with others.

The Christian Gospel does not announce a message of self-help. We’ve seen the best of what we humans can manage, and it isn’t enough. What we need is the God of the Universe to touch our sorrows and our bodies, our minds and our memories. We need God to break into our governments and our economies. We need God to restore us, or we’re doomed. Good News: God has come. In Jesus, God is here. Through the Spirit, life and healing is ours. And not just ours, but our neighbors. Friends we’ve known for decades – and friends we don’t yet know. This restoration flows to all.

In all our strivings for new things, whether lofty or mundane, we are secretly reaching out to this new and imperishable life with God. And the promise of that new life, given to us irrevocably through Christ’s resurrection, grounds our hope that rapacious time will not swallow and make waste of our best efforts. In this time of worldwide crisis, we need the energy birthed by such hope as we undertake the daunting task of mending our lives and our world. We also need assurance that, no matter what happens to us, our lives are embraced by Christ’s new and imperishable life. {Miroslav Volf}

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Diary of a Plain Pastor: Bumbler

You’re too restless. Your’e like a hornet in a bottle. But I believe you have the spirit of prayer. 

{The Diary of a Country Priest}

I wish I had a nickel for every half-baked idea, every book I intended to write, every conversation I imagined having – but forgot. My wife Miska sniggers at my forgetfulness and my mispronounced (or made-up on the spot) words (friends have dubbed them winnisms). I’m too restless. I take a number of wrong turns. If I wore a clerical collar, most days it would boast a stain of coffee or smudge of salsa.

That hornet and I share a few things. We’re both bumblers.

Of course, I long to live attentive to God; and I could use a bit more order to create space for that to happen. However, I’m coming to see God among the imperfections, not against them. When you bumble, it’s a bit easier to shed pretense, to stop masquerading as God’s power-broker. I mean, who’s kidding who, right? And the words to the bumbler’s prayer come quick and easy: God, help me.

I’m learning that prayers are better prayed from weakness than from strength. Prayers when I’m lost. Prayers when I’m confused. Prayers when I’m despondent or blue. Prayer for a friend, a parishoner, a neighbor. Prayer for my sons I love and my wife I adore – I ache for the three of them, sometimes I fear for them – but what can I do, other than my bumbling best and ask for God’s mercy.

I once heard someone ask Frederick Buechner to describe his prayer life. His one-word answer: meager. Who am I to judge another man’s self-criticism? But — I’ve read too much of the man, heard the holy tremor in his words, seen glory and imagination dance on the pages. By my lights, every syllable is prayer-soaked.

Slowly, I’m coming to believe that every syllable of my life can be prayer-soaked. I can walk, wrong turns and all, in that “spirit of prayer.” Bumble prayerfully on.

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The Diary of a Plain Pastor

And mind you many a fellow who waves his arms like a furniture-remover isn’t necessarily any more awakened than the rest. On the contrary. I simply mean to say that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it. {George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest}

 

Sometimes my sermons are boring. I know, sometimes I bore myself. It’s actually worse for me. If you’re listening, you have the option of nodding off, and you can even appear especially spiritual if you arrange it to appear as though you are buried intently in your Bible. Standing at the lectern, however, it is immensely hard to snatch a snooze.

Thankfully, Christian preaching is not about capturing attention or giving the congregation a good whirl. Preaching takes shape in the very human act of a Christian community gathering together to speak, receive and obey God’s words. Seldom flashy. This should be no surprise. With my sons, I suspect it will be the mundane, forgotten rhythms far more than the few high-gravity encounters that will most profoundly shape their souls. Dinner conversations, popsicles on the front deck, afternoons mindlessly tossing the ball – it’s all about the rhythm, presence, living our story. The same for a church. We gather, we speak, we listen, we strike the rhythm again and again. We are present. We live the story.

Yet none of this suggests the Bible is dull or lackluster. The Good Book burns. The Word illumines. Preachers use to speak of a “fire in the bones.” I’ve felt that fire here and there. And the priest is right, there is a pain to it. There is a pain to knowing the stories of the friends who’ve gathered, the ones who can barely drag themselves, limp with tribulation or fatigue, to this sacred space. There is a pain to knowing that a few who are listening are giving God and hope one last shot, but just barely. There is a pain when you’ve seen a hint of something beautiful – but you know you have no words and that you can’t make anyone gaze along with you and that, even if you could make them, you wouldn’t because forced love strips all the love right from the thing.

The old priest speaks of God drawing the word from him, this word good for the soul. That seems about right. When one of these fire-in-the-bones moments happen, I confess it’s usually a surprise. Typically, it accompanies a solemn holiness or a rupture of laughter or, most often, tears – but it’s always as if something’s happening to me rather than me making something happen. It’s God prodding, God pushing into my own heart, finding my disappointment or joy or sorrow (for myself or others) and then bringing that hidden place into the open.

And it’s painful. It’s painful to be reminded of your own brokenness and to glimpse the brokenness of others more clearly. This isn’t a woe-is-me pain, for sure. This is the pain each of us knows when we’ve done a good work, and we cry and laugh at the beauty before us. The farmer viewing his crop at the cool of dusk. A mother watching her son walk the aisle. A painter laying down her brush and a poet speaking syllables into life. One of the strangest truths in God’s world is this uncanny coupling of pain and beauty.

But a good portion of my art happens in the parish. I’m a pastor, the plainest sort. And today I’m listening to the old priest and finding my own tale mingled with his.

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Easter Light

We have stepped into the bright land of Resurrection. Whether we feel it or not, Resurrection has come. Easter is not our annual occasion for turning a naive eye away from the truth, all the while humming and smiling and refusing to stare reality in the face. Easter is the season where we yield to the Story that begins to make sense of all this madness, all this glory, all these dreams and disappointments that are forever colliding, forever giving us existential whiplash.

Easter doesn’t deny death or ruin. Easter says that death is so powerful, such an enemy, that God entered the fray. God still enters the fray. Easter tells us there is reason for joy. Easter reminds us that while we certainly have reasons for tears, we also have much reason for laughter. Easter insists that we refuse despair, we kick cynicism to the curb, we pick up our saggy bones and dance.

With Easter, we have an invitation to come out into the bright light, to believe that the God who raised Jesus from the dead can (and will) raise every kind of thing from the dead.

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The Saturday Between

On this day of stone-silence,
We sit fixed in the Saturday between.
Between tears and joy.
Between poverty and plenty.
Between ruin and triumph.
Between despair and delight.
Between forgotten and welcomed.
Between fearful and joyful.
Between war and war no more.
Between dark and light.
Between gloom and glory.
Between tears and laughter.
Between death. And life.
We sit fixed, riveted, in this Saturday between.

And this moment
Casts a pale, hallow light
Over the Long Saturday,
The many days
Where the world waits. Between.

But between is not the end, never is.
It is only between.

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Bonhoeffer: Against Abstraction

[Jesus Christ’s] word is not an abstract doctrine, but the re-creation of the whole life of man. {Dietrich Bonhoeffer}

I’m taking a course at the University of Virginia on “Peace and Resistance: Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.” So, of course, I’ve been reading a good bit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately.

As you know, Dietrich was a German pastor and theologian instrumental in the German Resistance during World War II. Dietrich was imprisoned for subversive activity, and (though complicated by the fact that he was a principled pacifist) later charges were added for his association with the infamous July 20 Plot to assassinate the Führer (the oft popularized story of the plot was the center-piece of Tom Cruise’s 2008 film Valkyrie).

As the SS grew more suspicious of Bonhoeffer’s entrenchment in the Resistance, they passed Bonhoeffer from prison to prison until he finally landed at Flossenburg concentration camp. This was his final stop. He was hung (asphyxiated actually) by a thin steel wire on April 9th, 1945 – only 14 days before the camp was liberated. Bonhoeffer was 39.

Bonhoeffer opposed not only the Nazi regime but the religious movement that swept through Germany, the “German Christian” movement. Attempting to re-frame Christian witness so it could harmonize with the Third Reich, the “German Christian” movement ultimately viewed their first allegiance to the State and their second allegiance to God. One bishop fielded a question: “What is one first — a Christian or a national socialist?” The bishop replied, “A National Socialist.” In public worship, they would go so far as to sing hymns to Hitler.

Against this moment, Bonhoeffer wrote his most challenging and enduring work, The Cost of Discpleship. His plain assertion was this: To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to say that God rules over everything. As such, you can not be a disciple of Jesus if you are unwilling to obey Jesus above every other person, claim or passion. You can imagine how that landed in 1944 Germany.

Dietrich believed that the proclamation of Jesus as Lord was always enfleshed in (and evidenced by) the lived realities of our life, the choices we make, the allegiances we declare, the principles and ideas that we obey (or disobey). Christianity is concrete, not abstract.

To be a Christian was not merely to affirm religious facts but to be gripped by the reality that Jesus Christ has come to resurrect us to an entirely new kind of life – a lived life. Equating Christian faith with any particular political movement is idolatry (and this is a lesson we best learn). However, being Christian will always have political (public, lived) implications. Obeying the way of Jesus means saying yes to some things and saying no to others.

The work of the Christian is not to redress faith so that it can be squeezed within another ideology but rather to live Christianly amid, within, over or against every other competing claim. If Jesus is Lord, then this assertion defines reality. Everything else must fix itself to that bare truth.

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First Stories First

The Bible is about God.

Perhaps it seems frivolous to clarify this, but I believe it’s a truth we’re on the verge of losing. These days, everyone caters to us because everyone wants something from us. The game is to find out what we want – and then beat the other guy in promising how fast they can get it to us. It matters little the trade, most everyone’s in on the racket — our corporations schmucking for brand loyalty, our politicians grabbing for votes, our pastors and priests (and of course, I wrestle with these demons) clamoring for affirmation and dollars. It’s easy to see why we might get the idea that everything really is about me. But this me that everything seems to be about isn’t the true me. None of these shucksters really know me, nor do they care to.

When the Bible enters this milieu, we assume that Scripture (or God) does the same. The Bible dashes after our questions. God rushes, like a zealous car salesman, to push a model than meets our every whim. But though we may drive off the lot with all the bells and whistles, are we any better for the transaction? Are we any more joyful? Any more alive? Any more human?

We may finagle a god who makes us comfortable or endorses the life we are set toward (with minimal adjustments as a nod to the Almighty). We may sigh contentedly if we locate a god who delivers quick pithy lines to our struggles, the immediate relief we demand. But if we settle for this god we think we want, we will never engage the true God who rules over the Earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Mary and Peter and Paul, the God who raised Jesus from the dead. If we are committed to the God we think we want, we will never know that the questions we are asking aren’t the right questions at all.

God is God, and we are not God. And the Bible is the book that tells us both of these things.

If I you will allow me to indulge in a moment of ridiculous oversimplification: some of our most vitriolic theological battles of the last two centuries seem to pivot on this question: Is theology fundamentally humanity’s story or God’s story. I have no desire whatsoever to enter the slugfest, but between these two choices, I opt for the latter.

But – it’s no better to go the other extreme and say that God (and God’s book) is so otherly, so divine, that we ought not expect it to engage the complexities and harsh realities and the wild joys of being human. By this way of thinking, you go to the Bible to discover whether or not it is okay to kill, but you have to go to a shrink to talk about why your heart feels like it may break in two. In other words, you go to the Bible to hear God’s story, but you have to go everywhere else to learn your own story.

The Scriptures – and our wisest voices over the centuries – have refused this dichotomy. They have taught us that the Bible is about God, first – but that it is about us second. And it must be in this order because the way we most truly know ourselves is to know God. As Augustine said, we know ourselves better in God than in ourselves. Our stories matter because God has made the remarkable (and at times seemingly foolish) move to intertwine our story within God’s story. God does God’s will, but God doesn’t rush past us. God wills that humanity be more than a blip on the celestial radar. Quite the opposite – in Jesus, God vested God’s full self in the human condition. Jesus was not a lab experiment. Jesus is the revelation that God is not distant. God goes local. God knows, as Hebrews tells us, all our human travail and weakness.

God knows these dark spaces intimately because God has suffered them, with us. Our pain matters – not because we are the center of the story – but because the God of the Universe endures our pain with us and longs for our pain to be no more. Our joy matters – not because the Universe will melt if we are not sated (our burden is heavy, but not that heavy) – but rather our joy matters because Jesus defeated everything opposed to joy and invites us into God’s kingdom where joy is evermore.

And every place where sin and death prevail and every place where joy is thwarted, every place in our story where we encounter injustice or loneliness or longing for freedom or a place of belonging – those are the places where Jesus wants to make our stories new.

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