“The bread of life.”

“Ashes to ashes . . . ”

“Those whom God has joined together . . . ”

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Pastors lead people through moments of immense personal and communal significance, and the pressure to deliver the right words in those moments is significant. I share a recurring nightmare with many of my clergy colleagues in which a bride or groom’s name is either mispronounced or forgotten, or in which the we suddenly forget all the words during a baptism or communion.

What puts me back to sleep after waking from these nightmares is remembering that, at these occasions, the words I have to say are not mine but the church’s. They are the words the church has uttered at the graveside and the font and the table long, long before I got here to say them with my hard-won combination of earnestness and self-effacing delivery. Thank God for that.

There are really important moments of leading in a church when the primary task is to let words you didn’t come up with do the work they have always done in the company of the faithful and to get your personality out of their way.

 

Yesterday was my first day of work after five days off. I filled it with bullets related to the coming week, Advent, and January, and I spent hours anxious that none of the work was getting done well, or even that it was the right work to be doing. In short, I spent the day in my head.

Then, returning to the church for an evening meeting, I ran into a student doing some homework at the coffee shop across the street, waiting for her weekly volunteer tutoring commitment to start . We talked for only a couple of minutes, mostly catching up, but it’s no exaggeration to say that it turned my day around. I went into my evening meeting in a different head space than the one I’d spent the day in.

There are clues scattered across our days about the things that make us come alive and the work we ought to be doing.

 

What I love about this story is not the distribution of partisan points or the “gotcha” element of a web video. It is a very, very bad look for James O’Keefe and those of his ideological ilk, impersonating a sexual assault victim, but there is no news in that. There is actually no “gotcha” to the story at all, because the people responsible for the video repeatedly stress that they are recording the interaction.

Here’s what I love about this story: good work. Specifically, good journalistic work, the conventions of objectivity and verifiability thwarting the twisted aims of liars.

The story only works because journalists did what journalists do–they checked sources and verified claims with more than one of them before publishing. Their source turns out to be a partisan operative working to produce a hit piece on “the mainstream media” in the service of helping an accused pedophile win an election. The hit piece fails because the conventions of objective journalism actually still work.

What conventions of your work are you sticking to out of conviction? Keep at it. Good work will win out.

Afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel is a Chicago experience that has been on our to-do list since we began our move here nearly two years ago, and yesterday we did it.

What a scene. Carolers in Victorian threads circle the dining room expelling “Fa la la’s” at every table. A harpist plucks away at “In The Bleak Midwinter.” Children gulp hot chocolate and make quick work of a three-tiered tray of finger sandwiches and macaroons while parents in dresses and ties clutch cocktails and tell each other with a little too much effort to be believable, “This is nice.”

There was a party of mothers and daughters seated near us, the girls all under 10 and in darling dresses, running around the dining room and the hotel lobby like Junior Ninja Warriors. Each time one of them sprinted past our table I slid my water glass closer to the middle. I noted with mounting judgment that the girls’ mothers were enjoying a wholly unperturbed time to themselves, and I congratulated my wife and I that our daughter was not given to such inappropriate antics in a setting as elegant as this.

That’s when my daughter’s water glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the table, sending ice and spiky shards across the carpet and issuing a bloody spectacle for teagoers’ viewing. Not to worry: the cut was minor and was easily plugged by a band aid supplied by hotel management. The cleanup was quick and inconspicuous. Daughter held herself together admirably.

It’s not just that the afternoon’s blood and glass came from my kid and not the out-of-control urchins zig-zagging the dining room whom I had only moments before audibly condemned. It’s also that, in daughter’s telling, she only dropped her glass because I bumped the table while leaning in to issue said condemnation so as not to be heard by the condemned.

Judge not, people. No joke.

 

 

 

Assessing a church or a denomination or a culture as one or the other says volumes more about you than the thing you’re assessing. In order to declare that a church has “compromised the gospel,” you have to reduce the gospel down to something simple enough to be compromised by a whole group of people all at once. That’s pretty tough.

I went in for a lot of this as a seminary student in the early 00’s, when I, along with a wide swath of my progressive classmates, denounced conservative evangelicals in America as having made a lethal compromise of the gospel for the sake of political power. There were troubling trends, for sure (George W. Bush equating the “light” of John 1 with America was one), but my determination that an entire swath of American Christianity has compromised the gospel really only meant that it was diverging from the values I was growing into as a young liberal in a mainline protestant seminary on the east coast. I wasn’t spending any time with any of them.

We call people compromised only when they’re not us, only when we don’t share the value to which they are trying to be faithful.

So why not ask that instead? What is the value here? How is the present course an attempt at faithfulness to the gospel?

“Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness.”*

No, this is not a question every church in America (or anywhere) should ask itself. Its assumptions are simplistic and its perspective is one of someone who cannot ever have had responsibility for congregational decision making.

Compromise is not the enemy. Jesus fiercest opponents loathed his compromise more than anything. “Pay taxes to the emperor or no, Jesus?”

“Sure. But don’t forget to give God everything else.”

Compromise.

Viewing congregational decisions as either compromises with the world or exercises in faithfulness seems really fruitless. In the contemporary obstacle course of work, school, family, church, and every other important and beneficial thing people want to do, the church ought to be the thing that backs down, the one activity that does not demand 100% compromise-free commitment. Because it is a living community whose calling extends beyond the time its members spend with one another.

My ministry is up to its neck in compromise–with family vacation, with school entrance exams, with band, with theater, with soccer and football and softball and volleyball. If my congregation didn’t compromise about the use of its’ members time, it would be denying participation to about half the people who want the church to have a role in their life.

We’re all compromising all the time. The church was born of compromise. People forget this when they denounce the contemporary church as hopelessly compromised in comparison to the early church. They forget that the early church was led disciples who abandoned or denied Jesus and who fought amongst themselves to keep gentiles out of their ranks. Even the stories the early church told about its founder and savior were compromises–approximations and adaptations shot through in every telling with failures of memory, the constraints of their genre, and the muddled context of their hearers.

The cry of “No compromise!” is the cry of the zealot who strives to build a rigorous moral gymnasium walled off from the corrupting influences of the city and the state. It leaves no room for God to act through the compromised motives and abilities of disciples, for Jesus’ “Feed my sheep” to the Peter who’d denied him or for the Council of Jerusalem.

Instead of “Are we compromised or faithful?”, a better question for the church to ask is “are we growing in faithfulness?”

More on that tomorrow.

*Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option

The thing I am struggling to grasp about the present revalatory avalanche of sexual harassment and assault allegations is the timing. I mean the timing in terms of decades, not days.

I was in high school in the early 90’s. Bill Clinton was Exhibit A at school and at home about what not to do as a man with respect to women. Talk of harassment in the workplace, terms like “consent” and the phrase “No means no” were not just part of my family norms (which they certainly were), they were in my public school curriculum.

I got a terrific sex education at public school. It was thorough about anatomy and contraception, but also about consent. My teachers were just as worried about coercion and abuse as they were about teen pregnancy. I remember it clearly.

I know. This behavior is not a problem of education. It’s about power. My public school sex ed teachers taught me that too. I guess I am baffled in the present moment because I have assumed for 25 years now that men my age and younger at least were on the same page about boundaries and no meaning no.

That assumption is another disappointing revelation.

The curriculum is fine. It might even be good. The calendar is ambitious. The program is solid or on its way to solid. There are options, there is diversity, there is clarity.

But if people want deeper instead of more, do I have a way for them to ask for it? Are we positioned to add something a participant wants to try, to experiment with them on something small and new and different that responds to some stirring in their soul?

The best program you can design is flawed if it doesn’t have any room to maneuver.

“Leave room for the Holy Spirit.”

I’ve been using the Mad Lib gimmick more lately, because it’s so good at generating participation and energy. It always makes me a little nervous though.

Nobody who voted for Donald Trump owes my kid an apology.

Her mother and I might even owe you a debt of gratitude. Since last November, our daughter has heard more and seen more of what her parents believe and value than ever before. The impact of that will be far greater than any damage the President of The United States, whoever that may be, can do to her.

Don’t apologize to Laura for your vote. Only watch out when she and her classmates are old enough to vote; these years with this President will not be lost on them.