I have been a pastor for 13 Good Fridays, and somehow today, my 14th, is the first Good Friday on which I will preach. How is this possible?

The church I served for the first three years of my ministry did an all-afternoon drop in Stations of The Cross meditation instead of a worship service on Good Friday. The second participated in an ecumenical community Good Friday observation where leadership rotated and the service rarely featured a sermon. I led the service here at my current church last year, but instead of preaching I told the entire passion story from John, which was so long that it didn’t leave time for a sermon.

It’s startling to realize that you’ve gone nearly a decade and a half into ordained ministry without directly preaching on the cross. I’ve preached on the cross, of course; references to it are scattered across years worth of preaching. But before today I have never taken the passion narrative as a main text for preaching all by itself.

I think this says something about me and the churches I’ve served. Sally Brown wrote a great book in which she diagnosed mainline preachers as somewhat allergic to the cross as a homiletical subject. We know our history, how Christian preachers before us have blessed violence and anti-Semitism in crucifixion sermons. We’ve heard the cross employed from pulpits to either imply or assert that victimization is God’s will for good people. We don’t want to repeat those mistakes, so we focus on telling the story or meditation. We fill Good Friday services with stirring music.

We must have something to say about this, though. I expect that whatever I say today will come up short, but, for me at least, it will be a start.

Last weekend’s retreat was at a YMCA camp north of the city. Most of our programming was camp programming, run by camp staff: team challenges, high ropes, climbing walls, scavenger hunts. It was perfect for the kind of retreat we were running, because some of the students were from the congregation, but many others were not, and practically none of them knew one another before the weekend.

It was also perfect because the YMCA is really good at recreation. I had planned to do some team building challenges of my own over the weekend, but after an hour with the camp staff I gave that up. They did the activities I had in mind but better, with better equipment and instructions from an expansive written guide.

I made no secret of my interest in that guide, and one of the staff disappeared into the office for a few minutes and returned with one in hand. “Here you go,” he said.

Score.

Here’s the last thing that was perfect about being at a YMCA camp, especially for a church youth retreat. The staff are all young adults, and some of them are college interns from places our students have never been, like Texas and Memphis. There are international flags hanging in the dining room representing all the countries that have sent staff to the camp. Being at this camp reminded me of my brief tenure with the Y after college and how international and young the organization is at its core. It’s a perfect partner for churches.

There were three hula hoops, but now there is one.

They hung from the edge of the orange storage tub, the one holding the board and card games. It was stacked on the blue tub holding all the balls and cones and frisbees, waiting in the front room of our cabin for the bus to arrive to take us back to Chicago after a two-day retreat, surrounded by duffels and pillows and sleeping bags. I hung them there myself. There were three.

But now there is only one, and the bus is here. Nobody knows what happened to the other two. They’re nowhere in the cabin. They’re not on the bus. They’re not on the ground anywhere. Two hula hoops up and freed themselves. It’s a mystery.

The fatigue and petty frustrations of a weekend with sixth and seventh graders overtakes me and my mind races with silent accusations and fantasies of punishments meted out to the scheming, the dishonest, the unrepentant. All is lost for humanity, for we are such a thing as steals plastic circular recreation equipment just for fun and then colludes with our fellows to keep the act hid.

Worse, we are such a thing as judges and condemns in wrath with no evidence, only worn out speculation, a thing that stands ready to sentence all suspects, that looks for testimony to prop up a punishment that’s already been decided.

God save us.

 

Policing speech is bullshit not something I love about working with teenagers. When somebody swears in youth group, I proffer the required, “Hey, let’s watch our language.” But my heart’s not in it. It feels like one of those things that we do to teenagers in church but not to adults, scolding them when they curse. Worse, calling out one student’s profanity sets a precedent that you have to maintain with everybody else. It’s exhausting.

No, I prefer a somewhat selective profanity patrolling strategy. Certain choice words and expressions earn an immediate rebuke, but many, many others get either gently chastised or flatly tolerated (sidenote: racist and sexist terminology, as well as slurs like “gay” and “retarded” are no-go’s in my youth group, but those feel like a category of speech distinct from profanity, one far easier to denounce).

I find it is simply easier on me as a leader to let some profanity slide.

It’s not about me, though, is it? It is about preventing offense to others in the community, especially those who lack the power or voice to respond to speech that offends them. If I wink at a certain level of profanity, then anyone who takes offense to it is left to themselves to oppose it. In a mixed-gender community of youth, especially early adolescents, this is more than a matter of individual sensitivities. Permitting a level of coarseness in the group’s speech exposes vulnerable people to continued offense.

I’m coming to think the cussing talk should happen early in youth group and should be quite specific in what words and expressions are forbidden and why. You can get as specific as the nastiness of the word’s referents, or you lean on slightly more elevated standards of decorum, but you should land somewhere. Don’t assume we’re all on the same page about what’s okay to say when we’re together and what isn’t. State the expectations clearly and uphold them.

Of course, this probably demands consequences for violations of those expectations. Otherwise you get a watch-your-mouth arms race that can’t end in anything constructive. I’ve had students use vulgarity to me personally over and over again for the sheer delight of watching my growing irritation. They knew I wasn’t going to do anything more than tell them to stop, only a little more forcefully each time.

Policing profanity in youth group sucks feels exhausting. But to build a community of mutuality and respect among students, it’s probably worth the effort.

I’m up before daybreak on a Saturday. We’re putting 12 jr. high students on a bus at 9:00 this morning to spend a weekend together–and with us three leaders–at a YMCA camp north of the city. It’s the seventh overnight event of the year. No big deal.

But it is a big deal because these students don’t know each other and these leaders have never led together. Eight students are from one program, four from another. The goal of the weekend is to be make new friends across the lines of school and neighborhood that have kept them from ever meeting, as well as to practice some cross-organizational collaboration.

I’m excited and nervous. I lead retreats all the time, and I have come to accept the role of being in charge of everything that goes wrong and everything that goes right. I’m not in charge this weekend. I’m one member of a leadership team of three. I know almost nothing about my other two leaders and they know the same about me. We know enough, though, because we know we want to work on this together. That’s not nothing.

Seth Godin likes to say that “This might not work” is the slogan of all meaningful projects. This morning in the dark I take comfort in that.

I’m thinking of organizing my annual report around only two headings:

What’s not working.

What’s working.

There are stories to be told underneath each heading, stories with numbers that show how many students attended (or didn’t), but those numbers don’t tell the whole story. There is growth and transformation in those stories, also missed opportunities and bumbled organization. Most importantly, there is learning in those stories, and that is what I want to forward in my assessment of how our work has gone.

Asking what we’re learning keeps us from getting too wrecked about what’s not working and too complacent about what is.

I voted on Tuesday in the Illinois primary. I picked up my car from the shop, stopped by the pet supply store for cat litter, drove to the polling place, picked up Kiddo from gymnastics, then went home and made dinner.

Voting was on my Tuesday to-do list.

I only knew a few of the names on the ballot, and I don’t have strong feelings about the water board or the county commissioner. Still, I went to the polling place and turned in a ballot.

I don’t think I voted for a midterm or any other non-Presidential election the whole time I lived in California, from 2007-2016. The outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections gave me a false sense of achievement that bred complacency. Of course, what I now see–what everyone can see–is that the active participation of men and women in those elections for state legislatures and city councils and water boards during that period gave a definitive shape to a politics and a culture that was not irrelevant to the result of the 2016 Presidential election. My shock at the outcome was hollow, because I’d been sitting on the sidelines for a decade.

The truth is that two, or perhaps even one, more pressing errand on Tuesday would have kept me from voting again. The whole experience felt perfunctory and annoying, like mailing a package at the post office, with a much shorter wait. But where did I get the idea that participating in democracy was dramatic? From CNN, probably.

Maybe if we don’t spend time on the boring bits of democracy, we shouldn’t complain when the dramatic parts don’t go our way.

 

 

For many a thing that can happen on any given day there are plans and processes, contingencies which belong to some person or team to handle should they arise. Take what happens should you be involved, while returning from the grocery store, in a traffic accident with a fire truck.

The truck stops. About this there is no question, though you should protest to the firefighters, “I don’t want to keep you from where you’re going.” The sirens were sounding. The lights were flashing. That’s why you pulled over. How could you have known that the corner you rolled to a stop at would be the very corner the truck needed to take? How could you know any of what would happen when the truck cut the corner too sharply and rode up on your front left bumper?

The truck stops, though you and every firefighter inside can see the emergency they were responding to about a half a mile up the block. It’s all process from here. A traffic officer is called, a report is taken and you’re given a link to a website where you can view that police report. Then the fire chief shows up and takes your statement, followed by a department photographer who snaps some pictures.

You go home and initiate a claim with your insurance. You take the car in to the shop they tell you, wait a week, pay the deductible, and you have your car back. Then you submit a claim of liability to the city to get that deductible reimbursed. Then you wait. It’s like any other accident.

Most of what happens most days fits this pattern. Things happen. Processes and plans kick in. That’s good and stable and predictable. The real test is when something happens that nobody has yet considered and for which no plans or processes have been devised.

Today I’m glad to know that a traffic accident with a fire truck is more like the former than the latter.

Yesterday I spent my day off cooking while listening to last week’s “Political Gabfest”podcast in which John Dickerson cocktail chattered about Catherine Price’s new book, How To Break Up With Your Phone. I remembered that I read an excerpt from the book in February.  

Dickerson said the book has “some useful solutions which are better than the, like, ‘turn your phone to greyscale,’ and other things that are frustrating and not helpful.” He’s throwing a little shade there at Tristan Harris and his “Time Well Spent” movement. I know that because I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Harris and reading about what he’s doing–and eagerly adopting his tech-restrictive prescriptions–over the last several months My phone is currently in greyscale.

So I walked down to my local bookstore and ordered the book. It should be in Friday.

A couple of hours later I walked into T-Mobile and ordered a new smartphone.

I contain multitudes.

I preached Mark 13 yesterday, not, I don’t think, for the first time in my preaching career. It’s the “Little Apocalypse,” Jesus’ last discourse in the temple before his arrest in which he holds forth about “wars and rumors of wars,” the “desolating sacrilege,” and the “coming of the Son of Man in clouds.”

I grew up in a church that took apocalyptic texts literally and that combed the days headlines for evidence of its appearing. But I’ve never preached in one. The challenge of preaching apocalyptic in progressive Protestant churches is to take all the imagery and urgency more seriously, not less so. I have spent my adult life creating space between my own faith and the day-to-day pertinence of End Times speculation, so being called upon to preach on such predictions is challenging in a funny way.

Don’t run out the clock. That’s the rule I set for myself this time. Don’t use up more than half the sermon academically explaining the conventions of apocalyptic texts and then talking the congregation off a literalist ledge it’s not really on. Actually speak to the earthquakes. Contend with the falling stars. Suggest what it all means for us, today, and in constructive language, not a litany of negations.

The preacher is never the right person to ask how the sermon went, but at least I can say I did the thing I set out to do.