Wednesday night I was invited to speak to a class that meets at South Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church. Matt Brown is the pastor there and Kim Lee, one of our students, serves on the staff. “South Meck” is a relatively new church located in the far southern reaches of Charlotte, housed in a lovely new building in the middle of suburbia. The people were warm and welcoming and made me feel right at home. What struck me about those who were there was their passion for living the Christian life faithfully amidst all the messiness of early 21st century American suburbia, and the variety of places and traditions from which these very different voices emerged. I would venture to say that most who were gathered there were not from traditional, Presbyterian backgrounds. Some were. But most were from some other tradition or even none: Catholic, Baptist, unchurched, even hostile to the church. Yet God had, in ways more mysterious than we usually note, brought them together and made them a part of the body of Christ.
As I listened to them talk, I sensed for the first time in a long time the miracle that is the church. It is so easy to forget that miracle or overlook it, but a Wednesday night gathering of this sort brings it vividly to life. They were hungry for the gospel of Jesus Christ. They may be hesitant to express that hunger, and their hunger may well be disguised underneath other names or claims, but they are wanting to be fed and are seeking to live a life that is faithful to the gospel that has claimed them.
When I was a pastor, I used to be more amazed than I am now that folk came to church. We often complain at how paltry and small our field of labor is, or how unresponsive others are to what we think important, but the fact is that people still hear the gospel gladly. They come. They worship. They will even come to hear you preach. That may seem like a small or obvious thing, but it is not. It is a miracle.
June 9, 2010
Since my youth, I have been a baseball fan. Growing up, my team was the Brooklyn Dodgers. After they moved to California, I lost interest in them, but before they left, well, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey were my heroes, as they still are. The “boys of summer” were my team and I can still recount for you the starting lineup of the early 50’s. My father and I would watch the “Game of the Week” which came on Saturday afternoons with Dizzy Dean, sponsored by Falstaff beer. In 1955 the Dodgers won their one and only World Series as Brooklyn’s team, beating the hated Yankees in 7 games. I was in the 5th grade then and got in trouble with one of my teachers because I whooped out loud when I heard the final score. The next year, 1956, the Dodgers and Yankees played in the World Series again but this time the Yankees won with a pitcher named Don Larsen hurling a perfect game. In my opinion Larsen was a mediocre pitcher who got lucky in one game against a really great pitcher, Sal Maglie. Still, a perfect game, 27 up and 27 down, impressed.
Last week an unheralded pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, Armando Galarraga, pitched an almost perfect game against the Cleveland Indians. 26 up and 26 down. The 27th batter, Jason Donald, hit a dribbler between first and second, and Galarraga ran over to cover the bag, getting there just in time to receive a throw to make the final out. Only the umpire, Jim Joyce, called Donald safe. Unbelievable!
There has been a great deal written since then about the “lessons” both umpire and pitcher have provided the rest of us in their responses to this “injustice.” Galarraga’s immediate reaction, that is, his unconsidered, uncalculated response, was to look up to heaven, smile in bafflement, and put his hands on his head. He did not jump up and down or go after the umpire (as I would have done) with veins bulging and expletives flying. Rather he seemed curiously chagrined by it all, smiling in bafflement and incomprehension. Then he went back to the mound and got the 28th batter out.
Later the umpire apologized to Galarraga and admitted he had been wrong and had blown the call. All of this may seem trivial, but it does stand in marked contrast to the way our culture practices outrage in other areas of life. The oil spill in the gulf offers abundant evidence from the world of business and politics that the reservoir of good will is distressingly shallow and unlike the oil business itself, does not require that one drill very deeply before hitting a gusher of incoherent rage. But why point the finger at businessmen and politicians when the church itself seems to offer such a sad spectacle of “passionate intensity.” We find it so hard to extend mercy to others. I am more convinced than ever that especially in church debates “winning” and “losing” are massively inappropriate terms to describe the mind of Christ.
Love, I suspect, “wins” few debates, and more often, “suffereth wrong,” often bearing with defeats that turn out to be more victorious than any victory won by votes. What was so striking about Galarraga and Joyce was that in the midst of “injustice” and its aftermath, neither lost his humanity. How did that happen?
In a not entirely unrelated column, Michael Gerson wrote the following concerning politicians who stray from their marital commitment: “Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity . . . . ‘The sins of the flesh are bad,’ said C.S. Lewis, ‘but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and back-biting, the pleasures of power and hatred . . . .’ Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies . . . . This recognition should lead toward the most underrated of the moral virtues: mercy.”12
Mercy. Could it be that mercy is what keeps our humanity intact, keeps us from reducing ourselves and others to “winners” and “losers”? Does mercy tell us something true about ourselves, not as a form of politeness but as something that is theologically true? We seek forgiveness, Calvin reminds us, not in the hope of securing a merciful God, much less to appease an angry deity. Rather, God is merciful. And because God is merciful, we can dare to approach “the throne of grace” with confidence, knowing that we will find mercy there. And having found such mercy, we can afford to be extravagant in sharing it with others.
As our denomination begins another “marching season” of church debates, one hopes for mercy.
September 21, 2010
Yesterday I was in a meeting with area pastors to discuss Eugene Peterson’s book, Practice Resurrection (Eerdmans, 2010). Peterson will be here next month to give a set of lectures. The book is an extended reflection on the letter to the Ephesians and accordingly, our discussion centered on the nature and mission of the church. One of the recurring points of discussion among the pastors had to do with the extent to which the church is under obligation to pay attention to the cultural context in which the gospel is proclaimed, as over against the extent to which the church is called to keep faith with the claims of gospel itself. This is not a new debate. Its lineaments have been traced by H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture, Torchbooks, 1975), among others, and more recently, by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon (Resident Aliens, Abingdon, 2014).
After the discussion, I reflected further on the matter. So many of the agendas which seek to make the church and its message more intelligible have little to say concerning what I would call the “soul” of the church. One of the pastors remarked that it seemed to him that Peterson was interested in what he called “deep church,” that is, the church not merely as a cultural phenomenon but something with a life of its own, possessing its own strange identity.
I do not think that pastor was arguing for returning to the glorious days of yesteryear, when the church was stronger, more numerous, and more visibly important to the culture. For one thing, those days were not all that glorious. However, the culture we are seeking to address today is a culture that is, ostensibly, not much interested in the mystery of the gospel’s
