A word, mostly for the ministers out there.
I’m in a ice-locked city, heated by anger and grief. The most recent cause is the killing in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti and from it the cascade of official lies. But fundamentally my feelings of moral injury (and perhaps yours) come from those who have authority and for whatever reason cannot speak truly or act justly. Grift and cruelty have become the law. The willful, gleeful double standard, benefiting those who support or apologize for the president and made a weapon against those who don’t, is a sure sign that the old method of moral suasion, so loved by the liberal ministry, is dead. You cannot shame the shameless. So, maybe the president is in decline, and perhaps the midterm elections will mean he’ll be inhibited in some way, and some equilibrium will return. But the calculus has changed and liberal Christians (perhaps others too) need new public politics.
Bring force or bring help, but leave the petitions and solemn assemblies at home. Church-speak appears as cliched insiders’ jargon. Hand-wringing public prayer leaves me hot in the face. Street theater antics have aged especially poorly. But even if you do everything the right way, you can’t expect an increasingly secular culture to care about your methods. When a gathering of clergy from a variety of backgrounds went to Minneapolis to witness and serve, it didn’t get the press attention it might have once gotten, which means it doesn’t work the way it once would have. Force, if there is any, comes from sheer numbers of witnesses; a phone camera is more powerful than any principled demand. But even that won’t keep you from getting killed.
However, our power as pastors is something other than force, and it comes from from speaking the truth and leading in the name of the Lord. Our hearers are as important as our message. Do not cast pearls before swine. Universalists have long been caught by the gotcha of having to include Hitler or Stalin, at long last, into God’s household, but these are exceptional cases and doesn’t describe how we ordinarily live and believe. Our first hearers are essentially good and decent people who are weak, fearful or worried about their and their loved ones’ places in God’s household. They so often have to unlearn the unlove that inhabits them, and from that strength and resolve with a new vision of all creation. Likewise, these are the people on whom the future of the Republic rests, sometimes uncertain and ambivalent of our history to date. Hope rests in what is possible, not just what has been. So some suffer and some die in that cause, which both brings grief and the respect of an ailing people.
As we lament and the families mourn, pastors, let us turn sideways — and if to be honest, inwards — to attend to this injury in the way to which we were called and ordained. We were called to do this. There are others with great skill who can attend to legal, logistic, political and organizational demands of the moment, and we can help in our turn. But our responsibility is to lead and defend people in that Godwards path, identifying truth and falsehood along the way, without confusing or conflating them. In the present moment, it’s easier to see the wrong than the right because it has become so unrepentant in cruelty and manipulation. We must minister to the assaulted and spiritually poisoned, and a “spirit of niceness” cannot protect us or serve them. This too, I fear, is a legacy of the old method of engagement. It necessarily means uncomfortable exchanges and exposure. But we cannot stay fearful — either of hellfire or ICE — and be true to the office God has called us to, or to the people we have been entrusted to serve.
May God bless us in our ministry, and may God grant the slain Paradise.
