Disagreeing with Your Teacher

I finished up reading The Weight of Glory last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It wasn't the thickest of books, but it was--as is all C.S. Lewis--rich and warm and spiritually nourishing.  I am the better for reading it, as I always am when I engage with his warm and gracious spirit.

What struck me, in the reading of his essays, was that I do not always agree with him.  Take, for instance, his essay entitled "Why I am Not A Pacifist."  I'm not either, not fundamentally so.  But I see this as a weakness in my nature, a flaw in my commitment to the radically healing and transformative message of Jesus of Nazareth.

Clive Staples, in his essay, elegantly and articulately argued against pacifism as a response to evil.  He brought the big guns of his Oxbridge brilliance to the table, reason and history, ancient story and the deep traditions of the church and her teachings.

But I could not help but notice that when it came time to deal with what Jesus had to say, he was a little more coy.  He danced around it, contextualized it, and did not linger there, because it was not a place he could linger.  To stay in the presence of the Christ requires us to set down our swords.  Period.  Tolstoy, who Lewis often quoted and deeply admired, he understood that.  Tolstoy was uncompromising in his advocacy of nonviolence.  But Lewis?  Well, he was living in a different context.

Pacifism is the way of Christ, but with National Socialism burning like a demonic fire in Europe, I can completely understand why C.S. Lewis would have discouraged passive nonresistance.  That does not mean I agree with tone of his essay, which did not touch on the depth of Christ's challenge to our desire to take up our father's sword.  But I can understand it.

Later, in another essay in the collection, Lewis waxes poetic about the natural state of things, which he views as fundamentally patriarchal.  Men are made to be in charge, he says, and egalitarian thinking exists only as a necessary counterbalance to our sinful nature.  He never quite gets around to explaining how this works with Galatians, but...er...I don't think he quite wanted to go there.

I just can't see it, nor can I embrace his thinking.

So here I am, with the great teacher of my childhood and youth, and I have found places where I don't just nod along as he talks.

It would be easy, and in keeping with the spirit of this dissonant age, to slap labels on him.  He's dated and inadequately progressive, I might say, turning up my nose.  He's just another example of patriarchal hegemony, with its use of violence to oppress and subjugate, I might say.

But then I would be deluding myself.  If I focused primarily on the places of disagreement, I would miss the profound and transforming grace of his writings.  If I chose to attack and deconstruct, rather than finding the places of agreement, then I would get nowhere.

If we only choose to learn from and relate to those with whom we completely agree, we will never learn, and never grow.

And so instead, I shake my head at those few places where a wise old colleague and I disagree, and choose to dwell in the many, many places where he sings new and graceful truths to my soul.

It's always better to seek the gifts and graces.

Preaching and Third Rail Theology

This last week, I had a conversation I'd been anticipating with someone.   The question posed was where I stood on the whole "gay thing," and did I concur with my... um ... "evolving" denominational position on the subject?  And so we talked for a while.

I and my conversation partner did not share perspective on the issue, nor to my knowledge were any minds changed on the issue, but we did share prolonged conversation, and it was civil in disagreement.   Following the conversation, I found myself reflecting a bit on my own approach to preaching on the issues we argue about the most.   When it comes to the "gay thing," I really don't have it as a central theme of my preaching.  On occasion, I have.  I likely will again.  But it's not been a core theme for me.  Is this just pastoral wussiness?  Maybe.  But there are other things at play.

In part, this is because when I preach, I discipline myself to preaching from the fullness of the Bible. That means following the three year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, which touches on the entirety of Scripture.   If you do that, well, the "gay thing" is just not a central explicit theme.  Our culture-war obsession with it is entirely out of whack with the narrative of Scripture.  On a verse-weight scale, it's of considerably less significance than menstruation, skin disease, and the sin of Jeroboam son of Nebat.

So on 95% of Sundays, I stick to justice, grace, mercy, and Christ's radically inclusive love for the stranger and the outcast, and let folks figure it out for themselves.

But in larger part, it's because as much as I value preaching, I'm strongly aware that it has limitations.  If you're in a community of like-minded souls, or a community that has formed around one strong personality, then you can get away with preaching whatever you like, as did that preacher in the video making the rounds this week.  You know the one, the guy who suggested that gays should be rounded up and sent to concentration camps.  Sigh.  I have it on good authority that he'll be obligated to spend his forty-seven thousand years in purgatory preparing and delivering graphic Powerpoint sermons on menstruation, skin disease, and the sin of Jeroboam son of Nabat to a bored throng of texting succubi.

Whichever way, preaching can mask the truth of an exchange.  You can pitch out your passionately held position, and be strong and outrageous about the things you're "agin", and everyone will laugh and say Amen, except for those one or two souls who are silently seething on the receiving end.  I've inadvertently done that on occasion myself, and when I've been called on it, it's been a convicting moment.

But in authentic community, we're not all identical.  There's difference.  And where there's difference, there needs to be openness and conversation.  Otherwise, you're just monologuing.  I know, I know, you need to stand up and be counted.  You need to be a prophetic witness, an overturner-of-tables, a declarer of the Way Things Are.

I'm perfectly willing to do so in my writing here, and in conversations, and in small-group study.   And in sermons, but only if there's safe space for difference to be explored and expressed.   In these places, questions can be asked.  Disagreement can be articulated and explored.  I prefer it because it is both harder and the risk is higher.   The risk comes when you look at the other with eyes that are not glazed-over with the scales of your presuppositions, and see the depth of common being you both share.   Are we willing to have our assumptions about others changed as we engage with them across the boundary of difference?

The hardness comes in taking that into account.   This person you disagree with is another soul, no matter how you may differ, and even if you are strongly convicted of the inherent rightness of your position.   And if you allow yourself to really see them, and not have your eyes scaled over, then it becomes considerably more difficult to view them through the polarizing lenses of our adversarial, binary culture.

Denoms, NonDenoms, and Disagreement

One of the favorite themes among nondenominational folks of all stripes is the essential failure of the denominational systems of church governance.  The Oldline churches are trapped in endless political squabbling, bickering about sexuality and ordination and the authority of the Bible.  Independent churches are free of all such nonsense, and can thus better grow into the vast sprawling parking lot Jesus MegaCenters that are the clear sign of God's favor on earth.  For as the Apostle Paul once wrote:  "How can they know if they have not heard?  And how can they hear if they cannot park?" (Romans 1:14-15, The Church Shopper's Bible)

Much of the success of the nondenoms, I think, comes from their ability to be in sync with the corporate/consumer ethos of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.   If the ethos is growth, then you're more likely to grow if you have a clear and definable brand.  Denominations, which are structured like governments, well, they're more prone to manifesting politics and bureaucracy.  If you're trying to be a self-governing community of communities, there are always going to be tensions and disagreements.

But if you're structured like a business, with an iconic founder/CEO/Senior Pastor, then there is less potential for disagreement.  The board?  They'll support the person who's the reason they're there.  The flock?  They'll follow the shepherd, whose face beams down upon them from the Jumbotron every Sunday like the great and powerful Oz.  And so the brand is clear and unsullied by difference, the message is clear, and the laserlike clarity of brand identity stands as a beacon in a world that yearns for neatly packaged certainty.

Until the pastor dies or retires or is caught in a motel room with three strippers and an array of assorted livestock.  Then?  Well, then things get a bit trickier.

The process by which big independent nondenominational churches do leadership transition often has all the grace of the choosing of a new patriarch for the Borgia family.  Or, to be more biblical about it, the process by which Judah often selected her kings.  Things can get ugly and political, because all of that politics we denoms do on the front end just sits, repressed and unexpressed, under the iron thumb of the Brand, until BLLLANG!   It's a bit like Yugoslavia after Tito.   You remember, right?  Tito?  That whole mess with Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s?  Sigh.

Take the recent ugliness at Jericho City of Praise, a big sprawling nondenom in my area.  Once the iconic founding pastor and his pastor wife passed, suddenly the board and the son were fighting it out in court over control of this huge 19,000 member Jeeza-hemoth.   Court, mind you, because if you're an island in and of yourself, when disagreement strikes, there's nothing left to do but take things to the law.  Settling things in-house becomes impossible, and as there's no authoritative external connection outside of the brand, the only recourse is the government and the services of highly paid counsel.

Strange irony, that.

Advantage:  Denominations.