Dear People in Pulpits,
Thank you for being there. Thank you–so many of you–for spending hours each week preparing the words you hope we’ll actually hear and heed during the scant 20 minutes or so you have our attention on Sunday morning.
Special thanks to those of you who serve dwindling churches and people who are tired and confused by the noise and haste and increasing partisan violence in public life. Thank you for showing up at baptisms and deathbeds, weddings and potlucks, and at food banks and festivities where you’re asked to say grace while kids scuffle for a place by the cupcakes.
So many of you serve in ways we lay folk rarely stop to assess. These days I feel particularly thankful for those of you who help us read Scripture in ways that resist oversimplification and challenge us to wrestle with historical and contemporary realities. I’m grateful for every effort you make to pay attention to the appalling cost of the wars we wage or support, the greed and violence we’ve normalized, the ways we harm “this fragile earth” and so many people who live on it in deepening poverty.
I’m writing also to those of you who need a little encouragement to step outside your own comfort zone and get us out of ours. In addition to gratitude I’m feeling a lot of frustration these days with pastors and church leaders who avoid the hard issues, starting with the fact that we’re in a dangerous political moment in which many Americans and many in other countries are leaning toward authoritarianism.
I don’t want to hear bland messages of kindly encouragement that don’t include a wake-up call about the historical moment we’re inhabiting. I’m not just bored, but offended by sermons that are safely predictable and implicitly, uncritically affirm the status quo. The status quo is a precarious place to be right now. Niebuhr’s insistence that sermons should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” needs to be reiterated with special emphasis, I think, on the latter.
We shouldn’t be comfortable with any of these things:
– a weapons industry that promotes ongoing warfare and reaps tremendous profit at tremendous cost to people, infrastructures, and ecosystems;
– a broken, gerrymandered, manipulated electoral process sold out by permission of “Citizens United” to the largest bidders;
– the normalization of poverty and neglect of the poor;
– mass incarceration and militarized policing even of peaceful dissent;
– underresourced public schools with underpaid teachers;
– a dysfunctional, profit-driven healthcare system;
– a polarized economic system driven by what was once called usury.
To name a few. You don’t have to be a thundering prophet of doom to deliver a message of hope in the Light that darkness has not and will not overcome. But please name what’s looming in the darkness.
Help us live into the paradoxical Truth: God is in charge, we know there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and in the meantime this earth is in dire condition and this generation is reaping the whirlwind sown by rapacious colonizers whose legacy too many of us unthinkingly continue as we turn away from atrocities and continue to buy, eat, travel, celebrate, and even extend “charity” in careful, self-protective complacency.
Help us with that! Help us with our addictions, not just to opioids or alcohol, though in most congregations someone is suffering from those, but to fossil fuels and violence and social media.
Help us with historical analogies that connect us to the living Jesus. You had to learn something in your biblical studies about the Roman Empire and the plight of a people living under occupation; I’d like to hear the words “Palestinian” and “Gaza” unapologetically spoken in the context of that story.
Help us by bringing what you know of Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic to present consciousness. Historical inaccuracies are dangerous. Anachronistic reading of Scripture is, as we witness in daily news, dangerous.
Help us identify the dangers of white nationalism; help us be reflective, not just reactive, when we hear the words “racist” or “fascist.” Help us notice how words–not just people and places–are being abused for profit and power. And help us use them with care.
Karl Barth, who put himself at risk by resisting Nazi control of German churches, said preachers should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. It’s a valuable image, though the corruptions and suppression of news media loom large on the list of problems we face. Help keep us thinking critically and faithfully by shining the clear light of scripture on the news sources as you do that.
Help us be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
If you do that, I promise, those of us in the pews who need that kind of leadership will reciprocate with prayer, encouragement, conversation, and, even in our discomfort, thanksgiving.
Yours in hope of a new heaven and a new earth,
MCM
Marilyn McEntyre has taught courses in literature and spirituality at Westmont College, Princeton Seminary, and New College Berkeley. She has published many books of poetry and prose, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.