One of the things that cracks me up is when people treat me
like some knick-knack on their grandmother’s shelf, a fragile soul that will
shatter into pieces, when people drop the F-bomb and, shamefaced, apologize to
me, “I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
You see I wasn’t always a pastor. I didn’t grow up in a
pious family. And I’m thankful for that.
Sometimes I think back to my formative early ‘teen years
when I toured around with a jazz band, A Little Night Music. At age 13, we
found ourselves in a wild party in the farming community of Modesto,
California. As we played toward the back of the lawn at a cocktail party, we
saw couples gradually pairing off and heading for the bushes… and certainly not
only with their spouses. There was one free-spirit, who—emboldened by enough
Jack and Cokes—faced the band and decided to do high kicks in her mini skirt
facing while we played Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet.” One
additional fact: she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Tending figs and cows must
not be all that interesting.
(Then there were the years at Cal--by now having been a
Christian--when I came back from studying at Doe Library and returning to a
house full or fraternity brothers crawling on the floor, having taken
hallucinogenic ‘shrooms. But I'll leave that for the next edition of this essay....)
I haven’t always been a pastor, and I’m thankful—thankful
because I don’t come to faith and to the church with the immense baggage and rage
that churched people do who are still muttering about “the hypocrites” and the
“legalism” and “all the evil stuff the church does.” True I never sang Kum Ba Ya crying around a
fire at a Christian summer camp. But I had the opportunity to read about Jesus
with fresh eyes, without the distorting fun house mirrors that Christianity so
often puts between us and God. For that, I am grateful.
2 comments:
Excellent. This candid report reminds us that 1) Pastors are fallen humans too, and 2) God understands it all too. It's not like God hasn't seen a girl flip up in her underwear-less miniskirt.
When I was in the Army, my Chaplain, Dan, used to get comments all the time to the same affect. "Oh, sorry Chaplain, excuse my language." Dan used to joke in his sermons that people seem to have the weird theory that crass language becomes more or less bad depending on a person's radius from the Chaplain.
Not only our Pastors regular people (and that's a good thing!), but God is not sitting on a cloud somewhere counting our expletives. We need to keep our eyes on what the spiritual life is really about. Good post Greg!
Well said. I think the other element I'll expand on, as I expand the article someday, is that I'm actually thankful that I didn't grow up in the church because of all the negative stories from the Christians who did.
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