Here we are again. A week ago, Donald Trump was elected president. We did this once before. Many of us tried to forget those four years, and how bone achingly hard it was to minister faithfully. Well, it’s worth reflecting back a bit on those hard years.
Every word of yours will be blue or red
One
of the hardest things about the four years of Trump was how everything was
viewed through an intense partisan lens. I remember the week the Sermon on the
Mount came up in the lectionary. A colleague was called onto the carpet by her
church council for “picking” such “anti-Trump” words.
At bible studies and council
meetings you could see parishioners calculating out if your words supported
Trump or the Resistance; anything that didn’t clearly have a red hat or a pink
hat with ears on it, was suspect. You were assumed to be on the other “side”
unless your words explicitly announced the shibboleth of the moment, whatever
the moment was. In short, good was wholly defined by its relationship to Donald
Trump and his framing of whatever issue was front and center in our national
life that day or that week.
This
means we need to remember how to blend idioms, so people can actually hear the
gospel. It means translating the message of scripture into two opposing
vernaculars and then tearing the corners off each, so they still startle and
save your people! It means preaching the good news about Jesus is going to
challenge your people in ways that are going to make them uncomfortable, and
sometimes they are going to hate you for it.
As a
corollary, there will also be a temptation to see every instance of discomfort
and every time someone spews hatred at you, as proof of your faithfulness. We
preachers aren’t that righteous. There will be times when we screw up or
are indelicate or are responding to events with our own agenda, not
faithfulness to the Gospel. Deep and meaningful discernment is required.
And the
lectionary is doing us no favors—or every favor, depending on how uncomfortable
you are willing to get. We’re heading into the year of Luke! Luke, who insists
on an ancient sort of gender equality when it comes to miracles—if a guy
receive healing in a certain way inevitably a woman will receive the same. Luke,
who is concerned about everyone having enough to such an extent that his John
the Baptist sounds to some like John the Socialist, with his cloak
re-distribution and emptying of the Tax Collector’s pockets. Luke, who begins
Jesus’ ministry with the words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he
has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Christian Nationalism
Along
with partisan lenses, there was the drum beat of Christian Nationalism. People
would continually confuse being an American citizen with being a Christian and
vice versa. Using Lutheran language, people were consistently confusing the two
hands of God—the authority of government and the authority of the church. Or to
use more American language, there were gleeful urges to break down the wall
between church and state.
Sometimes
this was fairly innocent stuff: “Why not more hymns that honor America, if
baseball games can honor our country, why can’t worship do the same.”
The
answer being that worship is something different than a baseball game. We’re
here to worship Jesus, not America. Many civic hymns aren’t written and
embraced because they have good solid doctrine, but because they rouse people
to fight, or feel especially good about a cause, or a country. For example, the
Battle Hymn of the Republic affirms that God’s glory is clearly visible in the
wrath filled death visited upon America during the Civil War. As Lutherans
we affirm God is most fully visible only on the cross, and even then, it is a
strange thing, an “alien work of God.”
Other
times it could get downright uncomfortable, insidious even. “In the prayers of
intercession don’t pray for countries that aren’t America.” “We’re a Christian
country, so shouldn’t non-Christians leave?” “The ELCA shouldn’t do refugee
work or foreign mission, we should help our own first!” “Pastor, don’t you
think Donald Trump is America’s King David, anointed to Make America Great?”
The
above may sound comical, but they are all things said to me last time around.
So, as good Lutherans, we ought to be clear that the Church is never a
political party at prayer, the City of Man isn’t the City of God, and there is
no such thing as a Christian country, because Christians are always sojourners.
Theocracy is not our goal, and the Kingdom of God comes about in instances that
will look nothing like America’s political process. We only hope that we are given
the grace to catch glimpses of it.
Exhaustion
The
pace of those 4 years was grueling. It felt like there was a whole year in
there where a major world-shifting event that had to be referenced and
unpacked in the sermon if the preacher was to be faithful, happened every
Saturday afternoon. Along with that, the number of parishioners breaking down
under the unrelenting weight of the news cycle and unending familial partisan
fights, in need of pastoral care but also prickly as could be, was astonishing!
In
retrospect, some of those times we preachers tried to be faithful to the moment
came off as shooting from the hip. For that matter, sometimes it was chasing
relevance, not faithfulness. But, in the fog of those four years, it was hard
to tell the difference. Even with the breathing room of the last four years,
it’s still hard, at least for me, to discern the difference.
Don’t go looking for crosses, they’ll find you
Maybe
this is a “me” problem. For all my time in New Jersey and Belgium and England
and Oregon and about a dozen other places, I’m at my core a Liberal from
Wyoming, a “Red State Reject.” That means I tend to assume a defensive crouch
and am tactically and strategically moderate. I don’t assume going for
maximalist goals or grand denunciations work. I assume if I were to announce that
everyone in the room has to side with me or my ideological opposite, I’m going
to be pretty lonely—and doing so might endanger other people. At my core I
value: listening, finding common ground, holding my own ideologies loosely, and
taking bold action only when it will do the most good.
This
kind of stance was not well received in the Trump era. You see, at least once a
month there was a drum beat on social media that, “If your preacher doesn’t
preach this talking point, this Sunday you need to leave your church!” This
was usually followed up by one-upmanship by preachers about how fiercely Trump
was denounced and how many “Red Hats” walked out that Sunday. It felt at times
like the misquote of the day was to, “Preach with Daily Kos in one hand and the
Bible in the other.”
And
maybe some contexts called for that level of political engagement. But every
time I tried to hop on that train, every time I tried to fully embody that
meme, “If you wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, look at what
you’re doing right now!” it felt performative, and like I was trying to
center myself in a story that wasn’t actually mine. The raw energy of the era
made every protest, every new book, every email, every action—be it wearing
safety pins or now blue rubber bands—the most important thing.
In short, I felt like I was rushing
off to find my cross so I could carry it. But, the same thing I tell
parishioners who get excited about some harmful thing being their “cross to
bear” and Luther told all those monks flagellating themselves as a good work,
applies here, “If you’re acting faithfully in the world, the cross will find
you.”
I found that to be true. Faithfully
ministering during the Trump years caused me to lead my fairly moderate to
conservative congregation to care about and advocate for Indonesian
refugees, some of whom were eventually deported. The cross found me, not in
safety pins or marches, but in the day in day out work of caring for souls
well. Or to roughly translate that into a secular phrase, “Think globally, but
act locally.”
A Word on Protest
With all the above said, there is
something right about protest that I’d been told in college, and only have come
to believe to be true after January 6th. I was fairly active in
protesting against the Iraq war. After that movement fizzled out, some folks
thought I would show up to the protest about the next issue, and the next
issue, and the next issue—there was literally a protest about something at
least once a week at U of O. It was like people cared about the medium as much
as the message, that protests were a good unto themselves, which always hit me
wrong.
At the time, again call me Crouching
Wyoming Hidden Liberal, I thought less was more—people would actually pay
attention to protests, if they weren’t the background noise of the everyday. My
more serious protester friends responded that the smaller inconsequential
protests were practice for the big ones that matter.
When the Women’s March happened, I remembering
making a big deal about how amazing it was that no one was arrested or hurt. Many
conservatives forcefully pushed back at me. I tried to explain how there is a
talent and genius to protesting well. My words were mocked. Then when the
conservatives did their version of the Women’s March—January 6th—hundreds
of people were hurt, several died, and there are still ongoing arrests!
On one hand, I could say that was
all by design, that the violence was all intentional, and therefore everyone
who participated ought to be locked up, or at least fined. Or I could assume
that the right has absolutely no idea how to protest, because they never
practiced.
Now, if my kinder interpretation is
correct, it also means college me was wrong. A healthy practice of protest
ensures that the big ones are orderly, that points are made with words instead
of with bear spray and brass knuckles.
Conclusion
-Trump is really good at pushing people into partisan
corners, we’ll need to be ready to preach Gospel to an even more siloed church.
-People are going to confuse Church and State, we need to be
clear about that separation and refuse to be co-opted.
-We need to think about pacing—we have been given timeless
truths and we need to trust they’ll be relevant even during seismic shifts.
-We won’t need to hunt down the hard particular work, it’ll
find us in the day to day of our baptismal vocations.
