A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

Speaking of War
 

Let's say this right out front. I got Afghanistan, did not get Iraq. Still don't. I do not understand its purpose, and I am mystified by its methods. Through its long course, I have expressed my reservations about the war in Iraq only a couple of times, from the pulpit and in print, though less directly than the words above.

Why have I not been more outspoken more often? Do I lack the courage of my convictions? Am I afraid to cause offense or lose a friend? Am I a big chicken? A lily-livered, yellow-bellied, backbone-wanting panty-waist? Well, yes, come to think of it, but not because of the topic at hand.

I made a decision 20 some-odd years ago, or maybe the decision was made for me, and I don't think it matters which. The decision led to my becoming a pastor. I have many pastoral deficiencies, but, in the main, the decision was a good one, because I would have made a bad prophet, which, 20 some-odd years ago, I considered my alternative vocation.

A pastor is residential with his people. Prophets have the good fortune to blow into town and tell everybody that they're going to hell if they don't change their ways, then slip off into the next county. The pastor can't do that. She lives much as her people live, breathes the same air, reads the same local papers, shares dietary habits, attends similar events, sends her children to the same schools, and participates in the common political, social, recreational, and spiritual life as the people she serves. The pastor is not above the people, but with them. Aside from a smattering of Hebrew and Greek, the pastor shouldn't presume to know any more than his people. She is expert in few things relative to her calling, and functions best in the role of general practitioner. That keeps his accessibility broad and her empathy long.The people I live and work among have the same range of views on the war in Iraq that is common to the general population. They are pro, they are con, they are varying mixtures of both. I know because they tell me. These are the people I visit in the hospital and at home, teach, preach to, pray for, break the Bread of Heaven with, marry (them or their children), baptize (their babies usually), and bury (them, though I pray not their children). I clasp their Sunday morning hands after worship, sit on committees with them, attend fellowship events with them, fuss over, worry about, care for them. All of them, even the ones I may not be madly in love with any given day — nor they with me.

The people of my church may be doofusses — in fact, they are not — but if so, they are my doofusses, and, when called upon, I will defend them like a sheep dog, be they right or wrong, until my little sheep dog canines are ground down to nubs and my little sheep dog bark vanishes into a dry husk of itself from overuse.

I believe that the decision to be pastor is also a decision preferring relationship over all else. Ours is, first and last, a ministry of reconciliation (II Cor. 5: 16ff.) Being rightly related to God and others trumps right doctrine, right spiritual feeling, right moral position. It trumps even the "higher" moral positions spiced with the heady aromas of justice and peace, or the ones carrying the more earthy, but no less important, scents of individual responsibility and the defense of life in the very young, the very old, the very disabled, and the very condemned. The chief virtue for a ministry of uniformity of viewpoints but unity of the body. Only abuse or abandonment of the body are causes for separation.

It's much like the decision to stay married for the duration. At some point, you decide that being married is more important than being right on this issue or that one. Marriage really is a partnership of equals, no matter what the fundamentalists of hierarchy and submission say. The graces of a marriage that indeed lives throughout its lifetime are the abilities to communicate, compromise, apologize, forgive, start all over again, work together, play together, laugh together and cry together. Accent the word "together." Again, only abuse or abandonment of the marriage are causes for separation.

If I live long enough, I will, someday, rejoin the faithful in the pews and listen to sermons from voices other than my own. Out of self-defense as much as adherence to Gospel tenets, I subscribe to the spiritual and pastoral discipline of preaching to others as I would have them preach to me. Say the preacher of my golden years were an advocate of the war in Iraq (and present signs are that it just may last that long). I could live with that. I would want him or her to be honest about her or his ideas.

However, I would not want the preacher to address the war every time she or he opened his or her mouth. I would lose all patience if the preacher harped on the issue, or hectored me about it, or, worst of all, made it her or his mission to convert me to a pro-war stance. People who harp about things are only trying to convince themselves. Bor-ing! People who hector are trying to intimidate into silence or drive away dissenting opinions altogether. People who attempt this kind of conversion are manipulative at best and domineering at worst. Abusive in any case. Such qualities show lack of respect from the preacher to the congregation. They are the ending of a beautiful relationship rather than its beginning.

I don't know who gripes my hindquarters more: the people on the loopy left or those on the wacky right. The older I get, the more I become a militant moderate, both theologically and politically. There's a danger there, of course, that I could become an extremist in moderation, as odd as that sounds. Being able to move between (and even appreciate) the hard left and the calcified right might prevent me from becoming stuck in the middle of the road. I seek not a standoff between liberal and conservative, but a dynamic, creative tension. Not the path of least resistance but dialectic. Not stasis but synthesis, containing a little thesis and a little antithesis and more than simply both added together.

It's hard to be a principled pastor trying to hold things together, to hold a community together. It's hard living in a moral universe where so many forces are spinning out of control, back into chaos, back toward non-being, away from life and away from the light. I am embarrassingly bad at my calling. Sometimes I feel like I'm a gnat trying to solve a differential equation. But that's no excuse. I've got to keep working at it, keep relating, keep pointing to the Rock who is higher than me, keep trusting the One who made all things to re­shape them into the new creation, and us within it into the realm of holy humanity, the beloved community.

It's all love's fault, you know. We could handle the first half of the Great Commandment: love God with all you've got and are. Putting all your time and energy and mass toward God makes you a most committed believer, but a little fanatical, too. There's no fiercer warrior than a one-eyed monotheist, a condition that a thorough theology of the Trinity can clear up completely when taken as prescribed.

It is the second half of the Great Commandment that really gets us into trouble. You've got to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Respect yourself, respect others. Honor yourself, honor others. And as Jesus demonstrated in the way he lived and at his story-telling best, your neighbor could be anybody. No one is excluded from that category. Even the enemy is our neighbor. (Jesus is just plain exasperating, isn't he?) You've got to love no matter what, no matter who, Jesus teaches, and though we may not like it, some of us take it to mean that it is all but impossible to love somebody and kill them at the same time. Even those of us who are not exactly pacifists, who want to leave some maneuvering room in this dialectic, too, think that Jesus is not pleased at all when we take up arms against another human being. War is not glorious; it is always sinful and ugly and costly in precious human life, and therefore war ought to be the very last option in a long, long list of options, and undertaken with great humility and the most awesome foreboding.

I don't get Iraq. But some of the people I love very much do get it. We ought to be able to live together, worship together, laugh and cry together, serve God and our neighbors together nonetheless. Accent on together. Despite differences. I feel no compulsion to prove them wrong; I don't want them to waste time trying to prove me wrong. Proof is in the living, not in the arguing. I'm a peace-nic, but I don't need to wage a sermonic war in order to make my case. I'm a peace-nic pastor, but the peace is not in the words. It's in the loving.