Preachers, Priests, Ministers, And Pastors---Part One

Please read Part Two here.

I like listening to some of those old-timey-like preachers, the ones that start slow and build up to a crescendo in ways that make you sure that you’re going to fall through the floor and go straight to hell and then give you some hope to go home with. The ones that say at the beginning that they’re not sure that they can really preach but then call out names of those present as they go on and draw in your attention and pace around the altar and sweat, their voices wavering as they take satan on and win in a contest that is bigger than World Wrestling. The kind that shows up in Harley-Davidson shirts and have some dirt under their fingernails and look at you with that clear-eyed, almost teary intensity and tell you they love you and want to save you and you believe it. The kind that spontaneously ask you in a conversation about football what your favorite Bible chapter and verses are. The kind that know heaven and hell well enough that they can stomp, pound, shout, plead, cry, and sing and do all of that without notes. The kind who will play an electric guitar at the altar and warn you off of drinking and remind you about car wrecks, and the kind who preach in churches where you think maybe the woman playing the piano or the guy at the drums could have played with B.B. King. Lined-out hymns, where reverence and longing for heaven flows through the people, and the beginning of the Greek Orthodox Liturgy, where you get that feeling of casting off from a shore and beginning a heroic journey with others, will touch my heart with heavy hands.

I really do like all of that and respect it all.

Sometimes as I’m washing dishes, I put one of those preachers on and listen in and I go along pretty far.

I can go right up to that point where they start claiming that someone is trying to rewrite the Bible and they’re there to stop that, or where they start preaching against gays or liberals or abortion rights. They hit that point where they start making themselves the center of attention or our first barrier against liberals and satan and anything modern and you can just usually feel the shift in energy. When they get to that point, I shut the tablet off or start looking at the exit if I’m in church.

I’m not looking for validation or agreement, but I am there listening for something that will touch my working-class heart and teach me something and give me new insight and something to use when I’m trying to get through the day. I want to be reassured that God has his working clothes on and knows what kind of person I am under my own working clothes or Sunday Best. Brother Dave Stacy sometimes hits that for me these days, but I have longed believed that God has a preference for the poor and the oppressed and that this shows up in Scripture.

I’ll take that raw honesty from the preachers, conservative as it can be, over a dry lecture that is intended to make me feel good or over something lighthearted with reference points like what happened to the preacher or reverend in college or on the golf course that I don’t get.

I don’t want to paint with too wide a brush here. There is nothing wrong with a preacher, minister, or priest trying to make us feel good. And I have heard some incredible sermons that took the listeners through hidden meanings in the text of the day and the contexts for those meanings. I’m going to post a couple of those sermons from a Roman Catholic priest on this blog, and I believe that attentive readers will be wowed by them. I recently posted a sermon by Fr. Dennis Parker that I hope will wow you as it did me.

It's not like it’s always one or the other or has to be, either explosive and spontaneous are-you-washed-in-the-blood-of-the-Lamb sermons or we-don’t-know-who-Jesus-is-but-it-sounds-like-we-should-have-Him-over-for-supper-on-Thursday. The “Wow!” sermons that I’m talking about are on another plane. So are genuine mysticism, heartfelt and soulfelt responses to tragedies that occur in faith communities, and calls to action for the common good. But have you noticed a pattern that I have? So many of the preachers, ministers, and priests who preach from that other plane end up getting fired or tossed out. It’s not just what they’re saying or how they’re saying it, but that they’re trying to engage people through critical thinking and that is exactly what decisive numbers of Christians want to avoid.

Now, I want to back up here and acknowledge that there are rural and working-class mysticisms and Biblical interpretations being done and lived out that go further and better than what many astute students will learn in school or that you will get by reading a certain book. My impression is that most of this great work comes from people who live within their traditions and who use their Bibles as their only points of written-down reference. They do their work alone and in small groups, and quite a few of them pay steep prices as they take their inspiration into their churches and communities. Examples of this in my circles include the Primitive Baptist Universalists, Reese Maggard and Johnathan Buttry. Look them up on Youtube or Facebook. Now, I can’t always grasp what they’re talking about, and I know that we disagree on quite a few things, but I have come to the point of believing that these are matters of revelation. They have a different revelation than I do, a different tradition, and, really, a different Christianity, but “different” is not the same as “wrong.”

Truth be told, there isn't one Christianity except in the mystical sense of the term. And my conservative friends who are either suspicious of traditions and institutions or who claim to be within traditions deriving from the earliest Christians but have no historically accurate way of mapping this are missing something beautiful that they have at their fingertips: the traditions that have developed in their hollers and rural communities and storefronts and workplaces can enable a truly radical theology that others do not have at their fingertips.  

The heart of my statement here is that God’s mind and will---these are impoverished human terms---changes in relation to what we’re doing and is so great and overwhelming and so full of gifts that we live with revelations that sometimes appear contradictory. God's nature and being and presence aren't changing, but our Scripture shows us how God's mind has changed in relationship to human will and action.

Our understanding of God also changes. Theological liberals make a good point when they insist that God is still speaking and that revelation is still unfolding. That’s half of a truth that should be followed by another truth---we need ears to hear, hearts to accept, and eyes to see because God’s revelations are unfolding but we don’t always get the help in churches that we need to hear, feel, and see. And we have this problem that the society we live in constantly tries to break down what is cooperative and collective and replace that with competition. It’s no surprise that we end up with competing churches and theologies and people who insist on leading and not serving.

I am coming to believe that the tests of which revelations carry God’s truth and are genuine come down to a few points that I can see (and more that I can’t see). Will a given revelation stand over time and develop? Does it meet the conditions we read of in Matthew 25:31-37? What tradition does a revelation exist within? Does the church, in a historically imminent sense, hold that revelation close to itself?

Three other points come up for me here. One is that doctrine only goes so far. It seems less likely to me that you will incur divine wrath if you get a point of religious dogma wrong and more likely that you will feel that wrath if you’re not taking Matthew 25:31-37 seriously and agitating for others to do so as well. Second, we would do well to take on the inquisitive and probing methodology that we see most clearly in Judaism. Complain to God and the saints, doubt and argue with the Holy Spirit, dissect, and reassemble---but do this from a place of dedicated study, and do it with others. Last, the Kingdom of God is an option, a choice, and choosing that Kingdom necessarily puts us at odds with the powers that be. It is a theological, faith, cultural, and social choice, but it is also an intensely political choice. More about this last point later.