So Close To Xian…

MAGA fan tells CNN: 'Trump is so doggone close' to Jesushttps://t.co/HZPVq4IxJR

— Raw Story (@RawStory) April 12, 2024

I can’t remember this story as clearly as I should, but I’ll tell it anyway.

One of my seminary professors was married to a UCC pastor. This was 30 years ago, and I think he was (is) about 10 years younger than me. All to say his wife was not in her 30th year in ministry. She pastored a church full of old people (didn’t we all?). And this is where I forget the details of the story, except to say this was the early ‘90’s, and the idea of Trump in politics, or MAGA, was in the unimaginable future.

The story is, she preached a sermon (I forget the topic. Politics? Social justice? Whatever.), and everyone on the way out praised her for saying the opposite of what she said. As her husband told it, she wanted to wave everybody back into the church and start over again. (This would become a familiar feeling in a few years.). Instead it wasn’t long before she left parish ministry for an administrative position in a UCC hospital. One thing you learn in the pulpit: most of the job is administrative, rather than pastoral or theological.

The point of mentioning this story? Same as it ever was. People hear what they want to hear. And it has bugger all to do with what they’ve been told.

There is a difference in degree between my story and the reported one. I’m not sure there’s a difference in kind, though. What the “people in the pews” think and what the “people in the pulpit/“in charge” are saying is usually rather disparate, and in some matters wildly so. Few pastors in the South in the ‘60’s dared preach agreement with, or even address the challenges made, in Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” To this day we still all prefer one sentence from Dr. King. So don’t think I’m making “us” morally superior.

I also knew a retired pastor who told the story of a church member (he was an interim, or temporary past; he could say this to a church member) who told him something (again, the crux of the story is lost to time) that prompted him to reply: “I think you’re worshipping a different God than I do.”

I still run into that reality, long after leaving parish ministry.