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Remember Mama: Thoughts on Motherhood and Ministry

Just when it seemed that we had finally buried the image of the overbearing, overprotective, zealous “Jewish mother,” a psychologist has come along seeking to resurrect the deposed matriarch. In a recent book which he wrote with Herbert Yahraes, A Child’s Journey: Forces That Shape the Lives of Our Young (McGraw-Hill, 1978), Julius Segal, a staff member of the National Institute of Mental Health, says we ought to give that well-worn stereotype another look.

Segal takes issue with those who have vilified the “Jewish mother.” From the mom of comedian Georgie Jessel’s routines, with her “Finish what’s on your plate” and “After all I’ve done for you,” to the caricature of a mother who harasses poor Alex Portnoy in Philip Roth’s novel, the term “mother figure” (of whatever religion or race) has come to symbolize that one who incessantly and detrimentally hovers over her young.

Something Worse Than Smother-Love

A generation of enlightened psychiatrists has indicted these “mother figures” for producing neurotic offspring. Whether the mother who folds overprotective arms around her darlings is Jewish, Italian, Irish, black or whatever, we have charged her with smothering her children’s individuality and fostering a host of neuroses. Now Segal asks: “Just how bad for the mental health of our children is this mother who chronically hovers over her brood?” In answering that question, Segal refers to a book by John Rothchild and Susan Wolf; The Children of the Counterculture (Doubleday). Rothchild and Wolf studied a group of young mothers whose childrearing practices sharply contrasted with those of the traditional “Jewish mother.” The group was composed of dropouts of the 1960s, young counter-culturists now in their early middle years. The authors visited diverse groups of “families” in both urban and rural communes and even a number of collectives established by new religious sects. How was life in the communes turning out for the children? What were the new parental approaches of young mothers who felt that their own parents’ child-rearing notions were inadequate? How were these 1960s revolutionaries rearing their own children, far removed from the traditional middle-class values of an older generation’s “Jewish mothers”?

The findings were not encouraging. In their, interviews and observations, Rothchild and Wolf found children who were not so much physically neglected as emotionally and culturally deprived. They were struck by the widespread boredom, apathy and melancholy among the youngsters, many of whom showed clear signs of emotional disturbance and psychological disorganization. Segal concludes that there is something much worse for a child than to suffer the domination of the stereotyped Jewish mother; namely, to be the offspring of valueless, unattached, self-centered parents who are unwilling to give the time or the emotional commitment that parenting requires.

In our indictment of the “Jewish mother” and her sisters of whatever religion or race, we have overlooked the fact that here were mothers who cared and were not afraid to show it. Whether standing over the piano mercilessly coaxing a budding prodigy or arguing at the kitchen table over how many green beans are enough, these mothers gave their kids something to live for, strive for, react against; struggle with and grow away from. While their methods of child-rearing may have spawned some neuroses, their children never suffered from the anger, emptiness and despair that often haunt children denied the lifelong benefits of strong, early and continuing affectional ‘bond’s. Noted psychologist Selma Fraiberg agrees with Segal’s opinion that children may indeed benefit from an excess of mothering:

Whatever tendencies Jewish mothers and fathers have to be “superprotective,” and whatever they may do in creating unusual anxieties in their children, these are at worst diseases of moral conflict, which are, after all, curable. In contrast, there is usually nothing one can do to overcome the diseases of nonattachment created when there is no bond to begin with.

Fraiberg also reminds us that the “neurotic” reactions to overprotective mothers and fathers can lead to some successful adaptations. Portnoy is not the only offspring of an excessively committed and ambitions mother. The Leonard Bernsteins, Beverly

Sillses and John F. Kennedys of this world are often products of similar homes.

Parental Disengagement

If self-centered, neglecting mothers and fathers were restricted to countercultural pockets of our society, there would be less cause for concern. But Fraiberg fears that culturally legitimized neglect of children may be infecting all segments of society:

After 30 years of experience in the field, I am seeing for the first time in the past decade forms of neglect in educated, middle-class parents. . . . These parents may not recognize it, but their children are clearly neglected. Often both parents are working or are in school, and their young are peddled around just as many poor children are -- to various neighbors, to tenement centers, or casual and haphazard child care arrangements. Or, they are dumped off at the “Y,” in the kiddie park, anywhere. These children suffer some of the same problems that we used to see mainly in neglected slum children -- the psychopathic behavior, the “acting out,” the disorders of conscience.

Few parents would willingly admit to neglecting their children. But after interviewing 250 children in several U.S. cities, sociologist  Sarane Boocock concluded that the ties between today’s children and their mothers are surprisingly weak. Fewer children accompany their parents on chores and errands. Many mothers, Boocock found, devote as little as 15 minutes a day to communicating directly with their preschoolers. Parents deposit their two- and three-year-olds for hours at a variety of day-care centers despite voluminous research indicating that there are no “good” child-care arrangements for children of this age other than parental care. Very often, the church is the major culprit in encouraging the proliferation of preschool-age child-care centers through its willingness to have its facilities used in this way. While in certain low-income communities institutional child care may be a virtual necessity, the church in all too many instances is merely subsidizing mothers who have convinced themselves that they “have to work” to maintain their unrealistic standard of living. Child abandonment can be legitimized in a wide variety of ways.

The sad picture of parental disengagement from children applies to contemporary fathers as well. The masculine role of family provider has been an excuse for many fathers to abdicate virtually any involvement in the day-to-day, nitty-gritty duties of parenthood. Addiction to work provides a guilt-free rationalization for the father’s lack of commitment to child-rearing. The women’s movement’s call for female equality (too often expressed by a mother’s simply joining the father in irresponsibility by dumping the children and getting a job) is not the cause of the current crisis in parenthood. Its fruits merely accentuate the fact that for years many mothers have shouldered total responsibility for the nurture of their offspring.

After talking with dozens of children during the past few years, Segal claims to have heard a common plea: Give us a sense of being wanted and cherished, a sense of uniqueness, and you will have given us that which only parents can give, but that without which we cannot survive. What hurts most is your lack of guidance and your absence of conviction in leading us to discover our special contribution to the future.

The “Jewish mother,” of whatever religion, race, nationality or sex, gave a strong, unequivocal message of caring, self-sacrificing commitment to a child.

The ‘Mothering’ Minister

And while we arc on the subject of mothers, I think we in the church need to be reminded of what many detractors somehow talked us into forgetting: that any minister worth his or her salt has got to be a big mama. The late Carlyle Marney once observed that pastors seem to have a basic need to mother everybody -- if they are any good as pastors. Like Marney, I was somewhat disturbed to discover that I measured toward the feminine end of the scale on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. That I was disturbed probably said something about my inadequate images of ministry. Jesus himself longed to gather Jerusalem about him like a mama hen gathers her chicks; feminists have reminded us of this neglected image of divine compassion. Anyone who has ever incurred the wrath of an old mother hen by threatening her brood can testify to the fact that Jesus was probably speaking like an “over-zealous,” “overprotective” “Jewish” mama here. My own conceptions of divine providence rarely exceed my memories of seeing an irate hen in a flap over her chicks. Jesus says that God is like that.

Father images for ministry are fine, so far as they go. I had always hoped my hair would turn a paternal gray to enhance my image as an effective pastor. But I seem “to be getting more of a Martin Marty hairline. Of course, there are bald-headed fathers too. A score of writers have noted the potentially perverted uses of “paternalistic” styles of ministry and pastoral care -- the fostering of a congregation’s childlike dependence on the pastor, the turning of ministry into pastoral self-gratification at the expense of congregational freedom and maturity. Nonetheless, who would deny that everyone needs a mother and a father and that everyone will inevitably form an attachment to some mother or father figure should one’s natural parents prove inadequate? In an age of absentee parents, pastors can probably expect their parishioners to regard them even more as mother and father figures. The question is not, Will I have a father or mother figure in my life? but rather, as Freud first told us, What will that figure mean to me and how will he or she affect my humanity?

This universal need suggests to me that pastors may be called, in addition to their other callings, to responsible parenting. I suspect that we ministers flee from the parental images which our people are forever placing upon our shoulders not so much from concern over the mental maturity of our people but rather in an attempt to avoid one of the chief risks and burdens of Christian ministry. My seminary students frequently say that they want their future congregations “just to treat me as an ordinary person, just one of them.” We wish it could be so, but for the responsible pastor it cannot be. We can flee from our parishioners’ paternal-maternal images of us, and successfully detach ourselves from their needs, or we can affirm these images and live them out in responsible ways.

Institutions like the church can pervert parental images. But there is an equally damaging distortion that results from simply not caring. The in loco parentis approach to student affairs is out of fashion at today’s colleges and universities. Gone are the days when colleges tried to influence the morals or the personal behavior of their students. But is this a sign of progress and growing student responsibility or a case of irresponsibility on the part of the college? The late Margaret Mead observed that “we give our adolescents more freedom and less guidance than any society in the world.” Too many college freshmen get the message from their college’s administration: “We don’t care if you bomb out, destroy yourself, ruin your future, or fail to live up to your potential. That’s your problem, not ours. Who do you expect us to be -- Mama and Daddy?” The college avoids the “Jewish mama” trap, but does it succeed in educating anyone into his or her full humanity?

Grandmother Love

Pastors need to know that it is not all that bad to be someone’s mama. With the currently accepted definitions of masculinity and fatherhood abroad, it maybe more flattering to be accused of mothering someone than of playing a fatherly role. My grandmother-in-law has spent some 30 years as pastor of various United Methodist churches in South Carolina. She is a large woman with snow-white hair who uses the grandmother image for everything it is worth. Every church to which the bishop has sent her has protested her coming -- for who wants to have one’s grandmother living so close? Then, after she has served a few years in their parish, the church members have more strongly protested her leaving. Awhile back the bishop sent her to a nasty little church, that had run off more than one preacher, refused to contribute a dime to any national church program, and cherished a reputation for being one of the most hostile congregations in the conference. Bessie went there with fear and trembling, expecting to have a short stay. After she had been there a few weeks, I called to ask how she was getting along in the Carolina Gomorrah.

“Oh, the people are just wonderful and as sweet as they can be,” Bessie exclaimed.

“No problems?” I asked in amazement.

“No, none that I can find,” she said. “Oh yes, we did have a little difficulty at first, but we got it ironed out.”

I asked her to tell me more.

“Well, when we were voting on next year’s budget, everything was going along fine. I was so proud to see them vote to pay all of their apportionments and askings. Then we came to the Black College Fund item. The chairman of my administrative board said, “We ain’t going to pay for no niggers to go to college. That’s the way we are.” So I said, “Tom, that’s not nice: That is definitely not the way you are. You all can do better than that.” Tom sat down and said he was sorry and recommended that we pay all of it. Why, we’ve even invited the neighboring black church choir to sing for us next week.”

Bessie is an effective pastor. After all, what Christian would talk back to his or her grandmother? The only trouble with the people at that church was that no one had ever before believed in them, pushed them, prodded them, loved them as Bessie did. She loved them unmercifully, as only a grandmother can.

Though transactional analysis and other pop psychologies may provide rationalizations for our avoidance of ministerial parenting roles, I have more than a hunch that the parental image will be with us for some time to come, not only because people need it but also because the gospel itself suggests it. At times, we all must fall back on someone’s everlasting arms, though those parental arms may be pushing us out into life even as they embrace us. We all need someone who believes in us more than we believe in ourselves, who will stop at nothing to have us be all that we can be. Sometimes the only person who will risk that kind of maternal love is one’s pastor.

Jesus showed us as much of God as we ever hoped to see. When he spoke of God, he shocked some people who like their deity abstract and aloof by referring to God as “Daddy.” When we cry “Abba, Father,” he hears us, Jesus said. To speak of God as father was not, of course, a fully adequate way to imagine God. People have varying kinds of experience with human fathers and, as soon as one speaks of God as father, some are sure to project upon God the dependency, fear, hostility or resentment that has marked their relationship with their earthly father. Even if Jesus had been so bold as to call God “Mama,” it wouldn’t have saved him from these dangers of anthropomorphic thinking.

But how well Jesus knew us. Even though our images of totally committed, self-sacrificing, lifelong love are invariably limited to our taste of that kind of love through our human parents, they are still the best images we have and about the best we can manage in thinking about God. Of course, pastors who sometimes act like fathers and mothers are not God, nor are even the best of human parents. But sometimes we earthlings cannot get much further in our thinking about such things as love, fidelity, commitment and caring than to summon forth the image of some mama somewhere who will always be for us the concrete human experience of such divine ideas.

A person could do worse than to imagine God as an old mother hen or an overzealous “Jewish mama,” and a person could do much worse than be cursed with a “Jewish mama” for one’s mama or papa -- or pastor.

The Risk of Divorce

In the past ten years, the number of marriages in the U.S. that end in divorce has doubled. While the rapid rise in the divorce rate does appear to be leveling off as we end the 1970s, the numbers confirm what most of us have already experienced among our own families, friends and parishioners: that marital breakdown is a major phenomenon in contemporary society.

Complex Questions

Unfortunately, the church’s good intentions in regard to marriage have often resulted in bad dealings with divorce. While denouncing divorce, we have expended too little effort on improving the quality of marriages, preparing people for marriage, and supporting couples in the midst of marital difficulties. We must admit to the hypocrisy of condemning divorce while at the same time condoning as “marriage” a relationship that is little more than a cynical armistice, a mutual state of boredom, an arrangement of legalized prostitution, or an excuse for the continued subjugation of women. Too often we have been blind to the difficulties in marriage, treated divorced persons as pariahs and, in general, approached the subject with the attitude that “nice people like us don’t get divorced.”

But very many “nice people” in the church are getting divorced. If marriage involves a creative, courageous, demanding, risky act, then it also contains the possibility of failure. The acknowledgment of that failure is called divorce, and it is a tough decision to live through. A number of recent sociological and psychological studies seem to support Jacob Epstein’s assertion in his book Divorced in America that “in divorce there are only smaller and larger disasters.”

But despite available data on the trauma of divorce, there are some who argue that, far from being an unmitigated evil, divorce can be a good thing. Many people have come to view divorce as a natural consequence of “personal growth” and the “attainment of selfhood.” Instead of regarding divorce as a failure, Susan Gettleman and Janet Markowitz, authors of The Courage to Divorce, contend that “all married couples should be considered dependent, neurotic, and too fearful to divorce.” They ridicule the often-cited analogy between divorce and death: “Why should people want to mourn the ‘loss’ of someone they prefer to be rid of or have outgrown?”

The logic of such statements condoning divorce is as fuzzy as the reasoning behind some of the old condemnations of that act. There are more complex, more important human questions than have been addressed by either the stern denunciations of divorce or the accommodating “cheap grace” efforts to bless divorce -- or by the heralding of divorce as a liberation from outmoded bourgeois morality. It is time for the church to address some of those questions.

The Biblical Evidence

Malachi’s word from the Lord “I hate divorce” (Mal. 2: 16a) to the contrary notwithstanding, divorce was permitted by the Old Testament without stigma or litigation if the husband believed that his wife had “some uncleanness in her.” In the rabbis’ interpretations, “uncleanness” could denote an act of adultery (cf. Matt. 19:9), childlessness (Mal. 2:15), or even an inability to cook well! A woman’s position was extremely vulnerable.

Jesus’ thinking on the subject was different. When questioned about divorce, he replied:

 “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: Whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery” [Matt. 19:4-9].

Mark 10:11-12 and Luke 16:18 also show Jesus taking a hard line against divorce.

In regard to the remarriage of divorced persons, Matthew’s later version seems to show a softening of Jesus’ tougher stance in Mark to allow for the extenuating circumstances of adultery. Paul, while simply repeating what must have been regarded as an authentic and basic teaching of Jesus against divorce, adds another extenuating circumstance: if one is married to an unbeliever who demands a divorce, then one may remarry (I Cor. 7:15).

The biblical evidence indicates that Jesus categorically condemns divorce and remarriage after divorce, basing his prohibition on an appeal to God’s original intention in creation (“. . . from the beginning it was not so”). Divorce is not part of the intended scheme of things. Remarriage after divorce is called “adultery.” Some have suggested that Jesus real concern here was with the abuse of women within the divorce practices of the day. But there is no sidestepping the fact that Jesus condemns divorce itself, not just its abuse, in the strongest possible words.

However, the biblical evidence shows also that the church, after stating Jesus’ unequivocal demands on this subject, felt free to permit some few exceptions, perhaps in a pastoral attempt to deal humanely with specific marital situations while still upholding Jesus’ demand. Robert F. Sinks has contended, in a Christian Century article (“A Theology of Divorce,” April 20, 1977, pp. 377-378), that Jesus was taking a “situationist” stance in which divorce might be deemed appropriate in order to fulfill “the law of love.”

If Jesus allowed for breaking the honored Sabbath laws   would he not also allow for a suspension of the proscription against divorce if such were to liberate a person from the bondage of an intolerable marriage? . . . does it not follow that marriage was made for humanity, rather than humanity for marriage? If the institution, important as it is, does violence to the individual, then shouldn’t the institution be amended in order that the individual might flourish?

A major problem with Sinks’s argument is that he still has Jesus’ “hard sayings” on divorce to contend with. As is typical of the “situationist” approach, rules and codes are jettisoned in favor of the broad, unspecific, vague demands of “love.” Whether “love” alone is a sufficient basis for ethical behavior, particularly when the larger society has a stake in what happens to a marriage, is a matter which Sinks does not address.

It should be noted, however, that traditionally the church has shown a relative lack of concern about that vague thing called “love” -- particularly in regard to marriage and divorce. In the service of holy matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer, the basis for most Protestant marriage services, “love” is considered only one of the necessary requisites for marriage. Other moral values such as selflessness, honor, fidelity, sacrifice, permanence and commitment are also affirmed. Never does the minister ask “Do you love each other?” The question is “Will you love . . . ?” Love is assumed to be an act of the will.

I am particularly suspicious of situation ethicists like Sinks when they plead the “Great Commandment as a basis for ending a marriage “in order that the individual might flourish.” In today’s consumer-oriented, capitalistic culture, where people are used, abused and disposed of like nonreturnable soft-drink cans, where “liberation” has been invoked to justify selfishness, it may be that the time has come for the church to say again what it has always believed -- that there is no way for individuals to “flourish” without the kind of communion and community and the permanent, deep, risky commitment that true Christian love demands -- qualities that are perhaps best experienced in the yoking of a man and a woman in marriage.

The Two Become One

Many church people, responding to the “hard sayings” of Jesus, affirm a stand against divorce. We are not, however, upholding an impossible, perfectionist ideal, an unrealistic interim ethic, or a hardhearted legalistic command. In an irresponsible, pathologically uncommitted age, any bond may seem unduly restrictive. We may be rendering the greatest possible service to contemporary society in general and to our struggling fellow Christians in particular when we uphold the bond of marriage.

Jesus’ sayings about divorce seem to be grounded in his perception of God’s original intention in creation: “From the beginning it was not so.” Genesis 2 shows woman coming from the rib of man. This account in no way implies superior or inferior status for the man or the woman. Originally they were “one flesh” and, after creation of male and female, they now desire to restore their oneness. This, for Genesis 2, is the basis of marriage. Sex is reunion. Far from being a subservient afterthought, the woman is the often-neglected half of the male’s incomplete image of God. Separation is sin because it is a violation of this inherent, unifying purpose.

Good Jew that he was, Jesus was not able to conceive that a man and a woman could be joined and then separated. That union brings about an ontological transformation, a creation of a new entity which cannot be dissolved through Moses’ certificate of divorce, We have here, in Jesus’ prohibition of divorce, not so much a command but an invitation to participate, through our marital unions, in the underlying, unifying purpose of all creation.

The Old Israel and the New Israel, in relationship to God, are frequently compared to a man and a woman in marriage (Isa. 50:1, Hos. 2: i6-2o, John 3:29). Our fathers and mothers in faith before us sensed that human marriage was an example, a human analogy for the union which the Creator sought to bring about not only among individual men and women but throughout the whole creation. Marriage is God doing in a man and a woman what God is doing in all creation. That union is real, and to sever it is to separate oneself from the union toward which God is moving us.

Undoing the Past

The comedian Jerry Lewis once remarked that the best wedding gift which he and his wife received was a home movie of their wedding ceremony. Now, whenever things are not going well for them, he takes out the film, goes into his viewing room, locks the door, runs the film through the projector backward, and walks out a free man! Sometimes we wish to God that we could do that with our history.

Aquinas once wrote that even God shares one limitation with us humans: “God cannot make what is past not to have been” (Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 25, 1023). Time is neither cyclic nor illusory; it is real, The past is behind us; the present is the time for decision; the future is determined by the sum of all our yesterdays and todays. Jesus’ word on forgiveness was not that what we do does not matter. His message was that the future is not utterly determined by the past and that, through repentance and conversion, we can receive the love of God despite what we have already done with our lives.

J. R. Lucas, writing in Theology (May 1975, pp. 226-230), reminds us that our neophilic society is constantly telling itself that the past is irrelevant and that our decisions are of no consequence. But the facts of our lives cannot be ignored. We are the sum total of all that we have been: past deeds, past promises, past loves. Even God cannot wipe that away.

Some human transactions -- for example, a business deal -- are adequately fulfilled in a brief encounter. Something is promised and something is given and the matter is concluded. But marriage is a relationship that extends “so long as ye both shall live.” The shared joys and sorrows, the mutual secrets and hopes, the contract of marriage and the union it effects have profound and continuing significance. Husband and wife may be estranged, but they will never again be strangers. We can never be totally free from a union once it is promised and participated in.

That is why it is not helpful to quibble over questions of whether a given marriage is “real” or “valid” in the first place. If vows were exchanged in freedom and sexual intercourse has occurred (it amazes me how realistically and seriously the church has always taken sex!), then there has been a marriage -- however unsatisfactory that marriage may have been. There was meeting and union. A promise was made. Promises can be broken, but they can never be retrieved. Such irrevocable deeds may be regretted or repented, but they cannot be undone.

A Sign of Failure

Those whose marriages have broken down can experience forgiveness and new beginnings, but only if they first recognize the reality of what has been done and its continuing significance for their situation. In my own pastoral counseling experiences, I have found that most divorcing couples are realistic enough not to want superficial, cheap attempts on the counselor’s part to heal their wounds lightly by telling them, in effect, that their divorce and their prior marriage are unimportant. To tell them this is to imply that all of their life’s deeds, promises and loves are without value. There will be no future healing if a couple delude themselves, through a pastor’s misguided attempts to provide loving support, into thinking that their divorce is a momentary inconvenience which is best forgotten rather than a broken relationship which will exert continuing influence on their lives. As Henri Nouwen says: “To forget our sins may be an even greater sin than to commit them. Why? Because what is forgotten cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil” (The Living Reminder, p. 17). We cannot face God unless we first face these facts of our lives which are unalterable and which will be of continuing relevance. “One flesh” is an empirical, experiential reality.

Helen Oppenheimer has spoken of the inherently unnatural, painful nature of divorce:

. . . a broken marriage is a broken marriage; something that stands out as an unnatural smashing of what was built to last, a blasphemy against the unity of Christ and his church, an amputation inflicted upon a living body. . . . The bond of marriage is indeed a real bond, affecting those who are joined in it for evermore. It can never be neatly untied, only harshly severed. When this injury has happened, the practical question is how the wound can best be healed, and the temptation is always either to cover it soothingly up at a grave risk of festering, or to keep it open forever as a warning to others [Theology, May 1975, p. 242].

I have always regarded “a friendly divorce” as an emotional non sequitur. There is something vaguely immoral about two people joining together in wedlock, sharing everything they have, beginning a home, and then one day politely shaking hands and amicably going their separate ways. Let us be honest about divorce, viewing it only as a painful last resort, rarely “good” or “right” in the eyes of God. Divorce is not a satisfactory solution for times when marriage becomes difficult, when love is tested, or when vows are hard to keep. Marriage can be difficult, but so can divorce. We have been relatively candid in recent years about the risk of marriage; now let us be honest about the risk of divorce! Divorce is a sign of failure and of the presence of evil. A union was severed; love was overcome; a promise was not kept.

A Note of Judgment

The practical burden upon pastors and parishioners in dealing with divorce (and with marriage) is to be bold in holding to the will of God as we see it expressed in marriage and at the same time audaciously doing God’s will by loving those in the throes of divorce. There will always be a note of judgment in the church’s dealings with divorce. If it is not there, we run the risk dishonesty and unfaithfulness. We are called to faith, hope and love in our dealings with God, women and men. But many of our “cheap grace” dealings with divorce, such as the experimental United Methodist “Ritual for the Divorced” (Ritual in a New Day [Abingdon, 1977]), speak more of our irresponsibility and unfaithfulness than of our love.

Our word to divorced persons must be that the failure and evil inherent in divorce (or any other human separation) would destroy us were it not for the fact that God keeps his promises and continues his love even when we break our promises and our love fails. The past cannot be erased, but it can be forgiven. Even the most grave wounds can be healed. Life’s painful actions of “last resort” can be done not by rationalizing away the difficulties of the moral situation but by firmly relying on the grace of God. “Love God and sin boldly,” Luther says.

While St. Augustine did not know everything about love, sex and marriage (and much of what he wrote on these subjects is less than helpful), he did know a great deal about the grace of God. He knew that our noblest attempts to risk ourselves and to do the good are doomed to failure unless we rely on God’s grace to aid us. He knew that our great failures to do the good can utterly crush us unless we rely on the grace of God to forgive us. I think the saint’s words to those of us involved in the risk of marriage and in the risk of divorce might be the same as those he addressed to the struggling Christians of his own day:

God does not impose impossible things, but by manifesting his command, he urges you to do what you can and to pray for what you can not yet do; by so doing you fulfill the will of God [On Nature and Grace, 43, 50].

Cleaning Up the Wedding

April may be “the cruelest month” for poets like T. S. Eliot, but I’ve found that June is rough on preachers. Consider Ralph Wade, pastor of the Friendswood Baptist Church in Indiana, who united Denise Golay and David Whitfield in marriage. Ralph went by the book, but Denise and David had other ideas. Their wedding bulletin explained it this way:

As many of you know, Denise has an avid interest in the obedience training of dogs, and David has more than a passing interest in photography. The relationship now shared by the Bride and Groom grew from these two interests. With this in mind they requested the presence of the “Special Guests.” Your cooperation in observing their presence as part of this service is appreciated.

Well, you guessed it. After the singing of the theme from Benji (“I Feel Love”) came the “Entrance of Special Guests,” and in walked Brujean’s Trace of Beauty, Sun Dance’s Top Dee-O-Gee, and We-X-L, who strolled down the aisle in canine dignity and took their seats on the front pew. Then Tim Fentz, cousin of the groom, sang “I Want This Lady (to Be My Wife),” a composition he had written for the occasion. I have never met Ralph Wade, but somehow I think I know how he must have felt as he stood there, in his black suit with red carnation boutonniere, Bible in hand, watching the “Entrance of Special Guests.” We don’t need the horror of Robert Altman’s film A Wedding to remind us that June can be the cruelest month for clergy.

Whenever conversation among a group of ministers shifts to “my most embarrassing moments in ministry, the talk inevitably centers on weddings. Phrases like “pagan display,” “abusing the church,” and “disgusting extravagance” are uttered to describe some of the weddings we are called on to “perform.” To those who are not part of the “professional clergy,” it may seem strange that we priests should regard happy events like weddings as among the most unhappy things we do.

But these people have never stood with prayer book and Bible at 6:00 AM, in subfreezing weather on the edge of the surf in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to oversee the vows of two grinning post-adolescents who plead to be married there because “that’s where we first made love.” I wore long underwear under my black suit and prayed not only that “God may bless your marriage and establish your home in peace” but also that Bishop Tullis would not happen to be out driving at that hour and catch me in the act of matrimonial license.

Nor can the average layperson empathize with how a friend of mine, who has a master’s degree in counseling, felt when he attempted premarital counseling with a 75-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman. When he raised objections about their age difference, the prospective groom merely said, “Old wine has the most kick,” and the bride indignantly responded, “Strom Thurmond did it, and look where he is.” For such ministerial moments as these, plainly more than 2 master’s degree in counseling is needed.

I

I know there are those who claim to have certain ministerial standards or liturgical principles that protect them from these embarrassing nuptial episodes. I have a friend who brags loudly about the rigor of his premarital procedures: a minimum of four hours of counseling, physiological instruction, birth-control advice, standardized personality tests, and theological lectures. For him, this is all evidence of his professional integrity in regard to weddings, though I point out that he has had as many divorces in his congregation as I had in mine. The few follow-up studies available on the effectiveness of premarital counseling, such as one by Theron Neese of Columbia Seminary, seem to indicate that the practice is more effective in dealing with the insecurities and doubts of the pastor than with those of the bride and groom. Premarital counseling may contribute little to the success of a marriage, but it certainly helps to assuage the guilt feelings of the clergy.

When I consider my own earnest efforts to “clean up” the weddings in which I participate -- the counseling, the rigid liturgical rules, the list of proscribed music -- I sometimes wonder if these are more for than for the bride and groom. Usually I attempt to justify my actions in terms of theological or liturgical principles. I have argued to the death with more than one couple that Wagner’s “Wedding March” is not religious music.” But it still sounds like religious music to them -- church is the only place where they have ever heard it played.

In my more honest moments I admit that my most basic objection to many of the weddings I get caught in is not that they are theologically unsound but that they are, to use a good old southern expression, tacky. It is embarrassing for a person of my impeccable good taste, my artistic interest, my theological training, my liturgical commitments to get caught in the midst of the blue tuxedos with red velvet collars, the brides with their artificial bouquets, the overdressed mothers and sniffing fathers, and the cousins with their guitars crooning “I Want This Lady.” Many times have I concluded a service with the traditional “Those whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder” wondering about the wisdom of divine judgment, to say nothing of God’s good taste in these alleged matchings.

II

Which leads me to a hypothesis: having observed the determined efforts of pastors to “clean up” weddings and make them respectable, dignified and holy, I have come to wonder if weddings make many of us so uncomfortable because they judge, as do few pastoral activities, the inadequacy of our pastoral theology.

A Christian wedding is a service of worship, an expression of faith, a high and holy moment in our life together. Conscientious, responsible pastors must do everything possible -- careful planning, sensitive counseling, congregational guidelines -- to make the wedding the worship service that it ought to be. But a wedding is much more than a “spiritual” event. Holy matrimony deals first with God and God’s church, but it deals also with a particular woman and a particular man who come together “in the presence of God and these witnesses” to ask for our blessing to have sex, make a home together, conceive and nurture children, be faithful and ask forgiveness when unfaithful, disagree over the budget, argue over politics, and have sex.

Sometimes I wonder if, amid all the high-sounding talk, the flowers and lace, and the tea cakes at the reception, we forget that we are dealing with a very earthly, very human, utterly prosaic endeavor. In fact, I wonder if part of the appeal of the words, the flowers, the lace, the cakes -- or, for that matter, of the liturgy, the premarital counseling, and the minister’s earnest appeal for “seriousness” and “dignity” -- may be a complex rationalizing away of this embarrassingly human event, in short, weddings are an embarrassment because they reveal the limitations of our tidy, virginal, whitewashed, pristine theologies which cannot yet deal with incarnation.

Let’s face it: standing there in our black suits or robes, Bibles or prayer books in hand, looking earnest and serious, we are up to our necks in the most carnal of incarnations. Sacraments are always scandalous in their materiality. We want to talk abstractly about agape, but the bride and groom are all eros. And beside them stand a nervous mother and a befuddled father and a cousin strumming on a guitar and an inebriated best man, all of whom instinctively sense that the union of man and woman is too great a mystery to confront without all the help we can get. It’s romantic love here, not the sanctimonious caritas or agape we gnostics prefer. Romantic, erotic love is always tacky -- full of poetry by Kahlil Gibran and moonlight serenades and artificial flowers -- and it does not last. But it is with such romantic mush that most of us begin to love, and at least it’s a beginning. Anders Nygren to the contrary notwithstanding, our English language may reveal more about how most of us actually experience the Greek agape, caritas, eros and philia when it simply mixes them all up and calls them “love.”

III

I submit that our chief pastoral duty at weddings is not to make sure that the bride and groom “know what they’re getting into” (did you when you got married?) or that they are suitably matched and able to keep a lifetime promise of love and fidelity (nobody is able -- that’s why we ask for grace) or that they know the real meaning of marriage (even bachelor Paul had the good sense to call it musterion). The real meaning of marriage may have as much to do with the crooning cousins, flowers and upset stomachs, arguments over how to cut the cake, and nervous fathers as it does with all our theological rationalizations of this most delightfully irrational of human acts. I submit that the real pastoral task is to stand up boldly, even if embarrassedly, in the middle of all this and dare to proclaim as clearly and sensitively and faithfully as we know how the gospel of Jesus Christ: that these tacky, romantic, transitory moments are redeemed by his loving presence in our midst and thereby given eternal significance. Marriage is “an honorable estate” not because it’s all that spiritual, ethereal or heavenly. Marriage is beautiful because even as it was “adorned and beautified by his presence in Cana of Galilee,” Christ deems our unions worthy of his presence today. It is his blessing, his challenge, his judgment, his commission which we pronounce over the seeming chaos of it all.

Our God, thank God, does not wait until we get our lives cleaned up and aesthetically acceptable, until we know what we’re getting into, until all the psychological factors indicate that we are ready to mate, and until we figure out the real meaning of what it means to love another human being forever. Our God -- the one who began his ministry at, of all places, a wedding in Cana of Galilee -- entered the flesh, the tackiness and transitoriness of it all and said, strange as it might seem to us of little faith, that our human unions are of divine consequence.

A Waiting Church (Isa. 25:9)



Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. (Isa. 25:9)

The best that can be said of the church in these past weeks of Lent is that we are among those who have waited.

Questions were raised that had no ready answers -- sin, injustice, evil, suffering, the demonic power of Pilate’s state, the limitations of the democratic mob, the failure of popular piety, the remarkably similar deaths of thieves and saviors. Through all the stories that do not end happily ever after and the sermons that never come to satisfying conclusions, we have waited.

We would have liked to sing a premature Alleluia or to place a florist’s bouquet on our stark Lenten altar, but we restrained ourselves, gazed at the cross and waited. Through cold March Sundays, Reaganomics, Jaruzelski’s law and all the Maundy Thursdays and Good Fridays, we have waited.

We have stood silent beside sufferers’ beds of pain, and watched them go into night, held their hands and wept with them over their sad lives. We have seen their bloated bellies on the six o’clock news, their thin, outstretched hands. We have filled our Lenten self-denial coin folders with quarters, and waited.

Archie Bunker, in fierce argument with his agnostic son-in-law, is asked, “Archie, if there’s a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?” He replies, “I’ll tell you why     Edith, if there’s a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?” There is only awkward silence, so Archie yells, “Edith, would you get in here and help me? I’m having to defend God all by myself.”

Archie is me all over. As Woody Allen says, It’s not that God is cruel; it’s just that God is an underachiever.

Lent requires a severe discipline on the part of the church. It is the discipline of waiting. It is the discipline of honesty about the human plight -- sin, evil, injustice, unfulfilled hope, unanswered questions. It is the discipline of a church willing to be somewhat tentative in its hope, to see faith as a now-but-not-yet sort of thing, the discipline of keeping close to those whose sad lives challenge our facile assertions of deliverance. And pity the God who has no better defense than the church.

Only the church that is able to keep ranks in a waiting world, that does not flinch at open wounds, that views the world from the underside, can hope to march one day to the summit. Only the church that can forgo its desire to sing Alleluia and claim victory, that dares to join its voice with those who know only dirges, can hope to be a part of a real victory party. This is the Lenten church, the church of self-denial, chastened hope, fasting, honesty, pain. Nobody gets in on Easter who was not here for Good Friday.



But one morning, so Jesus’ favorite prophet tells it, one Paschal day the wait will end. One day “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast” (Isa. 25:6). Those who spent all their lives waiting in a line that never got to the cafeteria door shall be fed their fill. Tears shall give way to laughter. Death, great omnivorous thing, shall be swallowed up, “for the LORD has spoken” (Isa. 25:8).

Wishful thinking? Pie in the sky by and by? Only for those who wish for what God is unable or unwilling to do, only for those who have all their pie and more here today.

The One who waited, suffered and died in solidarity with those who wait, suffer and die now gets his day to dance. Even now, as the first rays of Sunday dawn, he prepares the great table. Wine is poured to the brim, platters are full for a guest list that was proclaimed years ago.

Now, see them begin to move in sunrise procession up that bright mountain, crutches thrown aside, bellies empty no more, shackles broken, standing upright, put back together, one joyous, loud Easter parade moving to brassy Allelujas.

And the once poor old church, surprised to find itself in the middle of a parade moving forward for a change, borne up by those whom it once bore, will say by heart the words which it rehearsed for so many Easters past: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isa. 25:9).

What Then Shall We Do?

And the multitudes asked him, “What then shall we do?” And he answered them, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” Luke 3:10-11.

The strange story of Jesus begins with the even stranger figure of John the Baptist. This odd “voice in the wilderness” appears “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3). John is not the Messiah; rather, he is here to get people ready for the Messiah. He stands between the old and the new ages, the last of the great Old Testament prophets: dressed in a cloak of camel hair, fasting and living in the wilderness, preaching words of threat and judgment. John’s message is simple: “Get washed up and ready because Messiah is coming.”

To the multitudes he cries, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” In the coming conflagration, no one will be safe. Time is short. False hope and security must give way to repentance and righteousness. John warns those who seek safety in the old order, in the comfort of conventional standards and institutions, “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’” Even the chosen people, the insiders, must repent.

At this time in its history, Israel practiced proselyte baptism -- that is, gentile converts had to be bathed as a sign of radical change, purity in the new faith and birth into the people of Israel. John makes the shocking assertion that even Israel must be washed. If the chosen will not respond, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” We can imagine how such preaching angered those who felt that they were already pure, mature and secure and had no need of repentance.

The repentance John calls us to is no mere change of mind and heart. It is a total metanoia, a complete turning around from self to God. More than an emotional “feeling sorry for my sins,” repentance is the fitting response to the presence of the Kingdom, the only way left now that our God has come, the necessary choice between self-salvation and God’s salvation. Here is a costly Kingdom. John pays for his preaching with his head; we may come to the river singing “Just as I Am,” but we will not leave these waters without having participated in a painful, deadly, costly work.

“What then shall we do?” they asked John. The Baptist’s response is decidedly ethical. “He who has two coats, let him share. . . . He who has food, let him do likewise.’’



And so, on this third Sunday of Advent, we gather and ask one another, “What must we do to prepare for the coming of the Kingdom?” Unfortunately, we often respond by urging people to sit quietly in lavender churches, reflect upon the state of their souls and feel sad about their peccadilloes. But John will have none of this. He knows that when one is faced with so great and different a kingdom as this, one must repent. One must turn around, through deeds as costly, specific and particular as sharing clothing and food.

Unfortunately, we have psychologized the gospel, turned it into a feeling, transformed the Kingdom of God into a mood. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that the Messiah whom we await is the great cosmic affirmer of everything we hold dear and of all our illusions. But Hans Küng reminds us:

We are to preach metanoia. We must entice people from the world to God. We are not to shut ourselves off from the world in a spirit of asceticism, but to live in the everyday world inspired by the radical obedience that is demanded by the love of God. The Church must be reformed again and again, converted again and again in each day in order that it may fulfill its task.

So this Sunday, in the midst of our growing joy at the advent of God into our world, let us pause to listen to this harsh prophet standing knee-deep in cold Jordan water. Hear his judging words, no matter where they strike and hurt. Remember -- our Lord comes not only to save us but also to change us, to convert these stones into children. This Lord comes as the one who will turn everything upside-down, even us, until all creation is under his rule.

Let us not flee his judgment with sweet platitudes. Let us heed the words of the prophet and bear fruits that befit repentance, giving up our alibis and false hopes and repenting through work that corresponds to God’s advent among us..

A Liberating Word in Water

There are seemingly many Christians who, Jesus’ words and deeds to the contrary, are determined to outspiritualize Jesus, to disembody the Christian faith from its earthy Hebrew roots, to act as if we can experience the grace of God on our own without recourse to such primal and primitive facts as bread, wine and water. Carlyle Marney tells of a couple of seminarians who complained to him that worship is of little help to modern come-of-age humanity because it is "out of date" and "old-fashioned."

"It’s worse than that," replied Marney. "It’s downright primordial!" And therein lies the rub. We have told ourselves for so long that we have outgrown the need for the primal experiences and contact with the old archetypal symbols that we have started to believe it. We have intellectualized the faith into the dullness of "Four Spiritual Laws" or subjectivized it into transitory emotional highs (or lows) which keep everything polite, comfortable, marketable and harmless. Nobody gets messy or out of control or embarrassed. Of course, few get judged, converted, ignited or reborn either. But such is the price of progress.

I protest.

We don’t outgrow primal, basic, archetypal symbols. I agree with Jung that we can ignore them or deny them or attempt to explain them and thus dismiss them, but we can never fully dispose of them. This, I have come to see, is especially true for that most primitive, primal and primordial of all Christian acts -- baptism.

Rationalizations and Euphemisms

As one who is concerned about the renewal of the liturgy, I have been continually impressed that we do everything possible to avoid baptism. Too many of those who practice infant baptism speak of it euphemistically as "christening," "infant dedication," as a little educative exercise to remind the parents to get the child to Sunday school, or as an insipid, cute, rosebud of an affair all full of kisses and talk that "God loves you and we love you," hoping that the church can get its real business with the child done later in confirmation class or through an adult conversion experience.

Unfortunately, the advocates of believer’s baptism have not done much better. In too many Baptist churches, baptism is an afterthought to the real work of a prior conversion experience, an act justified on the purely historical grounds that "Jesus told us to do it" (though why and for what effect remain in doubt), a procedure mainly of value in entitling one to vote in future congregational squabbles. Baptists’ claims that they wait to baptize until someone "is old enough to know what it means demonstrate that human intellectual, rational knowing or human subjective, inner experiencing is primary. In such language, baptism is clearly an appendage -- a secondary, even unnecessary human act. This is a tragic development in a tradition which once believed that baptism was important enough to die for.

Many look upon the confusion in baptismal practice and theology, the relatively low place which baptism now occupies in the life of the church and the lives of individual believers, and come to the conclusion that baptism is about as effective in making Christians as a cincture on an alb is in ensuring celibacy; and that a massive educational effort is needed to resuscitate the sacrament before it becomes extinct. But a psychiatrist friend of mine reminds me that his profession is more interested in what we cannot do than in what we can do; what we attempt to avoid, deny or rationalize away rather than what we accept; what makes us uncomfortable rather than what makes us feel good.

We attempt to protect ourselves from such threatening experiences as death and sex by speaking of them either in veiled euphemisms or in flippant casualness. We do this not because death and sex are irrelevant but because they are so painfully, intimidatingly relevant. We conceal, mask and trivialize such primal human experiences in hopes of avoiding contact with the mystery and the threat which enshroud them.

Avoiding the Act of Baptism

The same phenomenon is at work in our dealings with baptism. I have marveled at the studied efforts of my fellow pastors who do everything possible to avoid the act of baptism. Baptismal fonts have become progressively smaller, moving from bathtub capacity to fingerbowl size in a few centuries. One church I know keeps its "font" in a closet, dusting it off on those all-too-rare occasions when a new Christian comes forth. Great care is taken to be sure that nobody gets wet, that it is all done as painlessly and as pointlessly as possible. Most Protestant baptisms are wedged into a Sunday morning service, or done in assembly-line style on Palm Sunday (for who, outside of old Cyril, would take up time on Easter with baptism?), or moved outside the worship service altogether so as not to trouble congregational repose with a screaming baby.

I would argue that for us so to treat the sacrament of initiation into our faith, the universally recognized mark of a Christian, the act which has indisputable biblical warrant, is conclusive evidence for the fact of baptism’s continual, primal, primary significance for the Christian faith. We avoid, deny and rationalize only that which has meaning. It may have negative meaning, or threatening meaning, or subconscious meaning, but it is still meaningful. Why else would we work so hard to deny baptism if not precisely because of its continuing power?

Baptism liberates from death. Death and crucifixion are the primary Pauline images for baptism. "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light" (Eph. 5:14), they once shouted as the baptizand rose from the waters. Baptism is a coming up out of the waters as pure and sticky and fresh as a newborn baby coming from the waters of its mother’s womb. The old self must die and be buried, and a new self must be raised up. Luther often spoke of baptism as a once-and-for-all event that takes your whole life to do. He said that baptism means "that our sinful self, with all its evil deeds and desires, should be drowned through daily repentance, and that day after day a new self should arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever" (The Small Catechism).

Each day we must learn to die, to let go, to be plunged under the waters so that God might pull us forth like newborn babies. Baptism is a dress rehearsal for death. We must die many deaths, and we must be born again of "water and the spirit" -- and again and again. Baptism is the once-and-for-all, continuing experience of death and rebirth, repentance and conversion.

A Devastating Grace

Baptism brings the liberating word of grace. Everybody talks about grace, but few of us seem to believe it. We are forever putting conditions and qualifications on the love of God: "If you rid yourself of your racism, if you vote Democratic, if you accept Jesus as your savior, if . . ." Such conditional, achievement-oriented, self-made-men religion certainly doesn’t need Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead to make itself plausible and reasonable in an achievement-oriented, you-get-what-you-deserve capitalistic culture. As Barth reminded us, grace is always more devastating than judgment. Judgment is easy enough to take, but grace threatens the devil out of us.

That is because grace is a gift. A gift implies dependency, and dependency raises questions about our pretensions of omnipotence. Baptism, at whatever age it takes place, reminds us that we are always helpless, dependent, needy infants so far as our relationship to God is concerned. We are always dependent upon God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The absurdity of self-help books with heretical titles like How to Be Born Again should be self-evident. Salvation is not an achievement, or a technique, or a new life style. It is first and last a gift; a gift which we cannot earn but which ends up costing everything that we hold dear. My, how we all hate to let go and be plunged under the water and cast ourselves adrift into the everlasting arms of God’s grace -- particularly we Western materialistic types who think we have earned or deserve everything that we have.

Baptism liberates us to live again as children -- children of God. It is hard to look too adult and pompous and dignified while you are being tossed into a swimming pool. That’s why John told the Pharisees ("You brood of vipers") that they needed to get washed too. Their sin was in their pompous pretensions of adult self-sufficiency. Nothing so disarms our pharisaic pretension as a dip into the living waters of divine grace.

Just as Mark shows Jesus being claimed at his baptism ("This is my beloved Son. . ."), so we are claimed, signed, branded and sealed at our baptism. We are not illegitimate, homeless, parentless children. We are royalty. As Jesse Jackson used to shout at the beginning of worship in his inner-city church services: "You were nobody. But now you are somebody!" Or, as Peter told his congregation in what may have been part of an early baptismal liturgy: "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. . . . Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy" (I Pet. 2:9-10). Baptism is a celebration of that new God-given status. It is public testimony to our adoption as God’s children, our ordination into the ministry of Christ.

How we need to have that liberating word in water! We have become too impressed by our diversity, our differences, our sin, our infidelity. We Protestants, in reacting against the objectivistic and collectivistic excesses of the late Middle Ages, have overreacted and have been left with fragmenting individualism and suffocating subjectivism. We have become so preoccupied with the magnitude of our own guilt that we have lost sight of the magnitude of God’s grace. Baptism expresses a profound pessimism about human achievements because it shows forth a bold optimism in the achievement of God in Christ. It speaks of God’s fidelity to a world frozen in its own infidelity.

Tell me that baptism is insipid, outdated and irrelevant; then go with me to the sandy bank of a dark, deep river in low-country South Carolina where a black Baptist preacher in a white robe baptizes nearly every Sunday afternoon, and watch him plunge those new brothers and sisters three times each into the deep as the congregation sings "I’ve Been Through the Waters." He holds them under as they thrash around a bit. Then he and two deacons at his side bring them forth, wet and washed and dripping like newborn babies. Someone could get killed like that. Someone could get wet. It will literally scare the devil out of you. Precisely.

The pastor who tells people that baptism is "a little ceremony for the parents" or "merely a symbol that the person has made a decision for Christ" is probably the same pastor who attempts to protect his or her people with talk of death as "natural and beautiful" or of sex as "merely recreation." We wish to God that baptism were that easy. Baptism says and does much more than these heretical evasions of the rite, and we are willing to go to absurd lengths to protect ourselves from it. Far from being an outmoded vestige of a naïve liturgical past, baptism is devastatingly contemporary -- a revolutionary manifesto that subverts many of the values on which we have sold ourselves in the past few years.

And what are those values? In part they are the values of a death-denying culture suffering under delusions of self-sufficiency and independence, gone mad in its desperate search for self-gratification through self-centeredness. We want instant healing through techniques of autosalvation which promise growth without risk or pain. We cannot be forgiven of anything because we have no sin. We cannot be given anything since we are "self-made" persons who have earned and deserved what we have. We cannot be born again since we assume that we have made ourselves by ourselves. We cannot be resurrected since we don’t expect to die. We yearn for love but have "liberated" ourselves from the commitments and relationships through which true love comes. We suffer from that capitalistic fantasy that you get what you deserve" and that we can buy happiness if we are willing to pay the price.

We wish to God that baptism were meaningless, because it proclaims and gives a meaning which cuts to the core the selfish, materialistic values of our consumer culture. Luther used to call baptism "God’s word in water." It is a tough, unpopular word these days.

Water and the Spirit

In the New Testament, baptism means everything that water means: life, death, birth, refreshment and cleansing. The amount of and use of water in baptism is not irrelevant. In fact, one major reason why our baptismal theology is either insipid or nonexistent is that few Christians have ever seen a baptism! We have been so niggardly with both water and grace. To watch a family and a pastor baptize in most congregations you might think they were changing a diaper rather than participating in the baby’s birth. It takes a leap of faith to convince oneself that water is being used at all.

The question is not "How little water can we use and still have a true baptism?" The question should be "How can we generously flaunt this effusive graceful word in water which God has poured out upon us?" If water makes "no difference," why baptize? It does make a difference. If we could tell people, we wouldn’t have to wash them. And if the sacrament means anything, its meaning will be readily apparent in itself. People may not know or understand much about grace, repentance, rebirth and atonement, but everybody knows about water. Precisely.

Baptism liberates from sin. It is unfortunate that Augustine’s debate with the Pelagians ended in an overemphasis upon human sinfulness and upon baptism as the sacramental eradication of that sin. This emphasis has impoverished most of our traditional baptismal liturgies which speak of baptism and sin and nothing else. But in our "Whatever Happened to Sin?" society, where sin is viewed as little more than psychological maladjustment, or behavior arising out of corrupt economic structures, or as a failure of the educational system, baptism reminds us that, in spite of Gestalt and I’m OK, You’re OK, what we do naturally is not the best we could do, that our inborn selfishness and pride are life-and-death matters, that Christians are made, not born.

Our divisions, our black, white, male, female theologies, are empirical evidence of our continuing separation: our sin. None of these old, artificial identities count anymore. Why? Because we are "one in Christ." Because we have been "baptized into Christ" (Gal. 3:28). All these old sinful distinctions must get washed off. Nothing less than conversion and rebirth will do. And, by the way, if you don’t think that babies are as sinful, egotistical and self-centered as all the rest of us sinners, you have lost touch with reality. Babies know about as much of human fallibility and dependence upon God as they will ever know -- and perhaps even more than we will ever know.

In times of great doubt and despair, in sailing inkwells at the devil, Luther said that the only thing that kept him afloat was to touch his forehead and repeat the words "Baptismatus sum" -- "I am baptized." This gesture brought comfort in his dark nights of the soul. Why? Because, said Luther, we know our God to be a jealous God, a God who does not easily part with that which he owns, and baptism is a continual reminder that God always owns me. Therein is true freedom.

Dress Rehearsal in Death and Life

Can you now see why, in an earlier day, the church always baptized at Easter? What better time to have this dress rehearsal for death and life? What better time to show forth the womb and the tomb, the waters of creation, Noah, the Red Sea and the Exodus, the crossing over Jordan and all of the other visceral, visible, primal, primordial images of our faith? I wish we still baptized at Easter. Then we might stop avoiding the scandal of Good Friday and the even greater scandal of Easter with talk about eggs and butterflies and flowers and pop-psychology and politics, and boldly confront the utter mystery of it all -- the mystery which has first confronted us and claimed us and loved us. We might stop trying to prove or defend or explain the resurrection and get out of the way and let God do one. This time in water.

I predict that we will probably not do much baptizing this Easter or on any other Sunday for some time to come. Not because baptism is irrelevant, but because Christian baptism is dynamite. It is a revolutionary action which cuts to the core our shallow, sinful images of ourselves and challenges many of our superficial values. In a world asking too little of itself, feeling cast adrift on a sea of parent-less chaos, timidly sticking its toes into the waters of life when what we need is a faithful plunge, Christian baptism has become again a liberating, revolutionary act.

As liberating as the judging, birthing, devastating, resurrecting and refreshing love of God in Jesus Christ.

Going Against the Stream

The other day someone told me about a friend who had been asked to preach in the church of one of the famous television preachers whom millions watch every Sunday. On the way from the airport, the guest received these instructions: “People worship with us in order to feel good about themselves. Therefore, don’t mention the cross in your sermon. And don’t dwell too much on sin. And don’t mention the John Birch Society.”



Television does set certain limits on today’s successful preacher, doesn’t it? So does the spirit of the age. There is a new optimism abroad in the United States. Commentators agree: We Americans have decided to think better of ourselves. The flag-waving, athletic-financial success of the Olympics got us rolling. Last month, we overwhelmingly rejected the one whose opponent labeled him “Minnesota Fritz and the Temple of Gloom.” No one was in the mood for bad news. Everybody smiling, red-and-white balloons cascading, we have enjoyed a veritable orgy of self-affirmation. A man in Georgia being interviewed by CBS on election day: “I think there’s a new spirit in this country. You don’t see nobody stepping on our flag these days. People are just pleased to be Americans. They’re tired of all the talk about problems. They want to hear about what’s right and good.”

Therefore, pity the preacher this Advent. Sunday after Sunday, it’s Isaiah and John the Baptist. Not the Isaiah who sings so well in Handel’s Messiah, but the Isaiah of chapters 63 to 64, who laments the fate of the Jewish exiles in Babylon. It is the raging plaint of a homeless people in a Babylonian death camp. They cry:

Thy holy people possessed thy sanctuary a little while;

   our adversaries have trodden it down.

We have all become like one who is unclean and all our righteous

   deeds are like

   a polluted garment.

thou hast hid thy face from us,

   and hast delivered us into the

   hand of our iniquities [Isa. 63:18, 64:6-7].

 

But we, 2,000 years later, have escaped the death camps so that we might celebrate Christmas. We are moving, have been moving since the first opportunity in late October, bedecked with tinsel, behind a fat, smiling, bewhiskered old man, toward cheer. Eggnogging our way to bliss. We are better off than we were four years ago and, presumably, we shall be even better off four years from now.

Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.



And here’s the poor old church. Out of step as usual. Unable to catch the spirit of the times, swimming against the contemporary stream, the church is all gloom and doom. Isaiah 63 to 64 this December is the theological equivalent of the Nehru jacket. The world wants Christmas jingles and the church sings a lament! The world has visions of sugar plums dancing in its head and the church sees only angry Jews standing by the fence, wailing toward heaven:

thou art our Father,

though Abraham does not know us

and Israel does not acknowledge us [63:16].

 

We Americans are doing better, better and better. And the old church had better get in step or it shall be left behind as our joyous parade of happy, successful, progressive, positive people moves upward, upward and ever onward.

A few years ago we watched one of those annual Christmas specials that appear on television about this time of year. Smiling singers cavorted in a winter wonderland (in Hollywood), then everyone gathered by the tree as the happy couple, stars of the show, held each other’s hands, looked into one another’s eyes, and sang, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.’’

Scarcely a month later, their marriage was over amid bitter public recriminations and charges in court of abuse. Yes, we said, come to think of it, there was something a bit phony, a bit contrived in their yuletide joy.

Like this not-so-happy TV couple, there is something a bit contrived in our wave of national self-affirmation. If we’re doing so well, why do we drink so much at parties? If we are so happy, why must we so forcefully reassure ourselves and silence those who disagree? If we’re so happy, why must we talk about it so much? Ponder the annual office Christmas party. There is something forced, rather compulsive in our holiday merriment.

A kind of optimistic numbness sets in, in which honesty is impossible and a realistic assessment of our situation is blocked by the royal theology of success. True prophets bring about social change by simply helping people to weep for what they know they have lost, to exchange their national anthems for laments.

“The Christian faith is a thing of unspeakable joy,” says C. S. Lewis. “But it does not begin with joy, but rather in despair. And it is no good trying to reach the joy without first going through the despair.”

The Advent prophet meets us on our cheerful way up and inserts a cold, despairing word into our seeming optimism.

 

We have all become like one who

   is unclean,

   and all our righteous deeds are

   like a polluted garment.

We all fade like a leaf,

   and our iniquities, like the wind,

   take us away.

There is no one that calls upon thy

   name,

for thou hast hid thy face from us,

   and has delivered us into the

   hand of our iniquities [64:6-7].

 

Scarcely had the election ended before the inevitable truth-telling began. Yes, we do indeed have a deficit problem. Yes, despite certain promises, there will be new taxes, and new cuts. Reality intrudes itself.

Let us not be too harsh on the royal theology which we created. In our own lives, in our yuletide overspending, overdrinking, overhoping, overgetting and overgiving we act out a sad seasonal ritual: oh, that a new video recorder or a new car might fill the emptiness. Yet, we know that in the cold gray of January the bills come, the radio evicts Bing Crosby and we find that, alas, the “Peace on Earth and Good Will” of the TV Christmas specials barely lasted until New Year’s.

We are out somewhere, back against the wall, in some padded, comfortable, tinseled cell. Even though the guards outside have smiling, amiable faces, we are still their prisoner. Exiles, far from home.



The hope for us, says the church in Advent, is that we are out of hope, and we know it. We know, in our better moments, where our quest for self-affirmation has left us. Now, lost in the cosmos, victims of the monstrous technological toys we have created, we wander. America, with our bombs and bombers, our deficits for defense, our cheese and wheat stockpiled before the scandal of the poor and hungry shivering in the cold again this Christmas -- our ancestors wouldn’t know us.

The Advent prophet leads a sad litany made all the more sad because it is reality: “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. . . . our Iniquities, like the wind, take us away. . . . thou hast hid thy face from us” (64:7-7).

That’s why the church generally refrains from singing Christmas carols during Advent. That’s why purple, the color of penitence, adorns our altar and the neck of your preacher. We dare not rush to greet the Redeemer prematurely until we pause here, in darkened church, to admit that we do need redemption. Nothing within us can save us. No thing can save us. We’ve tried that before. No president, no bomb, no new car, no bottle, no white Christmas can save.

No! to all false consolation, we say. No! to the empty, contrived merriment of a terminal world. Our hope must be in someone out there who comes to us. We find our way only because One comes, takes our hand and leads us home.

No thank you, we shall wait here, in yearning and silence, in darkness and penitence, for that One.

“In our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?” (64:5).

Wait. Wait and see what is to be born among us. God grant us the honesty and the patience to wait long enough to find some real salvation.

Taking Up the Cross (Mark 8:31)

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected . . . and be killed [Mark 8:31].

When Jesus asks, "Who do men say that I am?" Peter’s hand is the first to go up. "You are the Christ," he answers. Among all the others, he is here the disciple who understands. He looks at Jesus and sees the Messiah, on his way to Jerusalem to claim his crown.

But then Jesus’ next words strike like a tolling bell. "And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer . . . and be rejected . . . and be killed." And Peter, who only a moment earlier was so sure of what he knew, is thrown back into confusion. And so are we.

How is it that the church, like Peter, can answer Jesus’ question correctly and still be wrong? "You are the Christ!" we shout. This is no small insight. Some look at Jesus and see only the Baptist with his fierce preaching, or old Elijah, or one of the prophets. But we see him for who he really is: the Christ, the Anointed One, the Savior. Then the bright moment of confession and revelation darkens as the storm clouds gather and we stumble behind him toward the Passion. He picks up his cross and urges a cross upon us as well. Striking at the heart of our expectations for easy deliverance come the words suffer, rejected, killed.

As the worship committee of my church made plans for Lent and Easter this year, I noted that we minimized Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but planned big for Easter Sunday. We, like Peter, still find it inordinately difficult to believe that the Christ of Easter is the same Son of man who must suffer, be rejected and killed. Even more than Peter, we resist the notion that the cross is the definition of what it means to follow Jesus.

To help us avoid the cross, our theologies first minimize our participation in evil, and then inflate our possibilities for goodness. Evil is explained away as a temporary disorder of personality or a quirk in the political system. Sinfulness, personal or corporate, is but a matter of maladjustment that can be cured through some minor psychological or sociological tinkering -- I’m O.K. and you’re O.K. and the Department of Health and Human Services will make our community a nice place to live. Unable to be obedient or courageous, we are content to be decent. Don’t worry about what is good; it’s enough simply to do what works. Jesus was an idealist who lived 2,000 years ago in a dusty, prescientific sort of place, whereas I must adjust to Greenville, South Carolina, and keep up my car payments.

Must the confrontation with evil be as harsh as the eighth chapter of Mark depicts it to be? Must the alternatives be laid out so sharply? Do our timidity and good will deserve such a fierce rebuke? After all, we are only trying to keep good people from getting hurt. We are only trying to protect the innocent.

If we or Peter follow Jesus to the cross, you can be sure that we will be protesting all the way. Here is a path nobody wants to take, a burden no balanced person would willingly assume. Our shoulders are too weak to carry such a load.

The doctor spared few words. "Your baby is afflicted with Down’s Syndrome, mongoloidism. I had expected this, but things were too far along before I could say for sure."

"Is the baby healthy?" she asked.

"That’s what I wanted to discuss with you," the doctor said. "The baby is healthy -- except for the problem. However, it does have a slight, rather common respiratory ailment. My advice is that you let me take it off the respirator -- that might solve things. At least, it’s a possibility."

"It’s not a possibility for us," they said together.

"I know how you feel," responded the doctor. "But you need to think about what you’re doing. You already have two beautiful kids. Statistics show that people who keep these babies risk a higher incidence of marital stress and family problems. Is it fair to do this to the children you already have? Is it right to bring this suffering into your family?"

At the mention of "suffering" I saw her face brighten, as if the doctor were finally making sense.

"Suffering?" she said quietly. "We appreciate your concern, but we’re Christians. God suffered for us, and we will try to suffer for the baby, if we must."

"Pastor, I hope you can do something with them," the doctor whispered to me outside their door as he continued his rounds.

Two days later, the doctor and I watched the couple leave the hospital. They walked slowly, carrying a small bundle; but it seemed a heavy burden to us, a weight on their shoulders. We felt as if we could hear them dragging, clanking it down the front steps of the hospital, moving slowly but deliberately into a cold, gray March morning.

"It will be too much for them," the doctor said.

"You ought to have talked them out of it. You should have helped them to understand."

But as they left, I noticed a curious look on their faces; they looked as if the burden were not too heavy at all, as if it were a privilege and a sign. They seemed borne up, as if on another’s shoulders, being carried toward some high place the doctor and I would not be going, following a way we did not understand.

On a Wild and Windy Mountain (Heb. 11:17)

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son . . . [Heb. 11:17].

The film that my wife and I decided to show was the dramatization of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Afterwards, my wife would lead the children in a learning activity related to the story, while I would discuss its meanings with the adults. Patsy had some misgivings about showing so ancient and strange a tale to the children.

"It’s only a little Bible story," I said. "What harm can there be in it?"

The group watched silently as the story unfolded. Abraham was played superbly by the Israeli actor Topol, and the dialogue, in Hebrew with English subtitles, added authenticity to the film. What an austere sight it was to see old Abraham struggle up the windswept, dusty mountain -- Moriah -- a knife under his coat and his son trudging silently behind him. Finally the bronze blade is raised, the boy’s black eyes flash with horror; then the voice stays the knife, the ram cries from the thicket and it is over.

I stopped the projector, divided the group in half by age, and the learning began -- began for me, that is.

"Who knows what the word ‘sacrifice’ means?" my wife asked the children. A few hands went up, a definition was attempted here and there.

"But what does sacrifice mean to you?" she continued. That’s when the trouble started.

"My Daddy and Mommie are doctors at Duke," said one third grader. "They help sick people to be better. Every day they do operations to help people."

"And how is that a sacrifice?" Patsy asked. But the little girl was not finished.

"And I go to the day care center after school. Sometimes on Saturdays too. Mommie and Daddy want to take me home, but they are busy helping sick people -- so lots of times I stay at the center. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we have pancakes, though."

And everyone, from six to 11, nodded in understanding. They knew.

"But what does this old story mean to us?" I asked. "I daresay we moderns are a bit put off by the primitive notion that God would ask anyone to sacrifice his child like this. Can this ancient story have any significance for us?"

"God still does," interrupted an older woman, hands nervously twitching in her lap. "He still does."

"How?" I asked.

Quietly she said, "We sent our son to college. He got an engineering degree, and he got involved in a fundamentalist church. He married a girl in the church; they had a baby, our only grandchild. Now he says God wants him to be a missionary and go to Lebanon. Take our baby, too." She began to sob.

The silence was broken again, this time by a middle-aged man. "I’ll tell you the meaning this story has for me. I’ve decided that I and my family are looking for another church."

"What?" I asked in astonishment. "Why?"

"Because when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, businesslike, Rotary Club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s God could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to know that God."

Someone else was crying now, a young woman whom I had not yet met, a new member of the congregation.

The woman sitting next to her put her arm around her. "Gloria wanted me to tell you that her husband left her and the two children last week. She wants us to pray for her," she explained.

"What on earth was all that about?" I finally asked.

She knew no more than I. By then, the wind had died down, the bleatings of the ram could be heard no more, and Father Abraham had descended from the wild mountain, leaving our group of 20th century suburbanites on the flattened plain of middle-of-the-road, reasonable religion.

How odd that we who make our homes and plant our gardens under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, who regularly discard our innocents in sacrifices to far lesser gods than Yahweh, should look condescendingly upon Abraham. No stranger to the ways of the real God, Abraham would know that a mad, disordered, barbaric age needs more than a faith with no claim but that its god can be served without cost. How puny is this orderly, liberal religion before the hard facts of life.

The sky darkens, the wind howls and a young man walks up another Moriah, driven by a God who demands everything and who stops at nothing. He carries a cross on his back rather than sticks for a fire, but like Abraham, he is obedient to a wild and restless God who is determined to have his way with us, no matter what the cost.

Get Out of Here! (I Cor. 15:1-11; Lk. 5:1-11)

In a lecture on "The Renewal of the Inner City Church," Jim Wallis told a group of pastors true stories of declining inner-city churches that had, by the grace of God, rediscovered their mission and begun to thrive. I was inspired, but in the conversation afterwards one pastor after another criticized Wallis’s speech. They accused him of looking at the church through rose-colored glasses. One even implied that he had lied.

That evening I told Wallis that I was appalled by the group’s reaction. "I wasn’t," he said. "That’s the reaction I always get from mainline, liberal pastors. They are amazed when God wins. Scared to death that Easter just might, after all, be true."

Luke includes a story of Jesus’ homiletical success with a great crowd "pressing in upon him to hear the word of God," followed by a frustrating night of fishing failure in which the disciples "caught nothing." Then, when Jesus speaks, the disciples realize astounding, net-bursting success. It’s comforting to see Jesus’ sermons so well received after the unpleasantness at the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:21-30). Now Jesus is master not only of the word of God, but also of fish. We who so often feel powerless over the elusiveness of language, the scarcity of natural resources, the horror of world hunger, are thrilled to witness the unveiled, magical power of Jesus.

It’s too soon in Luke or the new year for an Easter story. Still, any time we’re working the night shift with Jesus, we must be prepared for an outbreak of Easter. We witness what it’s like to be astounded by a death-defying Jesus, moved from failure and scarcity to life and triumph. It’s wonderful.

Or is it? The reaction of Peter -- the premier, quixotic disciple, the first of the church -- to all this abundance-producing power? "Get out of here; I’m a sinner!" Last Sunday they wanted Jesus out of Nazareth because of his preaching. Now they want Jesus out of Galilee because of his fishing.

Peter moves from the security of fixed, failed reality -- "We fished all night and have nothing" -- into full, uncontained reality-- The water is deep and dark, spurring Peter to sense the gap between his world and Jesus’ new creation. Peter moves from calling Jesus "Master" to the even more exalted "O Lord!" Then things become unmanageable and scary. Peter sees his situation as a lack of faith rather than a lack of fish, and he blurts out, "Get out of here, Jesus," literally in the Greek "Get out of my neighborhood!"

Personally, I’ve got a better theology of ministry on Good Friday ("Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures"), with all sorts of sound sociological, psychological reasons for death and defeat, than I have a pastoral theology robust enough for Easter ("He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures"). Most of my sermons, even in Epiphany or Easter, work the theme: "Ten reasons why you are not really the Body of Christ even though you thought you were when you came to church this morning." There’s a reason why Marcus Borg, in The Heart of Christianity, labors to disjoin the "pre-Easter Jesus" from the "post-Easter Jesus." it is easier, I think, to be in the boat with Borg’s historical Jesus -- wisdom teacher/movement initiator/social prophet -- than with Jesus the Resurrected Christ who rocks the hell out of my dead and dying world. Though Jesus tells us, "Don’t be afraid" when he promises to teach us to fish like him, it’s scary. Get out of here, Jesus.

I was not present at the finance committee meeting the night they voted on next year’s budget. Next morning, I got a call from the chair. "Preacher" she said, "great meeting last night. I opened with prayer and it was as if the Holy Spirit descended on us. With little discussion we unanimously approved next year’s budget -- a 10 percent increase over this year’s. It was wonderful! There’s a new spirit in this congregation and we’re going to ride with it."

I said, in love, "Let me get this straight. The church that is five percent behind on this year’s budget is going to have a ten percent increase next year? That’s crazy! I’m the spiritual leader of this congregation. I will tell you when the Holy Spirit gets here. There is no way that you will pledge that budget!"

"Well, you weren’t there and we’ve already voted, so that’s that," she replied.

On Sundays during October, the chair reported on our progress during worship. The second Sunday in October she rose at the beginning of the service and said, "I never thought I’d live to see this day in this church. I am pleased to announce that we have pledged next year’s budget In full!"

The church erupted in spontaneous applause.

"Which is all the more amazing considering that this is a huge increase over this year’s budget." Applause again.

"Now, as I remember, there was somebody who said. ‘You will never pledge that budget’ Help me remember. Who said, ‘That’s crazy you will never pledge that budget’? Who said that?"

Sometimes I despise the anticlericalism of the lay people as much as I fear the unwanted intrusions of the Holy Spirit. It isn’t easy when you are fishing with Jesus. Get out of here, Jesus.

Stanley Hauerwas says that our culture is built on the fear of death. He thinks this explains our health care system, our economy, our government, Gold’s Gym and all the rest. I am now fond of saying that this culture is built on an even greater fear -- the threat of being raised from the dead.