Bread for the Journey. Thomas W. Currie
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came on Saturday afternoons with Dizzy Dean, sponsored by Falstaff beer. In 1955 the Dodgers won their one and only World Series as Brooklyn’s team, beating the hated Yankees in 7 games. I was in the 5th grade then and got in trouble with one of my teachers because I whooped out loud when I heard the final score. The next year, 1956, the Dodgers and Yankees played in the World Series again but this time the Yankees won with a pitcher named Don Larsen hurling a perfect game. In my opinion Larsen was a mediocre pitcher who got lucky in one game against a really great pitcher, Sal Maglie. Still, a perfect game, 27 up and 27 down, impressed.
Last week an unheralded pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, Armando Galarraga, pitched an almost perfect game against the Cleveland Indians. 26 up and 26 down. The 27th batter, Jason Donald, hit a dribbler between first and second, and Galarraga ran over to cover the bag, getting there just in time to receive a throw to make the final out. Only the umpire, Jim Joyce, called Donald safe. Unbelievable!
There has been a great deal written since then about the “lessons” both umpire and pitcher have provided the rest of us in their responses to this “injustice.” Galarraga’s immediate reaction, that is, his unconsidered, uncalculated response, was to look up to heaven, smile in bafflement, and put his hands on his head. He did not jump up and down or go after the umpire (as I would have done) with veins bulging and expletives flying. Rather he seemed curiously chagrined by it all, smiling in bafflement and incomprehension. Then he went back to the mound and got the 28th batter out.
Later the umpire apologized to Galarraga and admitted he had been wrong and had blown the call. All of this may seem trivial, but it does stand in marked contrast to the way our culture practices outrage in other areas of life. The oil spill in the gulf offers abundant evidence from the world of business and politics that the reservoir of good will is distressingly shallow and unlike the oil business itself, does not require that one drill very deeply before hitting a gusher of incoherent rage. But why point the finger at businessmen and politicians when the church itself seems to offer such a sad spectacle of “passionate intensity.” We find it so hard to extend mercy to others. I am more convinced than ever that especially in church debates “winning” and “losing” are massively inappropriate terms to describe the mind of Christ.
Love, I suspect, “wins” few debates, and more often, “suffereth wrong,” often bearing with defeats that turn out to be more victorious than any victory won by votes. What was so striking about Galarraga and Joyce was that in the midst of “injustice” and its aftermath, neither lost his humanity. How did that happen?
In a not entirely unrelated column, Michael Gerson wrote the following concerning politicians who stray from their marital commitment: “Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity . . . . ‘The sins of the flesh are bad,’ said C.S. Lewis, ‘but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and back-biting, the pleasures of power and hatred . . . .’ Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies . . . . This recognition should lead toward the most underrated of the moral virtues: mercy.”12
Mercy. Could it be that mercy is what keeps our humanity intact, keeps us from reducing ourselves and others to “winners” and “losers”? Does mercy tell us something true about ourselves, not as a form of politeness but as something that is theologically true? We seek forgiveness, Calvin reminds us, not in the hope of securing a merciful God, much less to appease an angry deity. Rather, God is merciful. And because God is merciful, we can dare to approach “the throne of grace” with confidence, knowing that we will find mercy there. And having found such mercy, we can afford to be extravagant in sharing it with others.
As our denomination begins another “marching season” of church debates, one hopes for mercy.
September 21, 2010
Yesterday I was in a meeting with area pastors to discuss Eugene Peterson’s book, Practice Resurrection (Eerdmans, 2010). Peterson will be here next month to give a set of lectures. The book is an extended reflection on the letter to the Ephesians and accordingly, our discussion centered on the nature and mission of the church. One of the recurring points of discussion among the pastors had to do with the extent to which the church is under obligation to pay attention to the cultural context in which the gospel is proclaimed, as over against the extent to which the church is called to keep faith with the claims of gospel itself. This is not a new debate. Its lineaments have been traced by H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture, Torchbooks, 1975), among others, and more recently, by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon (Resident Aliens, Abingdon, 2014).
After the discussion, I reflected further on the matter. So many of the agendas which seek to make the church and its message more intelligible have little to say concerning what I would call the “soul” of the church. One of the pastors remarked that it seemed to him that Peterson was interested in what he called “deep church,” that is, the church not merely as a cultural phenomenon but something with a life of its own, possessing its own strange identity.
I do not think that pastor was arguing for returning to the glorious days of yesteryear, when the church was stronger, more numerous, and more visibly important to the culture. For one thing, those days were not all that glorious. However, the culture we are seeking to address today is a culture that is, ostensibly, not much interested in the mystery of the gospel’s word of grace, and which is, to speak the truth, often asking other kinds of questions. Some of these questions have to do with the effectiveness of the church as a consumer item which can do something for “me” or the extent to which the church is an agency of change that will accomplish some generally regarded good or the way in which the church can serve as an instrument for cultural or political persuasion. Pastors are sometimes encouraged to judge their effectiveness in responding to these questions, and by the resulting increase in the number of members their congregations can record or the impact they can make on their communities. These are not unimportant indices of pastoral leadership. The Gospel of Luke-Acts seems very interested in precisely these kinds of criteria, noting the numbers by which the early church grew and the way in which the church’s influence was spread over the Mediterranean world.
Yet as I listened to the discussion and occasionally bit my tongue, I wondered what it would look like if our determination to be relevant succeeded, and the church became a more effective institution led by excellent managers and therapists who could provide the necessary religious commodities that consumers of our culture would like. Having done so, would we have lost our souls, forgotten how to speak the strange language of grace, where so much growth is underground (Cf. John 12:24: “ . . . .unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit . . . .”) and where what is measurable is often what is of least importance? I know that arguing in this way can be an effective way of dodging hard realities and giving into laziness or sentimentality. There is more than one kind of “cheap grace.” But I also know that we are dealing here with mysteries of the gospel that beggar description and simply cannot be reduced to “measurable objectives” or the trivialities of body count.
So what do I want? I hope that our seminary trains pastors who are at least uncomfortable with the culture’s rush to measure things, who are not afraid of being measured but who know the church will be judged not by the culture’s standards or its own, but by the God whose judgment is both more severe and more gracious than we can conceive. I believe that the word of the gospel always finds its own hearers and gathers them together in community. It may not be the community we would have chosen or even would want. It may not look like us or be what we are used to, but it will not be one we have programmed or targeted or managed, but one the Holy Spirit insists on giving us. The church, Will Willimon reminds us, unlike a seminary or university, does not get to have an admissions department.