Forty years I swam in the deep waters of the Christian faith, so deep in fact, I became a professional for twenty of those years...a Youth Pastor, a University Pastor, and a Preaching (or dare I say “Senor”) Pastor. The longer I navigated the clerical waters, the less certain I became! In my final two years as a weekly mouthpiece for God...standing on a platform with the expectation to share some truth about existence through a divine lens...you’d have heard behind closed doors, “I just don’t feel like I have the certainty to proclaim much of anything anymore.”
Not only did I find myself a messenger with a shrinking arsenal of material, I had zero desire to dictate other people’s behavior. Unfortunately, pastors are often expected to tell people how to live, what to do, even what to think. One congregant wanted me to tighten the moral clamp on a young unmarried couple living together (Code for having sex without the state issued paper. We all know the legal document sanctifies the penis.) to explain: “You either end this debauchery or you are no longer welcome here.” I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Let’s not even get into the shitstorm of “What does the Church do about gay couples?”
During this waning season, I encountered a metaphor that gave me space to continue my ministry. I believe credit goes to the tattooed pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. My job was simply to hold out the gospel: the good news of Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection and the flood of transformative energy that flows from his story - hope, love, second chances, dead-to-life, grace, inclusion, safety, shamelessness, guiltless, belonging...on and on it runs through the landscape of tired, heavy, dark and shattered hearts. I could do that! I did do just that!
I no longer had to fix people (How can a broken human fix another broken human anyway?). Instead, each week I’d stand up, hold it out, both arms fully extended: “Look! Come! Taste! Rest!” Seven days later you’d find me standing there again, arms extended: Look! Come! Taste! Rest!” No matter where the gathered crowd mettled during the week leading up to that moment: hate, bigotry, greed, adultery, dishonesty, violence, gossip...I’d still be there holding out the beautiful gospel. This image would pump life-blood to sustain me to the end...enough motivation to continue to preach, so I hoped.
But then I mettled in places of rot, where maggots feed on souls. I smeared the buried feces of the heart all over my face. You can’t hide that shit and it launched shrapnel into the gut of my best relationships. “Moral failure,” especially of the infidelity sort, assures an exit to a 20-year ministry. I wouldn’t recommend such a departure.
Although I’d mentally walked myself through the disastrous consequences ending my marriage would bring - I’d traveled it many times - a part of me hoped to still find on the other end some arms extended, holding out the gospel: “Look! Come! Taste! Rest!” - for me! An unfair request indeed!
Some admitted, “I don’t want to hold the gospel out for you!” Others might utter, “I’ll keep it tucked away until you really want it, then we’ll talk.” And others, perhaps the largest of the groups, couldn’t extend their arms because I’d snapped them at the elbows.
And here’s the whole point, where everything turns in the story...where the image dissipates into thin air.
With no arms to hold out the gospel, you’d think its own reality would lift itself up, its own sheer power, its overwhelming beauty and its concrete truth would crawl out through my moral debris and under its own power offer itself to even me: “Look! Come! Taste! Rest!”
Instead...quiet, a bare horizon.
There is no gospel without hands to hold it, no narrative that tells itself. The reality lives in the extended arms themselves. Ask the undiscovered Amazonian tribe how the gospel found them? Hope, love, second chances, dead-to-life, grace, inclusion, safety, shamelessness, guiltless, belonging exist as real and tangible human experiences...but they are human experiences, something we offer each other. It does not stand outside our creation.
The majority of my life Jesus monopolized these human experiences but in the bare horizon I’ve awakened to discover it never was Jesus. It was you...and her...and him....and them. So now I look for extended arms rather than what they hold. I too hope to engage this life and planet with extended arms.
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