A Response to Brian McLaren's "Church in the Trump Years"

C: As we think about those two ways of being, the separation of wheat and weeds, good fish and rotten fish… I can’t help but notice this article that separates out clergy into two camps “Active Collaborators” and the “Silently Complicit.”

G: Those both seem like negative categories, weeds and thorns, rotten fish and lutefisk… I don’t think those categories fit the Kingdom of Heaven.

C: Agreed… but the image of a “way” is instructive… isn’t that the way Matthew and the Didache and Psalms and Proverbs… the whole wisdom tradition really,…talk about two ways of being human, the wise way and the foolish way, paths of righteousness and paths of wickedness.

G: So perhaps all those #Resist signs outside of that Congressman’s office you hold vigil at could give us new categories—there are two ways for clergy to act in the Trump era—the Highway of Cooperation and the Highway of Resistance?

C: I like that, and we could even keep the slow lane/fast lane distinction.

G: We?

C: Okay… I could keep them. Then you have Cooperators in the fast lane—they support Trump as ruler even if they disagree with his policies, and you have the slow lane of people focusing on personal morality to the detriment of the social good… and on the other side, the Highway of Resistance, you have a fast lane, the clergy who have made every sermon about resisting Trump, protest in their collars, hungry to get arrested so they can be seen as the new Bonheoffer, or even hungry to get other clergy arrested so they become radicalized and move into the fast lane.

G: You’re being a little harsh there.

C: I’m harsh because I was them in the Iraq War—I wasn’t clergy but I was all in in the Fast Lane, and I don’t think what I did stopped the war or made for better policies. In fact, I think some of the stuff I did was counter-productive… we weren’t the adult in the room, or at least we didn’t look like it.

G: Processing your stuff much?

C: I am. So, the slow lane are those resisting by writing letters and making phone calls, bringing signs and granola to the vigils, and preaching in a way that their congregation can hear the incongruities between the Beatitudes and “Winning” without making it a referendum on the Presidential vote those congregants cast. They tear themselves in two making sure folk recognize they are respected, even as they deeply disagree about taking in refugees, and… well, everything.

G: You do realize you are sounding a lot like those clergy Dr. King wrote against, right?

C: I don’t sleep well at night.

G: You aren’t making it plain, put it in proverbs, maybe you’ll get there.

C: Okay… ummm…

Happy is the Pastor who brings along the weak ones.

Sad is the Pastor who rushes out ahead and can no longer find their flock.

Happy is the Protestor who supports women's healthcare and reproductive rights from cancer screenings to contraception to safe abortions--can that not be said to be pro-life?

Sad is the Protestor who decides to “take back” the term Baby Killer.

Happy the Pastor who conducts herself more presidentially than the President.

Sad is the Pastor who leaps into the mud to be slaughtered by the pig.

G: But you aren’t happy.

C: True. But, my greatest fear is that the fast-lane folk are going to wreck and in the process clog the slow lane of resistance as well—delegitimize all of us—our congregants won’t be able to hear us, or care to, and then we have a one-way street to 8 years of Trump and decades of cleaning up. I fear that I’ll be an old man before we recover from the damage Trump will bring to this country and this world.

G: Aren’t you a sunny one today.

The Laborers

G: Hey, C, get up!

C: Uh? It’s, like, 3am.

G: Yeah, isn’t it great! Don’t you feel invigorated?

C: Ehhuuh.

            Old ‘Gus put a travel mug of coffee in C’s hand and drug him out the door to his car.

C: Where are we going?

G: The Home Depot parking lot.

C: Why?

G: You’ll see.

            The drove there and parked in the dark, no one else present… C sipped his coffee, Old ‘Gus did jumping jacks with a huge grin on his face.

G: I was wondering, I watched you preach on Sunday, no one called or responded—other than that one guy, and people looked at him funny.

C: Yeah, it’s not common in Lutheran churches.

G: What else has changed homiletically? Do you still have set pieces?

C (perking up): I do. In fact, I have one that is especially good, because it is true. It’s so true some days it is the only thing I can hold onto and believe in this Jesus stuff at all.

G: Well then, let’s hear it.

C: I was volunteering at the Comea Shelter, a shelter for homeless men back in Wyoming. Each day I filled the shelter’s old blue mini-van up with bedding and drove it down to the commercial Laundromat, picked up donations around town, picked up the bedding, and brought it all back.

Sometimes shelter residence would ride shotgun and help me load and unload things.

There was one resident in particular who would often ride with me. He happened to have a swastika prominently tattooed on his forehead—it looked like the mark of the beast or something.

We worked together for several weeks—and during that time I did my best not to stare at it, at that thing on his head—I did my best not to ask questions about it.

Then one day we were driving along and he said to me, “C, I know you look at it.”

“Look at what?” I asked, trying to avoid the whole thing and pay attention to the road.

“The swastika,” he replied.

I was… this close… to responding, “What swastika?” but by that time I was staring at his forehead instead of the road, so I replied guiltily, “Yeah, I do.”

“I got it in prison down in Denver,” he explained.

That was of course just the kind of comforting thing you want to hear while alone with a guy twice your size and scary. All I could reply was, “Oh?”

He then told me how he had hated blacks and Latinos… though he used much stronger language for both.

“Oh,” I again replied, limp.

He continued, “Then I got out. No landlord wanted someone like me, as a renter. The only place that would take me was a housing co-operative run by a black man. It took me a while, but I just couldn’t hate them any more.”

G: Wow. That’s a pretty good set piece.

C: And, when I’m fully caffeinated, I can do hand motions of me driving, and mention the brakes never working, and looking over at the swastika and looking away… it’s pretty good.

Of course, I fail to mention that immediately after that beautiful testimony of kindness in the face of evil bringing redemption, he had a set piece of his own—he quoted line for line a routine by comedian Chris Rock that no white person should repeat, especially one with a swastika on his forehead.

G: Huh. At the same time, in a way wasn’t that faith seeking understanding? He was trying to square his racist past with an opened up and new future.

C: Maybe…

G: Ah. It’s starting, why we’re here, the Kingdom of Heaven.

            He pointed to Latino day laborers waiting on the curb by the side entrance to Home Depot. Trucks started picking them up, not everyone, but some. The white hand would point at the guy and motion him into the back of his pickup truck.

            After a while the trucks stopped coming. There was a lull, the guys that didn’t get picked up meandered a bit, Old ‘Gus took out a knife and cut up an apple and handed a slice to me.

C: The kingdom of heaven?

G: Wait for it.

            We waited, and around 7 another set of trucks drove by and picked folk up. A little later straggler day laborers arrived. They didn’t look so great, one had a maimed hand, another kinda hobbled, others brought lawn chairs and looked bored. By noon all the “good” laborers were all taken, even some of the “bad” ones, the broken and hung over ones, the tired and old. Despite my protests we stayed there watching until 5ish.

G: What do you think it would look like if each of those people received the same wage, whether they worked an hour or 13?

C: That would be unfair.

G: They’d be envious of the contractor’s generosity?

C: The last will be first, and the first will be last in the Kingdom of Heaven, right?

G: Right.

On Race

G: I don’t mean to pry, I was just wondering who this white woman is on the cover of my book?

C: You’re not going to believe me.

G: No?
C: It’s either your mom, Monica, or it’s you.

G: I’m… I’m an African man… mom was a Berber… I don’t understand.

C: When the Church shifted Europe-ward, and then over here to America—the saints of the Church got whitewashed... most everything did, really.

G: I can understand that, people want to be able to relate to those they read… I’ve even seen pictures depicting Jesus in a wide variety of ways—like this one you keep around.

C: Yeah, in some ways that depiction of Jesus is a reaction to the blond haired blue-eyed Jesus we see so many places.

G: So… they portray me as white… but no one actually thinks I was white, do they?

C: They do. I mentioned that you were African in a sermon a while back and an African American woman came up to me afterwards nearly in tears. She’d went through Catholic school her whole life and thought the Church Fathers were all white. Realizing a bunch of you were African was really special, even liberating, for her.

G: Really?

C: Yes. The way we, even in the Church, interpret race is so heavy with history… Africans and Natives were seen as not having souls, which meant they could be owned as property and have their property taken.

Then when they were converted, and often re-converted, to Christianity the faith was used as a method of control.

Later, when Darwinism was first being explored people assumed European humans were a higher order of species.

Blacks were discriminated against in education and told they were innately stupid

… so being told the guy who thought through the faith, and whose theology had the greatest impact on Western Christianity, is African… can be profoundly liberating.

G: You moderns are so strange.