The Challenge of Community

The Challenge of Community     Sept. 17, 2017

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

“If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter the person you are with is a mean person.”  Dave Berry

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Documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore, was one of the only people to publicly predict that Donald Trump was going to win the 2016 election. He felt like he knew the blue collar, angry white voter well enough to predict a win when everyone else was saying that there was just not way that Trump could win. So, the old corpulent liberal was right while all of the Ivy League pundits were wrong… chalk one up for Michael Moore, which is good for a few talk show conversations and maybe even a Broadway play. . . and as eager as you, Erica Spyres, have been to be cast on Broadway, thank your lucky stars that you are in Carousel and not The Terms of My Surrender.

But what makes Michael Moore worthy of mention here today is the fact that he has predicted that Trump will win re-election in 2020. That is a horribly sobering thought but Moore doesn’t think he will win because he deserves it or has earned it but he is reading the tea leaves of disharmony among progressive voters. For the past ten months people have been asking, “How did Trump win?” but now we have to start asking what Will McAvoy, the main character in the fictional series, Newsroom, in his famous rant on the first episode of the sadly discontinued series but I can feel his rage when he asked this crucial question, “If liberals are so f*****g smart then why do they lose so g**d****d always?” 

I recently published an article on the DailyKos about liberal cannibalism after experiencing the melt down of the committee that planned the protest when Donald Trump came to town a couple of weeks ago. As if to prove me right, a number of liberals attacked me personally with busy forks and knives in hand. A local candidate for office wrote to me and said, “I would confront the cannibalism but I don’t want the cannibals to turn on me.” Which is, I would argue, the whole darned problem. 

Liberals have a hard time getting along with one another. We tend to be idealists and that idealism often expresses itself in perfectionism and, ironically, in rather fundamentalist-like insistence on doctrinal purity. As much as we despise the fact that Donald Trump almost never admits that he was wrong. He never apologizes for anything, no matter how obviously wrong he was. But I want to ask you to think about your own history… how long has it been since you apologized for anything? Do you ever admit that you are wrong? Do you try to make amends and keep relationships together or do you “unfriend” in real life as easily as you do on Face Book?

I came to Springfield in 1991 to take the helm of a shipwrecked church. Church politics can be pretty mean and in this case a small group of power hungry critics had quite secretly harassed the senior minister, the associate minister, the secretary, custodian, and office manager into quitting virtually all at once. The majority of the members had absolutely no idea what had gone on behind the scenes to cause such a sudden collapse but they were determined not to let it happen again.

I became the captain of a ship that was sinking fast and I had to plug a lot of holes to keep a fairly large institution from meeting a rapid demise. Most of the people responsible for the staff’s departure, once outted, were sufficiently embarrassed to move on to cause trouble in other churches but one couple was determined to deny involvement in the gossip-laden coups and to rehabilitated their reputations.

In fact, they were so determined that they greeted my arrival in town with seeming warmth and enthusiasm, showering my little family with gifts, dinners, and kindness. The chairman of the board was none-too-happy when he came to my office to warn me about being chummy with someone who had been such a problem just a few months earlier.

I was trying to suspend judgment, to be reconciling, and I imagined myself, at the ripe old age of 33, to be healing the rifts in the church. My board chairman, an experienced academic who had been through a lot of power-grabs at Drury University said something to me that day that I have never forgotten. Joe said, “A snake doesn’t have to bite you to prove that he is a snake.”

It was a hard saying and let me be very quick to say that if religion offers anything to its adherents it is the stubborn insistence that a person can change. We do not have to be defined by our past failings. There is not a person here who not, at some time, fallen prey to some kind of prejudice, who has not dismissed or disposed of someone out of unfair judgment. Most of us can even describe several changes we have made in our character through conscious choice to be better people than we have been in the past.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the belief in his rather more confessional faith that forgiveness without confession is cheap grace. That is, a person can change and forgiveness should be virtually guaranteed. People deserve to be given a chance to grow, to learn, to change but Bonhoeffer insisted that the only way that makes sense is if the person is first willing to be honest about the offense. If they simply deny their guilt and insist that everyone join them in that denial, they are not really changing at all.

There are times when any one of us really needs to be forgiven for something but what we usually really want is to be told that we are innocent, that we don’t need to be forgiven. I’m sure that there is someone in advertising or marketing who has persuaded Donald Trump to always throw his shoulders back, stick out his chest, and insist that whatever he said or did is exactly what he should have said or done, no matter how wrong or how heinous. We all know how silly and disgusting that behavior looks on him so do you really believe it looks any better on you?

At least in the case of this fellow at my former parish was concerned, Bonhoeffer was entirely correct. Once the embers from the fire he had initially started at the church had grown cold and the congregation was growing and becoming healthy again, he went to work doing everything he could to dishonestly and unethically undermine everything I ever tried to accomplish and had to finally be confronted in a painful way in a board meeting that I would have done anything to have avoided, for his sake if not for my own.

As I have looked at this across the decades, I realize that the failing was not entirely his. The rest of us, me included, also failed him because we never care enough, risked enough, to help him to grow out of being such a horrible person.

Formally, what we are talking about here is a kind of situational ethics. I love the way that the comedian Dave Berry sums it up, “If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter, the person you are with is a mean person.”

What I have observed about human nature during my nearly 40 years of parish ministry is that people often are not consciously aware of how they are poisoning interpersonal relationships precisely because they have never been confronted by what they have done that is mean, dishonest or toxic. Their immediate circle of family and friends, because they snake has never bitten them, will ignore those instances of being mean to the waiter, gossiping about a neighbor, or playing power games in churches, offices, or volunteer groups.

The committee that flew to Louisville, KY to recruit me to come and rebuild this church were honest with me about what had happened and they all pledged to me that they would never let it happen again. They promised that I would not have to defend myself against such power plays because they were going to remain vigilant and that they would make sure that such shenanigans would be extinguished in its infancy should it ever happen again. And they were true to their word for at least six weeks but certainly not for two months.

We are reflexively self-protective. Most of the time when we see someone being mean to the waiter we will make a mental note of it and try hard to make sure that we are never in a position to be the recipient of such treatment. We excuse ourselves by saying to ourselves, “Well, he has never done that to me.”

But what is really in the best interests of the person who is nice to you and mean to the waiter? What would help them to become a better person? Does denial actually help them or does it literally set the stage for the next offense?

When we started our little liberal outpost of a church in this red state, we said in our mission statement that it was our goal to role model what it meant to be a healthy spiritual community. Prior to our startup in 2008, every church I had ever served simply tried to cover up the emotional land mines and pretend they were not there. The seasoned members knew where the land mines were and they did an elaborate dance to avoid stepping on them rather than trying to encourage actual community.

Pastorally we often call a church a healing community. It is a place where people can come to be loved when the world or family has wounded us. We show acceptance, approval, love, and we tolerate one another’s eccentricities so that it can be a safe place to heal. But healing is about more than just binding up wounds.

When the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, turned his career in the direction of teaching community-building skills, he famously said that community is tolerant of everything but intolerance. That is, an intentional community can foster the health of anyone who wants to get healthy but the community itself cannot exist if it tolerates those who seek to destroy the community through their own brand of hostile intolerance.

Next month I’m going to spend a weekend in Clemson, SC. The invitation initially came from a struggling UCC church that meets on Sunday evenings at the local Unitarian Church. It was set up so that I would speak in the morning at the Unitarian Church, then speak at the UCC congregation in the afternoon, and then spend Monday in meeting with both groups trying to figure out how the two congregations could successfully be merged.

There theological differences were slight and both congregations defined themselves by open-mindedness. In the six months that have transpired between the initial invitation and my actual trip there, the UCC church has moved out of the Unitarian congregation’s building and though I am still speaking at the Unitarian church in the morning, my afternoon gig is a more philosophical gathering of a kind of progressive diaspora.

Now, you don’t need for me to tell you that South Carolina is a red state. If such a thing is possible, it may even be more red than Missouri. If the tiny group of progressives in Clemson can’t figure out how to tolerate one another’s company in a loving way, both congregations might fail. I feel a little sheepish about this because our tiny seated congregation here in Springfield only survives by the grace of donations from our internet listeners and there is a Unitarian church here in town that can’t afford to hire a minister and yet we have never had a serious talk about merger when absolutely nothing would be more obviously logical. And, trust, me, I’ve opened the topic with different people in their congregation several times but it seems that they would rather watch themselves slowly die off than open their minds a bit to a greater level of cooperation.

And that, my friends, is why Michael Moore has predicted that Trump is likely to win again in 2020. Not because he knows how to win but because progressives don’t seem to know very well how not to lose. I think that we can do better and for the sake of the progressive faith movement and for the safety of everyone everywhere in the world, I pray that we will.