Preaching angry
I left the house defensive and exasperated. I should have known by my reaction that she was probably right.
Wayne and Madge were an increasingly frail couple from the Western Sizzlin and Shoney’s Big Boy era. He always wore slacks and she a broach. Generally these pastoral visits to their home were pleasant enough. After they kenneled their feisty daschund and invited me in the house, we would sit in the floral den with coffee and pound cake. The conversations were almost predictable. Madge would be out on a worry limb fretting about some culture shift. In 1999 this worry led her by the heart to listen to a conspiracy theorist and send her poor husband stockpiling for the coming year. I was sure this conversation was about some new clothing style, music genre, or popular television program gone to the devil. I would listen, assure her of God’s kind and providential care of His people, and listen to her talk through it slowly and climb down the tree touching the ground with her toe as if the earth could still be lava hot. By the time I prayed and left, Madge was a smidge less worrisome. But this visit was not the typical visit.
The worry that Madge wore on her countenance on this visit had to do with me. After the general niceties and catching up on their health, Madge launched into her question: “Why are you preaching mean?” Mean? I had not been accused of preaching mean since my last year of seminary when our instructor (another elderly lady come to think of it) asked us to do a righteous indignation speech. My speech was a tongue in cheek (sort of) repudiation of the name of our seminary cafeteria. My argument was that Solid Rock Cafe was a transgression of the third commandment; “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” A cafeteria named after the triune God? There was nothing transcendent about that cafe but for the endless games of pool we played in the back room to ease our studied minds. Nevertheless, like the words from my seminary instructor, I now heard the same words from Madge . . “You’re mean.”
I left frustrated. When I arrived back at my office, one of the church elder’s wives was there tidying up for the coming Sunday. To ease my conscience I asked her if I had been preaching mean? She assured me I had not and said there are times we need to hear hard truths. She then coddled my defensiveness by agreeing with my assessment that Madge was sliding down in her mental health. That’s it! Madge was the crazy one.
It took years of ministry for me to realize and admit that Madge had been right. My anger was not obvious. It was subtle and couched in gospel truth. Madge was intuitive. Looking back I realize that there were things that I expected the church to be and do that, in my estimation, the church was failing to accomplish. If the church wasn’t becoming what I wanted it to be, what did that say about me? The church was making me look bad. What did I do? I know that I still preached the good news of Jesus. But I also know that I nuanced the good news with my own attempt at producing some sort of guilt in the hearers to control them and produce what I wanted to see. That doesn’t work. People don’t experience lasting change through outward conformity to demands, but by internal heart change that has encountered the kindness of Christ.
That was fifteen or more years ago. The church in that town survived my bouts of meanness. They have since had pastors who have led them further and deeper and more graciously than I could have ever led. I am thankful He leads me in His kindness and that, as the saying goes, He uses crooked sticks (like me . . . and you) to draw His straight lines.