Faith Works 8-5-22 & 8-12-22

Faith Works 8-5-22 & 8-12-22
Jeff Gill

Hot takes in church? Not so fast.
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When I was serving as associate pastor of a church while I was in seminary, during the 1980s, there was a fellow who often accosted me after worship about "English Only" as a possible state law or constitutional amendment.

He wanted me to address the issue in sermons and allow him to stand by me at the door collecting signatures for a petition to make "English Only" the national language. I said no, he could stand on the sidewalk outside, but not at the back of the church.

Happy, he was not.

But I don't recall getting any flack for it, other than from him.

Back then we also got the pre-internet classic, a mimeographed flyer telling us what Madalyn Murray O'Hair was about to do through the FCC to restrict religious speech. She died in 1995 and I still had copies of that chain letter handed to me long after.

So I won't say that the pressure on preachers to touch on politics is new. Certainly it is not. I have a personal interest based in our public history in this county about Chaplain David Jones, who left a record of passing through the area in 1773, and later owned a great deal of property in early Licking County, Ohio. He ended up traveling the then-frontier from his home in New Jersey and later leaving his parish in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (yes, THAT Valley Forge) because his preaching on how rebellion against British rule was not against God's law, and it upset Loyalists greatly. Concerned church leaders gave him the assignment to try preaching in Welsh to the Shawnee both to test the theory that the western Indians were descended from Prince Madoc (wrong) and to let the atmosphere cool between Loyalists and the Sons of Liberty. David Jones preached politics, no doubt about it.

What I do think is new, and somewhat unprecedented historically, is the pressure to offer "hot takes."

If you've not run into the term, congratulations: you've learned to limit your exposure to social media! But hot takes are all the rage; they're often Twitter cheap shots, and they're as unformed as lava bursting out of a volcano. "If you aren't preaching about X, you need to think about whether you're really a Christian." "The latest Supreme Court decision reactions are making it clear who really cares about X."

Think "sweeping generalizations" but with intentionally jagged edges intended to cut and hurt, and you've got "hot takes."

The flip side is the incredibly strong trend to call nuance "indifference" and unwillingness to offer a quick summative agreement or disagreement not just "waffling," but to call a desire to pause and think things through "overt if not actual cruelty," even "silence is violence."

Trust me, there are virtually no preachers who haven't dealt with people walking right up to them immediately after a worship service — or my favorite, right before it's supposed to start — and demanding that you address a specific hot issue in the news. And again, this isn't entirely new, but the "hot takes" expectation does feel different to me, anyhow. "Jeff, this happened Friday and it was in the news yesterday: tell the people where we stand today!"

And (at the risk of pushing the Bothsideism button) it ain't just one partisan wing. In recent years I see and receive and am confronted with insistence that this issue can't wait, and must be given a hot take from the pulpit treatment.

It's an old joke, and a fair criticism, to respond to the idea that church bodies tend to think in terms of centuries . . . and the Sixteenth Century at that. Faith communities have a natural tendency to be, well, conservative, and by that I don't mean politics, but in the basic meaning of the term: to conserve, to preserve, to protect "the deposit of the faith" and not simply to jump where "itching ears" might take us.

Yet saying a religious leader or group of religious adherents need to take some care, if not due process, to reach a settled conclusion; if you respond that we need as a community to reflect and discern before we proclaim on a new issue — this is the kind of thinking in community that has become strikingly unpopular, and I believe we need to bring back into our midst.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got plenty of opinions, not always as a minister. Tell him what you think is a hot topic at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.



And then, right on its heels:

Faith Works 8-12-22
Jeff Gill

Here I stand, I can do no other
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Lutherans all know the line, even if they don't speak German, "Ich stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders."

"Here I stand," said Martin Luther as the Protestant Reformation began, and he added "I can do no other" or perhaps "I can do nothing else."

Growing up in a heavily Lutheran town in northwest Indiana, even the Catholic kids knew about Luther and Melancthon. I picked those stories up as well, on the streets and in the churches whether Lutheran or not. (And there were elderly folk I was told by their grandkids quite seriously who did not believe you could get into Heaven unless you spoke at least enough German to say the Lord's Prayer, I mean, "Vater Unser im Himmel…")

Brother Martin knew his non-negotiables. Many religious and civil leaders of his day disagreed, but just enough supported him that he didn't end up like Jan Hus (look him up!). Today, we can mildly debate what Luther did and didn't get right about his protestations about the papacy and Roman authority in Christianity.

In my own tradition, there's a great love of a phrase with many supposed origins, since we aren't the only Protestants to use it: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. It first came up in Latin, and some translate the closing "caritas" as "love" which is fair enough as translations go.

Obviously, the hitch here is: what's essential?

I'll take a swing at it. Give me three strikes or so. I would argue that communion is an essential for Christian worship. My reading of scripture and tradition strongly urges me to affirm that we are best served in having Christians when we meet for prayer and praise to ground ourselves in that meal which Jesus Christ instituted. So mote it be.

Yet I do not believe the only way to rightly, or fitly hold a communion service is to have an ordained person behind the table to preside. I know I can find hundreds, nay thousands to raise their hands and voices to this and say "Nay, Jeff, your essential for communion is correct, but not HOW you go about doing it." So we would have agreement on essentials on one level, or from a particular angle, but disagreement in which we need either liberty or charity . . . or love . . . to work things out.

Getting to essentials is never as straightforward as it first appears. That can either make one quite tenacious, or extremely forgiving. Perhaps even both, but that can be challenging in its own way.

I have nothing against ordained clergy; a good thing, too, since I am one. But even as I would argue we are not absolutely necessary for communion, or even preaching, I'd also say I believe it is essential we open the opportunity for preaching and presiding at the table to females. I use that term intentionally; I say essential because I think there are negative consequences to limiting such a pivotal role in religious life to, say, just males (or just females, but I haven't run into that one yet).

And again, I know hundreds, nay thousands of fine upstanding folk will say "How can you call an essential that which I see a verse or two of scripture saying is forbidden?"

This is where as I was saying last week I really, really, really don't like hot takes. A hot take like "Letting women preach means next thing you'll let anyone in the pulpit." For everyone wanting to call down fire on someone saying that, my not-so-hot-take is this: I think we need to have a conversation. This is what's missing in too much church life, let alone civil discourse. (620)

Where I stand, and I can do no other, is on a belief that we need to talk to people who disagree with us. To hear them out, to understand the best of where their assertions come from, and to then try best as we can to offer our best understanding of how our faith leads us to stand where we do (see I Peter 3:15). Hier stehe ich.

Perhaps I'm too old to say this, but I am working on my essentials even still, fifty years after my baptism. And I have fewer of them than I once did, but I'm more certain of those remaining. Starting with the importance of our needing to talk, and including as many as possible at the table. To talk, and to eat together.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure there's always room for one more, call it Elijah's chair. Tell him about your essentials at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.