Pentecost Sunday

(written the week of May 31st)

Our church, like most, has not been meeting during the pandemic shutdown. Fortunately, we have a decades-long history of broadcasting our service on Sunday morning over a local radio station. So we didn't have to figure anything out when the pandemic shut our doors, we just kept doing what we'd been doing for years. The only change was that instead of feeding the sound from inside our sanctuary to the radio station, either live or time-delayed, our pastor and someone who was acting as liturgist would go to the radio station on Thursday to record a pseudo-service. Then the radio station spliced in recorded music and played it back on Sunday morning.

As the pandemic restrictions eased and things began to open up again, we decided to borrow an idea that many churches have been trying: a parking lot worship service. This past Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, and our pastor was all ready to set up in the parking lot with a sound system, a couple of musicians, and (we hoped) a whole bunch of people in their cars who were excited to be together again. Whatever I may believe about God (or not) on any given Sunday, there's no doubt that our church is made up of people who are happy to be together, and we have all missed that during the pandemic shutdown.

But Sunday morning, in spite of an early sparkling start, by 8:15 or so the weather had turned. Around 8:30, a massive thunderstorm rolled through, with winds up to 69 mph, toppling trees and ripping off branches and knocking out power all over the county. More than 30,000 people were without power by Sunday afternoon. Unsurprisingly, there was a remarkable lack of people showing up in our church parking lot. At 9:40, twenty minutes before the service was supposed to begin, the power at the radio station was out.

Since our plan had been to broadcast the radio program over the sound system--so that both those in the parking lot and those who had stayed home would be hearing the same thing--that put us in a tough spot. Only a few people had arrived at that point, but our pastor made the tough call to cancel the service. We turned some people away, and started texting and calling others to let them know that the service wasn't going to happen.

Then, lo and behold, about two minutes before ten o'clock, the power came back on at the radio station. At that point, there were eight of us still at the church. So one of us opened the doors to his car, cranked up the radio, and the eight of us hung out in the parking lot, sitting in camp chairs or leaning on cars, and listened to the service our pastor and a liturgist had recorded a few days before.

I had had a bad week. And by "bad," I don't mean that bad things had happened to me, I mean that I was my worst self. I had let some things slide at home that really should have been taken care of. I had hurt my sweet mom by inadvertently texting a snarky comment to her instead of to my sisters. I had not met my own expectations in accomplishing a couple of personal goals. Our country was in the midst of the response to the murders George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and I was feeling the collective burden of our national sins. How come we can't stop this? Have I been doing enough? How do we finally change this? To be precise, I was feeling like crap, and hopeless on top of it.

And then I had the experience--one that I've had many times before-- that reminds me why I go to church. The words of the confession seemed to speak right to me, and the forgiveness of sins washed over me, as if rolling away my failures and petty meanness. Forgiveness doesn't change a thing. Not on its own, anyway. I'm still the same person with all my same faults after I've been forgiven as I was before. I'm still responsible for creating change in myself and around me, and I'm still responsible for apologizing to my mom and making things right.

But it reminds me that with all my crap and all my faults and all the ways I can't solve the problems that are right there in front of me, I am still a beloved child of God. For that hour, I can lay my burdens down, the load of failure that threatens to pull me under, and breathe into it, just long enough so that when the service is over, I have the energy and the resources to keep going.

That is all.

(Edited to add 6/24/20: The original version of this has been out there on the RSS feed all along, but I deleted it while I dealt with my narcissistic white liberal guilt over being an idiot. I made a few edits so that I could live with it. It's entirely possible I should have left it in its original state as a marker of my learning curve. But I didn't.)

In which I do even more re-hashing about church, or maybe it's just hashing this time, and continue to fail to get to the point.

So when I left off this topic last Tuesday, our little presbyterian church, which has been in the same location for over 100 years, had seen a steep drop in membership, but we still have our dedicated loyal survivors of about 180 members. We're lucky that includes a broad range of opinions, viewpoints, and outlooks on life.

I say lucky because that's really hard to find right now. People tend to congregate (pun!) with the likeminded. Our church is one of the few places I know where people with markedly different opinions about all sorts of things coexist and actually function well together to accomplish good things in the community--we're actively involved in working with at-risk teens, the homeless shelter, feeding the hungry, and an array of other activities.

I highly value that diversity of opinion. There are churches in our town that are more in line with my own opinions, but I don't want to go to church in an echo chamber. I grew up with that, and it's stifling.

It works for awhile because you can get that warm glow of "I know I'm right about this because everyone around me agrees with me," but eventually that sameness becomes restrictive. If your opinions change as you learn new things and have new experiences, you may find that the people you thought loved you for who you are, actually only love you if you fit in. Or they say they still love you (and maybe they genuinely do), but they don't want you in the group anymore.

At least that was my experience. I'm getting way off track here.

About a month ago, someone spoke up during worship with an opinion that was phrased in decidedly liberal/Democrat language.* The person that spoke is so immersed in that segment of our culture that she didn't think she was being partisan, she thought she was just stating The Way Things Are, with a ringing call to champion social justice.

But the conservatives heard a liberal saying "only Democrats care about this issue" and suddenly a wide-open rift has occurred right in the middle of our church. And we're finding out that this particular rift has been on the verge of breaking open for a couple of years now.
It's worth stating the obvious here and pointing out that these conservatives are not way-out right-wing nutcases. They go to a church--some of them for decades--that has no problem with women in church leadership, in a denomination that states that a woman's pregnancy decisions should be between her and her physician, and also allows gay ordination and same-sex marriage.

And yet they vote Republican, and they don't see a problem with that. (I don't either.) They're Republican because they were raised that way, or because of their views about fiscal policy, or banking regulations, or the military, or foreign policy.

In the aftermath of this incident, we're coming to realize that the reason we've been able to coexist for so long is because we don't talk about politics. And I find myself in the unusual situation of being a liberal who is defending the conservatives. It's making me a little nuts. The noise that's being drummed up on the part of the more liberal members of our congregation has become so unbearably tone-deaf that I can hardly stand to be involved. But I'm on session (church leadership) right now and so, voilà. I'm involved.
The whole situation has made me realize how clueless some liberals are about some conservatives. I live in a community that usually votes heavily conservative--in 2016, President Trump took 65% of the votes, and since various other parties took 6%, that means less than 30% voted Democrat. So I have a front-row seat on understanding conservatives, something I think liberals who live in more populous areas don't really have. I can't avoid the Trump base, or the never-Trumpers, or the Libertarians, because I live right in the middle of them.

So as a service to you, my gentle readers, I'm going to pass on some things I've learned about Conservatives in the past two years. Because when President Trump won the election, I made a small promise to myself that I would try to learn, and not just dissolve into anger and despair. (I confess I haven't always been successful.)

Please note that I'm not doing this because I'm trying to convince you that they're right, but because it is time, it is long past time, for us to start building bridges instead of continuing to yell at each other about how wrong the other side is. 

Good grief, how do these things get so long? I was planning to get started on what I wanted to say, but this is already too long. To be continued, and since I want to get this done because I need to sort it out for myself, I may actually post Out Of Schedule. Wtf is the world coming to.

Happy Tuesday.

* Apologies for the lack of details, I'm being purposely vague so if anyone local reads this, it will be unidentifiable.