Misguided Faith?

In the wake of our two Presidential candidates being forced to denounce enough religious leaders to fill a NAMBLA convention (okay, I'll admit that was a bad joke if you admit you chuckled), I've been thinking a lot lately about my own experiences in my church back home in Texas.

To be sure, nothing I experienced there rises to the level of divisiveness and controversy generated by the pastors who've received so much attention this election season, but to Christians, one sermon I witnessed might certainly be viewed with disdain. One young pastor at my church, essentially an intern serving as an Associate Pastor and Youth Leader for a short time before officially being ordained, gave a sermon in which he argued with the translation of certain Biblical passages. He stated that, translated properly, when Jesus speaks of "eternal life" for the faithful, he's not promising that our soul lives on in an afterlife, rather he is referring to life the way we might say an elderly woman looks "so alive" ... a state of bliss achieved while one is still alive. He said that, when we follow Christ's teachings, we are promised to be truly "alive" only as long as we are biologically so.

This kind of "progressivism" is not generally acceptable to most Christians, particularly when it flies in the face of the very basis of their faith, and it definitely was frowned upon by a majority of our congregation. The next week, I met with our Senior Pastor, another progressive Christian, and during our chat, we had occasion to discuss the controversial message. He confided that he thought our Youth Pastor had fundamentally misunderstood the role of religious leader. "My job," he admitted, "isn't to take the congregation where I want them to go; it's to help each individual understand where he wants to go on his journey of faith, and then to help guide him there." He went on to acknowledge that of all the roles a pastor fills, that is the toughest. How do you lead an entire congregation, when everyone is at a different point on their journey? How do you construct a sermon that appeals to everyone, from conservative to liberal, without offending any of them?

What made this so remarkable to me was that every single week, I always felt as though his sermon had been written specifically for me. Without fail, he said the words I needed to hear precisely when no other words would've helped. Of course, I knew he hadn't composed his message just for me, so I marveled at it all the more. I imagined that most other parishioners left with the same feeling I had, that he had looked into their souls and divined the very sermon that would lift them out of whatever had been troubling them.

This is the miracle of faith that I think Rev. Wright and Rev. Hagee, along with our own Youth Pastor, have misunderstood: that it is in nuance that the faithful find guidance. That is how a congregation of 300 or 3,000 can each feel a personal connection with a message, can apply it to their own situations, in ways the pastor or other parishioners could never have imagined. In the years I attended that church, I never learned what our Senior Pastor's political affiliation might be, nor did he ever openly take sides in any political fight. I think liberals and conservatives alike could find inspiration in his words and each group could likely point to excerpts from his sermons that provided foundation for their leanings, whatever they may be.

It was this sense of subtlety that he so wanted to impart to our young intern before he left our church. As I said, his liberal Biblical interpretation wasn't as corrosive as, say, Reverend Hagee's comments, yet I have to wonder what would've happened had anyone in the congregation run for political office. Would Christians across the country be burning the candidate in effigy as a result of what some would call very "un-Christian" comments by the intern? I suppose only if the sermon made its way to YouTube.