Earlier in the week my wife had been to a tense meeting of our homeschool group. This was a regular business meeting, but on the docket was a discussion of the group's Statement of Faith. The Statement is pretty standard fare -- an explicit declaration of Trinitarian theology, penal substitutionary atonement, and an immanent, literal return of Christ. I forget if it also explicitly mentions scriptural inerrancy, but it might. Over the past couple of years one of the board members has been faced with people who either wanted to join the group but couldn't sign the statement of faith, or who (like my wife) signed the statement but had reservations about its theology, and/or whose husbands (like me) wouldn't sign it at all. Some were wondering if it could be made more inclusive, more ecumenical.
One of the families we've met through the homeschool group is that of a local Free Methodist minister. He's an interesting guy. He's a little younger than I am, with a fondness for tractors and the Cappadocian Fathers. He's bright, but he's at that level of bright where he doesn't always know what it is that his brightness is latching onto. It's like he sees certain threads but there's a layer that's unavailable to him that might freak him out if he saw it for what it is. Maybe he will someday, maybe he won't. I don't know.
He's been getting some flak from an element in his church concerned that he's going "Emergent." He's not, particularly -- he's more paleo-orthodox than anything -- but he's young and bright and has a goatee and wants to draw from a deeper well than the 19th-century evangelicalism that frames his tradition, and this is enough to engender suspicion among a group of people who have been reading too much John MacArthur.
He had his own tense meeting earlier in the week in which some of these issues were aired. I don't know exactly how his meeting went, but my wife told me about the homeschool meeting: several of the homeschool moms on the preserve-the-Statement side of the fence brought their husbands -- or their husbands insisted on coming along -- and the men came out swinging. If you don't like the group's Statement of Faith, they said, get your own group. They managed to connect their particular take on the Christian faith (as exemplified by the Statement) with everything from the Bible itself (natch) to Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Everyone else, by contrast, was made to feel like second-class citizens of God's Kingdom, and while the defenders of orthodoxy would almost certainly say that's not what they meant, a number of people -- including several with no particular qualms about the statement itself -- left the meeting feeling brutally judged, even ostracized. "Narrow is the way and few are those who find it" was a frequent refrain, as if Jesus had in mind an intellectual commitment to 19th-century revivalist evangelicalism when he said that. But they got their way; the vote that night confirmed the Statement of Faith as written.
I still wasn't seeing 145 so I called for directions. As it turns out, I had both misremembered the lot number (it was really 135) and gone in the wrong entrance to the park. A few turns brought me around to the right place and I found the trailer, a nondescript brown one about halfway down the street. I felt out of place. And by "out of place" I don't mean snobbery but a variant of guilt. My car, a cheap import, was nevertheless nicer than anything around it. I felt certain that my clothes marked me as just another white liberal.
Probably I was overthinking things. I do that. Our church has a bit of history with this trailer park, or at least we're cultivating it. We run the largest mobile food pantry in the state, and someone noticed that a lot of the families that come to the food pantry had addresses in this particular trailer park, so they checked it out and saw that the people there needed a lot of help. They couldn't afford basic repairs and upkeep on the homes, and it showed. We began scheduling workdays to assess homes and effect repairs. We dealt patiently with some of our volunteers and some general naysayers who wondered why we were bothering to help people who probably (in the mind of the naysayers) wouldn't appreciate it. We pitched the need to put some money and sweat equity where our social-justice-leaning mouths were.
On one hand, this seems paternalistic, a bunch of middle-class white people salving their consciences and assuaging their latent guilt over the inequities of capitalist society. On the other hand, people who really need food get real food. A family that really needed new steps for their trailer really got them. Dozens of trailers that really needed to be winterized got real plastic on their windows to keep out the real cold. Another family basically got a new bathroom, down to the floorboards (which were rotting). All of this is done without expectation. We don't do it so they feel obligated to listen to us talk about Jesus. We don't do it so they'll come to church. We do it because it's there to be done, and I can get behind that.
I wasn't there to work, however. I was there to buy tamales. One of the park residents is a Mexican woman who supports her family by selling tamales. I'm no tamale connoisseur, but these are fantastic. She includes a homemade salsa verde that will melt your face off. It's wonderful. I knock and she comes to the door, tamales in hand. I fumble for my money. I had picked up some cash to give our daughter for a weekend youth trip and some cash to pay for tamales and put the cash in different pockets. Then I promptly forgot which was which and ended up fishing through my pockets and awkwardly flashing cash in front of woman a selling tamales to scrape by. For some reason I'm very self-conscious about this.
I get home with the tamales along with some taco fixings and a six-pack of Corona (Thom Stark makes fun of me for drinking Corona, but it's what I like). My wife asks me about the beer: "You bought beer? Don't you have any?"
"No," I say confessionally, "I drank it." (It wasn't Corona anyway.) "I need Corona to wash down the tamales -- and I'm contributing to the delinquency of a pastor." My pastor friend and his family were coming over for dinner and I usually try to get him to drink a beer. I don't imagine he gets offered beers on most of his pastoral calls.
This night, I didn't even ask him. I just popped the tops on a couple of cold ones and squeezed a couple of lime slices. He was hooked. Ditto the tamales, which were a big hit. We got the kids going on their tacos and sat and talked, quenching the intoxicating heat of the salsa verde with the intoxicating coolness of the beer, sharing our reactions to the week's meetings and the trials and tribulations of ministry life. As we talked, the troubles of the week washed away, and our emptiness was filled, at least for the moment. We cracked jokes and I got to hear my pastor friend call John MacArthur a dumbass. We got to be heard around the table, and were allowed to feel like we were understood as well.
Our church serves communion once a month, and I don't usually take it, not because I think myself unworthy but because I'm usually playing the piano. It's what I do. I don't really feel left out -- evangelical communion exists in a kind of mushy middle between a robust sacramental theology in which you might get to really eat Jesus and the table fellowship out of which the tradition sprang in which you might get to really eat food.
That night, though, the Host came wrapped in a corn husk and the Blood of Christ had a little bit of lime in it.
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