When I read a political post on Facebook or Twitter, I rarely respond unless I completely agree with it and it isn’t insulting to anyone as best I can tell. I do this for several reasons, the prime one being that I believe that if you want to say something out loud in a social setting, you are allowed to do so. If you are otherwise interesting or worthy, people will forgive your lapse into boorish behavior. If not, they will ignore your remark for now and you in the future.

I discussed my concerns about my own church in an earlier post. We have since taken a break from that church to see what else is out there. I fear I don’t fit in anywhere. The people in the congregation we left have been wonderful and understanding. Those who agree with our pastor’s political views are particularly understanding because they want to hear more confirmation of their political beliefs from him. Many understand the impetus for our sudden departure, which was the Father’s Day sermon. It covered every hot button politically left slogan/phrase/call to arms out there and we were done. I hope that one day he understands that calling out white, southern males for their society’s racist past and their current white privilege wasn’t the BEST choice for a sermon in his South Carolina church on Fathers Day. He reached out to us after we had largely disappeared for a few months, but didn’t want to have an email conversation. He wanted to talk in person or on the phone, which he conveyed by email because he didn’t want to talk enough to CALL or come by. Lack of self-awareness aside, at least he put the offer out there.

Today I read his blog for the first time in months, only because Dwight said I should. He lamenting the circumstance of a fellow pastor who couldn’t be “real” because he/she had to segregate his/her Facebook friends into groups to keep the conservatives from seeing his/her political posts. He posed the question, how was he to give a sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other if he couldn’t be political? I think once a pastor decides to align himself blindly with a political party or with a political ideology and stops objectively looking at the issues, he needs to step out from behind the pulpit and out of the role of pastor. However, rather than address the question, I wrote a comment on how a pastor can be political and not offend anyone, but didn’t post it because it’s his blog and he should have his say there, as I should have mine here. I offer this:

When the pastor makes people who actively participate in the work and worship of the church, who interact with and care for the sick, the grief-stricken, the needy themselves rather than insist that the government filter more money to them via the bureaucracy, who want to be in that church to worship and do the work of Christ, begin to feel marginalized and disrespected for not aligning themselves with that pastor’s preferred political party, it’s time to do more than segregate Facebook friends. It’s time to examine how they are leading. It’s time to live the talk, because nobody argues with that. It’s time to take in a refugee family chosen for them by someone else, it’s time to live in an area with a diverse population, it’s time to give all they have (ok, all they have above three times the poverty level) to the charitable organization with the highest overhead costs. Because those things are all the reality of what they say they want. It’s time to quit talking and quit posting and do something that makes those they already know feel loved and valued by them and by God and to set an example of something other than the holder of the bully pulpit. It’s never just the posts or the sermons. People see when anyone isn’t living up to their own demands for others. It’s time to stop mistaking humility with stupidity. It’s time to stop creating a personal hierarchy of membership based on level of education or giving. It’s time to let someone impartial help them do some soul-searching. It’s time to be a servant, too.

I walked Molly today instead of going to church, but church is taking all my energy nonetheless.  I didn’t go last week because we were at our cabin in the snow, a deep snow for the area.  I went Wednesday and had a wonderful time, as always and today I miss the people and the good things we discuss. I’m not there because my pastor has chosen to take a stand on gun laws, going to all the media outlets with his agenda and plan and invitation for all Godly people to join him and the assurance that this was a moral issue, not a political one. I sent him an email with the subject line “I call bullshit on this.” I’m not afraid to face him, I’ve seen and talked to him since, but as I’m angry and I’ve no doubt he is, I left it there for now.  Still, I have to wonder now where I belong. I have a lot of problems with this campaign: the personal attention-seeking; the dishonesty in the assurances that this side of the debate is a moral issue only (I call shotgun on moral argument!); churches involving themselves in political campaigns; the members and duties being neglected while he singles out this part of the issue of violence for attention;  the propaganda website that inspired him.

We all agree that reducing violence is good. If we were honest we would also agree that society would be better off without alcohol.  It would be better off without video games, too.  My dislike is for a church that would take a political side on an issue in order to push one party’s agenda.  I don’t want to hear that.  Do I want to hear an idea about what I can do to help our young men not fill themselves with so much hate and make themselves so isolated that they can coldheartedly murder innocents?  YES.  Do I want to hear how to heal wounded hearts? YES.  Do I want to hear biased political rhetoric that offers no real hope for improvement? NO.

I expect fairness from a church and the secular organization behind this campaign relies heavily on propaganda.  Well, that is my belief, anyway.  Their web page has a lot of statistics, but the individual ones are pulled from a variety of sources. That’s a red flag when the actual data is from the same source or two.  You see, data collected objectively usually tells the whole story. Statistics aren’t always so straightforward and are the favorite tool of Propaganda.  Let me give you an example. If you collect data on 1,000, 000,000 people who use paper towels to dry their hands and find one of them has a specific fungus on their thumb, that is statistically insignificant.  Let’s say you switch paper towels for cloth ones and retest after a week, finding that an additional person now has the thumb fungus.  Well, thumb fungus is still statistically insignificant.  However, it is true that after the switch of paper towels for cloth, there was a 100% increase in the instance of thumb fungus. OH. MY. GOD.  Draft the anti-cloth legislation NOW. I’m going to put two wooden thumbs in the front of the church for each of the infected. Repackaged data isn’t data any more. It’s a story.

Back to my church problem.  I don’t believe I belong in my church any more.  When I joined in 1999, it seemed perfect.   Many of the things I loved about it are still there, especially the warm, welcoming, compassionate members.  Welcoming is important because they made room for this opinionated, bossy, introverted engineer who can take interaction with other humans in only the smallest of doses.  They let me find my places in their midst and let me try places that I didn’t belong.  Then we get into theology and the whole thing goes to hell.  We read the Bible together and discuss it, though even in my Sunday School the liberal theologians shout down the conservative viewpoints.  I’ve been called judgmental so many times in there that I haven’t contributed a word in two years.  The first time I was called judgmental was for my answer to the question posed by our leader, “What would you change to make our church better?”  My reply, “More doing, less talking.” The immediate reply from another member was “Let’s not be judgmental. Some people are just better with discussing ideas.”  Yeah, the lazy ones- there’s a real judgment for you, lady.  You seemed to be confused about it.

But the last few years, well, actually there were warning signs when Gore lost the election, things have gotten more politically focused and more Jesus void.  One Lent season we had a church project to listen to a CD of the New Testament being read.  Some of the comments were, “I’m not sure that I like this Jesus.”  I’m not sure I understand what you think about Jesus, then.  He was complex but He knew His audience and He wasn’t speaking in code.  Sometimes I listen to the seminary graduates in our Sunday School class and I wonder if the atheist I heard on tv once was telling the truth:  Biblical Scholars know that the story of Jesus is largely untrue. These people I know, who sit there beside me, have a cagey way of phrasing answers, hinting that their insider information proves that Jesus was looking ahead to the day that current liberal American politics rose to power.   Or that they can make it up any way they want because it doesn’t matter.  Sometimes I am frightened by how often I leave Sunday School wondering if that isn’t what all the smirking is about.

I read a blog post shared on the Patheos site and the writer was berating the moderate Baptists for hanging onto that name because they had certainly shifted to the far left.  He reminded them that Christianity is a gift and a legacy given to them and to not a blank to be filled in by them.  Music to my ears.

Nevertheless, here I am, in the middle all by myself in the moderate camp.  I’ve looked and looked and can’t find a church less politically left than mine without plunging to the political right and I’m not always there, either. What do I believe?  I might be teetering on the edge of Libertarianism politically and maybe theologically.   Do I think God hates gays? I do not. Do I think the Bible makes the case that homosexual acts are sinful? I do.  I think the Bible makes a much stronger case that gluttony is a sin and you can tell from a mile away that I’m guilty of that one, but I expect the church doors to be open to me, the Wednesday night potluck supper to be open to me and not to be judged on everything I put in my mouth. I expect that I must treat everyone else with love and respect.  Most importantly with regard to the sins of others, it is not my place to point out what I believe to be YOUR sins and not the job of the church to point out the sins outside the church. I believe we all sin and that being a Christian means that I’m worried about MY sins, not yours. Where you are concerned, I am compelled to care about your physical well-being and how you are treated.

I can quit going to Baptist churches, I guess, but I was raised and educated through high school in them. That is six days a week most of the year. I am well indoctrinated and as a result, what a church says it believes is important to me.  Other denominations would ask me to profess a belief in something I don’t. I want my Sunday worship to be WORSHIP of God, of Jesus and an acknowledgement of the everpresence of the Holy Spirit.  I want reminders of forgiveness and hope.  Truthfully, I would be ok with never hearing another Lutheran hymn, but I’m not the person anyone would turn to for a playlist.  I don’t want your politics, unless you agree with mine or want a truly open discussion (no one does) and even then I don’t want them during my worship.  I want to spend time with others gathered in His Name and His name is Jesus, no last name. Well, ok, Jesus SonofGod, but that’s not really a last name.  Anyway, I’m praying about this. I really am.

My co-workers called me a Pusher and when it came to driving to and from work or lunch, I was. My desire was and is for others to get out of my way. For pushers like me, rush hour traffic is vehicular nirvana, an endless supply of new goals; as soon as we claim success with one push, the next target is in sight. Convincing one to move is a little championship every time.

Though there were days and days of pushing bliss, there were also times when the system broke down and I stewed about all those other bad drivers.  I compiled and refined a list of driving habits that make me nuts and here are the top offenders: braking immediately after changing lanes, speeding up when being passed, refusing to give way to the pushers, running red lights, not understanding your responsibilities in a merge situations versus yield situations, not accelerating to traffic speed when entering a highway.  I support the death penalty for those. Before the trial.

Then I retired and discovered a big, new world of driving frustration populated by non-rush-hour drivers or what I call “daytime” drivers.  The first thing to understand is that “imminent danger to others” is the only skill level they have other than average. Things that would result in a rush hour first-drive death are top of the class during the day.

Each time I leave home I am disappointed anew in the length of time the trip takes. Traveling by car during rush hour takes no more time than a regular drive, unless there is a backup and, frankly, I am convinced that all backups are the result of a daytime driver’s attempts to navigate in the rush hour world.  The wasted time factor is a constant, whether the result of sitting in one spot for 8 minutes to wait your turn, because there was an 88-year-old driver in the left lane who should have a periscope installed to help their sightline or because the driver in front of me stops at every intersection to read the street name.  It may be one of those identifiable constants like pi.  What it means is that my time is wasted.  Frustration is a variable.

As fearsomely incompetent as these clueless wonders are, unfortunately, they are not the only ones thwarting my efforts to acclimate to daytime driving.  There are the workers in trucks.  They know who else is out there and they combat the slow by pulling out in front of anyone headed their way.  Enter the former rush hour racer doing the almost-legal six miles over the limit and by the time the worker realizes that he has miscalculated because I’m going faster than anticipated, I’ve already had to hit the brakes and am considering an appropriate salute.

Don’t get me wrong, I love retirement and the ability to set my schedule. I just hate driving during the day.  It’s worse than rush hour and I believed it would be better. In rush hour the other drivers would make shockingly aggressive moves and sometimes they were personal.  I drove a sporty, red BMW for a while and I promise you the affronts by other drivers were quite different than the years I spend pushing folks with a white minivan, so don’t tell me it’s not personal.  But I always thought the other drivers were aware of their surroundings. I assure you that most of the other drivers out there during the day are not. Except me, of course. I’m a good driver.