This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our lives are always moving. What we think of as “The Big Thing” is never really the final thing. It’s simply the next thing. And there will be another next thing after that. Everything in this life is temporary. And if we set ourselves up with the expectation that this next transition is going to be the one that finally makes it all clear and settled, all we are doing is setting ourselves up for disappointment.
On All Hallow’s Eve (Oct. 31), Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the chapel at Wittenberg University in Germany, outlining his problems with some of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and sparking what we know as the Reformation. But the Reformation wasn’t really The Thing because there were plenty of other Christian leaders who agreed with the need for reforms but disagreed with Luther! The Reformation gave fuel to the small fires that were already burning in Roman Catholic Europe. And while much good came out of the Reformation, including the fact that I, as a woman, wouldn’t be a pastor today without the Reformation, it also popped the top on all kinds of religious division. The Reformation launched 150 years of bloody religious wars in Europe which claimed the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
No person and no event is ever simply all good or all evil. None of our transitions ever turn out quite the way we expect them to. And while there are events in our lives that happen and then end, there’s always something else coming next. And the lines between one thing and the next are usually quite blurry. That’s reality. We spend a lot of time watching TV and movies which have episodes with a clear beginnings, characters who are good or bad, and clear endings, maybe not always happy endings, but clear endings. But real life isn’t like that.
As we approach Election Day, I pray that we can remember that our transitions are always imperfectly unfinished. That we are always imperfectly unfinished. Where does this leave us? Here’s where I’m landing: I may be imperfectly unfinished, but God is not. The port in this storm is the Living God. And while traditional monotheism says that God is “unchanging,” the testimony of our sacred stories is that God is a God On The Move. The point of Jesus is that instead of watching us from outside time and space, God pitched a tent and moved into the neighborhood, not to dwell in a building but to dwell with us, among us. The Living God On The Move came to experience what it’s like for us to be in transition, to not be sure what’s coming next, to feel frustration and uncertainty and pain and grief and loss. To make it as clear as possible that we are not alone. To affirm the complexity of human existence. And to redeem it for us. Father Richard Rohr says that God’s cosmic act of forgiveness is to forgive reality for being such a mess. And if we can tap into that forgiveness, receive it for ourselves and extend it to others, we too can find the peace that comes with forgiving reality for being imperfectly unfinished. We can learn to live with it.
The biggest hallmark of being Protestant is that we follow the dictates of our own conscience more than we follow church tradition or hierarchy. But the caution of being Protestant is that we must be so careful to do that with humility and grace and peace, lest we damage the reputation of Christ with our infighting and dogmatic violence. May God give us the grace and wisdom to translate that lesson to our political convictions. And may God give us the courage and trust to live with whatever comes next after Election Day.
Rev. Beth Gedert is the pastor of Zion United Church of Christ, an LGBTQ-affirming congregation committed to doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. You can reach her by email at [email protected].
