The Lesson around the lessons

I was chatting with a friend last week about ministry issues. He was telling me about some incident he was involved in that could only be described as bizarre. I forget what it was but his closing remark struck me as all too true, he said, 'You know, sometimes in ministry you find yourself in these WTH (What The Heck! Yes, let’s keep it clean) moments, moments when you are called to do something that nothing in your ministry ever prepared you for; there was no seminary class, no tutorial, no weekend retreat that covered handling this particularly odd-ball circumstance.

It reminded me of one of my own WTH moments. A family in a church in which I used to serve basically employed me as their personal chaplain (some families in churches sometimes do that, ask any minister) and so I was called to the pre-wedding party, to, you know, open in prayer. Now, half the family was Christian and so wildly celebrated my presence there, the other half - devoted to another religion - not so much. They occupied, to a person, the body of seats either side of the aisle, Capulets to the left, Montagues to the right. It became clear as the evening unfolded that I was part of a PR strategy to reach the non-Christians. As with unfolding nightmares, these kind of details are made clear as the process unfolds usually just too late to do anything about it; it is part of the nature of a nightmare. There was a marquee, there was opulence, there were lights, there was grandstanding and copious amounts of food and then there was me, there to seal the deal for Jesus. As I was about to 'take the stage' the patriarch of this shindig turned to me and said words along the line of, 'you don't mind emceeing this function do you? Sing a song or two, crack some jokes, keep it funny.' At that last remark he may even have clicked his fingers and moved his hands in that dealing cards kind of way reserved for revving people up before they head out to perform. Now you may be thinking, why did I not just say no? Well, I am clinically incapable of saying no; I am a people pleaser of some repute. In fact, if I am arrested for multiple homicides sometime in the future, I would not be at all surprised if my defense ran along the lines of, 'well this stranger approached me with a gun and a mandate and I just couldn't say no.' You may also be thinking, this is preposterous! Not true! It is. I promise. Every word. It happened.  And this is the thing, I've had to stand and deliver, as all ministers do, in some hairy situations - first funerals where you're praying not to pronounce the dead person's name incorrectly to speaking your call before bishops and ministers. Nothing, nothing, nothing has ever put the fear of God into me like this single request. Now anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not a naturally funny guy. I don't have that x-factor that will turn an occasion like this into a laugh-fest. I knew it was going to be a bloodbath before it had even happened, another natural part of an unfolding nightmare. Sometimes, you see, with ministry, people presume things, they presume you always want to be front and centre, they presume you love public speaking and crave any occasion to 'lead the flock' when in some moments you profoundly don't. You find yourself a bit like Lawrence Olivier who - as a person once remarked about a man who, in fact, was quite a retiring personality - had the unfortunate habit of always backing into the limelight. So I headed out, by that I mean the force of the patriarch's push in my back out-weighed the force of my finger-tips against the door frame.

 And a blood-bath it was. I cracked some jokes, said some prayers, even sang some songs. They had organised a backing band: four sorry looking individuals going by the name 'The Gypsy Kings'. They were so relaxed, too relaxed even. The sax player played his alto out of the side of his mouth, like it was a dual-function saxophone/Turkish hookah pipe; he winked at me and said, sing anything, we can play it. So I sang, 'She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes!' now what on earth possessed me to sing this song, I have no idea. My friend to whom I was telling this story interrogated me long and hard on this point and I honestly cannot say, maybe it was the fact that I knew most of the words to this song without having to descend into an endless flow of Beatles-like lalalas in place of the chorus. I'm not the kind of person who carries around a filing cabinet full of lyrics in my head. It really was that or kum ba yah (which, as I think about it now, we might have sung after my prayer.) Or maybe in the moment I thought it had cross-over potential, I don't know. Whatever you think of it does not matter, the fact is 'The Gypsy Kings' played it with aplomb, side-mouth-sax and all.

There comes a moment on occasions like this when all is lost and every shred of dignity is gone - the jokes have bombed, the glass-shattering rendition of songs have left people mortified - where you kind of relax into the role at the precise moment the audience are reaching for cheap objects to hurl at you. The Christians were sullen; you could almost see them forming arguments in defense of the gospel: 'well mamaji not all ministers act that way.' The non-Christians looked like angry minions. I could have gone on but for my friends who had also stopped laughing now and were indicating with thumb swiping across neck that either I needed to end this thing or my life was in fact in danger, or both.

Not these Gypsy Kings, the other Gypsy Kings...

The moral of the story? This is life.  This is the inexplicable. Interspersed between stretches of the mundane lies the bizarre and it reminds us in life that there really is no such thing as normal. In the words of the inimitable graduation song, Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen), The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.' A word on worry. I worry about Christianity, a lot. I worry about some Christian's obsession with the idea of normal  - as if there is a normative - this is the way things must be, people must believe like this, and they must act like that. When I think that heaven might be populated with people just like this, like it's the Stepford Wives but this time for eternity, I want to leap off a cliff. There is no scope for creative thought or out-the-box thinking, and so some Christian messages, when they grapple with the world, often seem to do so with a certain defensiveness, a latent fear. Just check out your local Christian magazine and see how many of those articles are chasing spooks.

The best thing my parents did for me was send me to Wits in the 90s; you can't study humanities at Wits without learning to celebrate diversity; the post-modern theory of Derrida doesn't make sense unless it comes out of the mouth of a over-the-top third year wearing black mascara and sporting two nose rings, who goes by the name John and considers his faith as lying somewhere between high Catholicism and Hinduism. I was lectured by a young gay man, Buddhist in fact, who had eczema so spent long stretches of each class with his hand down the back of his pants scratching the back of his knee; why he needed to go through his shorts to reach his knee I will never know. I spent long stretches of those same classes finding ways I could politely recommend skin creams to him. You see, I too have eczema. He took us for Pauline epistles and he was exceptional.

The staple argument that is rolled out tirelessly and, frankly, creates a gag reflex in me, is the ol' slippery slope chestnut. Ooh, you're on a slippery slope. Start dabbling in people with other worldviews and before you know it, you'll be killing cats. If you begin to listen to that speaker or read those books, before you know it, your faith will be gone. Can I propose something here? Maybe the worst sin is not dropping the F-bomb in a moment of high stress. Maybe the worse sin (if sin can be categorised like this) is creating fear where fear need not be. Sin is a sinister, malicious son-of-a-gun and this kind of mindset is right up its alley. It is sin’s far more nuanced form and far more difficult to detect but then sin doesn't, we should know, under-estimate our intelligence.

You see, if it was true that really conversing with the world would automatically land said person on a slippery slope, why do I love Jesus more today than ever before? I love people who are radically different from me, I love listening to their opinions and worldviews, I love the colour of it all, but I still love Jesus more, and I love Jesus in them more. In my experience of Jesus, he has never moved me away from diversity but always towards it, he has never encouraged me to deny the unknown but to investigate it. And this is hugely liberating.  With my lecturer, it wasn’t just the lessons that were awesome, it was the Lesson around the lessons; those moments when I got to chat with him one-on-one and found a person who genuinely cared. It was the Lesson I learnt when he marked a script of mine which, unbeknownst to me, was the exact topic of his Masters dissertation – he basically used any white space on my paper to re-write his own dissertation but still found it within himself to give me a considerate mark. Life is a lot about the Lesson around the lessons, isn’t it? When you engage in life you begin to learn all sorts of things about yourself and you are humbled and you are inclined to open yourself a little more. It was through this guy that I learnt that my previous attitude towards his orientation was far more offensive to God than his orientation itself.

If you are going to follow Jesus and be scared you just can't be too careful, demons are lurking everywhere and you'll be forced to extend the fruits of the Spirit to include hysteria, paranoia, fear and ignorance, among others. Jesus has always encouraged me to look at things differently and to explore, in its fullness, this world, this world in which Jesus 'lives and moves and has his being'.  These, of course, are the words Paul, spoken in Acts, used in explaining the nature of Christ, as my gay, Buddhist 1st year lecturer would have taught us.