Charisma
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the pulpit to the man with the smokin' hot wife. Plus: The Beatles
In the Wild West days of the blogosphere, there was a site called “Bad Vestments.” I wonder now, after waves of consolidation and social media bottlenecking, how I ever found it. It was waspish and mean, but its thesis statement (which, in the days of link backtracks, it’s actually possible I unintentionally bestowed on it) was “Christian worship is not about you.” The aesthetic crimes it documented were busy-ness, empty frivolity, bad visual design (“a rare misstep by the Holy Father,” I remember over a picture of Benedict in a mint-green mitre and cope). But the theological failings were more significant: self-important individuality, statement-making, attention-seeking. Vestments are a part of worship, and if they serve to glorify and set apart and draw attention to the person of the presider, they distort the whole experience of worship.
I haven’t looked at or for any of this content since George W. Bush’s second term, but I do think about that phrase “Christian worship is not about you.” My stated rationale for wearing an alb at every service, even in churches where this was not the expectation, was that I didn’t want people to develop opinions about my pants. I’d go further and say “Christian ministry is not about you.” So many of the ethical and theological problems we have with church leadership come from, or at least involve, a misplaced emphasis on personal gifts and the feeling of special burdens and special prerogatives they can create. “Look at me!” can be worse than a sin; it can become a business model. But, if I’m honest with myself, it’s a model with a plausible rationale. Charisma, not in the ancient sense of a truly divine spiritual gift and inspiration, but in the modern sense of personal appeal and magnetism, can feel like the only foothold a smooth-faced secular world offers.
Person and Office
Two months ago I wrote something about clergy who escape parish ministry for the easier yoke of online influence. Today I’m thinking more about parish ministry itself and the difficulty of maintaining a distinction between the person of the minister and the office of ministry. I have glossed this, to myself and others, as “Pastor Ben shows up to celebrate the Lord’s Day when Mr. would rather sleep in.” Knowing the distinction is one thing, keeping it is another, and forming parish life with it in mind is still another. The truth is that Mr. Ben must, or is at least expected to, stand in for and supplement the bare functions of Pastor Ben. People want to like you; they quite understandably want to feel a personal bond, camaraderie, even admiration. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
The problem for us is that the person can end up overshadowing the office. The connection to the former becomes the evaluation of the latter. And this is a general phenomenon. Think of all of the offices that, once upon a time, commanded a certain respect or deference in themselves but are now honored only in proportion to our view of the person holding it. The presidency is the biggest and most obvious example of this, with even the Supreme Court deciding on the fly what sorts of powers the office includes based on whether the majority agrees with the actions of its occupant. But it’s everywhere. Judges, generals, teachers, doctors, you name it—all such offices are coming to be regarded inasmuch as the person exercising it does what we think is good. I’m as guilty (if “guilt” is even the right word) of this as anyone. I don’t trust doctors the way I used to after getting lots of expensive and useless medical attention. And it’s hard to watch the antics of a guy like the Rittenhouse judge without thinking that this person is, qualifications notwithstanding, a dumb rando in a special robe. The abuses of clergy, long protected by deference and mystification, need no rehearsal here.
Thus we are thrown back on ourselves, having to make our character and decisions (or politics, sports affiliations, or affect) serve as a pledge for the authority of our office. You perform a role—you show up, stand in the right place, say the right words, discharge your duty correctly and scrupulously to efficaciously produce the grace promised by God—while also, perhaps inevitably, performing a persona. I’ve seen a lot of them. I’ve tried a lot of them. They can be honest and more or less harmless. I strategically heightened my White Sox and Packers fandom to create solidarity with minorities of my northern Illinois congregation and benign rivalries with the rest (This progressed to the point that someone very graciously made me a double-sided stole with White Sox and Packers logo-print fabric). But they can become pandering or inapt (my country medley at a church event mimicking the voices of Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings is something I remember with a cringe). At its worst, of course, there are deployments of charisma that become downright toxic. The stereotype of the megachurch preacher with a “smokin’ hot wife” has become a joke (and a cause of earnest handwringing) but it encodes some serious and bad messages about the virility of the pastor and the valuation of women. Confusing the sacred ministry of the Gospel with any cultural ideal of masculinity is bad, and all the worse when that cultural ideal is as fragile and puerile as ours.
Beyond the power of charisma to authorize abuse (or heresy, or boring old misfeasance), then, it creates the risk of a pointless hypocrisy. Should one’s marriage, Sox fandom, swaggering sermon delivery or sense of humor prove less than immaculate, a scandal may occur where none was needed. Pastors can answer questions no one asked, but people don’t have to like those answers.
Embracing Anti-Charisma
So charisma in ministry becomes a trap. In the best case scenario, if you depart the scene without a hint of scandal and leave only good memories, you are simply pushing the inevitable disappointment in the person of the pastor onto your successors. “Pastor Megan is nice,” I imagine my former parishioners saying, “but she just can’t sing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ like Pastor Ben could.”1 More likely, we will invite our own disappointments. Modern ministry is a year-after-year Kobayashi Maru scenario that demands too many competing, and perhaps incompatible, skills. Day to day management, setting a vision, producing endless content while leading others, speaking the truth, winning souls, and swimming upstream against demographic and cultural trends that are far older than you are: I don’t know anyone who can do it all, or many who are swift, strong, or dazzling enough to obscure their inadequacies for long. Time and chance happeneth to them all.
It’s good, then, to stand on the office and leave oneself, as it were, in the shadows. The office is enough. The Word is charismatic in itself, the Sacraments beautiful and powerful on their own. The church gives us chasubles and presider’s chairs and special words that only we say not because we’re wonderful and powerful but because maybe we’re not. Maybe our only power is in what we do. I wonder sometimes if my colleagues who place themselves in a theatrically egalitarian posture in the sanctuary aren’t in effect setting themselves apart in a more subtle and unmanageable way. “I’m just like you, except I get to do all the talking.”
I’ve ended up going in the opposite direction, little by little, as time goes on. Without quite meaning to, I’ve made my manners more delicate and restrained. My humor at church has become bone-dry. I’m not even a little bit racy, or witty, or flirtatious, or edgy. I’m defiantly dull and anti-charismatic. Perhaps this is a defense mechanism; if you’re going to be a bit reclusive, it’s better to be boring in the first place. But this is at least in part a matter of conviction. I would have Christ, and not myself, shine through my words and actions as far as possible. I can (and indeed need to) be myself on my own time. Or to put it more positively, whatever gifts I have for this work must be put fully and without remainder in the service of Christ and the growth of his people into his image on Earth, and not in the service of my own image, popularity, or esteem. It’s a terrible and great mercy to imagine preaching these words of fire and pouring grace from Christ’s wounded side and then to leave no trace of oneself behind. “Preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten,” in the exhortation attributed to Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. It helps, of course, that two of these are easily accomplished. Christian ministry is, sooner or later, not about you.
Appreciation: Two of Us
Over the holiday, I started watching Get Back, the documentary by Peter Jackson of the film recorded during The Beatles’ misbegotten sessions for what would become Let It Be. It was, especially at first, a bracingly unpleasant viewing experience. The guys aren’t getting along, the songs are a shambles if they can be said to exist at all, and the anxious part of me that tries to plan ahead for something as simple as an Advent sing-along was agog at the haphazard way the world’s biggest entertainers were approaching a massive event less than three weeks in the future. Yes, all of this despite knowing that the planned television event and live album would never happen, the stray wisps of “The Long and Winding Road” would turn into a song I quite like, and eventually Billy Preston would show up to save the day.
I was not even giving the movie my full attention when an embryonic version of “Two of Us” got started. This song, which I don’t think I’d heard in twenty years or more, wrenched me back in an instant to my junior year of high school and the hours I spent hanging around and playing guitars with my buddy Pete. It’s a perfect song about a certain kind of adolescent friendship, I think:
Some youthful friendships and enthusiasms take root and mature over the years, others pass away silently, without difficulty or regret, and still others are recalled with embarrassment or sorrow. That’s how it has to be. Adolescence is a time to be and do a lot of different things with a lot of different people, and only so many of those things and people can make it through the narrow gate to adulthood. For most of a year, I spent as much time with Pete as I did with anyone else. Our friend groups overlapped and somehow or other we started sharing the walk to and from school, unburdening ourselves about girls, and playing songs in his basement. He wasn’t the most ambitious guitar player in our circles, but he was kind and thoughtful and spiritual in an eclectic but earnest way that I found new then and rare since. He was the sort of guy who would bike out to a cornfield to sleep out there, and I was the sort of guy who admired that.
We ended up working on a bunch of songs that we performed—the first time I every played guitar for an audience—in a little multi-purpose room on a school arts day. We sang “Blue Sky,” “Blackbird,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” lots of stuff people thirty years older than us would have known and loved. And “Two of Us,” which hadn’t aged a day since McCartney and Lennon nailed the harmony on January 31, 1969. “Two of us riding nowhere / Spending someone’s / hard earned pay.” The conjunction of an intense friendship with nothing in particular to do is a special thing. Not that I knew it at the time, but the days were short when I could have experienced anything like that.
Pete graduated and went to college. I don’t recall where. I’m sure paths crossed once or twice after that, and at one point we were Facebook friends. I remembered the time we spent philosophizing up and down Gammon Road with fondness. But the song itself just vanished from my memory, along with the feeling it captured. A powerful, even life-altering moment can simply up and leave without a visible trace. It doesn’t seem right.
But it left me the joy of rediscovery. As the song emerged in the footage, I could finally hear in it the pathos of the Lennon-McCartney partnership in its terminal days. They were just boys when they started making music together, and for seven years, everything they did changed the world of popular music. Watching the movie, we see a flagging partnership revive itself with jokes and breezy run-throughs of old favorites. “Two of Us” is that whole goofy, affectionate mood in a musical form of half lines, lyrics about aimlessness, and big open chords. They even do that as a joke, singing back and forth through clenched teeth or in a Maharishi-esque accent. It’s art, it’s commerce, it’s cultural innovation on a global scale, and it’s also two guys screwing around and delighting in each other.
Two of us wearing raincoats
Standing solo
In the sun
You and me chasing paper
Getting nowhere
On our way back home
I pulled up the chords and learned it again, but it’s not the same without someone to play it with. It can’t be my son, who ought to find this experience with someone other than his dad. I don’t know how an attempt to capture this loose-ends frivolity would go with another area guitar dad. So I do it as a solo, a misplaced duettist singing about an absent partner from life’s long-ago sunny, Sunday-driving day. We did this once, you and me, and I was just waiting to remember it.
Sermon: Christ the King
Today’s post more or less in homiletic form:
I am fully aware that no one will ever say this.