Clarence was on the search committee that called me to my first-time position at Compton Heights Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in St. Louis. He was also Moderator of the congregation. Midway through my third year, I asked, “Where’s Clarence? I haven’t seen Clarence for several weeks. It’s not like Clarence not to be here.”

I reached him by telephone and told him I missed him at church. Was everything okay? He invited me to come to his house. I went.

There was no small talk. Clarence launched right in and presented a laundry list of grievances that stretched from the Mississippi River to West County. The actions and inactions of his church and its members had failed him.

“I want something I can die for,” he said, “and right now I wouldn’t walk across the street for this church. All my sixty years I’ve done what I’ve been told I need to do. I’m still here and there’s something in there at the center that I want and need but I don’t know how to get it.” 

Hard words to hear. I have no memory of how I responded, only of what he said. I wrote them verbatim in my journal. 

A wise elder in the Lexington, KY, church I served from 2014-2022 had held nearly every position a lay member could. He’d seen it all – the church and its people in all their glory and gory from the inside out. One day, musing over an incident when something went sideways at meeting and someone threw up their hands in exasperation, Josh folded his hands, placed them on his chest, calmly shook his head, and opined, “If you work where the sausage is made, sometimes it can make you sick to your stomach.” 

Clarence had a belly full of bad church bratwurst, and I had a front row seat to his spewing out his displeasure uncensored. 

Milton was Clarence’s soulmate in disillusionment. A retired pastor and member of the church I served in North Carolina, he was socially conscious, justice minded, intellectually astute, pastorally sensitive, and theologically grounded. However, in the years following his retirement, he lost his wife to a brain tumor, lost his confidence in the capacity of human beings to effect significant social change, and then lost his faith to boot.

I used to pick him up from his apartment and take him to Hardee’s on Friday morning for a biscuit and cup of coffee. He’d unwrap his biscuit, break it open, and scrape all the bread out with a coffee stirrer, leaving only the golden-brown crust.

“David,” he said one day over the hollowed-out communion of coffee and crust, “I don't believe any more. The good die young. The wicked prosper. No good deed goes unpunished. With every cause I give myself to, it’s two steps forward and three steps back.”

He was done with the church in all its clunkiness and clumsiness. Done with its people in all their hypocrisy and pettiness. Done with aspiring and striving for the best only to fail, fall short, or be turned back by the worst. The good, right, and true were going down to defeat, he’d spent his life playing for a losing team, and he saw no help or hope in sight. Stick a fork in me. I’m done! Bad sausage. 

As with Clarence’s words a decade earlier, Milton’s disillusionment was hard to hear. Again, I have no memory of how I responded, only of what I heard.

Clarence and Milton were not alone, of course, in walking away from the church exasperated with the enterprise, shaking their fists at God, a belly full of bile. The nineteenth-century English Romantic poet, Robert Southey, once scoffed, “I could believe in Christ if he did not drag behind him his leprous bride, the church.” Some romantic, huh? An old saying goes: “To live in love with the saints above that will be glory. To live below with the saints you know is another story!" Some people – and some of God’s people – are a piece of work! 

Elijah scored quite a victory for God’s cause on Mt. Carmel one day, but next thing you know, the tide turned as did the fickle faithful and ‘ol Jezebel was after him. Whereupon the prophet hightailed it to the desert, plopped himself down under a broom tree, put his face in his hands and said, “I quit. I’m turning in my prophet card. I wouldn’t walk across the street for these people!” (1 Kings 19:1-4). 

A story is attributed to the late Rev. Forrest Church. When he travelled on an airplane, he used to cringe when the person seated next to him asked, “What do you do?” because when we pastors tell strangers we’re ministers, we get all kinds of responses. One is to tell us they don’t believe in God, to which wise Forrest Church once responded, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

Well played! There are indeed beliefs about God that are illusions that ought not be believed. Sometimes disillusionment is a good thing. Look at the word. Dis-illusion: to have an illusion dis-missed. Part of growing up – maturing – is to shed whatever illusions we may have, painful as that may be, so that our lives, relationships, and beliefs may be rooted in the truth.

Illusions about God include perceiving God as a Santa who gives presents to all the good girls and boys. Or God as the Lone Ranger who gallops in at the nick of time to save the innocent and punish the guilty. Or God as a genie who, when you rub the lamp, you get three prayers answered. I could go on. To believe any of them is to set oneself up for disappointment. They’re illusions. Look for another God.

Likewise, there are illusions about the church and its members. Believe them and you’re in for a sour stomach. It’s an illusion to think the church is a place where the fruits of the Spirit –love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control – are in full bloom in everybody all the time in all-encompassing abundance. Neither is the church a place where “never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.” Illusion!

Any relationship, if it is to last, requires disillusionment: being divested of beliefs that are not true. I thought I was marrying a woman who was an athlete, lover of classic rock music, and connoisseur of roller coasters. Not! Not! and Not! All illusions. Should I have looked for another? Are you kidding? Do you think I’m everything Jennie thought I was? Rather than building a relationship, church membership, or faith on an illusion, it’s best to be disillusioned and rebuild from a foundation of what is true.

The truth, if I might overly simplify things, is that the church is exasperating because it is comprised of human beings who are exasperating. Always have been. Always will be. Comedian A. Whitney Brown, a Saturday Night Live alum, quipped,

There’s a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They’d rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It’s very embarrassing.

He could have said the same thing about the Bible. It, too, chronicles a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It’s very embarrassing to have the story of God’s people’s failed attempts at sausage making across the ages chronicled with such exasperating honesty. Things turned sideways in the Garden of Eden and have persisted ever since. We human beings become exasperated at the whole faith enterprise and walk away from it, vowing to never cross the street again to return (the largest, fastest growing denomination these days is Nones – No religious affiliation. Done with it!).

The gospel truth is that despite humanity’s exasperating history and our propensity to exasperate, disillusion, and walk away from each other, never to cross the street again, God does not give up on us. When we walk off in a huff, God leaves a light on and the front door unlocked.

I remember as a kid throwing a temper tantrum and telling my mother I was leaving. I stomped across the kitchen where she was and let the screen door slam on the way out. Mom, unperturbed, said out the window, “If you’re going to be gone forever you might get hungry. I’m getting ready to pull some chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. Maybe you want a couple of cookies and a glass of milk before you go?” I took her up on her offer and ran away as far as the back of the garage where I sat down and enjoyed my snack.  

I’m talking about grace here. Grace is Elijah in the desert shaking his fist at God, “I quit! This prophet stuff is for the birds. Find somebody else.” What did God do? God sent an angel with a fresh-baked cake and a jar of water. Elijah ran away from God and God sent room service (1 Kings 18:1-19:21).

Grace is Jesus. Despite his disciples – the church – having forsaken, denied, and betrayed him, he didn’t walk away from them never to return. Out the Via Dolorosa he walked with the cross of our rejection on his back, crossing one street after another until he reached Golgotha. He was crucified, died, and was buried. But on the third day, having been raised from the dead, he crossed streets from Jerusalem to Galilee, appearing to his disciples along the way with the promise of his eternal, steadfast presence.      

When Milton died, I led his funeral service with another pastor in our community and one of our church’s elders, both of whom were aware of his flagging faith. Fred Craddock, one of the finest preachers of his era, said we all have moments when we struggle to believe. In those moments, he said, we need others to believe for us. So, Ron, Mike, and I proclaimed the resurrection, God’s victory over sin and death, despair, exasperation, and disillusionment. We commended Milton into the everlasting arms in the sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life. Though for a season of his life Milton could not believe in God, God never ceased to believe in Milton.      

I lost track of Clarence and Wanda after I left Compton Heights in 1989. Thirty-five years later, I was doing an interim ministry in Columbia, MO. I was remembering him and Wanda and composing these chapters in their memory. I googled their names and found obituaries. Wanda died at age seventy in 1997. Clarence lived to the age of ninety-six, dying in 2022. They were members of Lake Ozark Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Missouri. A pastor I knew years ago did Wanda’s funeral. One of his successors officiated at Clarence’s. Maybe Clarence’s faith in God, humanity, and the church had been restored. Chastened. Deepened.  

The obituary read:

Clarence served in the United States Army during World War II receiving a Purple Heart. He was a member of the Lake Ozark Christian Church of Lake Ozark, MO, and was employed as an accountant for Union Electric for many years. He was one of the founders of Cornerstone Center for Early Learning in St. Louis, MO. He was a proud supporter of multiple children’s organizations and Native American organizations. Clarence was a wonderful husband, father and grandfather.

The obituaries named the cemetery Clarence and Wanda are buried in. It is an hour’s drive south of Columbia. I knew what I needed to do. When Clarence told me in his living room, “Right now I wouldn’t walk across the street for this church,” I had no response. Thirty-five years later, I did. I’d walk across the street and then some for him on behalf of the church, its members, and its risen Lord. I’d make a trip from where I sat in Columbia to where they were buried an hour south.

I did. I drove an hour, found the rural cemetery, parked the car, and wandered through the gravestones until I saw their names. I knelt and touched the stone in respectful silence to honor the memory of two people who had been formative in my life, servants of their nation, their church, and a half century’s worth of children.

On the way back, I pulled into an old-timey roadside drive-in in Eldon, MO, that boasted footlong chili dogs. I ordered one with the works – chili, cheese, onions, mustard. It was the closest thing to sausage I could find.

It was delicious.