“Church Curmudgeons”
Britannica Dictionary definition of CURMUDGEON: a person (especially an old man) who is easily annoyed or angered and who often complains.
I bid Jennie adieu last Monday morning. She headed back to Lexington, driving through the path of totality at 10 mph until she pulled off the interstate and watched the mid-day darkness from a cemetery outside Poseyville, IN.
When she called me a day or so later to check in, she caught me up on folks she’d seen, heard from, or heard about in Lexington, a place I’ve been all of one day in the past three hundred. One of the people she caught me up on is a curmudgeon, albeit a Christian one – a cranky Christ follower (Is that an oxymoron?). Every congregation has a few. Churches and pastors, in our propensity to be nice, find it difficult to set boundaries for bullies or speak a firm No to the overly ornery. As such, we become enablers, safe harbors for people with hurtful dispositions. I’ve had my share of correspondence and come-to-Jesus meetings with parishioners behaving badly, but few if any produced lasting change. As Taylor Swift sang, “Haters gonna hate.” And curmudgeons gonna curmudge.
I remember a question Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr asked a few summers ago at the Chautauqua Institution. “How is it,” he wondered aloud, “that we have formed so many mean Christians?” Why is it that a confession of faith and baptism followed by worship, study, and fellowship over decades don’t always translate into lives exuding the fruit of Christian character – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Old-time evangelist Billy Sunday was right when he quipped, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.” Curmudgeonly Christians are a case in point.
John Ortberg wrote about a member of a church he served named Hank. "Hank," he wrote, "was a cranky guy." And he always had been. "He was once a cranky young guy, and he grew up to be a cranky old man.” Ortberg continued:
“But even more troubling than his lack of change was the fact that nobody was surprised by it … No church consultants were called in. No emergency meetings were held to probe the strange case of this person who had lived his entire life as part of a church and yet was not transformed. No one was surprised that over time he had not become more and more like Jesus. No one assumed that each year would find him a more compassionate, joyful, gracious, winsome personality. No one anticipated that Hank was on his way to becoming a source of delight and courtesy who overflowed with ‘rivers of living water.’ So, we weren't at all surprised when it didn't happen. We would have been surprised if it did.” (The Life You’ve Always Wanted, pp. 30-32.)
This world is filled with Hanks and Henriettas, self-professed Christians who have never changed. Sadly, the churches they are a part of don’t find that surprising.
One of the bedrock beliefs of the Christian faith is this: God, working through the power of the Holy Spirit, can transform lives. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for this transformation, this heaven-sent makeover, is morphoo. It is cousin to the word metamorphosis. The God turns caterpillars into butterflies can make human beings more Christlike.
Do you buy that? I ask because we’re skeptical about people changing. We say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” “She’s never gonna change.” “He’s set in his ways.” “She’s stubborn. You’re wasting your time trying to get through to her.”
As a pastor, I try to love everybody, curmudgeons included. That’s in every Christian’s job description, of course, not just clergy. Love, of course, does not mean being a docile doormat. Tough love is part of the job description. Rebukes can be done in the Spirit. Easier said than done, though. Years ago, in my quest to be a pastor to a particular serial complainer, a wise soul told me the necessary first step is “getting to compassion,” being able to see the other person as a broken human being whose prickliness is rooted in wrongs they themselves have suffered at the hands (and tongues) of others. “Hurting people hurt people” is how I heard it put. Richard Rohr wrote, "If we don’t transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” Few of us, however, are able to do the hard work of honest introspection, counseling, and therapy required to transform our pain. With that perspective, my initial indignation yields to compassion – what a sad way to live life. The fact that hurting people hurt people doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it may explain it.
Despite skepticism about people changing – curmudgeons morphoo-ing – I remain hopeful. After all, the first Christians called John, author of the fourth gospel, “the Beloved Disciple.” But he wasn’t always! We’re told in Mark’s gospel that Jesus nicknamed James and John Boanerges, which means Sons of Thunder (Mark 3:17). Do you suppose that nickname bespoke a stormy temperament? The way I look at it, if God can transform a Son of (a) Thunder into the Beloved Disciple, God can convert other curmudgeons. Even Hank. Even the sour sister in Christ Jennie reported on. It’s a truth John marveled at until the day he died. In his words, “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). There are many people I can’t wait to see when God’s redeeming work is done, all their hurts have been healed, and they are transformed.
Now excuse me. I have to go out and tell some kids to get off my lawn.
