A Moment of Pastoral Privilege

I’m going to take a moment of pastoral privilege here. Please, grant me your patience and grace.

I think that it ought to be impossible, this week, for preachers across our country to address the good news of Jesus Christ without also addressing the matter of mental illness, and especially the matter of mental illness combined with the ready accessibility of military-style firearms.

Here is how I am facing the matter of mental illness in the light of the gospel, today. This I offer as a person of faith – and by that I mean not only faith in God but also faith toward other human beings as children of God. I also offer it as your loving pastor.

You can imagine, because you have probably heard from me before, that I strongly question the right of a very few individuals to keep and bear firearms that are designed either for killing large numbers of human beings at a time, or else for killing only a few in a spectacular way. (Well, you know what I really question, but for now let’s stick with this.)

We are seeing over and over again in the media what happens if an opportunity to do serious harm to others is not prevented. We see over and over again in our personal experiences what happens when mentally ill people decide to do harm to themselves. We are repeatedly broken and heartbroken on the individual, communal, and societal levels.

Statistics have proven futile for making this point. And the present blaming of the FBI for the incident in Florida rings of scapegoating societal sin rather than facing our actual problem. Furthermore, more accurate recordskeeping and registry, by now, will likely only create another futile bureaucracy. So, to me, much of this moment in history seems simply absurd.

If mounting numbers of dead schoolchildren and churchgoers and countless others in public venues only serve to polarize us, making the resolution of our collective problem still more improbable, then perhaps we deserve what we are facing. But concerns should not remain unspoken.

We organize educational opportunities around what to do when an “active shooter” enters our schools, public spaces, and places of worship. Meanwhile, newscasts report about mental health professionals active in our schools, seeking to soothe the anxiety students are having just showing up for class.

It is incumbent upon Christians that we offer mercy, compassion, and healing. These are the qualities given example in the Pioneer and Perfecter of our faith; indeed, these are examples of faith itself – not belief, but truth, faithfulness, mutuality, love. However these qualities may take form in any of us – as simple comfort and the binding of wounds, or as personal examination and action, or as advocacy for political and societal change, or even as ones preparing our communities for what feel like inevitable emergencies – our consciences should be telling us that such suffering as we are witnessing on the part of victims and perpetrators needs to come to an end.

The potential gifts of troubled people should not be underestimated. Poets and playwrights, preachers and activists and politicians, indeed the foremost among us in every walk of life, have often been the same who have experienced or are experiencing challenges with perception and acuity, or depression and addiction.

As I have spoken with many of you in the past, and as I found myself mentioning to one of you, this very week before the incident on Wednesday took shape, our religion has such a rich history of the positive contributions of people who obviously experienced serious episodes of mental illness, breaks from what the rest of us consider reality, but who were brought back from the brink not only by their faith in God but by the faith of their God in them and by the love of their families and friends! I refer to people like Noah the alcoholic and Abraham who heard voices telling him to do harm to his own child and Mary Magdalene who was relieved by Jesus of seven demons. How can we refuse to make our world safer for such people and our care of them better?

The obvious answer to me is that, if our rights and privileges are endangering ourselves and others, then we make sacrifices of those rights and privileges for the sake of ourselves and those whom we love, or at least of those for whom we are responsible. You may draw other conclusions, and I am prepared to understand that some compromise would be necessary, but – in the interest of mercy, compassion, and healing – at this moment I say, I am prepared to part with a right that, admittedly, I have never exercised in order to protect the innocent.

As a private citizen I will pursue this course. As a person of faith I will persist in that faith based in mercy, compassion, and healing. As a clergy person I will invoke the Spirit of God to act on our behalf to help us together discover the path through this valley of the shadow of death. And as your pastor pledge to you that I will keep and bear you, lovingly and without judgment, for neither of us can live without the other... at least not genuinely.

So, now I’ve mentioned the matter, I’ve taken my moment of pastoral privilege, and that is all for now, except my request of all of you that – no matter whether or not you agree with me, please treat one another gently in speaking of this together, bearing in mind your oneness in the Holy Spirit, the loving heart of Jesus Christ, and the grace of the Creator in whom you are working out your salvation.