Belonging – You don’t have to earn your place here.

In Marriage Encounter they taught us that tolerations are a symptom of spiritual divorce. Not conflict. Conflict is fine; conflict means two people are still in the room. Tolerations are what happens after. You stop raising it. You work around the person. You are perfectly civil, you have quietly filed them, and something has ended without anyone announcing it. A marriage can run for years on tolerations. So can a congregation.

Fred Rogers said it as simply as anyone has: I love you just the way you are. Not I will put up with you. Not I will love you once you come around. Just the way you are, including the part we skip, which is when you are at odds with me. That is belonging. Acceptance, not toleration. It is much harder than it sounds, because toleration is comfortable and it looks like virtue from the outside.

We are not Mr. Rogers. So we follow Paul, who did not tell us to be nicer. He told us to put on Christ. Not admire him. Not agree with him. Put him on, the way you put on a coat, and go out into the day wearing him, which means looking at the person in front of you the way he would before you have decided anything about them.

From a prison cell, Bonhoeffer asked the only question that matters: who is Christ for us today? Not who was he. Who is he, now, here, in this building. I know my answer, and I don’t like it much. The person in this congregation who drives me up the wall.

I should say where this comes from, because I did not arrive at it by being generous.

My wife was married before, in a Presbyterian ceremony, with a Presbyterian minister. Years later, when the question of the Catholic Church came up, we were told she would need an annulment. Be precise about what that means. The Church said the marriage had never been sacramental; on its own terms it had not been a marriage at all. And the requirement was that she formally petition to have that non-marriage declared null. Annul what, exactly? She was being asked to submit to a process whose only function was the submitting. Not to establish a fact. The fact was already established in their eyes. To acknowledge who held the authority to decide.

Remember that Marriage Encounter reference? I was also married before, and on one of those weekends I stood up and described why our marriage was a sacrament. In our divorce, my ex-wife asked me to support an annulment. The grounds were that our marriage was not sacramental. That farce drove me to my paternal grandfather’s faith. So we are Lutheran.

I do not tell that to score a point against Catholics. Half the people I hope will read this were formed there and still miss it, and my quarrel is not with them. I tell it because I recognized the machine, and the machine is not Catholic. It is ours. Every branch has one. Its function is to decide who is inside and who is outside, and to require you to submit to that decision before you are permitted to eat.

We say we are brothers and sisters in Christ. We say it easily, and it goes past without anyone noticing it is a claim about kinship, and kinship comes with instructions. You do not audit your sister before you feed her. You do not ask your brother for his papers. And you do not get to pick them.

Here is where the theory meets a Tuesday.

Someone in this congregation questioned the way I was assigning rooms on the calendar. I was annoyed. I walked the building with her to prove the point. We counted forty doors and ten restrooms. Not one of them needed to be on a calendar. Every one of them belonged in a safe-church policy that I, as Council President, had not thought about. She was not wrong. She was carrying something I needed and could not have gotten any other way.

Others would not stop talking about Pre-K costs. So we went and found the real numbers, which nobody had.

Another person’s beliefs can infuriate me inside ninety seconds. Eight of us sat down with Genesis for an hour, one reading it through Kabbalah, one through Luther and the King James, the rest of us somewhere in between. By the end there were eight opinions in the room, one apiece. Nobody won. Nobody was corrected. None of us was the guest.

That is the pattern, and I have stopped being surprised by it. Every time I have actually put on Christ and looked at the person driving my ego up the wall, they turned out to be holding something the congregation needed. Not because irritating people are secretly wise. Because a congregation where everybody agrees with me is not a congregation. It is a caucus with hymns.

Jordan does not believe in God.

He sets up the Lenten meals and tears them down afterward, while the rest of us are in worship. He runs the game nights. He handles the nuts and bolts of a great deal that happens in this building. His daughter is two and sits on the chancel steps next to the pastor, and the whole congregation has more or less adopted her. In four years nobody has asked Jordan to resolve his theology first. Nobody is going to.

I want that read twice, because it is the entire argument in one man. We did not tolerate him into the building. We did not welcome him on the understanding that he would come around. He belongs, and his unbelief is not a problem being managed.

If you want to know what this congregation actually is, it is not the welcome statement in our bylaws, true and hard-won as that is. It is a man who does not believe in God, stacking chairs during worship because the meal will not set itself up.

There was a man across the street from our building with a megaphone, telling us we were going to hell. He is on the list too.

Not because I am going to be gracious about it. I oppose everything he is doing and I will not move an inch. But he is not disposable, he is not outside the family, and I do not get to file him. Both things at once. That is the hardest place I know to stand, and almost nobody in American Christianity is standing there right now, which is exactly why it is worth claiming.

People are using the name of Jesus to do the opposite of what he said. They are sorting. They are checking papers. They have built the machine again and put a flag on it. That is not the answer. We have had better arguments for a century.

In 1968 this congregation noticed that families here needed a preschool, and built one. That is not a metaphor. It is a school, in its own wing and downstairs, five days a week, fifty-eight years, with teachers who have been here fifteen and twenty years, of every faith and none. Speech and occupational therapy delivered in the building for children who would otherwise wait months for it. Nobody launched it. Somebody decided.

Somebody looked at the kitchen, decided it needed fixing, and led it. Somebody decided the building needed cameras. A refugee family settled nearby and needed food, and four members drove to Costco and came back with three months of staples. Not a program, not a drive. A Saturday and a couple of carts.

A theatre company rehearsed in our building three days a week for months. Most of them do not worship here. The building was theirs anyway.

On Mother’s Day the pastor asked the children about their moms, and one of them said, “I have two moms.” Everybody smiled, and the service kept going. That is the whole story. That is why it is the story.

In 2007 I made a photograph I call Sisters. What took me was the symmetry of the three bridges and the slope of the roof on the David Lawrence Convention Center. A mentor who reviewed the image told me that was the architect’s intention: the Three Sisters from the twentieth century, the convention center built for the next, made to belong together. You look at them and it is simply right.

Yesterday we went to Rib Fest, and the bridges and that roof took me again. Pittsburgh’s North Shore feels like a place to belong. There were people there who would drive me crazy, different beliefs, different values, and on a perfect Labor Day we all belonged there.

I do not have a program, and I am suspicious of programs. I do not have a complete answer to what is happening in this country, and I am not going to pretend I do from a website.

What I have is a congregation where a man who does not believe sets the tables, and where the woman who questioned my calendar found a hole in our child safety. Where eight people read Genesis eight ways and all came back the following week. Where a two-year-old belongs to everybody.

None of us is certain of very much. That is not our weakness. It is the only condition under which any of this works.

So, who is Christ for you today? You already know. It is the person you were hoping I would not mention.

Sunday is at 9:30. Come ten minutes early if you want to see whether any of this is true.

Fred Geiger, member, PHLC