Lost at Sea

navigating when the stars fall from the sky

I opened up a news feed on my phone this morning while I waited for the water to get hot.

It’s probably the worst choice at the start of the day but for a while we’ve been living in a world that prompts me to scan for new signs of an impending apocalypse every morning.

The first notice in my newsfeed today was surely a sign of that apocalypse.

I found myself reading, yet again, about one of my heroes in the Church, someone I had had great admiration and appreciation for, confessing to a pathology of moral failure. I am using the expression “pathology of moral failure” to distinguish between a moment in which a person makes a harmful, hurtful choice and situations like this in which a person makes an ongoing series of harmful choices and engages in deceitful living to maintain a façade of true-faced living.

Let me use a bible story to illustrate what I mean.

In the Old Testament, we have the famous story of King David taking a stroll around his fortress walls one evening while his armies fight battles on his behalf. He looks down and spies a woman in the privacy of the roof of her own home, taking a bath. A moral failure was David taking a second look and seeing the woman, not as a soul bearing the image of God but an object to satisfy his horny lust. Even then, he could have stopped staring and retired from his own walls. But instead, he engages in a pathology of moral failure that brought about an ever-increasing wave of harm attempting to cover up harm that traveled destructively through time to the end of David’s empire.

I read the headline this morning and my heart was broken.

It wasn’t that long ago I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other people listening to this man give a talk/share a message/preach a sermon that I thought was brilliant and which, I thought, had to come form the very deep well of a soul in communion with God. If you’d told me that day that the man in question would soon reveal an affair with another married person over a number of years – well – I would have never believed it.

I won’t rehears the list but I will say that in forty years of trying to follow Jesus, I’ve had to make decisions about books on my shelves (and sometimes shelves of books) written by an author/pastor/Christian celebrity who has committed harmful acts – like King David – forcing me to reframe their work and the way in which I have experienced their influence on my life.

I remember in Bible College going over the story of David and Bathsheba in Old Testament History class and being comfortable describing what happened in that encounter as adultery. Years later, married and being the father of a daughter, I couldn’t get through that story without recognizing the power dynamic involved between a king and one of his subjects. I couldn’t reconcile the responsibility of a person in authority to protect people under his care from danger – including himself – and what David did.

And kept doing.

And tried his best to cover up.

I appreciate that the author involved in the situation I read about this morning is withdrawing from public performances. That feels like a bare minimum. But it also stands in sharp contrast to the current trend of pastors who practice the same kind of pathology of moral failure who go on to declare themselves “restored to ministry” after a lovely break for a few months of rebranding and letting the news cycle move on from the harm they have done.

This isn’t meant to be a rant about sin and adultery and holiness. I’m just here to confess to you that I am feeling lost at sea. All the navigation tools I once felt confidence in, all the sailors I put my trust in for guidance – it feels as though they are mostly turning out to be unreliable. Their words convinced me they were living in a direction their actions reveal they were not. It feels like we’ve created a system in which the institution has greater value than the individual and the people with power and prestige in that system are empowered to behave in ways that demonstrate a gap between that which we say we stand for and that which we’re really all about.