The Gospel Is Not Your Happy Ending

Preaching isn’t supposed to be entertainment. But lately I find myself reflecting on my experience of hearing a sermon more than the content or the illustrations and techniques. I’ve turned off the cerebral part of my brain that used to hear sermons and examine them as if they were gutted frogs glued to cork board for dissection. Maybe this is because my dual identity as hospice chaplain and pastor ended about two years ago when our congregation closed. Maybe it’s because fill-in “supply” preaching to strangers feels more like a gig than a community spiritual event. Maybe it’s because I live in Las Vegas.

Now the sermon occupies for me the same space as the streaming show I watched last week or the comedy act my wife and I saw last night when we got a spare moment from the kids. Preaching for me as a pastor was about the words, but for me as a hearer it has become about the “vibes.”

Though my professors and theologically inclined colleagues and friends might shame me for saying this, I kind of like it. Not because I miss being up there or because I think that preaching is some outmoded form of communication. Actually, quite the opposite. As a normal hearer, I can now really let the messages sink to the heart, get past all the guideposts and tropes I’ve absorbed. I’m not trying to group them into larger categories, attune them to pastoral needs, or set them up in a lectionary or sermon series like I did when I was a pastor. I’m just listening now. And in just listening I’m paying better attention to myself.

Over the last few months, it has dawned on me that preaching is just not connecting with me. My wife insists that it’s just because I read, think, and debate too much about theology. I was warned on the very first day of seminary that “you’ll never be able to just go to church or just hear a sermon again.” And that may be part of it. But it was only recently that I was able to discern why the majority of the sermons I’ve heard in the last eighteen months have been failing to reach me. It had little to do with theology. The disconnect had everything to do with what I was “streaming” from the pulpit on Sunday mornings.

I’ve been to a great deal of places and heard from a variety of denominations and not-denominations. And a core message bleeds together from all of them. It goes something like this: my problem is, I am told, that life is hard. The reason that life is hard is because I am very wrapped up in my life and trying to do things my own way. But that is okay because there is someone who loves me anyway, and when I think about him, he opens me up to know what I am missing. Love is the only thing left out of my life. And when I think about God, I know what love is. When I know what love is, I can then freely choose it. Then my life will be better.

A few years ago I could have shaken my fist at the preaching of the law and turning it into gospel by softening it up. Or I could have gone chapter and verse and talked about the confluence of semi- (and not so semi-) Pelagianism and moral therapeutic deism that American culture just eats up. But now that I’m just a tired suburban dad with the remote in his hand, something else has dawned on me:

In all those sermons, I was watching … a seasonal Hallmark movie.

Don’t get me wrong. I not so secretly love Hallmark movies. I watch them with one eye while I chart in common areas in nursing homes. They are pleasant and give me a comforting aroma of nostalgia for my younger years growing up in the Midwest. But they don’t challenge me, they knowingly flaunt my taste, and worse of all, they don’t provide actual long-term comfort to me. They just kind of remind me how sad it is to not crunch through a leaf pile or watch the falling snowflakes on Christmas eve.

These Hallmark tropes have been abused so much on the internet that you already know what they are. Small-town girl is now making her way in the big city. She has everything going for her, but she’s lost touch with herself. The career-focused guy she’s with is also not in touch with her. She meets an old friend that maybe was an old flame from the past who looks good in a flannel shirt, and slowly they engage in seasonal-appropriate activities around his sweet and precocious children. They fall in love. Then there’s some minor drama that causes the flannel guy to get mad, and she needs to make a big gesture to prove that she means it. She chooses him, happiness swoops in, credits roll.

It dawned on me listening to yet another sermon asking me to be bold and “choose love” that I was the heroine of the Hallmark movie. Hilariously I’m caught up in the inconveniences of modern life which cause me to be selfish and ashamed (it’s usually traffic). Jesus is introduced to me as the guy in the flannel shirt who just loves me and needs me to be a part of his life — either at this church in particular, or the world in general. Maybe I knew him as a kid but I didn’t know all about him, and I certainly didn’t know how much he loved me. But now over a warm cup of cider or hot cocoa, I can get to know him again and be loved.

Some of these sermons might lean into the “big corporation is coming for the Christmas tree farm” subplot if the preacher is a little more progressive, but they rarely stay there. These sermons sound like calls to action, but they are just warm blankets the pastors put around my shoulders to assure me that I’m in the right place. Just trust Jesus and everything will be okay. The gospel is just your happy ending.

Hallmark movies are rightfully, if at times unfairly, taken to task for painting an idealized picture of modern life. And I think these kinds of “higher love” sermons should be too. Most of us do not live in Hallmark films. There might be moments of joy, but there are real struggles too. Those struggles don’t need to be seen if you’re trying to sell greeting cards and “Precious Moments” figurines. But when the guy looking over your shoulder is nailed to a cross, they shouldn’t be shelved away.

Failing to act in a loving way is seldom a conscious choice. There’s something to those ubiquitous knee-jerk stories about traffic and grocery store lines that is true. Stressed out, tired, exhausted, irritated, over-burdened, anxious reactions to things are universal because they are human. They are also human because they are not easily overcome. Our choices are bound up by our limitations and the limitations of others way more than they are able to overcome them. Stories of selflessness catch our eye because they are rare. The hard school of parenthood has taught me how hard and unnatural it is to put others before yourself by trying and failing so many times to teach this to my children. So often we fail to choose love, not because we can’t but because we won’t. Scripture teaches that we are in bondage to sin and can’t free ourselves. Preachers who make us think that failing to love others is more of a bad habit than a chronic disease are teaching us to be dishonest with ourselves. Any therapist who would treat their patients encased in childhood trauma and family dysfunction to “try harder” would watch their client list dwindle.

The only thing worse than failing to choose love psychologically is the absurdity of actually choosing it.

People let you down. They get hurt. They hurt you. They fail to understand you. They fail to appreciate you. They can, if so inclined, elect to go on with their lives as if you don’t exist. I’ve been at the deathbeds of too many people estranged from their children not to know how terrible the burden of love can be. The idea that the rectitude of “choosing love” can be balm for these wounds is ridiculous.

I can be a jerk, this is true. But most of the pain in my life arises from my choices to love rather than not to. I love working in hospice as a chaplain, but I am constantly battered by the desire to be there for people, to not have the patient I’m close with die over the weekend where I am unavailable. The more I give myself to my work, the more my home life suffers. I constantly let down my gifted and incredible wife, who always picks up the slack when I’m left physically and emotionally unavailable after a day of driving in the hot sun or hearing the lament of a cancer-ridden parent that they won’t see their children grow up. For me, loving her means always trying to do better. Loving my kids drains my wallet and strains my budget — and that’s the easy part. The hardest part is sitting up late at night wondering if they’ll make friends, be happy, or even be able to afford a home of their own one day. And then around the edges lingers my love for my dad who died of cancer when I was only 22, who I would trade every single limb and vital organ in my body to talk to again only to ask if he would have liked the new Dune movies. Grief is love too. You don’t choose it. It’s the problem. And it really sucks.

So often in life we aren’t faced with a choice to “choose love” but instead are looking for an ounce of relief because we are crushed by love’s burdens. And the only help we have is from the one who freely elected to bear those burdens with us and to get crushed under them with us. For Christ, it’s not just about knowing us, it’s a matter of dying for us. Jesus does not show up in our lives doing woodwork in a flannel shirt. He shows up pinned to nasty Roman woodwork with nails and a thorny crown.

We don’t choose love. Love chooses us. Once and for all. Angels sang about it while shepherds were watching their flocks. An empty tomb proclaimed it while Roman soldiers shuddered. As much as we desperately want our lives to be Hallmark movies, we are actually trapped in David Mamet plays or Alexander Payne films (with a dash or two of Tarantino in my case when I try to get my five-year-old to go to bed at a reasonable hour), and Jesus gives us a new script that says we are loved, valued, included, and worthy. The happy part is not at the end of a journey of self-discovery and long walks of bland and stilted dialogue.

The gospel is not your happy ending. It is instead a blockbuster new beginning — a new character arc at each and every moment when we find him in the tattered wreckage of our choices. As only the best writers and directors can do, Jesus takes all of it, all the mess of real life, and brings it around in the end to show us not just who we will be, but who we are. Forever a sad unloving mess. But also forever in him.

It’s an amazing show really. And it calls for more than just a warm cup of entertainment.