Agents of Change

Church history nerd alert: I was thinking about the Reformation this morning.  As usual I have Richard Rohr to thank for setting me off on this tangent, in the daily meditation today he says:

In my opinion, whenever we see an iconoclastic form of reformation, it is an angry regression and an overreacting constriction. It is not good news.  Examples include 8th century orthodoxy, most 16th century protestants, and presently ISIS.

Aw, snap Rich, did you just compare my theological tradition to ISIS?  After all the nice things I have said about Francis? After I walked 500 miles to go to one of your frankly overwrought churches and get a huge silver incense thingy swung over my head by a bunch of priests?
Dude.
ISIS?
For serious?
Okay, deep breath. I will admit that perhaps some of the Reformers were sort of ISIS-ish, even maybe, just maybe John Calvin (cough-Servetus).  But come on man, you have to admit that the Reformation wasn't an overreaction, the Roman Catholic Church was seriously corrupt and not exactly living out the Gospel.  I mean the Inquisition was pretty ISIS-y too.  And let's face it, Y'all did more killing of heretics than we did, and the Crusades, the original desert storm, that was on you guys, and that probably set the groundwork for a whole lot of middle eastern messiness.
Alright Gaskill, remember what you said yesterday about unity and all.  You like Rohr, he's a good guy, and you know, Martin Luther, John Calvin and definitely Ulrich Zwingli could be kind of prickly.
It occurred to me as I stewed in my Reformed juices that there is a sinister tendency of humans when they are faced with an agent of change: they start picking at the personal flaws of the agent.  So yeah, Martin Luther did eventually write, Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants, the title alone sort of casts doubt on Luther's solidarity with the huddled masses against the corrupt system.  John Calvin and the Protestants in Geneva did, in fact, burn Michael Servetus at the stake for heresy, and there were long and bloody "wars of religion." But do those things invalidate the Ninety-five Theses, or The Institutes of the Christian Religion?  I sincerely hope not.
If we are going to go into the business of invalidating positive change because of the moral or ethical impurities of the agents of that change, we're never going to get anywhere.  Every once in a while, you hear rumors that Martin Luther King Jr. may have had some extramarital affairs, and that suspicion is supposed to somehow invalidate the civil rights work that he did.
Because he wasn't perfect.
See how that sounds pretty ridiculous?
We have an election coming up next year, and we are already in the process of vetting those who are crazy enough to throw their hats in the ring.  I will admit, general moral suitability is important, but I think we can go much too far.  In a world where Jim Jones and Jimmy Swaggart are definite possibilities we need to have a certain level of cynicism in place to the people we allow into power.
Cults of personality are usually not healthy leaders.  Notice I said usually, because there are time, MLK again springs to mind, when it sort of works.  Maybe some of the skeletons could just stay in the closet.
We need bold ideas to lead us into important changes.  If JFK had not challenged us to go to the moon, we probably never would have tried it. If we had known he was a bit of a womanizer, we might not have taken up the challenge (look at how that same sort of charge pretty much destroyed Clinton's credibility in a much later era).
I don't think expecting integrity is wrong, but this is the way God works sometimes: with highly imperfect people (like Jacob, David, Peter, Paul, you know those guys from the Bible).  God can use people whose motivations are all screwy and whose methods might even be violent or corrupt.
So this is where I disagree with Rohr, even though our methods of going about things can be pretty screwy, even though our motivations and methods might be absurdly corrupt and sinful, even though there might be wars and rumors of wars, there is always the Good News, not because we managed to say it correctly, do it right, or even think about it righteously, but because God works in us.
It's called grace, and I'm going to hold on to that for all I'm worth.