Good Friday

Our congregation does not have a Good Friday service, so unlike many of my colleagues, I had Friday to do the normal sorts of Friday things. Friday is my day off and I generally use it to get things done, in this case the agenda was getting my 60,000 mile service done on my car. I know that going to a dealership is expensive and takes longer than going to Jiffy Lube, but since I drive a VW that has some fancy features, I like to take it to the dealer about every third oil change.  But I know that it's going to shoot my day in the face and probably my wallet too.  I needed four tires and alignment done in addition to the usual "routine maintenance" which is not cheap so I kissed about half of my tax return goodbye and settled into the waiting room with a book to read and tried to make the best of it.
The waiting area was not crowded, so that was a plus, but the TV was on way too loud, and it went from some vacuous morning talk show over to one of the cable news channel, thankfully not Fox News.  I shared the room with several older black folk, two of whom were a married couple who were quite talkative, even as the wife was intensely engaged in flipping through a well worn and tabbed Bible.  Over the course of several hours, mostly just by hearing (eavesdropping, though you can't much help it in such a circumstance) what she said, I came to be rather charmed by her honest and compassionate ways, and I could discern that her Bible was actually being put to use as more than just some sort of decoration.  For instance, she was rather upset at the story of the day involving Laura Ingraham and David Hogg, the conservative talk show host and the 17 year old Parkland student.  The former had made disparaging comments about the latter not getting into some of the colleges he had applied to, and the latter and his gang of newly fledged social media warriors proceeded to call for people to boycott sponsors of the former's talk show, prompting an immediate, if if somewhat insincere, apology from an adult who had decided to mock a teenager about not getting into college. The story is a pretty standard example of the decay of our public discourse, but this dear woman had it in her head that the colleges who rejected this young man were the ones at fault before the talk show host ever put her two cents in, which is wrong, but the fact that her heart works that way was touching.  In her mind, the colleges rejected Hogg because of his involvement with the March for our Lives movement, which is probably not true at all, the timing is just all wrong and colleges reject student applications all the time, it's nothing to cry about, although I still hold a grudge agains Duke for not taking me.  I listened to this conversation and I loved this woman for her compassion, if not for the rectitude of her opinion.
I am not generally a person who gets involved in waiting room conversations of this sort, partially because I am aware of my tendency to sound like a know-it-all and also because wading into political or even tangentially political discussions these days is likely to be fraught with danger.  So having sat with these folks for several hours, listening to their good natured chit chat, there was a certain sense that I had about them: they were sincere and faithful people who seemed inclined towards kindness more than anything else.  She was a retired DC school teacher, he was a retired workingman of some sort.  She was working on something involving the Bible and it was a difficult assignment that had been given to her by the Bishop of her church. 
In comes another younger black woman who sits for a while and then notices the Bible in the hands of the older woman.  It prompts her to ask if the older woman has read Enoch, which is part of the Apocrypha, and at this point my spidey sense starts to tingle, this is not going to go in a healthy direction I fear.  Sure enough, the younger woman has some sort of fascination with extra-biblical texts, probably because they are not part of the boring old Bible.  She had some (mistaken) ideas about the structure of the Hebrew Scriptures like not really knowing the difference between Torah, Tanaach and Talmud, and they are after all T words that relate to the Old Testament somehow or other.
I was a little worried because the older woman's knowledge of the Bible was being put to the test by someone who was not using their knowledge of the Bible in good faith, but in a sort of trivial manner where simply knowing who Enoch was and that he apparently did not die (questionable assertion given the actual text, but not unique to her).  She started talking about how Enoch was one of the two witnesses, people who did not die who were supposed to do something important in some sort of end-time scenario.  Now my "bad theology" radar was blaring, and I had a window to jump in because neither of them could remember the other person who did not die according to the Hebrew Scriptures.
"It was Elijah," I said, conscious of my own tone and voice, trying to keep it low key and not patronizing.  "Elijah was taken up into heaven by the chariot as Elisha, his student watched him go."
All of them looked at me like I had just sprouted out of the sofa, "And it was actually Elijah and Moses who were the witnesses to the transfiguration of Jesus on the Mountain," I said trying to bend this story back to a place of actual Biblical reality.  I did not immediately identify myself as a pastor, I still didn't want to take the stand of the expert.  What I did do is volunteer my actual knowledge of the Bible, I did sort of wish I knew a little more about Enoch, but the Apocrypha is not a particular fascination for me.  I found that even the dear woman with her well worn King James Bible, had a very limited understanding of how things all fit into the narrative.  Her training had been in verses and pericopes and proof texting, carefully guided by her Bishop.  She was prepared to teach and preach to fellow believers, but she was not adequately prepared to face what I think was some sort of modern day gnosticism coming from a very enthusiastic and certain person.
My involvement, and my ability to inject actual Christian doctrine into the discussion actually drew this loving, sincere woman to remember her own faith with more confidence and as this happened I sensed more uncertainty from the younger woman.  She was not as zealous for her love of Enoch as a world changing text, and she made some excuse to vacate the waiting room.  The older woman then told me that she was, in fact preparing for an examination before a board of ministers to be authorized to preach and teach in her congregation, which was the difficult assignment she had been fretting about.  It was only then that I told her that I was, in fact, an ordained person who had been through seminary training.  I told her this because I wanted her to know that I understood how nerve-wracking facing the gatekeepers can be.  But I was glad I waited until this point because from that point forward she actually started taking notes about what I was saying, which totally changed the dynamic of the conversation, and then I was teaching.  By now it was just the three of us in the waiting room and I had just about had enough of trying to read and more than enough of listening to the news.  I asked her about her assignment, which was clearly giving her trouble, it was about filtering your thoughts.  I thought about how appropriate that could be to what just happened with the Enoch lady, but I decided not to disparage a person who had clearly left our little dialogue, so I told her about the practice of contemplative prayer and accepting thoughts as they come, but weighing them against the need to love and forgive.  She had been going down the road of trying to control "sinful" thoughts and trying to think only good and righteous things.  I told her this was a path to futility, and that instead she should examine those "sinful" thoughts and find out if there is a righteous way to deal with them, for instance meet angry or bitter thoughts with forgiveness.
Before I knew it, we had been talking for more than an hour, and their car was done, and mine was nearly done.  I believe that our mutual presence there was no coincidence, it was the way that God works, and even if it required me to be a bit more of an extravert than I normally would be, it was my place and my calling to be there.  It was a Good Friday.