c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) A friend in another region is waging war on her pastor.

She feels justified, no doubt, and by now has a bulging dossier on his failings. Her campaign, I am told, is succeeding in undermining a ministry. I don’t know her pastor or details about the situation. I just know that citing the evidence isn’t all that needs to be done.

As with our steady movement toward war with Iraq, the evidence makes for good theater, but by itself the evidence doesn’t compel any particular course of action. One must still exercise wisdom, discernment, a weighing of costs and benefits, a consideration of other people, and a search for the good. Having a mountain of facts doesn’t make that work go away.

Life isn’t a courtroom where the evidence leads to conviction or acquittal. Life is more difficult than that. The angry must look behind their anger for what truly feeds their venom. The wounded must deal with their wounds. Crusaders must ask why bringing down another person matters to them. Those who document the failings of others must ask what in themselves they are trying to purge.

I know from experience that pastors are projection screens for the unresolved issues of their parishioners. People project onto pastors _ and onto other leaders _ that which they loathe or fear in themselves. It feels paralyzing to be the target of such projections.

But the wise and battle-scarred pastor knows that he isn’t the reincarnation of the father whose abuse turned a child into a self-loathing adult. The female pastor knows that she isn’t the witch, temptress or unattainable cheerleader whom a once-adolescent boy hasn’t gotten over. Having a paycheck doesn’t make the pastor an enemy of the newly unemployed; having a family shouldn’t threaten the lonely.

Nor should being human produce as much heat as it does. Leaders are as frail as anyone, and their frailty runs the same gamut as those whom they lead, from substance abuse to laziness to hubris to infidelity to garbled grammar. Leaders must prove worthy of trust, must be held accountable and cannot be allowed actively to abuse others, but leaders aren’t called to be perfect or superhuman.

Evidence of their frailty doesn’t justify the scorn that rains down on leaders. For that scorn isn’t about evidence or moral absolutes; it is about our own confusions and lapses. Stoning the harlot won’t make the people’s own sins vanish. If anything, judging others make us more resistant to amending our own lives.

Rather than wage war on each other, we should learn from the leper who came to Jesus seeking healing. He didn’t attack the smug and intolerant who forced his kind to be outcasts. He didn’t turn against fellow lepers. He came to one who could help.

The leper didn’t come with knives flashing or, in our modern form of nonphysical violence, with career-ending or reputation-smashing evidence carried as a banner. He came “begging.” Not because he was diminished, but because he had hope that here, at last, was a possibility of new life.

The leper didn’t come with specific demands for action. He didn’t wield a detailed manifesto. He knelt first, and then asked Jesus to “choose.” He did have a quest _ to be “made clean” _ but he trusted Jesus to choose the right course for him.

It’s easy, I suppose, for us to see a leper adopting such humility. What else could a lowly leper do but beg, kneel and be abject? It is harder to imagine an outraged crusader giving up her anger, putting aside her dossier and asking God to choose. It is harder to imagine political leaders who were elected to make difficult choices kneeling now before God _ and not the cheerleader God whom the self-righteous can always find when they need vindication for decisions already made, but the God who sees into all human hearts and is marked by mercy and compassion.

Begging, kneeling and yielding don’t come naturally to any of us. Warfare feels better. But as combatants always discover after battle, a field littered with bodies doesn’t answer questions, surrender doesn’t make an enemy go away, and victory doesn’t restore peace.

DEA END EHRICH