Michael Precht

I am standing on the chancel, to the side along the wall, as the band leads the singing. Also standing, also singing, are 200 or so teenagers, parents, and trustworthy-adults-who-have-no reason-on-earth-to-be-here-on-a-Saturday night-except-that-they-want-kids-to-know-they-are-loved-by-God-and-His Church.

The worship at this Discovery Weekend is such that I am not so much singing as surrendering, surrendering my voice to the current of praise, and now the tide is pouring down the descending line as we sing:

He’s faithful in every season

So why would He fail now

He won’t.

I ask myself—not skeptically, but contemplatively—“Is this still true?”

Can I still say that God has been faithful in every season?

He has.

My inbox is too full again, and I’m worried about that soft spot in our hallway floorboards, and I just saw the sticker prices on the colleges my daughter has the grades and test scores to get into.

But yes, He has been faithful. Every week, I watch my wife bless everything in her path. All our kids have told us, spontaneously and independently within the last month, “I love our family.” We were out too late last night, enjoying the laughter and camaraderie of dear friends. And now I am praising God in the company of saints, astonished by the people I get to serve.

I remember harder and less certain times. In two days, I’ll see a friend who once let me surprise and embarrass myself, as I dissolved in tears for nearly an hour. I remember I once asked a bishop, “Just send me somewhere I can support some other pastor; I’m not sure I have it in me to lead right now. Just let me serve.” And after all that I am here, astonished at the grace of it all.

I can say He has been faithful in every season, so I sing all the louder.

—

I’ve told the same story across five different sermons since I first heard it. I tell it like this:

My sister in Christ, LP, is a Lutheran pastor. She, and the folks who hired her to her first church, are everything you expect Lutherans to be: easygoing and pale, all the way down their family tree. But 15 years ago the church’s neighborhood started changing, and now on Sundays, the formerly empty seats are filled with immigrants from Liberia.

LP says the biggest change is in the offering, because Liberian ushers simply will not walk an offering plate back up the aisle.

A Liberian usher is going to dance.

LP says the offering is now the most joyful, praise-filled moment of the entire worship for the immigrants in her church. Every Sunday is a revelation that makes them clap and sing and dance.

Because they who came to this country with nothing are delighted to discover they have something to give.

LP no longer serves that church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so I have not asked if the Liberian ushers still dance up the aisle.

Is it still true? Can they say in this season that God has not and will not fail them?

—

The thing I’ve loved about Discovery Weekend in three different churches now is how the older students lead the younger ones. Earlier today, LJ and AB each gave “The Forgiveness Talk.”

They didn’t just tell their admiring, younger disciples “You are forgiven.” We Christians, especially we Protestants, sometimes tell only that half of the story. We take the eternal, cosmic power poured out by God in Christ, and we reduce it to a vague and general… immunity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously called this Protestant tendency “cheap grace.”

I was so proud of LJ and AB. They told the truth, the whole truth, and they gave examples from their own lives. We are forgiven, and we can forgive.

LJ and AB got it right.

But I have no idea how I could look Alex Pretti’s family in the eyes and say “you can forgive.”

—

Last week, someone at her church asked my wife, the Reverend Jennifer Precht:

Are we going to host those missions interns this summer? Are they still going to come here from Mexico and the Congo and Macon, Georgia?

Jennifer: “Looks like it. I think so.”

Well. I don’t like saying this or telling you how to dress. But if they stay here this summer, you might need to make sure you wear your Sunday dresses every day. You know, the flowy, bright dresses with the belted waist. If someone calls immigration on the interns, it might be good for you to look a little extra… you know.

Maybe Jennifer’s long blonde hair, slender waist, and feminine softness would be enough to convince folks in tactical gear not to grab the interns who visit each summer to study the Bible and work for a pittance in local community centers over the summer. Maybe Gabriela and Grace won’t get shoved around or spend a few nights in a detention center, even though they have thick accents and have probably danced an offering plate down the aisle once or twice. I love that church for wanting to protect Jennifer and those interns.

It’s a holy thing, the desire to protect.

At Discovery, the senior high kids want to protect the younger youth from the cruelties and cringe of 7th grade.

The adult volunteers want to set the upperclassmen on a path of safety through the thousand fascinating dangers ahead of them. Tonight at the prayer service, a beloved school resource police officer stood in my pulpit as a parent and volunteer to tell the crowd of kids and parents: You Are Loved. He wanted to protect them from ever doubting it.

I want—I need—to protect my children and my wife. Jennifer and I would lay down our lives for our flocks. It’s a job requirement of a “pastor,” aka, a shepherd.

So I will assume thousands of the federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis signed up for their jobs because they also want to protect something.

Like all holy things, the desire to protect can be corrupted, but it is not totally depraved.

—

Even so, there is another desire that masquerades as the desire to protect. I expect nearly every man has felt this desire.

When I was 12 years old, I told my Dad I wanted to be a sniper. I loved the action of the .30-06 rifle we were sighting in for hunting season. I loved that I had grown enough to control the kick against my shoulder. Mostly, I loved the opportunity to exercise my will so absolutely in the world. I’d never been the fastest or strongest at anything, but with a determined mind and disciplined breath, I could master my surroundings through only a thought and the slightest pressure from my index finger. Even 100 yards away, the paper target was entirely subject to me.

I did not really want to kill, but neither did I dream of protecting. What I desired was sovereignty.

From the clearest camera angle I’ve found, it appears seven agents were surrounding Alex Pretti, and at least four were actively restraining him when he was shot and killed. He was first tackled after stepping between a Border Patrol agent and the unarmed woman that agent shoved to the ground. When tackled, Alex had one open hand raised; the other held a cell phone. He also had a legal, registered pistol secured in a holster. Once he was on the ground, with all four limbs restrained, it appears an agent in a gray jacket removed Pretti’s holstered pistol one second before an agent in a khaki top was the first to fire.

In the heat of the moment, no one can say which the shooters desired more: to protect someone, or prove something. Whatever their intentions, the cold hard fact is that the shooters endangered their own colleagues to shoot an unarmed, kneeling, and subdued man from behind. And, they made a choice to remove all further choices from Alex Pretti. Whatever their intentions, they made themselves sovereigns of that place and time.

—

Only God is fully sovereign, and in His sovereignty God chose to carry a cross, though he could have called a legion of angels instead. God announced by example (just in case we missed the Sermon on the Mount) that it is better to suffer than to inflict suffering.

After the cross came the empty tomb; God announced that those who die to themselves rather than inflict suffering are unconquerable. Not even death can overcome God’s will or make God forget the one who lays down his life for a friend.

On the day of the final resurrection, there will be a judgment from which no one has immunity. There will be forgiveness, yes, for those who confess, for those who do not try to justify themselves or prove their own righteousness. But forgiveness is not immunity.

Forgiveness requires humility and surrender.

—

I don’t know what to do with all this on a day that has held wonders for me and horrors for others. So I pray.

I pray for the earnest, passionate, kind teenagers who have dedicated themselves this weekend to “loving God, and loving our neighbor” (that Golden Rule no longer feels as banal and obvious as I would have thought once upon a time). These kids have been God’s faithfulness to me this weekend, and I pray for every person who has been God’s faithfulness to them.

I pray for the soul of Alex Pretti, who was shot an hour before one of those teenagers gave the “Love Your Neighbor” talk today.

I pray for the soul of Renee Good, and for Becca Good’s grief, and for Renee’s three children and all who love her.

I pray for Charlie Kirk, for Mark and Melissa Hortman. I pray for their loved ones and the ongoing work of forgiveness.

And I pray for Alex and Renee’s killers; I pray for those men who insisted they were protecting Alex and Renee’s homeland, and who must now know for the rest of their lives that they erased two people from that home. I am reliably told that even (maybe especially) the most righteous of soldiers and law enforcement are often haunted by the lives they’ve taken. I do not presume that the shooters in Minneapolis are haunted, but I pray they will be. I believe in revelations and conversions, and I pray that one day they will discover the full weight of their neighbor’s glory, and just before that weight brings them to despair, I pray they will discover forgiveness. I pray they humbly surrender to that forgiveness, confessing that they need it.

I pray for Minneapolis, a beautiful place where I have deep memories, and for all the people there from all manner of places.

And I pray that one day—maybe even on Sunday—Liberian ushers will dance, not in denial but in defiant joy and faithfulness.

I pray, I desperately pray, that they still know something that I am not fit to tell them.

I pray they know how, even now, He is faithful in every season. Only if it is true for them can it be true for any of us.

I pray for such a witness; I pray we humbly surrender to such a witness, and I confess we need it.