Pastor's Corner: The beauty of the gray areas

Sometimes, we really want the world to be binary. We want black or white, good or bad, wrong or right, yes or no. We want extreme clarity. But is the world really like that?

Recently, I took a class for pastors on the ethics of pastoring and pastoral boundaries. We were handed a list of questions, and we needed to circle "yes" or "no" for each question. Some of the questions were clear, like "Is it acceptable to pursue a romantic relationship with a parishioner?" The answer is obviously no.

But other questions just didn't fit with the yes/no dichotomy. For example: "Is it ever acceptable to hold a parishioner's hand during a pastoral visit?" Sometimes, holding a parishioner's hand is totally unacceptable, but at other times, like in the Care Center or the hospital, nothing on God's good earth is going to stop me from taking the hand of my parishioner when they hold it out in a wordless plea for soothing human touch. The "hand-holding" boundary is not a black or white thing; it depends on context and intentions. There's a gray area when it comes to physical contact. Negotiating that gray area takes some discernment, but there's real beauty, connection, and safety when it's done well.

Lots of life is like that. The gray areas, where things aren't fully A or fully B, can be full of wonder, even if we have to look a little harder to find their beauty. Think about the first creation story in Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1 NIV). That's just the first in a long string of pairs and opposites. Perhaps you can fill in a few more ...

... like day and night, evening and morning, light and darkness, dry land and seas. Lots of pairs in Genesis 1! But we don't just hop between day and night or earth and sea. There are moments and places in between. While the vision of creation in Genesis uses these pairs - day and night, land and sea, light and darkness - to show the completeness of God's creative activity, we know that the natural world is not just made of these opposites.

When God laid the foundations of creation, didn't God also make marshes, estuaries, and coral reefs? When God wound up the atomic clock of the universe, didn't God also set dawn, dusk, twilight? That particular kind of light we get at 10 p.m. during the longest days of summer, when it's not quite fully night because the day refuses to quit?

These are just a few of the in-between times and places that God wove into creation from the very beginning, even if the author of Genesis opted to craft his narration around the polar opposites that we also find in the world.

Jesus also knew something about the good news of life's gray areas. Think about how he approached the Sabbath: he knew that treating the Sabbath as a black-and-white commandment made us slaves of the holy day, rather than making us free to worship and rest. Jesus, like many faithful Jews before him, approached the Sabbath as a day to honor God and God's commitment to flourishing life ... whether that meant plucking heads of grain to feed hungry stomachs (see Matthew 12) or healing people in desperate need (see Mark 3).

Parts of us may long for a black-and-white world, but - thank God! - there is beauty in the gray areas, and good news to be found amongst the in-between places, too.

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church