Faith on a Plane
Our friend Jason tells the story of a Lutheran pastor named Jim Nestingen, a hulking 6’6” Minnesota beer drinker with the belly to prove it. Jim was boarding a plane to fly coast-to-coast when he saw who he would be sharing a row with: a man just as big as him. They awkwardly wedged up against one another and exchanged niceties, preparing for the long haul, basically sitting in one another’s laps. In response to the obligatory job question, Jim said, “I am a preacher of the Gospel.” The man next to him responded loudly, almost allergically, “I’m not a believer!” Jim assured him that was okay, and they kept talking. Turned out that the man had been an infantryman in Vietnam and ever since had carried with him all the awful things he’d seen and done there. As the plane flew from one end of the country to the other, the man dumped his entire story out into the lap of his seat mate.
When he had finished, Jim asked the man, “Have you confessed all the sins that have been troubling you?”
The man balked. “Confess? I haven’t confessed anything!”
Jim boomed back, “You’ve been confessing your sins to me this whole flight long. And I’ve been commanded by Christ Jesus that when I hear a confession like that to hand over the goods and speak a particular word to you. So, you have any more sins burdening you? If so, throw them in there.”
To which the man balked again, “No, that’s all. But I’m not a believer! I don’t have any faith in me!”
Jim unbuckled his seatbelt mid-landing and stood over the man, which caused quite the stir with the flight crew. “Well, that’s quite all right, brother,” he said. “Jesus says that it’s what’s inside of you is what’s wrong with the world. I’m going to speak faith into you.” And he proceeded with the absolution: “In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority, I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
Flabbergasted, the man balked again: “You can’t do that!” To which Pastor Jim responded, “I can! And I just did! And I will do it again!” And he did. The man began weeping uncontrollably until finally he began laughing uncontrollably, all the way down the tarmac to the gate. As the two men were grabbing their overhead luggage, Jim grabbed the man’s hand and gave him his card and said, “You’re likely not going to believe your forgiveness tomorrow or the next day or a week from now. When you stop having faith in it, call me and I’ll bear witness to you all over again and I’ll keep on doing it until you do—you really do—trust and believe it.”
The man did. He called him—no joke—every day until the day he died, just to hear the declaration spoken over him in Christ Jesus. Surrendering to this absolution became something he couldn’t live without.
What if this were the kind of surrender for the rest of us weary, incredulous passengers? What if the good news was actually this good, that no matter how many times you balked, no matter how many misgivings you had about belief, and how much you’d prefer to keep matters in your hands, the forgiveness of sins remained? As the man says to Jim, “It’s just too good to be true. It would take a miracle to believe something so good.”
It takes a miracle for us all. And this is the theme we’re exploring in this issue: in the fluctuations of faith and doubt, the persistence with which God bestows his grace. But through it all, this is what we’re getting at: that despite our earnest questions and heavy burdens, Christ is our answer. He has surrendered all, and it is on his account, believe it or not, that we have hope.
Mockingbird is a ministry that seeks to connect the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life in fresh and down-to-earth ways. We do this primarily, but not exclusively, via publications, conferences, and online resources.
Mockingbird was founded in June, 2007 in New York City by a small group of friends and colleagues. The initial idea was to reach out to young adults who considered themselves “burned by the Church.” We held weekly meetings, worked hand-in-hand with a couple of local churches, started a weblog, launched publishing projects, we even hosted conferences. Essentially, we “threw a lot of stuff at the wall and looked to see what stuck.”
From the beginning, we wanted the flexibility to go where our efforts would take us, that is, where God would lead, rather than push an agenda. We quickly noticed that our resources (the website, the conferences, the publications) were getting the most traction. We were also reaching more than young adults, that we had outgrown our initial scope. So we amended our mission to encapsulate what we were actually doing: demonstrating and cataloging the myriad ways in which the Christian understanding of reality – what people are like, what God is like and how the two intersect – is born out all around us.
We aim to do so in a way that is both comforting and inspiring, always looking for new words for the old story.
Behind our entire project lies the conviction that none of us ever move beyond our need to hear the basic good news of God’s Grace. In particular, none of us ever fully escape the gravitational pull of personal control (and anxiety) when it comes to life and how we live it. Hence the name “Mockingbird,” which refers to that bird’s peculiar habit of repeating the song it has heard, over and over again. Our basic approach has not changed.
P.S. Mockingbird has no formal denominational affiliation. From the start, we have been funded by the generous gifts of individuals and churches.