The Silence in the Truck

They watched it because it was on and because neither of them had anything else planned.

His uncle is seventy-one and has been to everything. Every funeral, every first birthday, every hospital. He is the one who drives. He does not talk much about what he believes and he has never missed a Sunday in his life that anybody can remember.

The documentary was well made. That is worth saying because it would be easy to pretend otherwise.

Good camera work, calm narration, a great deal of footage of ruins. And its whole argument, laid out over ninety minutes, was that what became Christianity was politics from the beginning: a movement that got useful to somebody powerful, and then got shaped by whoever it was useful to, and that the parts you could not use got quietly dropped.

His uncle did not say anything during it. Not once. He usually talks all the way through anything.

At the end he stood up and said he would run him home.

And they drove forty minutes and neither of them said one word about it.

They talked about the road works. They talked about a cousin's knee. And at the house his uncle put the truck in neutral and said good night and waited, the way he does, until the door was shut.

That was in July.

He has thought about the silence more than he has thought about the documentary, and what he cannot get past is this: two men who have sat beside each other at four funerals could not say one sentence to each other about the thing they were both thinking, and he is not sure which of them was protecting the other.

Whatever else is arguable, there was nothing to gain

Let me name what was in that truck, because it was not doubt and calling it doubt would miss it.

It was care. You did not speak because you did not know what it would do to him, and he did not speak for the same reason, and two men who love each other sat in a cab for forty minutes each protecting the other from a conversation neither of them was afraid of.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the political account has a real problem at the beginning, and it is one you can hold without overstating anything. That is not my kind reading of a July evening, it is what stands written in Paul's letter to the Galatians, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that page was in the truck for the whole forty minutes.

Read what he claims about where it came from, in a letter written to people who could check his movements.

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.Galatians 1:11-12

That is a hard sentence to write to a church that knows people who knew you.

But here is the part that matters more, and it does not depend on believing him.

The documentary is describing something real. Power did attach itself to this later, and it did shape a great deal, and the ruins in that footage are ruins of that. Nobody honest denies it and nothing on this site is going to.

The trouble is the word beginning.

At the beginning there was nothing to gain. No standing, no protection, no money and no office. The first people making this claim were making it in a place where making it cost them, and a movement that is politics from the start does not begin by handing its first generation nothing but trouble.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better documentary: what you hold did not start as an arrangement, because the written word has a man insisting on that in a letter to people who could contradict him, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept the awkward version rather than the useful one.

And the guard, said plainly, because this house does not overclaim. That does not clear every later century, and you should not want it to. Some of what the film showed happened. What is written gives you the beginning, not a certificate for everything after it, and the Holy Spirit has never required a man to defend two thousand years in order to stand on the first thirty.