Time to choose sides

If you’re Methodist, especially United Methodist, you have probably seen this photo several times in recent days, on Facebook and other venues.

It shows the Methodist Church’s 1956 General Conference, meeting in Minneapolis. On May 4, delegates voted to make women eligible for full clergy rights.

Remember this photo, and the great advancement for human rights and Christian identity that it represents, because those rights are under attack by an evil movement known as Christian nationalism.

It may be nationalistic, but it is not genuinely patriotic, and it is certainly not Christian. It is far, far from Christian, though it cloaks its agenda in Christian language and tries to work its way into churches to solidify its political standing.

And its adherents have made it crystal clear in recent days that one of its agendas is turning back the clock on women’s rights by 100 years or so.

Repealing women’s right to vote.

Right to hold property in their own name.

Right to serve as judges in our court system.

Right to have any voice but an echo of a man’s – specifically their husbands, to whom they are bound until death do they part, or until the husband decides that she is no longer a useful appendage.

There are other ways that this movement is profoundly evil, but this one is enough to mention for now.

Remember that it was only 70 years ago that women became eligible for full clergy rights in the Methodist church, and there are still denominations that deny women these rights, allegedly on biblical grounds but really on the same grounds on which this evil movement has always been based, whatever it calls itself: the notion that certain men are endowed with more rights than others and they can do whatever they want to whomever they want whenever they want, just because.

Those are the stakes in our current political and religious “debate.” Whose side are you on?

Blasphemy & insanity

       These are dark days in Washington, D.C.

       If blasphemy is in the air, insanity rules on the ground.

       I’ve been deliberately silent recently, hoping that the current occupant of the White House might miraculously turn into a functioning humane being and the toadies he’s surrounded himself with might summon the courage to push him away from disaster.

       Neither prospect appears likely.

       The White House clown and his VP sidekick now see fit to lecture Pope Leo on Christian theology, while right-wing extremists devise new smears to revive long buried but never quite dead fears of Roman Catholicism.

       Slipping away from his bogus Board of Peace to pursue war with Iran, our fearless “leader” devotes an Easter message to condemning Leo for pursuing peace. He even accuses Leo of being “WEAK on crime.”

       This tirade, of course, comes after he threatens to bomb Iran back to the stone age for daring to stand up to him and posts another ridiculous picture of himself in the guise of Jesus.

       When even some of his staunchest supporters appear shocked by this image, he claims he thought it portrayed him as a healer.

       (Does he really believe anyone will believe that? Well, Franklin Graham apparently does, and Paula White, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who usually jumps up and down waving his “born again” credentials but now appears to have been born again in a different way.)

       An Atlantic staff writer says these episodes reveal that to our “leader,” religion is about power, not morality.

       No surprise there. Only a few months ago, he declared that the only thing constraining him was his “own morality.” As if there were such a thing. His “morality” is solely what serves his personal interests.

       He even views Leo’s election as pope as due to him. He says Leo “was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with” an American leader.

       It’s hard to deal with that kind of fantasy. Some attribute it to dementia, but it’s a more fundamental disorder than that, and the signs of it have been there for years. To paraphrase one commentator, what kind of man says and does these things?

  —————

       It gets worse.

       Many of his functionaries wallow in a deeper fantasy that could get us all killed.

       The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has gotten hundreds of complaints from U.S. military personnel in the Middle East about officers who proclaim that this war is “all part of God’s divine plan” as outlined in the book of Revelation.

      One officer allegedly said that our “leader” has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

       This is not a casual misinterpretation of scripture. This is monstrously bad. This is satanic.

        On September 9, 2001, my Sunday sermon concerned caring for our children, globally as well as locally. I remember one line especially well: “If Palestinians have a form of country music, a popular song right now might be, ‘Mamas, don't let your sons grow up to be suicide bombers.’ ”

          Two days later, suicide bombers carried out terror attacks against targets in New York and Washington, and thousands of Americans died.

          My remarks were not prescient, though any observer of the international scene might have foreseen some awful thing developing. (My remarks also were not “prophetic,” in the standard “evangelical” Christian sense, meaning predictive. Prophecy is not about predicting the future. Prophecy is evaluating the present in light of God’s will for the future.)

       Here’s the thing: When the minds of Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists are both warped by similar satanic impulses, awful things are going to happen. Again, this is not prescient or prophetic. It’s just common sense.

       Don’t look for much of that in certain seats of power these days.   

       Or in many of our churches.

       We are now in the midst of "America Reads the Bible," continuing to April 25. Hundreds of celebrities are reading portions of the Bible in a continuous livestream. It’s billed as “a sacred opportunity to call our nation back to its spiritual foundations.”

       Among the readers are Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, who has never encountered a Bible verse he couldn’t misquote (or even repeat a misquote from a movie), plus our so-called “leader,” who is scheduled to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22.

       Read that one for yourself. The ironies pile up from start to finish!

       Let me conclude today with this Bible reading, Matthew 5:11, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Think of Pope Leo when you hear, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” On his account, not your own.

Off into space!

Awesome – that’s the only word for the launch of Artemis 2 earlier this week. It was just awesome.

Linda and I watched the live feed from NASA starting about an hour before launch. From a camera mounted inside the Whtie Room, we saw technicians close the capsule door, disconnect two hoses and cover the opening, then get away as the crane that contained the room moved aside.

About a half hour later, after many reports of systems being “Go,” the rockets were fired – the massive liquid fuel rockets that could be shut down in an emergency and the two solid fuel rockets that once ignited would stop burning only when they were totally spent. Awesome, scary; hard to believe the complex technology that harnessed such raw and primitive power.

One image especially sticks with me. A camera inside the capsule showed the head of mission specialist Christina Koch as the crew waited for launch, strapped down in such close quarters that she had barely enough room to turn her head.

Godspeed, astronauts!

        *

A story so sad I can hardly tell it: Barrett Breznik of Kearney, Missouri, was born with Down Syndrome. He had surgery for a heart condition, then developed cirrhosis of the liver but was removed from the liver transplant list after doctors determined that multiple infections meant that he would not survive the surgery. He was only seven months old when he died.

        *

Robert Mueller was a decorated Marine veteran and former director of the FBI who served under four presidents. He was classy, intelligent, brave and honest. His recent death was celebrated by the current occupant of the White House, demonstrating an attitude so degraded you wonder how both could be of the same species.

I write this on Good Friday, when we mark Jesus’ death for all. So the one who suffers by comparison with almost every other human being also is one for whom Christ died. That makes him very valuable. Alas, all he seems to value glitters with insignificance, and with every action he takes he tries to drag us all down with him.

Immigration and the Bible

          I really hate to say this, but this time John Piper got it right.

          I might describe Piper as a hyper-Calvinist, or maybe just an irritating theological and social “conservative.”

          I once read a book of his titled Don’t Waste Your Life. Great title! Terrible book.

          Usually when I’m done with a book, I pass it on one way or another. Not this time. It went straight into the recycling bin. I did not want to expose another human being to Piper’s toxicity.

          One thing about him: he tends to ground his awful ideas in scripture. Yeah, he usually reads scripture very wrongly, but at least he reads scripture.

          Would that some of his critics might as well.

          A week or so ago, Piper posted this on X:

          “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:34 Christians know the miserable bondage we were all in.

          It would appear that you just can’t quote the Bible to expose contemporary hypocrisy. Piper was inundated in mostly vituperative replies to his post.

          It also would appear that most people yelled at him because they did not want a biblical voice of any kind in today’s immigration debate.

          But at least one commentator twisted scripture around to fit his vision of the immigration problem. According to this guy, the “strangers” in question were converts to Judaism and were to be accepted because of that.

          Yep, they were no longer strangers at all. Now they were just good Jews – former immigrant foreigners, yes, but now Jews in good standing.

          There is no way you can read Leviticus 19:34 that way – or any of the hundreds of other similar passages in the Old Testament. No way at all.

          Here’s another translation of Leviticus 19:34 that makes it pretty plain: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

          John Piper, once a “conservative” darling, is now denounced as “woke.”

          You know what “woke” means. It means you are awake and alert and trying to follow Jesus.

          On this one, Pastor Piper, you are wide awake, while so many of your critics snore loudly in ignorance.

A long time coming

My new book, Day by Day, calls itself A Journey Through the Bible, and when some people see the depth of it, they wonder how long it took to put together.

  More than 25 years, actually – not in continuous writing, of course, but in a couple of spurts and gasps over three distinct iterations.

  The first iteration was in 1999, when I was pastor of what is now Crossroads United Methodist Church, in Lansing, Kansas. I called it Testaments, and I created it as a one-year study of the Bible.

  In fact, a hardy group of parishioners soldiered with me through the study over a year’s time. I don’t remember who all the participants were, only that at least four have now gone on to glory.

  I offered it as an alternative to Disciple Bible Study, which is more intensive and takes a very long time to get through the whole Bible. Testaments also was cheaper, only $5 per copy, basically the cost of copying and binding it.

  It was 52 pages long. I supplemented it with weekly doses of commentary and discussion questions. It was a lot of work, but I was appointed three-quarters time at Lansing, so I had some time for extras.

  When we were done with it (and pretty much exhausted, as I recall), I set it aside and worked on other projects.

  One of those extras was the script for The Victory of God, a stage production based on the book of Revelation that we put on in 2002. I’ve since expanded that into a book as well, though I’ve discovered that publishers shy away from books that don’t follow the misleading “end times” claims of dispensationalism.

  More than 20 years after Testaments, I was looking for a long-term Bible study for my congregation in Edgerton, Kansas. I was formally retired by now but still working half-time. I gave Testaments a thorough work-over and came up with a new title, Connections.

  The timing was bad, though. The pandemic made a mash of our plans for group study. Connections never had much opportunity to connect.

  But I really liked the way I’d revised it, so I thought I would expand my revision and clean it up even more. I discovered that Cokesbury already sold a Bible study called Connections, so I went in search of a new title.

  Day by Day was such a natural fit that I figured that title would also be taken, but it really wasn’t, so I ran with it.

  Connections wasn’t bad, just a little slapdash here and there. Day by Day is a lot better. Now that I see it in print, of course, I see some things I wish I’d expanded even more, and a couple of things I might have done without.

  But overall I’m happy with it. I even recommend it to you if you’re looking for a daily study that will challenge you to grow in your faith and really think about what you’re reading without some of the cliches we’ve come to associate with Bible study.

  As I’ve explained here before, in this study we try to move beyond the assumptions and clichés of pop religion and really try to take the text on its own terms rather than on our terms.

  Likely I have not always been successful in that endeavor, but trying to set aside ourselves and open ourselves to the ministry of the Holy Spirit is what Bible study is essentially all about.