The Crumbs

Whenever summer arrives, I’m reminded of one of those entertaining facts about the complex, beautiful living world around us. We humans may seem to be the dominant species on the planet, but there are other creatures that do just as well. Like, say, the ants, who outnumber us two point five million to one, and are one of the most successful and adaptive creatures on our little world.

There are nearly fourteen thousand distinct species of ant. There’s the nearly two-inch long Amazonian Dinoponera Gigantea, meaning “Terrible Painful Giant” ant, which has a pretty potent sting and sharp mandibles. There’s the less threatening Carabara Atoma, the smallest known ant, which means “Heavy-Headed Speck” ant, which is as long from the tip of its antennae to the end of it’s abdomen as a credit card is thick.

Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?

Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.

So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving. 

I got to wondering: Where are they going?  So I tracked them one day.  They’re going to my compost bucket, where they push past the charcoal filter to help themselves to countless little bits of rotted tomato, carrot peelings, and the cut-tops of okra.

Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs!  Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect.  It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience.  We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.

The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.

First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.

But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.

It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.

The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.

We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.

Typically, I read this passage as speaking most directly to our ethnonationalist biases, to our tendency to look on those from other cultures as unworthy.  It's not primarily about how we treat our dogs, eh?  

But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.

Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.

That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.

Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours. 

It’s a hard world for little things, but we don’t need to contribute to making it any harder.

----

Just because, here's a Portlandia sketch about ants that amuses me.  Note: Tetramorium Immigrans are also known as "sugar ants."  They do not eat wood.  I know this because I am a Dad.

The Deathbed Confession

Confessions, if one is a reformed Christian, are the place where a church stands and makes a statement about a crisis facing the church.  Who are we, and how do we retain our integrity as God's people given a moral challenge that faces us right now?  What is it that subverts our discipleship?  What must we declare together, if we are to follow Jesus as authentically as we can?

It is, in that, a declaration intended to be both unifying and integrative.  

Like the Barmen Declaration, which challenged the usurpation of the church by the Nazi regime, or the Belhar Confession, which renounces the spiritual blight of racist segregationism from the depths of South African apartheid, most confessions rise from a condition of conflict, and give the faithful a clear vision of where the Beloved Community must stand.

They are a fierce call to integrity in life together.  It's why Presbyterians remember confessions, and why the Book of Confessions is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Constitution.

Our era poses plenty of challenges for the church, and so...Presbyterians being who we are...we've convened a committee to come up with a statement that speaks powerfully to where God is calling us right now.  They've done the work, and now we've been asked, by that committee, to give that confession a read.  

Then, we have been asked to sit with it a while.  Where it troubles us, reflect meaningfully on why, and then consider it some more.  When we've done that, respond.

The confession they've drafted for our consideration does not yet have a name, other than "Proposed New Confession." This doesn't quite have the ring of "Second Helvetic" or "Westminster," although it's probably already catchier than "Brief Statement."  Were I a marketer, I'd really want us to have a stronger brand identity at launch.

So how does it read?  What does it say?  What are we called to affirm, and what crisis calls us to a moment of choosing and shared witness?

The language is reflective of the academic-progressive character of the PC(USA), and marks our denomination's continued emphasis on inclusion and welcome.  It has four sections.  The first, entitled Image of the Triune God, lays out our understanding of the nature of...surprise surprise...the Triune God.  It does so in language that moves even further down the inclusive language path than the Brief Statement of Faith.  In tone and semiotic choices, it's fuzzier and more prone to poesy than other confessions, but nonetheless retains a vital and necessary core witness to the nature of our Creator. 

I particularly appreciated its Augustinian expression of the Trinity as Love, which shows some solid theological chops cast with concision and poetry.  It's in essence the same understanding of an interrelationship of love that C.S. Lewis expresses in Mere Christianity, even if it's wearing some soft flannel pajamas.  

One could quibble, I suppose, with some of the language.  Like, say, the use of the word "affection" as a wiffle-ball euphemism for "sexual orientation."  Them's ain't the same things, y'all, not by a long shot.  στοργή is not Ἔρως is not ἀγάπη, right?  

Generally speaking, it's perfectly fine.

The second section, Turning Away From God's Image, establishes the nature of the crisis.  

In four powerful paragraphs, it lays the essence of the challenge of our age.  The first three name that challenge: that humankind has once again lost itself in the thrall of wealth and power.  This love of Mammon and the sword has corrupted the witness of faith, and as a prophetic critique, it's dead on.  It stings like Amos and Micah, and delivers the sort of uppercut to heresy that would do Saint Nicolas proud.

In the final paragraphs, there's a clear naming of our deepest moral and spiritual challenge: the mutual careening towards the sabotage of our entire ecosystem.  Taken together, those paragraphs are succinct, cogent, and complete.  

But in the midst of that fierce declaration, the confession takes a detour.  There's an abrupt tonal shift, the punch is pulled, and instead we get the rote neo-Cistercian self-flagellation of the Presbyterian People's Front.  

Meaning, all of a sudden we've donned our best intersectional sackcloth, mourning our Complicity in such pressing contemporary crises as...checks notes..."manifest destiny."  What follows, if one knows generic progressive discourse, is the usual performative litany of historical wrongs.  We're colonialist, and racist, and sexist, ableist and queer-o-phobic, all of us damnable sinners, pie Crenshaw domine, dona eis requiem, whack. 

I find this both baffling and frustrating, for a variety of reasons, three of which I'll pitch out here.   

First, all of these lamentations seem to operate under the assumption that the PC(USA) is made up entirely of cisgender White men who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

"We have," the Proposed New Confession intones, again and again, but that "We" is not a "We" that the church as a whole can confess together.  Sure, our demographic skew is heavily towards being the Presbyterian Home of Honkeytown, but...and I don't know if you've noticed this...that's not who all of us are now.

Can a Korean American choir director or a Ghanaian elder claim to have reviled their immigrant neighbors?  Can a historically Black church say that it has covered itself in racism's robes?  Can the women who make up a supermajority of our membership lament their complicitness in their own self-denigration?  Can the Queer folk who have fought for decades for inclusion declare themselves morally responsible for the harm inflicted upon them?  None of them can, not meaningfully.

All of these Christians are (and here I'll turn on all caps) PART OF THE (PC)USA.  They are not they.  They are us.  They are we. Yet those members of our shared fellowship are all positioned as the objects of the confession, not the ones proclaiming it.  It's an exclusionary, neosegregationist liturgy, which is jarring given the confession's stated purpose. 

Second, it just doesn't resemble the PC(USA) I've known for the entirety of my 57 years as a cradle Presbyterian.  Every Presbyterian congregation I have worshiped in, been a member of, or pastored?  None of them have lived out their lives together in a way that would justify these laments.  In the more recent cases, be it the civil rights movement, the ordination of women, the inclusion of Queer folk, or the embrace of those who live with disability?  In every one of those instances, we've fought our way through to an authentic witness, and at nontrivial cost in relationship and membership.  Saying, for example, "You took a consistent stand for women's voices, but, you know you could have done more, and you're part of The Patriarchy, so you are automatically complicit?"

I don't buy it.  I've looked at it, sat with it, thought about it, and...no.  One cannot repent for a sin they have not committed.  We have plenty of concrete and material sins to attend to, and repentance...understood from the whole witness of Scripture...just does not work that way.  Here, I'm very much aware that I'm not compliant with the demands of our particular denominational Newspeak. I still view persons as the fundamental unit of moral analysis, for example. I'm guilty of so many doubleplus ecclesiastical thoughtcrimes.  Mea culpa.

And finally, it feels, and here forgive me...Old.  Not just Old, but Old Old, in a very particular gerontological way.

The laments themselves are cast in semi-chronological order, a retelling-in-negation of the history of the Presbyterian church in this country.  They are decades out of date and centuries passed, sepia and crumbling.  None of them, not one, meaningfully reflects the PC(USA) now, or the specific crisis we inhabit.

It's almost like we don't know where we are anymore, like we can't remember what we did yesterday, or the names of the people around us.  But oh, do we remember the past, past struggles, past traumas, and past conflicts.  We remember when we mattered, back when we once shaped the direction of a nation, when our voice made a difference.  Remember at the General Assembly of 1818, when we let expediency and groupthink water down our witness, where we made a bold statement and then equivocated?  Remember when we marched at Selma?  No-one else remembers that, not anymore, but we're lost in the thrall of wouldacouldashoulda.  It's a little solipsistic, a little maudlin, and more than a little morbid.

This section reads, to be blunt, like the deathbed confession of White Liberal Christianity.  

"The Deathbed Confession?"

Do we want that to be what this is?  An end of life groan of regret at mistakes made and things left undone, croaked from dry and dying White throats as the denomination falls into the Consuming Fire?   Maybe we do.  Maybe that is what we want.  I know that's what some of y'all want.  

The time for that church is over, some folks say.  It should just cash out. Think of the things we could do with that money!  Choose any charity!  Give to the poor!  

But again,"The Deathbed Confession" has kind of a ring to it, if we're talking brand identity.

As a foundation on which to build, though, and a naming of the spiritual battle facing the church, this section might not be the best step forward.  

Because we're not dead yet.

To those who've labored long and hard over this work, in the unlikely event you find yourself reading these reflections: I recognize that some of these responses might feel uncomfortable.  But, you know, just sit with them for a little while.  And anyway, it's just one portion of one section, and y'all did ask for responses.  I mean, you did.

There's so much more to the Confession than this, though, and I'll get to that in another post.

A Scripture for the President

When I heard it, I laughed.

This last week, the Least Christian President in American History (tm) sat at the Resolute Desk and recorded himself reading from Holy Scripture.  It was part of a week-long cover-to-cover Bible reading with scores of participants, one whose intent was to remind America of the power of reading the Bible, or so the organizers hoped.  

I am, rather obviously, fond of reading the Bible on the regular.  It's not a single book, mind you, but a Sacred Book of Books, a collection of texts assembled over a millennia that reflects the journey of a covenant people with their God.  It has many authors, but also one Author, and all of it, every last bit of it, speaks transforming truths that we need to hear and understand.  Reading it changes us, if we're willing to read it deeply.

And so it was that Donald J. Trump, Forty Seventh President of the United States of America, a man who is happy to hate his enemies and whose not-going-to-church-today golf-trip-motorcade blocked the Beltway and almost made my family late for worship this most recent Easter morning, recorded himself reading from 2 Chronicles. 

Trump?  Reading from Chronicles?  It was perfect, just perfect, so much so that again, I laughed.  The textual portion itself centered around national humility and repentance, which is not something Trump's America does, ever, not ever.  Demanding that people you despise repent, sure.  But actual, sackcloth-and-ashes we-messed-up-Lord repentance?  That's a sign of weakness.  The cardinal rule of MAGA is to always double down and punch back, and never, ever admit fault. 

It is, in a plain reading, wildly ironic.  

But it gets weirder if you go deeper.  

The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are among the most MAGA-friendly books of the Bible.  Or, to be more accurate, they're all about Making Judah Great Again, even if M'JuGaH doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  Sounds too much like meshuggah, eh?

Like the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles was most probably written in the period closely following the Babylonian exile.  The people of Judah were rebuilding, having been returned to their land by Cyrus of Persia.  Tradition holds that the author of Chronicles was Ezra the scribe, and though there's the inevitable scholarly debate around that, it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.  Rebuilding requires having a powerful sense of what came before, and, well, that's the whole point of Chronicles.

1 and 2 Chronicles are a scribal retelling of the history of the national aspirations of the Hebrew people, as Ezra took the story that spans the older books of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings and edited them to meet his interests.  He cuts and pastes those histories as vigorously as Thomas Jefferson, and those editorial choices are striking.  They speak to the purpose of Chronicles.

Because Chronicles...like Ezra...tells of a deep yearning for the restoration of a nation to greatness, and looks to the past with a powerful hunger.  That shapes the way memory is recalled, and the way that the story of the past is told.  

There are many changes, like largely ignoring the history of those cursed "northern Kingdom" Samaritans.  Most relevant, given the liturgist in question, is how Chronicles approaches King David, first and greatest of the kings of the Jewish people.

In the older stories of David, those told in the Deuteronomistic History, he is remembered as deeply human.  In 1 and 2 Samuel, David is an emotionally complex soul.  He cares deeply for Saul and his son Jonathan, even though the erratic, moody Saul threatens his life over and over again.  When David's son Absalom rises up to take power from him, David desperately clings to hope for reconciliation, and when the news of Absalom's death is brought to David, his heart is utterly broken.  David knows indolence and lust, murdering the honorable Uriah to cover up his infidelity with Uriah's wife Bathsheba.  The prophet Nathan is forced to confront David with the horror of his actions, and David is shattered and repentant.  At the end of his life, David is a weak and diminished old man, easily manipulated by Nathan and Bathsheba so that Bathsheba's child Solomon can take the throne.  

These are meaty, real, earthy stories, ones that speak to the truth of our human mess and the ways even the best of us fail to uphold God's covenant.  They teach and they preach powerfully to the human condition, and are willing to question power.  Particularly the power of kings, because kings are people, and people are a mess.

That ain't how Chronicles presents David.  

Even though Chronicles is almost entirely reliant on the history recorded by those earlier books, it spins their story with the doggedness of a White House Press Secretary.

David, or so Chronicles describes him, was perfect.  He's buffed and without blemish, run through an Instagram filter, naturally tan and with a full thick head of hair.

Ezra's David almost never puts a foot wrong or makes a bad choice, unless Satan himself leads him astray.  He never weeps or shows weakness.  The conflict between David and Saul is only mentioned sotto voce, and there is no discussion of any of the intrigue in David's house.  There is no Bathsheba-canoodling in Chronicles.  The fight with Goliath isn't mentioned, likely because that would suggest David was once small and not mighty.  David fights, and wins, and fights, and wins, and gives long set piece speeches about building the temple with specific attention to the choice of only the best and most expensive materials.  He hands over the throne to Solomon completely of his own volition.  

As narrative, it's pretty danged flat, and Ezra's scribal compulsion to insert Lists of People and Things don't help that cause none, neither.  There's a reason that all the stories we retell and remember aren't from Chronicles, because generally speaking, we don't read aloud from spreadsheets in worship. 

Taken as a whole, Chronicles is history as hagiography, history as a glossing-over of anything uncomfortable or difficult or messy, history that desperately wants to find perfection in the glories of the past and the shine of remembered wealth and power.  

Which, I would contend, is precisely why it is God's will that Chronicles remain forever part of sacred scripture.  Because human beings are great at editing out the hard parts, not being challenged or changed, and utterly failing to learn from our mistakes.  We need to remember

Lord, does history teach how we're great at that.

Enduring Fury

I was turning ash from the fireplace into the soil of one of my raised beds when I was suddenly distracted by a ruckus.  A crow, one of the neighborhood murder, flew low and fast across the asphalt of the road, screeching with a clearly panicked harshness.  I've seen that particular crow around, an old bird with one missing tailfeather and a matching missing flight-feather on its right wing.  Gapfeather was not having a good day, because behind it, right in and tight, was a hawk.  It was fractionally larger than the crow, from size and coloration possibly a red-shouldered hawk, not that I would know that if I hadn't looked it up afterwards.

The raptor was laser-focused, with evident and violent intent.  Gapfeather was fleeing and crying out for help, diving into the denser underbrush under the tall trees on the other side of the street.  This was odd thing to see, because smaller hawks don't mess with crows, typically.  Crows are large and sharp of beak, after all.  If anything, the reverse is true, as the more-intelligent and social crows will gather in large numbers to mob, harass, and drive hawks away. 

The chase continued, the desperate crow retreating tactically, flying from branch to branch, trying to put tree trunk between itself and its pursuer, all the while shrieking out that high pitched caw for aid.  The hawk just kept coming.  Other crows began to gather, but weren't yet intervening, hopping around on the bony-finger branches of dead chestnut oaks and observing cautiously.

Finally, Old Gapfeather bolted back in the direction from which it came, the hawk right on its tail, as merciless as Javert.  I listened to the panicked corvid's screams fade into the distance.

Something must have happened between them, something that wasn't about hunter and hunted.  Perhaps, given the season, it was that the crow had attempted some high-risk egg stealing, and the hawk was enraged and had slaughter on its mind.  It would not relent or give quarter.  It had gone to war.

Which, of course, got me to musing on our own primate predilection for violent conflict.  What is the purpose of war?

If one is a pacifist, and radically committed to nonviolence, then war can have no good purpose.  There is no legitimate end that can be served by brute force and harm inflicted on another, as the means define the ends.

This is the clearest and most self-evident reading of the teachings of Jesus.  It is also wildly inconvenient for any society that is predominantly Christian, as nation-states that are morally averse to conflict have a tendency to be devoured by those with no compunctions about war.  That, in part, was why the early church in the Christianized Roman Empire struggled so mightily to justify Christian participation in martial endeavor.

Just War theory, which rose first from St. Augustine's writing, casts boundaries around war, and as refined over centuries attempts to ensure that peace is always the goal of war.  Meaning, not just but also integrated into the prosecution of war itself.  Making efforts to avoid killing noncombatants, showing mercy to those who have been rendered helpless, and...most importantly...acting from right intent.  War cannot be just if it is motivated by vengeance, greed, or hatred.

Then, of course, there is the idea that war has only one rule: victory.  The goal is nothing more and nothing less than the destruction of an opponent and/or the seizing of their lands and property, by any means necessary.   From this perspective, concepts like honor, decency, or mercy only weaken martial endeavor, as they place undue bounds around the capacity to project power.  The rules of engagement are that there are no rules.  Do whatever you must to win, period.

Across this moral continuum, humankind has struggled to find a way, still bound to primal subsentient conflicts over territory and resource, to mobbing intruders with black wing and beak, to turning sharp talon and blind rage against those who trespass against us.

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

I have developed, over time, a mental frame-set for understanding the fabric of American Christianity, and the place of most Christian public figures in that frame-set.  There are progressives and conservatives, public theologians and writers, activists and mystics, fundamentalists and liberals.  There are a wild array of denominations and theological perspectives.  On top of that, there's a healthy dollop of send-me-your-money charlatans, name-it-and-claim-it hucksters who live lavish lives fleecing their flocks.

That latter group is well known to me, particularly the leadership of the "Word of Faith" movement.  These are the pastors with the Gulfstreams and the Bentleys, the massive sprawling mansions and...in some cases...their own international airports, built on the dime of their church, tax-free, of course.  Those folk have gotten called out in my sermons on the regular, because their warped version of Christian faith is...well, it's an abomination.

I know these pastors.  And I know the most influential leader of that movement.  

Which is why it was a little odd reading an article about the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism and finding...Kenneth Copeland? 

In today's print version of the Washington Post (which you might have missed if you cancelled your subscription), I read the following, describing a pro-Trump rally at a Louisiana megachurch:

"We have every right there is to tell the Devil: 'You take your hands off this nation!'" roared televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who put on a U.S. flag jacket and red MAGA hat when he took the stage.

The scene could have come from any of the hard-right Christian road shows now barnstorming the country, with a focus on swing states in a razor-close election.  Extremism analysts say the tours serve as both a get-out-the-vote juggernaut and power flex for a Christian supremacist movement that aims to transform the church the same way MAGA did the GOP: by forcing out moderates.

Ministers like Copeland preach that Christianity is the bedrock of American identity and should influence all aspects of society, ideas central to Christian nationalism."

This is a new game for Kenneth, and in focusing on the political extremism, the Post did kinda miss that angle.  Copeland has, for decades, been most notable for both his wildly flamboyant preaching and the brazenness of his grift.  "Christian hard-liner?"  Hardly.   He's the capo dei capi of the Word of Faith Prosperity Gospel movement, owner of that international airport, possessor of multiple jets, and lives in an estate that sprawls even by Texas standards.  Because, again, private jets need room to land, baby!  He is the worldliest of the worldly, the alpha wolf of that pack of wolves.  Politics?  Nationalism?  Those were the realm of the actual fundamentalists, the Jerry Falwells of the world, whose battle was against modernity and liberalism.  Copeland was...and is...in a wholly different business.  There was a time when conservatives had issue with the Word of Faith movement, when they called it out as heretical, unbiblical, and a blatant con.  There was a time when a Republican Senator led an investigation into Copeland, concerned that he was just a scammer hiding behind a Jesus mask.

Now, though, it's Kenneth Copeland we find front and center as the face of right wing Christianity, wrapped in the stars and stripes and wearing a MAGA hat.  Like the rest of the Prosperity Gospel movement, he's been all in with Trump from day one...birds of a feather, and whatnot...but that's got nothing to do with Christian Nationalism, or a country governed by Christian virtues.

He's in it for the same reason that Elon's in it: there's money to be made.  Because freedom of religion means freedom to believe anything you want, eh?  What right does anyone have to say that getting rich off of the Gospel is a bad thing?

It's pure predatory Mammonism from a high priest of AmeriChrist, Inc., being packaged in the flag, injected straight into the veins of the gullible and the desperate, and bears precisely zero resemblance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A Vote to Save Trump's Soul

Unlike most of the earnestly progressive siblings in my denomination, I have a rather vigorous sense of Hell.  I've expounded on that elsewhere, so I won't get into that here, other than to say that I make no distinctions between God's love, God's wrath, and God's justice.  The cup we pour out is the cup we receive, after all, and against that measure, the current Republican candidate is in a world of trouble.

Donald J. Trump has already made American Christian discourse harsher, crueler, and more selfish, stripping grace, kindness, and wisdom from countless churches.   The crass brassy transaction of his relationship with evangelicalism has driven millions from the faith, as empty platitudes, flagrant lies, and the naked hunger for power have supplanted the Gospel.  

He has undercut the most fundamental blessing of our republic, subverting the Founder's intent for a nation in which leaders are freely elected, and where where power changes hands peaceably.

His anti-Christian nationalism has slandered millions of Latino migrants, 80% of whom are hermanos y hermanas en Christo.  He would turn America into a walled Jericho, into an inhospitable Sodom.  His misbegotten Abraham Accords "fixed" the Middle East by conveniently pretending the Israel/Palestine issue didn't exist, setting the stage for the unprecedented chaos and bloodshed of this last year.  Well, to be fair, it's precedented by millennia of strife in that benighted region, but you know what I mean.

But my deepest concern, honestly, are the tens or hundreds of millions who will suffer if he is elected again.  These are the souls that will starve, suffer, or be forced from their homes and lands because of his refusal to acknowledge our rapidly changing climate.  His flagrant quid pro quo with the oil and gas industries, coupled with his bizarre demonization of everything that would both allow us to adapt and become more energy self-reliant?  They've become pseudo-religious dogma on the far-right now, a bitter, unbiblical, and demonic creed-of-greed that will contribute to actually unprecedented human suffering.

Donald is aware of exactly none of this.  It doesn't even register.

He's a worldly man, after all, utterly unspiritual, as one would be as a Child of Mammon.  A little boy raised in a temple of gold will grow into a big man who couldn't care less about heavenly or eternal things.  And sure, yes, there's grace for all, but grace has to be freely received.  It is for all who repent.  He's great at doubling down, and has no use for repentance.  Repentance implies you were wrong, after all, and he is never ever wrong.

Yet despite all of this, Donald J. Trump is a child of God.  He knows not what he's doing.  I do not desire to maximize his suffering.  I do not wish him harm.  Though he is my enemy, I love him, because I do what Jesus tells me to do.

If he wins the upcoming election, he will receive the worldly power he desires.  But he will also reap the fruits of his actions once given power, and that...insofar as I can honestly see it...imperils his immortal soul.  It's the dark bargain of all who lead, of all who take on the mantle of worldly power, but for Donald, it's a particularly dangerous thing.  

Given power, Trump will pour out a cup of bitterness for himself, a cup as deep as the oceans, as deep as the night sky.

Don't vote against him because you hate him.  

Vote against him because you love him.  Because if he wins?  And God is just?

Lord have mercy on his soul.

Praying for Donald Trump

The question, one that pressed into my soul yesterday, was this:

How to pray for Donald J. Trump following the attempt on his life?  As a Christian, I'm duty-bound to pray for my enemies as deeply as I pray for my friends, which is enough of a challenge.  But the specifics of the prayer were a unique conundrum.

I mean, had he been seriously or critically hurt, and hospitalized, that would have been straightforward.  I'd have prayed for his recovery, and for his doctors, and for healing for the nation.  That was the simple prayer offered back when he was afflicted with COVID, and things looked touch and go for a while.  Had he died, that would also have been straightforward, prayers for the disposition of his soul and again, for the healing of the nation.

But Donald J. Trump is fine.  

He could have died, yes, but he did not.  

He was aggressive before, he was more aggressive after.  His injury, such as it was, was the sort of thing one might get in a moderate fall.  It was of less import than a sprained ankle, and far less of an impediment to his life.  Nor did his response indicate any meaningful psychological trauma, or any reaction other than unshakable defiance and an even deeper conviction of his own special place in history.  

I shared this observation during a conversation with a Trump supporter yesterday after church, and they agreed.  "He's fine," they said.  

In point of fact, he is stronger after the attempt than he was before the attempt, and he knows it.  

He is just as physically healthy, albeit with a surface wound to his ear.  He is far socially stronger, as the "iconic" images of his deeply ingrained fight response have cemented the messianic convictions of his most fervent supporters.   Their collective victim-narrative is now sealed in his own blood, so to speak.   

He will step into the Republican convention this next week as a bloodied and unbowed hero, fist raised in defiance, and be received with roars of adulation.  

He isn't in mourning, or in shock.  He's fine, and feeling fine.  He is reveling in this moment, the purest gift to a consummate showman.

That's not a partisan assessment, but the simple reality.

So my prayers were simpler.  For healing for his ear, such as it is.  For the disposition of his soul, as always.  And, particularly, for the future of this country, and a turning away from the bitter spirit of violence that so blights us all.

SNAP, Pantries, and Christian Nations

Just about every Wednesday, a genial cadre of local Buddhists arrive at my Presbyterian church.  

They arrive in a van, laden with seven to eight hundred of pounds of food, which their temple has purchased to help support the efforts of our bustling Little Free Pantry.  Volunteers from the church join together with the nuns, hefting forty pound bags of carrots and onions.  Crates of potatoes and apples, pallets of canned soups and sauces.

All of it will flow through the Pantry over the course of a week, as folks in the community who need food support pull into our gravel parking lot.  It will join the generous donations given by members of the church, and by the good decent folks out in our little town.

When church folk started our Little Free Pantry...think a Little Free Library, only for nonperishable food...we'd not known what to expect.  We'd anticipated it to be a modest supplement to the nonprofit Food Bank that already exists in our community, just across the street, hosted by our Methodist neighbors.  It was simply something to handle the off-hours when those food bank shelves weren't available.

For a while, that was precisely what it was.

But debt-addicted America printed trillions of new dollars into the economy during the pandemic, which had the surprising effect of triggering inflation.  Golly, who coulda seen that coming?  And then, with costs rising ahead of wages, we cut back on the SNAP benefits that had been a lifeline for families during the pandemic.  The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program feeds tens of millions in our country, and after it was expanded during COVID, that retraction had a notable impact here in the trenches of food provision.  

Sure, the pandemic was over, but inflation had changed the entire economic dynamic, and millions suddenly found that affording little luxuries like housing, transportation, and food had become unmanageable.

Demand soared.  Suddenly, that cute little roofed box, with its equally cute Little Free Produce stand?  They weren't just out on the margins.  Every few minutes, another person stopping by, the flow increasing when the working day came close to an end.  When I arrive in the morning on Sundays, people are often waiting patiently for it to be restocked.  Our hard-working volunteers fill it, and fill it, and fill it.  Over the course of this year, we're on track to having moved thirty thousand pounds of food through the pantry.

Nearly thirty thousand pounds.

Across the way at the local food bank, demand is up fifty percent.

This is the reality.  This is what's happening on the ground.  Up in the cold airless aether of ideological
blather, the conversations in the House of Representatives have turned to cutting SNAP further.  It's "bloated and broken," or so say those who claim to want to offer a "hand up, not a hand out."

Now, I don't have a problem with making programs more efficient.  I don't doubt there are layers of bureaucracy that could be trimmed away.  It's a food program, not a jobs program.  So do that, sure.  But anything that results in less food for the hungry, or that creates more bureaucratic processes, procedures, and protocols for people in need to negotiate?  That's not the kind of country a free and decent folk would want to live in.  

And I don't have any issue with empowering people to be self-supporting.  But the people who need food are working people.  They need those calories so they can work to support themselves.  Having food is a hand up.  Offering people platitudes instead of plates of food only makes sense if you're the sort of fool who thinks you can live by eating ideology.  It's indecent.

On a fundamental level, that's also not Christian, bruh.  It ain't Buddhist, neither, but being that I'm a pastor and Jesus is my Lord and Savior, I can only speak with authority about the former.  

Seriously.  There's a deep irony that the same folks who wrap themselves in flag and cross and declare that America must be a Christian nation?  They're the folks who want America to do exactly the opposite thing that Christians are commanded to do.

We feed people.  Because Jesus. Told. Us. To.  This isn't complicated.  He ain't your Lord and Savior if you don't do what he tells you to do.

Lord have mercy, have these folk even read their Bibles?

Trump Antichrist

Trump is again standing for office, defiant and shameless, unrepentant and doubling down.  He remains a deep threat to our republic.  Another season of madness seems to be dawning on our nation.  

But as difficult as that is, the United States of America isn't my primary concern, nor is it my primary life commitment.  

The corruption of my faith is my concern.  A significant portion of American Christianity sees Trump as a legitimate...even God-ordained...defender of the Christian faith.  This is, to the eyes of my soul, insane.  Demonic, even.  

Christ cannot be served, ever, by a lie.  

Nor can Jesus be served by blind partisan hatred, and that was my personal challenge.

After the riot he instigated on January 6th was over, my rage burned bright.  It was hard for me to focus, or to see those I care for deeply who had voted for and supported Trump with anything other than anger.  It was not good for my soul.  Hatred and resentment never is.  I wrote about it at the time, but that wasn't enough.  The anger remained, obscuring my vision, clouding my ability to show grace.  

"Trump Derangement Syndrome," it's mockingly called by those who somehow can't see him for what he is, but it did indeed feel like that.  It was a disease of the self, one that ran as deep as the delusion that blinds his followers.  I was becoming what I hated.

That hatred also tormented my Christian brothers and sisters.  On more than one occasion, I have been approached by another Christian troubled by how deeply they found themselves hating Donald Trump.  These are the gentle souls, the souls who live for missions of compassion and kindness, the sort of folks that one would describe as Saints of the Church.  Generous, thoughtful, welcoming, prayerful, and radically focused on Christ's peace.

"David," one said, embarrassed and horrified at their own thoughts.  "I just want him dead.  I can't stop wanting him to die."

I felt that hatred in myself, and so I did what writers do when they need to process something.  I wrote a book.   

I'd had the idea for it back in 2019.  I was already tired of my own anger, stoked every single day with constant provocations both real and imagined.  I'd had a dream, vivid and lucid as certain dreams are, in which I visited Trump as he wandered alone and despairing in Hell.  In that dream, to my great surprise, I found myself moved with a deep compassion.  It meant something.  I wasn't sure what, but it needed more articulation than a poem of questionable quality.

The idea for this book came to me, but I couldn't bring myself to write it then.  I was exhausted by his media omnipresence, the endless reality-television drama-queen vomit of his presidency.  There were already so many books about Trump, a veritable cottage industry of Trump-adjacent mammonist profiteering.  

I also had, at that time, other writing that consumed my attention, novels about A.I. and a book of theology about the odd weather we've been having lately.  

But after the riot, and the struggle I encountered in other Christians, and the spreading, sprawling thicket of falsehoods that to this day cast the pall of a dark alternate reality over millions of Americans who remain in Trump's thrall, I found that I had to write it.  For myself, and my sanity.  

Well, for what passes for sanity with me, anyway.

TRUMP ANTICHRIST is written in Satan's voice, the personified voice of hatred, of cynicism, of falsehood, of power.  It is, when I described it to my agent and to the editors who were kind enough to look at it, a bit of theopolitical satire, written in the least trustworthy, most seductive voice I know.  

Those editors gave it a pass; some, because it's weird, but others...notably...because they were afraid.  Of frivolous lawsuits.  Of less-than-frivolous threats of violence from Trump supporters.   I don't blame them.  America is increasingly consumed by a peculiar and familiar madness, and the prospect of death threats from glazed-eye partisans isn't something one wants to bring on oneself.  

So I self-published it, because the odds of a weird, self-published book being read by more than a dozen souls are pretty close to zero.

It's a short, odd little book, one that serves several purposes.  

First, it is my own struggle to come to terms with how human beings who consider themselves Christian could follow a leader who is...in every single conceivable way...the diametric opposite of Jesus. There's a theological term for such a leader, and you know what it is.  That term is "Antichrist."  In the book, the voice of the fallen Divine Prosecutor makes that case, using both scripture and Nietzsche, because that's exactly what the devil would do.  He's not wrong, not technically.

That voice, though.  Let's talk about that voice.  The "narrator" of the book is chosen intentionally.

It's written in the same voice that whispers hatred and a hardened heart into my own soul.  The same voice that tells me that there is nothing more righteous, nothing more purely just, than hating my enemies.  

Second, and because that's the way the book is written, it's not the book you think it is.  Or even that I thought it was, when I began writing it.  

Sure, it skewers the desperate, obvious rationalizations that Christians use to justify supporting someone who incarnates everything they claim to reject.   But if you loathe Trump, and desire the destruction of those who follow him, and find yourself nodding along when Satan tells you exactly what you want to hear about them?  

What is that, precisely?   

It's the same evil.  When you toss the devil's coin, both heads and tails are evil.  The shadow cast by evil is still evil.  Blind partisan hatred dehumanizes and controls us, just as surely as it turns us to dehumanize our enemies.

You cannot fight evil with evil.  That doesn't mean you can't speak out when something monstrous rises.  That doesn't mean you accept lies as truth, encourage hucksters and profiteers and narcissists, or walk in silent lockstep with brutes and thugs.  You must resist these things.

But if you're crazy enough to consider yourself Christian, you are obligated to use other means.  To do that, you must break the spell that holds you.

You're welcome to give it a read if you need some help with that.

Widows and Orphans

A thought, the other day, as I was meditating on the scriptural grounds for a deep and sustained care for the elderly among us.  I mean, sure, yeah, there's plenty of "honor thy father and mother" and the like in the Torah and Writings, but what about texts that are more explicitly Christian?

Jesus, after all, didn't seem much for the traditional niceties of familial obligation.  Nor did he encourage his followers to spend any of their time tending dutifully to their aging parents.  "Let the dead bury their dead," he said.  When family came a lookin' for him, Jesus ignored them.  "Who are my mother and brothers," he said, turning to those gathered.  "You are."

Which is a fine thing for a crowd to hear, but Mary, being a Jewish mother, couldn't have been pleased.  "What am I, chopped liver?"  "Yes, mom.  Chopped liver."

The challenge in the Gospels and Epistles, as we consider our care for our still-living-ancestors, is that the radical message of Jesus pushes us to extend our love to all.  Not just our blood, our family, our tribe, but to the outcast and the stranger and the enemy.  

It's a radical redefinition of neighborliness, one that assumes the care for kin is just a given.  The emphasis is newness, is a putting away of the old and embracing something yet unseen.  

Which, of course, it ain't, not any more.  Being a caregiver is a burden.  It's something that gets in the way of our careers, of our self-fulfillment, of the living of our Best Lives Now.  The old are an inconvenience to be managed, rather than a duty to be fulfilled.

So where do we find a commitment to care for the aged in the teachings of Jesus?

That seems to rise from two places.  First, from the Gospel commitment to the outcast and the marginalized.  Our culture has no use for the old old.  Age is hidden away, compartmentalized and separated from the endless rush and busyness of consumer culture.  Caregiving does not contribute to our productivity.  There's no significant return on investment.  It does not serve our immediate self interest, and it's hard, and it's draining, and we just can't right now.

But Jesus, pesky pesky Jesus?  He always challenges culture, in any era.  Our culture's shallow self-obsession and churning, family-shattering careerist diaspora is no exception.  When Jesus calls for us to care for those that have been forgotten and set out on the margins, that moral imperative extends to the forgotten, isolated elderly among us.

Second, from the broader demand to care for widows and orphans.  It's a fundamental theme of Torah, one picked up by the Gospels and Epistles.  Widows and orphans are members of society who find themselves disconnected from society by circumstance.  The basic protections that come from participation in a culture are no longer theirs.  They are not, for reasons of ability or cultural expectation, able to provide care for themselves.  So into the sacred teachings of scripture is etched the demand to provide care for those persons.  It's a basic metric of a just society, and a fundamental duty of the righteous.

Because what human beings have always known is that those circumstances could befall any of us.  Sudden misfortune could happen to any person at a time of vulnerability, and only a nation of brutes and monsters would allow those who were part of it to suffer in such a way.

You might be thinking, hey, that's a stretch.  But is it?  I mean, sure, many older women are widows, but orphans?  Oliver and Little Orphan Annie pop to mind, which isn't exactly the demographic of most residents in nursing homes.

Then again, pretty much everyone in their seventies and eighties is an orphan, technically speaking.  Their parents?  No longer alive.  Their ability to care for themselves, increasingly reduced by physical and mental limitations.  

So there you are.  What awaits us, all of us, in the arc of our lives, is a time when we will find ourselves on the margins of consumer culture, no longer relevant, suddenly strangers in a strange land.  

When Alternate Realities Collide

I am an expert when it comes to alternate realities.  Well, sort of.  To clarify:  With two published books on the subject, I am arguably one of the world's top ten experts on the intersection between Christian theology and the multiverse.

Arguably.  But I'm going with it.

It is and will continue to be my assumption that God's creation is more than our spacetime.  Instead, I view God's creative work as an infinite panoply of all potential reality, in which everything that can possibly exist does exist.  It's very much a minority position, and the sort of thing that would have meant all sorts of serious unpleasantness for me if I'd lived in an era where heresy wasn't the norm.  Yay separation of church and state!

That perspective has been strangely tested of late, as America is increasingly rent apart by competing narratives about what is real and what is good.  There are two diametrically opposed visions of reality at play, each of which stands in radical opposition to the other.

On the one hand, there is the narrative of a President who is a charismatic, straight-talking, no-nonsense businessman.  He tells it like it is, seeks to restore a nation to true faith and its rightful greatness, and "has a heart" for the common man.  He stands against a corrupt, sinister, and decadent cabal of secretive elites, who are doing everything they can to strip him of his rightful leadership.

On the other hand, there is the narrative of a President who is a charismatic huckster and charlatan.  He lies as easily as he breathes, and has dog whistled, worm-tongued, or bought his way into the confidence of millions.  Seeking attention, power and his own enrichment, he is now attempting to overthrow the results of an election, while those who are not bamboozled resist his despotic designs.

Both of these narratives cannot describe a single person, or a single reality.   They can be independently true, in separate universes.  If a theistic multiverse is your cosmology, as it is mine, they do.  In the infinite glory of God's manifold providence, a being named "Donald J. Trump" is both of those things.  Many other things too, like an animated meat toaster and a seven winged seraph, but let's stick with those two realities for now.  They are both "real," in that they may well exist in their respective corners of the multiverse.

But those realities cannot coexist in one time and space as descriptors of a particular entity.  Truth and reality are complicated, sure, and we human beings are none of us perfect.  But there is a difference between personal complexity and antithesis, between accurate description and fundamental error.  

If I step outside and say "It is raining right now," I am making a specific statement about reality.  It is either true or it is not.

Now, one might try to obfuscate or qualify that statement.  "Well, what if it's drizzling?"  "What do you mean by 'right now'" "Does a sun shower count?"  "Did you know that the Xuatatla people have forty seven words for rain?"  But then you are being willfully stupid, the sort of stupid that comes when we use reason to overthrow common sense.

Either there is a massive conspiracy to commit fraud, or a pathological narcissist and those in his thrall are lying.  It is either part of our reality or not.  There is no Hegelian synthesis between the two.  And unlike statements about higher order realities like Love, Purpose, and God, a statement about material reality is provable.  There must be evidence that affirms or denies the truth we claim.

Were I to contact you via email and let you know that I currently have 125,327 Bitcoin in my accidentally frozen Coinbase account, and ask to use that as collateral for a personal loan from you, you'd need some evidence of that assertion.  If I couldn't give you that affirmation, you could still take me at my word.  But that'd be foolish.

The assertions of election fraud are precisely the same thing.  There is no evidence to verify them. They simply did not happen.  They are not part of our reality.  Nor are the assertions that the vaccine is a tool of a demonic elite cabal.  Nor are any of the fevered fabulisms of QAnon.  None of these things are real.  Not one has a place in our corner of creation.  They have no foundation at all.

When we make statements about our reality that have no basis in that reality, then we are mistaken, delusional, or lying.  Mistakes?  We all make them.  They can be corrected.  It's part of growing and learning.

Delusions and lies are more dangerous than mistakes, because they are fiercely resilient.  They do not yield to correction.  Nor do they yield to evidence, because they never relied on evidence in the first place. They represent the semiotic incursion into our reality of something fundamentally alien to it, as if another realm of being was trying to press into our own to define it.

For the soul in thrall of a delusion, their delusion must be defended at all costs.  There is no evidence because that evidence IS BEING HIDDEN.  IT GOES DEEPER THAN WE EVER THOUGHT!  

Or, if you know you're lying, this is where one lie leads to another deeper lie, which will lead to another and another.  

That's what has made the "reality" pitched out by conspiracy theorists, radical ideologues, and propagandists so damaging to the arc of our history.  Those false narratives, those "alternative facts?"  They make a truth claim that isn't simply unfalsifiable, but is actually the antithesis of the sliver of creation that we inhabit.  It does not belong here.

There's an archaic word, one used by more primal peoples.  It describes what happens when something alien to our reality tries to take control of it...and of us.  It's a word that's a bit awkward on the tongues of the overeducated, and has what could at best be considered a checkered history.

That word is "demonic."

Why I voted FOR Biden.

I recognize that this election season is all about opposing your opponent.  It's about coalescing around hatred for ones enemy, about tapping into that group energy that comes from having a person you can focus your anger on.

It's classical Alinskian politics, after all.  Nothing motivates human beings more than having a villain to fight, a face to put on your hate, a heel to boo and hiss and attack.  And Lord have mercy, do we have that energy going on right now.

But though I feel that spirit out there mightily, and it rises up on the wings of my anger about clear threats to the integrity of the republic, I also don't really trust that energy.  It's evil, after all.  And my Teacher doesn't fight evil with evil, no matter what Palpatine might be hissing at me on Twitter.

I take a deep breath, center away from that form of power, and try to think positively.  Where is the good in my choosing?  How does seeking the good...not just my own, but of the republic I love...drive how I will act as a citizen?  I have already voted, going early because, well...it seems necessary this year.

So let me say this:  I voted for Joe Biden because he's a decent person who will be a decent, competent president.  When I voted, I did not do so grudgingly, or with reservations.  I am not simply voting *against* someone.  I want Joe Biden to be president.  Frankly, I wanted him to run in 2016, and was disappointed when he made the choice to step aside.  My decision to cast my vote for Biden is affirmative, not a "best of two bad choices" or a poke in the eye to those who see the world so very differently than I.  There are reasons for this.  Let me lay 'em out for ya.

1) Biden is a moderate.  I am also a moderate.  Well, moderate in some things.  I am moderate in my moderation.  But generally, I don't believe in abrupt change, or in moving suddenly unless there's a truck coming at you.  Evolution is life's path through the order of creation, and it is also the best way to accomplish necessary adaptation.  Abrupt changes to living systems are likely to fail.  Moderates consider the possible good on either side of a contentious issue, and find the path that makes the most sense given the reality we inhabit.  Not the pipe dream of a perfect future, or the lie of a perfect past, but the reality of where we are, who we are right now, and how we might take that step to become better.

I see that logic in most of what Biden does.  Take, for instance, Biden's  stance on busing, for which he was attacked during the primary season.  Busing was, quite frankly, a shortsighted solution to a real problem.  Decoupling students and parents from local schools is an ideologues idea of an answer to systemic failures in our school systems.  I would vote against any candidate who proposed it, because there's value in community, and in not having to drive halfway across the damn county to bring my kid something they forgot, or to pick 'em up when the nurse calls.  It's not racist to oppose it, because race isn't the only thing at play when it comes to busing. 

Moderates think about such things, and I am voting for Biden because he is a moderate.

2) Biden knows how to work with others.  Again, this is because Biden isn't a radical or an egotist.  He doesn't see politics as a zero sum game, but understands that you're better off at least trying to connect with those who aren't your base.  He's representative of a better time in American politics, when folks were willing to reach across party lines to get things done.  A better time, frankly, than the one we inhabit.  He's got a track record of this, a lifetime of evidence that he is willing to find common ground and treat those who disagree with him honorably.  

He is a liberal, in the classical sense of the term.  Liberality is the enemy of radicalism, and has always been.  It is neither leftist nor right-wing.  In the Soviet Union, it was the liberals who were harassed and imprisoned.  In Nazi Germany, liberality was equally attacked.  Why? Because liberals are a threat to every form of authoritarianism.  They insist on listening to and considering the potential merits of other positions.  Liberality also assumes that the person you are talking to is not a caricature, but an actual human being.  Kindness, grace, mercy, and understanding are liberal virtues.  Biden is a liberal in the most traditional sense of the word.

In part, that comes from his persona.  Let's talk about that. 

3) Biden is a centering presence.  Tone matters in leadership, as it does in all relationships.  Try saying something to your wife in a gentle tone.  Now say it in a snarky, bullying tone.  Which one is more likely to have you sleeping on the sofa?

Biden listens.  He is genuinely the kind of person who cares.  It's why he's been around as long as he has, because it's not just a facade or a schtick.  It's his identity.

If you want to unify a nation, there are different approaches to doing that.  The best approach is to appeal to the center, to reach out to the best shared spirit of a people.  That calls a nation together.  It unites from common purpose, and from a position of shared hope and determination.  It is the path of nations that are growing and moving forward.

You can also use darker energies to force unity.  Fear and hatred are excellent tools for pulling a people...or a subset of people...towards a given end.  They can be powerful.  These work well when coupled with brute force.  If a people aren't united by common purpose, you can motivate a subset of them with fear of an enemy, then use the coercive power of a police state to subdue and subjugate the rest of them.

A leader must express that, particularly if they want to lead more than a subset of partisans.  If you want a nation to cohere, and if you dislike divisiveness, you need to choose leaders who refuse to use the energy of division and disruption.  Seek the measured, the thoughtful, and the leader who will acknowledge and respect a worthy perspective, even if it is offered by a political adversary.

That said, there's always the concern that a moderate leader won't be able to push back when pressed, that they'll not have the necessary spine to resist when the integrity of the nation is attacked or pressed by a hostile aggressor.

After the first debate, we know what he looks like responding to blind aggression now, so, yeah.  That one's fine.

4) Biden is old. 

He is not young. For many folks, this is spun as a negative.  Joe Biden is 77.  He isn't hip and edgy and now.  Farthest thing from it.  But with age can come wisdom.  A lifetime of experience is not irrelevant, nor is it irrelevant that he understands the ebb and flow of political fads.  I don't buy into the idea that age is only a negative.  Jesus Mary and Joseph, it's not like we're living in the world of Logan's Run.  Well, not quite yet, anyway. 

I value the vision and depth of those who have lived more years than I, seen more things than I, and know more than I.  I understand things in middle age that I did not in my youth.  Every year, my well of experience deepens. 

There are two concerns, of course.    First, that age can come with significant diminishment of cognitive function.  Which is why I've made a point of listening to Biden speak off the cuff, and listening to him answering questions.  Not for just a soundbite, but for a whole hour of speaking, unfiltered by any spin.  He's not the best at it, not as good as Obama or even as Reagan.  But neither is he incompetent.  

Second, that age can calcify a person's perspective, and make them less likely to respond effectively to a new and unanticipated challenge.  Old dogs often go back to the same bag of tricks, over and over and over again.  It's a human tendency, and one I feel in myself as I get more curmudgeonly with age.  To counterbalance this, you need liberality, a willingness to see the good in the new, and one other thing.  You also have to have people who you respect to teach you things you don't already know.  Which gets me to the next point.

5) Biden is more than Biden.  

He isn't perfect, and he doesn't pretend to be.  But Biden is the sort of leader who knows to listen to wise counsel.  He does not assume he knows everything, or that his opinions are the only ones that matter.  A Biden presidency would engage the minds of other human beings, tapping into deeper expertise and acknowledging that one single person cannot know all things.

If your understanding of leadership is that good leaders are strong and in complete control of everything, that might not work for you.  Some folks assume that a leader who doesn't just give orders and demand loyalty is somehow "inauthentic."  As a pastor who cares for my community and from my doctoral work in leadership dynamics, I know that churches...and by extension, any human group...that are run by one person with ultimate power?  They fail. 

The strong church...or organization, or nation...is the one where the gifts and wisdom of the whole group are utilized.  Expertise is not smothered by ideology or ego.  The power of the team, and the strengths we all bring?  They all need to be brought forward.  In a time when we are tested by a hornet's nest of crises, we need that kind of leadership.

6) Biden personally manifests the Christian virtues. 

This isn't going to work for everyone, as not everyone is Christian.  But I am.  The teachings of Jesus define my path, and while I'm the farthest thing from perfect, I measure my success as a soul by how I do what Jesus asks me to do.  What that looks like as we live day to day is defined well by the classical Christian virtues.  There are many different ways to present that set of morals, but one of the clearest is found in ancient Christian teachings about vice, sin, and the virtues that counterbalance them.

The Seven Deadly sins, we know.  Lust. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Wrath. Envy. Pride.  Give power to a person ruled by those sins, and they will cause harm.  Against them...not in parallel but on their own terms... we find arrayed the angels of the Seven Virtues.  Chastity.  Temperance. Charity. Diligence. Patience. Kindness. Humility.  Give authority to a soul that has tapped into the power of these graces, and they will be a blessing.

Let's break those virtues down.  Chastity means containing carnal desire through fidelity in relationships.    Temperance expresses itself through moderation of impulses, by refusing to allow the momentary impulse to drive your choosing.   Charity means benevolence, a willingness to sacrifice self for the greater good, and a turning away from the hunger to maximize personal benefit at the expense of other.  Diligence means putting in the hard work necessary to do a thing.  Good things take time, dedication, and focus.  Patience means playing the long game, ignoring the provocation of the moment and keeping your heart turned towards your purpose always.  Kindness requires a concern for others and their wellbeing, and for that concern to govern your behavior towards all.  Kindness rejoices in and magnifies the successes of others.  Humility creates in us a willingness to learn, an openness to be changed when we are wrong, and a servants heart.

I see all of these spirits working in Joe Biden, and not just now, but over the many years we've been able to watch him in public service.  Is he perfect?  No.  None of us are.  But you can tell from his life where his priorities lie, and how his deeply held lifelong faith forms and shapes who he is.  You shall know them by their fruits, as my Teacher said.

7)  Joe Biden Loves to Drive.  

This isn't going to work for everyone, because not everyone loves cars the way that I have since I was a little boy.  But Joe Biden's a car guy.  I love cars.  Sweet baby Jesus, do I love cars.  Biden still owns the same Corvette he bought back when he was a young man, and clearly takes pleasure in it.  The thing he hated most about being VP was not being able to get out and drive.  He likes the feel of a fast car, the elemental pleasure of being behind the wheel.  

As it so happens, the first truly fast car I ever drove was my uncle's '65 Stingray.  Fuel injected 327, sky blue, gorgeous.  Dang, was that fun.

This is, I'll admit, a silly thing, but I know that were I to ever meet Biden, I'd have trouble ending the conversation.  Because God help me, I can blabber on about cars all day long.  Just ask my congregants.  So while I feel some lament about depriving Joe of that for the next four years, well...I can appreciate him.

On Planting a Poison Seed

Mainstream American Christianity is an odd thing these days.

It's changed over the course of my lifetime, as the dominant theology of our culture has transitioned.  The argument between the modernists and the fundamentalists has  been settled, with the winner being...neither of them.   American theology is now prosperity theology, the name-it-and-claim-it faith of tee vee Jesus preachers.  It's our semi-official state religion, as this administration has surrounded itself with the priesthood of Mammon, who know a good grift when they see one.

The heart of the prosperity gospel is remarkably simple:  Do what God asks, and you will be rewarded.  Plant a seed, and God will meet your need.  This means, in practice, that you're giving money to the aforementioned tee vee preachers, whose wealth and success clearly indicates the correctness of this theology.  How could my pastor possibly have a jet, if God did not favor my pastor?  Why would pastor have a 25,000 square foot mansion with its own international airport, if God did not favor pastor?  

Yeah.  I know.  But that's the schtick.

I've never bought in to that transactional approach to faith, not at all.  God's grace is poured out to us whether we merit it or not.  It's completely unrelated to how much treasure we dump into our particular franchise of AmeriChrist, Inc.  I also don't for a moment buy that wealth, material success and righteousness are linked.  The wicked can do quite well for themselves financially, and as a follower of Jesus, I know that suffering can come to the righteous.  It's that whole "cross" thing.  

Still, I can't ignore that there is a consistency and mechanistic predictability to prosperity preaching that appeals to millions.  We want to know that our actions and intentions create blessings in our lives.  We want to know that we can do things that will influence how God treats with us, and that we'll be rewarded for doing what is expected of us.  You always know where you stand with that God.

But there's a thing that I can't quite fathom, and it has to do with the logical extension of Prosperity theology.  If doing right by God with our lives and our treasure guarantees blessings and wealth and well-being, then the inverse should also be true.  If we are doing wrong by God, then we will be materially cursed.  If we are pouring our treasure and our energies into things that are an offense to our Maker, then...if the idea of prosperity preaching is true...we should expect to receive the dark reward of our blighted choices.

People or nations that plant poisonous seeds should expect a harvest of poison fruit.

Which gets us to the strange paradox of America right now.  Prosperity preachers are all in with our current national direction.  Their theology defines our national life.  Donald J. Trump is the Prosperity Gospel President.  

But...are we prospering?  Is everything going swimmingly?  

If you believe the theological reasoning of the preachers who now flutter around Trump's baleful light, there's a direct correlation between our choices and God's favor.  And Sweet Lord Jesus, unless you're dumber than a bag of particularly dumb rocks, you can't miss where we are right now in terms of God's favor.  No sane human being would say that we're in a time of God's blessing.

Things have gone to hell in a handbasket.  We're in the thick of a pandemic that seems to have no end, and in which more Americans have died than in the First World War.  We're economically crippled, with debt running wildly out of control.  The rifts of division in our culture are widening, and old wounds are re-opening.  The streets are filled with discord and tear gas.  Armed militias prowl our streets and threaten other citizens.  We've never been less respected by other nations, and never been more an object of pity to other nations. On top of that, there've been four years of freakishly intense weather.  Historic floods.  Wildfires obliterating entire communities.  Devastating storms have left coastal communities staggered, and left entire cities in ruins in the heartland.

If you believe that God favors the righteous nation with blessings, then open your eyes and look.

God. Is. Not. Favoring. Trump's. America.  

We're gettin' a taste of God's abundance right now, but what we Americans are getting is our butts abundantly kicked.  Not by the "subversives" and "leftists" who have always been the straw men of right wing despots, but by reality itself.  

By the standards of America's warped version of Christian faith, we have clearly offended God, and are reaping the whirlwind we have sown.

Is this my theology?  No.  It is not.

But it is the theology of a people who have confused lies, discord and failure with truth, harmony, and prosperity.