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.

More on Lent…

       More thoughts on Lent, including a clarification:

       To clarify: I am not categorically against the idea of “giving up” something for Lent.

       Especially for young people or relatively new Christians, giving up soda pop or chocolate or Facebook or something similar may be entirely appropriate as a teaching and learning experience.

       It’s just that after awhile you need to move beyond that.

       In more mature Christians especially, I think you need to think more strategically about what you’re giving up. You want to shun those things that distance you from God and move toward those things that bring you closer.

       In that vein, Linda and I are both embracing a more positive approach to Lent this year.

       Following a hint from Nadia Bolz-Weber, Linda is celebrating all the people and experiences that bring her joy.

       Following a hint from Ginger Rothaas, I am celebrating all the people and things I love.

       We’re both recording these things as they occur to us in a Lenten journal.

       Ginger’s suggestion is to record one love for each year of your life. Following that pattern, I need to record 77 loves – and maybe one more because I’ll be a year older in another month.

       So far I’ve got 11. Rather than listing each person individually, I’ve grouped them as Immediate Family, Extended Family, Church Family, Good Neighbors, and so on. Maybe if I run out of ideas in a few weeks, I’ll celebrate people one by one by name.

       Anyway, that’s what we mean by marking a positive Lent rather than a negative one. If repentance really means setting new directions, then careful consideration of all the loves and joys of your life is surely the start of a new direction.

       What do you think? Am I avoiding the issue here, or getting closer to it?

*   *   *   *   *

       In a recent blog on forgiveness, slightly renegade Anglican Bishop Todd Hunter recalls an encounter that has helped him understand the importance of forgiving.

       He writes:

        “In a conference setting I cannot remember, a young man came up to Dallas Willard seeking forgiveness for an unkind, unfair comment he had made against him. Dallas always had a warm, welcoming presence about him, but in this moment his eyes softened even more. The gentleness of Dallas’ face, the peace exuding from his body language, signaled no retaliation or rejection was about to happen.

        “Instead, with a tone full of love, Dallas simply said, ‘Thank you—but don’t give it another thought on my account. You are off the hook. You are free.’ ”

       I find the language intriguing. “You are off the hook. You are free.”

       The expression derives from fishing, of course. When you release a fish, or it evades the hook on its own, it is no longer captive. It is free.

       When you forgive someone, you let them off the hook. You set them free. You also set yourself free, if you were harboring any resentment against them.

       According to various dictionary renderings, getting off the hook means escaping from a difficult situation, escaping from an obligation, or escaping the consequences of an action or a punishment that you deserve because of an action.

       And isn’t that what Jesus has done for us? Hasn’t he let us off the hook for our sins for our many failures to love God and others as we love ourselves? Hasn’t he freed us from some of the consequences of our actions?

       And, depending on how you want to interpret this, hasn’t he placed himself on the hook for us?

       To think of it that way, you don’t have to subscribe to the awful doctrine known as Penal Substitutional Atonement. You just have to know that Jesus has let you off the hook and set you free. That’s enough in my book.

Have a happy Lent!