He’s Alive

I was once trapped in a hospital waiting room with a woman who insisted on telling me about all of her negative experiences with other pastors. The latest and gravest insult was the ending of a tradition she loved. The choir in her church had always sung Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus on Easter morning, but the church’s young new whippersnapper of a pastor had decreed that this year they would do something different.

To her, Easter was just not Easter without the “Hallelujah” chorus. It was as if Jesus could not get out of his tomb until he heard it. Presumably he remained tomb-bound until the following Easter, when tradition would surely re-assert itself and the choir again would sing Handel’s “Hallelujah.”

On this Easter morning, which is so unlike previous Easter mornings that we have shared, I want to ask you two questions.

First, what makes Easter Easter? Is there a tradition that makes or breaks Easter for you? Is there something you must do to properly celebrate the resurrection of Jesus?

Second, what do you do to keep Jesus stuck in his tomb? What do you do to keep the joy of resurrection life bottled up where it can’t affect the rest of your life?

Think of the many traditions we often observe at Easter. Which of these are necessary for you?

How about meeting face to face, in person, physically present to each other? I know that’s a big one, but if it’s necessary, then obviously what we’re doing right now is not acceptable. Online worship is just not the same thing as being together in the same space. But in these perilous times, it is for the best that we are not together physically.

What about a sanctuary made festive with white banners and Easter lilies? Not this year.

You can forget about a sunrise service, too.

What about singing some good ol’ Easter hymns? Sorry, only one hymn today. And when we’re not singing as a group, singing is an entirely different experience, isn’t it? Many of us rightfully cringe at hearing ourselves sing – especially if we’re wearing a face mask.

A stirring choral anthem? Only on our YouTube playlist.

The children’s Easter egg hunt with chocolate bunnies and candy eggs? Only if you hold it in your own backyard, for a limited number of kids.

A family feast featuring ham and all the popular side dishes? Maybe a feast, if you can afford one this year, but probably with fewer family members than usual, so probably not so festive.

Pastors and worship leaders also are fond of the Easter afternoon nap because it’s the first time in weeks that they can really relax. Anyone can participate; you don’t have to work in the church to get involved. It’s pleasant down time, but it’s hardly necessary.

We do a lot of things to celebrate the day, but none of these things make Easter Easter. Only one thing makes Easter Easter, and that is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If that didn’t happen, none of our traditions makes a bit of sense and some of them – like the Easter bunny – seem even more ridiculous than usual. And if it did happen, then none of our traditions come close to celebrating it properly.

If Jesus really was dead on Friday night and alive on Sunday morning, nothing before or after compares in significance to what happened in that tomb. It changes everything. And if it doesn’t, something is wrong.

Mark’s gospel gives the most spare account of the event, and the most mysterious, because it seemingly cuts off in the middle of the story. Having found the tomb empty and encountered a man in white – surely an angel – the women run from the tomb in terror and dread. They’re so frightened that they don’t tell anybody what they saw.

Well, obviously they do tell somebody, eventually, or we wouldn’t be here today. They return to the place where the other disciples of Jesus are hiding, and by that time their minds have cleared sufficiently that they can tell their story. And the male disciples don’t believe a word they say.

Even after a couple of the men run out to the tomb and see for themselves that it’s empty, nobody is quite sure what to make of it. It’s only when the risen Jesus starts appearing to people, very much alive, that realization starts to set in. It really has happened. Christ is risen!

That’s what makes Easter Easter. That’s the part we must never lose sight of. Jesus is risen. Nothing we do can add to the magnificence of this event. But a lot we do can detract from it.

If we fail to live out the resurrection in our own lives, it might for us never have happened. If it’s not a life-changing event, if we aren’t visibly different after we have patterned our lives around it, then it is like that proverbial tree that falls in the forest and no one hears. An earth-shattering event has occurred, and we have missed it.

Notice that I said we have to pattern our lives around this event. Normally, we think of incorporating an event into our lives. But that’s impossible here. The idea of a person coming back from the dead is so far out of our range of experience that it cannot be incorporated into our worldview. Our worldview has to change. We have to change. We have to adopt an entirely new way of thinking. We have to literally change the pattern that our lives are built around.

Tom Wright, the British theologian, says we have to learn to “think resurrectionally.” That’s a little awkward to say, but maybe it’s even more awkward to do.

If Jesus has been raised from the dead, you can be, too. That’s part of the personal payoff here. Many people call it heaven, though it’s actually more than that. It’s resurrection life, life to the fullest degree in all dimensions of time and space.

But enough about after you die. What about now? Can’t you experience resurrection life today? You’d better believe it! The Apostle Paul says that becoming a follower of Jesus is like dying and rising with him. (Romans 6.3-5, Colossians 2.12) Something happens, and we’re changed by that experience. We’re different people now. We’ve not reached a state where we love others perfectly, as God loves us. But maybe we’re getting closer day by day.

And maybe we feel the presence of Jesus with us, day by day. Jesus is not just some figure of ancient history. As the hymn says, he’s not bound to distant years in Palestine. He’s alive! He is with us right here and now. He is with us today as surely as he was with his disciples those many years ago. He is a living presence in us, and throughout the world.

Sadly, sometimes we who say we believe that fail utterly to behave as if we believed it. It’s all about loving. Jesus gives us precious few commands to live by. They coalesce around one command: Love one another.

If our actions fail to show love, Jesus has never risen for us. When our actions fail to show love, we shove Jesus back in his tomb and cement the door shut. There’s only one way to let him out of his tomb, and that’s to start loving the way he told us to and shows us how to do.

What does the love of Jesus demand of us? What’s the loving thing to do? Those are the key questions of our lives. Maybe they especially apply today, when we are in the grip of a global catastrophe. Some people want to use it to enrich themselves, either financially or politically. Some people want to find a way to help others. When you look at it that way, it’s not hard to tell the difference between those who think conventionally and those who “think resurrectionally.”

Two thousand years ago, God did a thing beyond our imagination. God raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus is alive today, and he does not observe any six-foot distancing rule. He’s close by each and every one of us. He’s able and eager to resurrect us, too. And he will, if we let him. If we let him out of the tomb we have built for him, he’ll let us out of the tomb we have built for ourselves.

This is a crisis moment. Thousands of people are dying of this virus every day. Even with all our prayers, Jesus is not going to swoop down and make it all go away. Jesus is looking at our response to the virus as well as our response to him.

I imagine him saying: Listen to the experts. Don’t be foolhardy and meet together right now. Don’t be spiritually haughty. Don’t test God. Only trust God. For certain, he says this: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have conquered the world!” (John 16.:33)

No pandemic can stop the flow of God’s grace to us. Nothing can keep Jesus in that tomb. Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death! On this Easter Sunday, we declare: Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed. Glory, hallelujah! Amen!

This message was delivered online on Easter, April 12, 2020, for Edgerton United Methodist Church. To find a video version, search Facebook for YouTube for the church’s channel.

Hosanna

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples ahead and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it.

“If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’ “

They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it.

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields.

Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

—————–

In churches, we often stage the Palm Sunday procession as a children’s parade – and what a joyful parade it can be! Children love waving palms and prancing around and being the center of attention, and we adults encourage them to wave those palms madly, if only because that relieves us from having to do it.

If it were a Chiefs or a Royals game, we’d be happy to wave some red or blue banner, but wave a leafy green plant in church?

One Palm Sunday I had a brief confrontation with a woman who sang in the choir. She refused to even hold a palm branch in her hand. It was so undignified, she said. I wanted to reply, “So Jesus dying on a cross was dignified?” Happily, I kept my mouth shut.

We want to make Palm Sunday a harmless children’s parade, but Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was neither harmless nor a children’s parade. It was a joyful but potentially dangerous political demonstration. It was one of those events that gets people clubbed down, gassed down, shot down with a water cannon, shot down with bullets, or ground down by any of the many brutal ways that oppressive rulers use to quash political demonstrations.

Jesus entered Jerusalem claiming to be the ruler of Israel, its king and its high priest, and because he made such an audacious claim, the secular and religious rulers conspired to kill him in the most public, most painful and most humiliating way they could imagine – by nailing him to a cross at a major intersection outside the city.

“This is the king of the Jews,” said the sign placed over his head.” Let this be an example to you.

Jesus is fully aware of the risk. Notice how carefully he stages this event. His twelve disciples – those closest to him – are clueless as to what’s happening, just as a few days later they are clueless when he takes them to a secret place to share the Passover meal.

Jesus wants both events to happen without a hitch, and he stages both events secretly. He works through people who are not widely known to be his followers. Why doesn’t he trust the twelve? Because he can’t trust them. He knows that one of them is a traitor, and if he tells any of them, the traitor may get wind of it and tip off the authorities ahead of time.

The donkey is the symbolic animal of Israel’s royal court. Other nations prefer their kings to ride a magnificent white horse. In Israel, the royal animal is a humble donkey. By riding a donkey into the Holy City on the eve of a major religious festival, Jesus proclaims himself king of Israel.

His idea of kingship is radically different from that of the authorities. He comes as the Prince of Peace. They think of power only in terms of brute force. Still, they are so stunned by his claim that it takes them five days to string him up.

We shout “Hosanna!” today because they shouted “Hosanna!” then, but what do we mean by it, and what did they mean by it? “Hosanna” is a cry of joy and a cry for help. It literally means “Save us!”

So when they shout “Hosanna” while Jesus is proclaiming himself king, the people are both accepting and acclaiming him as their king and asking him to save them, to be their liberator, their savior, those lord and master.

Some historians argue that by the time of Jesus, “Hosanna” had lost its original meaning. It no longer meant, “Save us,” they say. It was more like our modern shout of “Hooray.”

I don’t buy it. Even when we don’t know the precise historical meaning of “Hosanna,” don’t we really know, as if by some kind of deep instinct that reaches through differences of time and culture, what it means? When we shout “Hosanna,” aren’t we asking Jesus to save us?

We sure do need somebody to save us, don’t we?

Our nation is divided politically and culturally, and as we approach a major election to determine our future, we are hunkered down in our homes trying to wait out a deadly virus that is likely to kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people around the world, that has already infected or killed some people we know and strikes fear in all our hearts.

We are afraid for our personal safety, and for the safety of loved ones, and for the safety of our beloved institutions and life patterns and habits and hopes.

What does Palm Sunday have to do with this?

First, let me note that it’s not just Palm Sunday. For quite a few years now, it’s been Palm & Passion Sunday because too often we want to emphasize the positive nature of the day and ignore the pain that follows. But we just can’t do that and fully appreciate the joy of next Sunday, when God refuses to take the “No” of the cross for our answer and brings Jesus back to life.

Between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday is a deep passion we cannot ignore. We can’t skip over it or edge around it. We have to live through it with Jesus. We have to share the pain of his betrayal and humiliation. And we have to know that he did it all for us.

If we had been there shouting “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday, we might just as well have been there on Good Friday shouting, “Crucify him!” We’re all guilty of failing to love others the way Jesus loves us. Jesus dies because of our failure to love. All our sins arise from a failure to love, and Jesus dies for our sins.

“Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus says, “that he lays down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13).

Throughout Lent we’ve been studying the book Reckless Love by Tom Berlin. In his final chapter, he talks about emulating Jesus. That doesn’t necessarily mean challenging the authorities the way Jesus did. It does mean loving others the way Jesus did and does. In all situations, we ask ourselves, what does Jesus’ rule of love tell us to do? What does love demand of us? What is the loving thing to do at this moment?

Sometimes loving others can lead to great suffering. Sometimes it leads to a cross. In this next week, as we meditate on the last days of Jesus, I ask you to think not only about the suffering that Jesus endures but also why our failure to love others makes that suffering inevitable, and how emulating Jesus also can be our path through suffering to Resurrection.

Amen.

This message was delivered April 5, 2020, Palm & Passion Sunday, via Facebook Live to members of Edgerton United Methodist Church and others who might find it.

Reckless Love – 5 – Value the Vulnerable

Our first reading today is sort of the anthem text for the study we’re doing for Lent. That is the book Reckless Love by Tom Berlin. The reading comes from Luke 10:25-29.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Our next readings are from Matthew chapter 23, where Jesus rails against his foes in the religious establishment. First verse 13, then verses 23 to 24.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.”

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. “You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!”

This week’s chapter in Tom Berlin’s book is titled “Value the vulnerable.”

I find that notion especially relevant in these perilous times of a raging pandemic, when those people in our society who are always the most vulnerable are now critically vulnerable, and yet some politicians appear eager to write them off as expendable, so we can “get back to business” as quickly as possible.

Who is my neighbor whom I have to love? That’s the question the lawyer asks Jesus in the story from Luke. Jesus responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. There are many possible takeaways from that story. Surely one of them is that your neighbor is anyone you encounter who is in need.

Tom Berlin notes that one of the easiest ways to make this commandment manageable is to identify large groups of people to whom it does not apply.

The fewer people we have to love, the easier it is to do. The lawyer is hoping that Jesus will post some limits here. Perhaps he’ll say, “No, you don’t have to love those people; you only have to love these.”

And of course those people will be the ones you most want to hate and exclude, and these are the ones you most admire and want to include.

Jesus could have made it a lot easier if he’d given us some clever rules for how to work this out: who we could hate without feeling guilty, who we could refuse to associate with because they’re the wrong kind of people, and so on.

I once knew a guy who thought he had pretty much everything figured out, especially spiritual things. He was always saying, “Judge a person by the company he keeps.”

There are a lot of problems with that statement, among them that by this criterion, Jesus was a dismal failure. Jesus kept bad company. He associated with the down and out, the poor and those without hope, sinners and reprobates. He valued the most vulnerable people around him, if only because practically no one else did.

W.C. Fields was a great comedian from the early days of radio and film. He was known for hard drinking and riotous living. One day one of his friends found him studying a Bible. “What in the world are you doing?” the friend asked. Fields said: “Looking for loopholes, looking for loopholes.”

Of all the texts in the Bible that we’d like to avoid, this love commandment from Jesus is the one we’re most afraid of. When it comes to loving people we’d rather not even think about, we’re all looking for loopholes.

Really, Jesus? You expect me to love them? You gotta be kidding!

Jesus blasted the religious leaders of his day. Rather than inviting people to love God, they drove people away. They acted like gatekeepers locking people out rather than door openers inviting people in. Maybe even worse, having kept others out of God’s kingdom, they never went in themselves.

Blind guides! They followed the tiniest rules, Jesus said. They even offered God a tenth portion of the mint and other spices they grew in their home gardens. But they ignored what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law.” These matters are justice, and mercy, and faith.

These are matters of the heart. These are matters of loving others as God wants us to love them. It’s so much easier to do the flashy stuff that shows everyone how religious we are.

The scribes and Pharisees may have been “religious,” but they were not loving. And the full testimony of Jesus and the prophets before him is that God cares not one bit for your religious piety if your actions are not motivated by love and expressed by active love to others.

If religion is only a matter of looking holy on Sunday mornings, it’s not worth squat. If religion is not something you live out every day of your life, it’s worthless. In Philippians 3:8, the Apostle Paul describes such religion as “trash.” At least, that’s how the word is often translated. In the original Greek, the word he uses is much more colorful and coarse.

Think for a moment of who might be the most vulnerable today, when a deadly virus is sweeping the planet.

People who are older and have existing health conditions are most vulnerable to getting the disease.

People who were barely hanging on before this crisis and now don’t know where their next meal will come from.

People who have lost income or their jobs because so many businesses are shutting down.

Health care workers who are working, literally on the front lines, to save those who are infected and to keep others from becoming infected.

Those “essential employees” who are working longer hours with fewer and fewer workers beside them to keep certain operations running.

The clerks in your local grocery who are nearly exhausted after working so many days overtime to keep the shelves stocked with food and other supplies – yes, including toilet paper, if folks would stop hoarding it.

Pray for these vulnerable people. We need them, and they need our support.

There are those, of course, who are looking for loopholes.

There are those non-essential businesses that refuse to close because they think they’re somehow exempt from the rules that govern everyone else. There are those churches who think they are so holy that germs won’t get to them.

There are those politicians, such as that clown in Florida, who think we should ignore health experts and return to business as usual – and, hey, if we lose a few hundred thousand old folks along the way, somebody has to make sacrifices, right? Somebody – as long as it’s not me.

What’s the right thing to do to love those who are most vulnerable? Is it to lift restrictions and let people interact freely, and hope the virus will just go away? Or is it to continue to follow the guidelines of health professionals and stay away from each other for awhile longer? What is the just and merciful and faithful response here?

Friends, I am not going to risk your lives by parading my piety and pretending to be faithful while I am not doing the right thing.

Next Sunday is Palm & Passion Sunday, the doorway to Holy Week. The doors of our church building will remain closed. We’ll again worship online. Sometime during Holy Week, probably on Good Friday, we’ll offer a special time of worship, perhaps in a way that is more interactive than simply you listening to me talk.

On Easter Sunday, we’ll offer a unique worship experience, but it also will be online. We’ll celebrate together soon – not soon enough, but only when the time is right for us to gather safely.

Pray that the time will be right soon. Pray that God protects the most vulnerable among us – and give us the strength to do the same. Continue to love one another by keeping a certain physical distance – not a social distance, but a physical distance. It’s the best we can do in this dangerous time.

Amen.

This message was delivered March 29, 2020, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, via FaceBook Live.

Reckless Love – 4 – Openhearted Love

This is the Apostle Paul writing to the church at Corinth, carried down to us in a document known as 2 Corinthians 5:16-20. Paul writes:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view. Even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new!

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

———————–

If you joined us for our Ash Wednesday worship, you heard part of this passage then. That was three and a half weeks ago. Hard to believe this is the fourth Sunday of Lent. Our world and our lives have changed so fast.

Change is what this passage from Paul is all about. Change is also what the fourth chapter of Tom Berlin’s book is all about – and, of course, what Lent is all about.

The book is titled Reckless Love. That title seemed outlandish enough a few weeks ago. In these days when we’re all practicing “an abundance of caution” to stop the spread of a deadly virus, it seems foolhardy, even dangerous, to speak of loving recklessly.

Yet that’s what Tom Berlin says we must do if we are to love the way God loves us and wants us to love as well. To love God’s way, Berlin says, we need to learn “openhearted” love, love that is open to encounters with others, knowing that those encounters could change us in profound ways.

I think that’s exactly what Paul means when he says that “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.” Rather we now, regard everyone from God’s point of view.

From a human point of view, we are divided into warring camps. It’s liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat, pro-Trump versus anti-Trump, straight versus gay, black versus white, male versus female, young versus old – on and on, ad nauseum.

Seems like some people just gotta have somebody to hate. Hey, if you don’t hate the right people, we’ll tell you who should hate, and then you’ll be just like us and not like them – and isn’t this what life is all about? No! That attitude sums up the human point of view that Paul says we’re supposed to put behind us.

There’s a string of “therefores” in this part of Paul’s letter, and each “therefore” points back to Christ. Knowing Christ is supposed to change us. We’re supposed to love God’s way now. That’s agape love, love without reason, love without hope of reward, love inspired by God’s love for us.

God’s love makes us different people. At least, it’s supposed to. Tom Berlin says most of us were perfectly happy with the way we were until we met Jesus, and sometimes we’re not so sure about the outcome of that encounter, because meeting Jesus sure did change us.

In fact, there ought to be a huge difference between the way we were Pre-Jesus and the way we are Post-Jesus. If there isn’t, maybe we really haven’t been following Jesus. Maybe we’ve been following an imposter.

You have to wonder, considering how much hate there is in some churches these days, who some folks are following. Seems like some are still following Jesus from what Paul calls “a human point of view.”

We don’t want to know Jesus that way. We see him as our Savior, our Deliverer, our Lord and our God – and, oh yes, the one who commands us to love one another.

Tom Berlin notes that Jesus does not suggest that we love our neighbors. He commands it. He’s not even polite about it. He just says “do it.” And if we do it, if we are truly “in Christ,” as Paul puts it, we will love openheartedly because we are a new creation.

Everything has become new. Most of all, we have become new. We just aren’t the same people we once were. God’s openhearted love has liberated us to love openheartedly.

So how do we live with an open heart in a time of social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine and great suspicion, if not fear, of the other? First, of course, you have to open yourself to the other. You have to open your heart and your mind.

A common division in our society is that of race.

If you were a young black male, it would be commonplace for you to be walking down the street and see a white woman walking toward you, but before she gets near, she walks across the street to avoid passing close to you.

That action, and others like it, may stem from conscious racism.

Or it might be a bodily response that has become so ingrained in her that she isn’t even aware of it. It’s unconscious. She does it without thinking. Call her on her behavior, and she might not recall that she did anything out of the ordinary. In fact, she did not do anything out of the ordinary. But it being ordinary doesn’t make it right.

Such attitudes are very difficult to change because it’s hard to find their source. Bigotry is a twisted form of self love. It is buried deep within the heart, and it can be rooted out only by an experience that turns the heart from fearful to accepting.

Jesus offers us such an experience – probably many of them, in fact.

When we follow Jesus, we seem to be always finding ourselves in human interactions that stretch us, that agitate us, that shake us all up. Jesus once suggested that following him requires us to live like new wineskins that will expand as the new life within us ferments. By contrast, if we behave like old wineskins, the fermenting new wine will cause us to explode.

But we are new wineskins – new creations, as Paul says. With hearts and minds renewed through the love of Christ and through more open contact with others, our actions can be transformed.

We can choose love as a way of life. We can make love a habit of the heart that expresses itself in everything we do. Only then can we join God’s ministry of reconciliation and be ambassadors for Christ, entreating others to be reconciled to God, as we ourselves have been.

It’s hard to feel like a good ambassador when we’re supposed to gather in groups no larger than 10 and stay 6 feet apart.

But maybe we can use this time of imposed isolation to prepare ourselves for those days ahead when we can interact freely with others. Maybe Lent is the perfect time for each of us to be forced to stay away from others while we get our acts together spiritually and relationally.

Maybe Lent should last as long as it takes for us to decide to set our prejudices aside and step forward to new life with an open heart. Maybe then, when we hear the bells proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus, each of us can proclaim, “I am risen with him!”

May it be so with each and every one of us!

This message was delivered March 22, 2020, the fourth Sunday of Lent, via FaceBook Live.

Going Viral

Nothing like a pandemic to bring out the crazies.

Naturally, they reflect the fractures in our culture.

“The best way to love our neighbors is to do so from a distance right now,” says one Episcopal priest. Yup.

“We feel we are being persecuted for the faith by being told to close our doors,” says the pastor of a church in Baton Rouge.

Really? When all large gatherings are discouraged, you do you really think you’re being singled out? Of have you just run out of other things to whine about?

“I’ve got news for you: This church will never close,” says a pastor in Florida. “The only time the church will close is when the Rapture is taking place.”

I’ve got news for you, pastor: The Rapture is a theological fiction, and your phony bravado does you and your church no credit. How many people will you expose by never closing?

Jerry Falwell Jr. speculates that the virus is the work of North Korea. Evidence for this claim? None.

But to seal his reputation as a false prophet, he says: “I just think it’s silly to be wringing your hands and worrying about something like this…”

That’s essentially been the response of Missouri Gov. Mike Parson. A good ol’ boy Republican, he refuses to take action because his philosophy of government will not allow government to be a force for good.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly is criticized by GOP legislators for acting too aggressively. She’s a Democrat, after all. She could be planning to take away their guns or impose a dictatorship or something.

Trump insists on calling this the “Chinese virus.” He insists this isn’t racist, though it is, thoroughly and calculatedly. He’s playing to the bigotry and ignorance of his base.

Take the clown in government in Riley County, Kansas, who says the virus won’t be a problem there because they’re aren’t a lot of Chinese people living there. That just doesn’t make sense any way you look at it.

Some say it’s not racist to call it a “Chinese virus.” After all, we called earlier epidemics the Hong Kong Flu, the Spanish Flu, and the like. And those weren’t tinged with racism?

The Chinese, for their part, insist that the virus was introduced to their country by Americans. Iranians say the same. Both have governments that can’t be trusted.

The Chinese government bungled its handling of the virus at first, allowing it to spread like wildfire, to change the metaphor. Trump’s response has been remarkably similar. That should not be a surprise because Trump and Xi both work from the same authoritarian playbook and will not listen to experts on any issue. We’ll see if Trump can lie his way out of this one.

At any rate, health experts say testing for the virus is no longer necessary in most areas. We have already failed to contain it. It’s everywhere now.

Worst-case scenario: 1 million or so deaths in the U.S. Pray that the right people are allowed to make the right decisions to keep it from getting that bad.

As for those who continue to downplay the threat, and insist that they always took it seriously when clearly they did not, never believe a word they say about anything ever again. Never. Not one word.