I Wanna Be a Contender

I have a new ambition. I want to be a high Republican official – a legislator or governor or attorney general.

What a great gig! You can lie freely, and your “base” will lap it up.

You can twist information to your heart’s content, and nobody outside of those nasty media folks and a few Democrats will ever question your newfound “facts.”

People will applaud when you claim that the Jan. 6 coup attempt was just a stroll across the lawn.

People will cheer when you compare mask mandates to Nazi oppression.

“Go, go, go!” people will chant when you want to ban books that may offend somebody you want to vote for you.

Bucketloads of money will flow your way when you say Trump won.

You can do anything you want and say anything you want, and nobody gives a fig because you are a Republican, God’s gift to the future of the planet – hell, God’s gift to the whole solar system.

Move over, Ted Cruz.

Give me room, Roger Marshall.

Shut up and learn, Josh Hawley.

Look in your rear-view mirror, all you clowns in the Missouri capitol – and this means you, Parson and Schmitt.

Duck, you suckers in the Kansas crowd – far too many to mention.

Look out, Abbott and Costello (I mean, DeSantis)! I’m coming your way!

So that’s my new ambition. I want to be another scum-sucking liar who’s proud to hang my hat under the GOP banner.

Sorry, all you Republicans who remember when your party stood for honesty and genuine patriotism and all those other quaint notions. Your day is done. This is the new GOP. Get your brown shirt now before the price goes even higher.

A Fourth Deadly Virus

It has become almost commonplace to suggest that there are two viruses in our midst – the coronavirus and the virus of racism.

In a sermon series I did in June 2020, I suggested that three viruses are ravaging American society today – the coronavirus, racism, and authoritarianism. The latter, of course, is most keenly represented by presidential poseur Donald Trump and others who follow in his footsteps.

Now I am ready to add a fourth. Call it a variant of the other three. Call it, as others have, an “infodemic.” It is an epidemic of misinformation. So much of it now concerns vaccination and masks and the “freedom” that some claim to expose others to the virus with no sense of personal responsibility.

The Republican party has become a master of misinformation on almost all fronts. I certainly would not call all Republican legislators liars, but when you consider the likes of Hawley and Cruz and DeSantis and McConnell and so many others, it becomes difficult not to paint with a broad brush.

No, we can’t talk about race because that’s “critical race theory.” No, we can’t investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection because that might expose traitors in high places. Yes, we believe in individual freedom when it comes to masks, but not when it comes to reproductive rights.

Yes, we believe in local control, unless it conflicts with mandates from Republican-controlled state legislatures. Yes, we believe in free elections, as long as Republicans draw the district lines and enact rules that keep minority (but soon to be majority) folk from casting a ballot.

There used to be a thing called truth, around which we could unify. Then along came Trump and the concept of “alternative facts,” meaning self-serving lies. And downhill we have gone.

We are in a volatile moment in our country’s history, maybe in human history as well. This is a moral crisis. We need a moral revival. What we need, the Rev. William Barber Jr. says, is a moral revolution. It will not come from liars and poseurs.

We need leaders who will unify us, not divide us. We need leaders who seek not to dominate but to persuade; leaders who want to make peace, not war; leaders who stand with the oppressed, not the oppressor; leaders who are humble, not proud; leaders who thirst and hunger for righteousness; leaders who understand that the source of real strength is not the knee you press on someone’s neck. No, real power resides in your alliance with the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Look it up, as the loony conspiracy theorists say. Start with Acts 17:28 and Revelation 4:11. Only the truth will set us free from these four raging epidemics.

An Anti-Anti Manifesto

Contrary to popular superstition, the pandemic is not a hoax. It is very real, and it is far more dangerous than you think it is.

Contrary to popular superstition, vaccines help prevent you from getting the virus.

Contrary to popular superstition, masks help prevent you and others from infecting one another.

Contrary to popular superstition, children are almost as likely as adults to get new strains of the virus.

If you don’t want to be vaccinated, you are welcome to have a nice death. But have the common courtesy not to take others with you. Stay home. You are not fit for human society.

If you don’t want to wear a mask, enjoy your “personal freedom” not to wear one – at home. Don’t go out in public. You are not fit for human society.

If you come down with the virus, don’t go to your doctor or the hospital. Why should you put your life in the hands of people you scorn when they tell you to get vaccinated and wear a mask?

If you don’t want your children to wear a mask at school, don’t send them to public or private schools where they might encounter other children. Homeschool them. Or keep them at home without schooling them, so that they will grow up as ignorant as you are.

If you think your rights are being violated, consider the rights of others not to be contaminated by you. Your right to breathe freely in public ends the moment your breath touches another person.

If you think the inconvenience of getting a shot or wearing a mask is too much to ask of you, don’t bother wondering what great thing you can do for your country. You’re just not up to the task.

A Christlike Reading

I became aware of Bradley Jersak’s work less then a year ago, but how I wish I’d discovered him earlier! He makes Christianity feel alive again by returning to our origins and tracing how we’ve departed from them, especially how far we’ve drifted from vital readings of scripture.

His latest book is A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way. It’s part of a trilogy that includes A More Christlike God, and A More Christlike Way.

If you noticed the repetition of the word Christlike in the titles, you’ve found the secret to Jersak’s method. In Christlike Word, he says: “The emphasis of this book … is that Jesus is the Word of God and the Christian Scriptures faithfully testify to him.”

“The Bible an epic story of God’s love,“ shown most clearly in Jesus, he says. Reading it the Emmaus way follows the way Jesus himself modeled interpretation of scripture, as when he outlined it two to the two travelers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:25-27).

“An Emmaus hermeneutic, in which one reads the Hebrew Scriptures through the gospel lens of Christ, is our primary precondition for reading Scripture,” he states. One implication is that you don’t read Jesus through the lens of the Bible but rather you read the Bible through the lens of Jesus.

That sounds circular, and it surely can be, but it can save you from biblicism and biblioatry. You’re not imposing some fanciful notion of what the Bible is onto the gospel. Rather, you are using the gospel, the Good News of God, to interpret the Bible, from front to back.

If you read something that doesn’t sound like Jesus, you have reason to believe that either you or the author of the passage has misunderstood or misrepresented what God said or meant. “When a passage describes un-Christlike images of God, we must not read them literalistically, because attributing moral darkness to God’s nature or deeds is not worthy of God.”

Again, “The biblical use of words such as anger, wrath, and fury are passions that, when literalized, replace the one true God with an idol and commit a monstrous blasphemy”

You must always read a passage for its literal meaning but be careful about interpreting it literally. Jersak says: “the literal sense is essential to my reading of the Bible. But I believe that literalism and its handmaid, inerrancy, sprout from modernist ideology. Claiming a high view of Scripture, literalism actually undermines biblical authority by pre-imposing on the text a standard of sterile uniformity.”

“The Holy Spirit breathed truth through the authors of Scripture via both ancient worldviews and now-archaic descriptions. This does not make what they said untrue” unless “you force their descriptions to be read literally.”

If you are chained to a literal understanding of the Bible and wonder why it varies so much with the Jesus of the gospel story, now you have an answer to your questions and an avenue for further explanations of gospel truth rather than the fictions of pop religion.

The more you let Jersak’s thesis steep in your mind, the more you will be convinced of its truthfulness, and move closer to the Living Word, who is Jesus Christ.

________

Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike Word: Reading scripture the Emmaus Way (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2021)

________

A digital copy of this book was provided to me by Speakeasy on the condition that I post a review of it.

Have a Cuppa

Today’s post from Ginger at CompassionFix.com was too good not to share. She writes:

What is getting your Time, Energy, and Attention right now?

TEA is a helpful acronym to remember to help you stay in alignment with your priorities, values, and goals.

It is also a helpful tool as an energy barometer – if your energy is low, consider what you are giving your time, energy, and attention … then make some adjustments.

We get to choose and control where we spend our time, share our energy, and give our attention.

Decide with whom and on what you will share your precious TEA.

That’s all. That’s great! Have a cuppa on me.