Category Archives: Life as the church

Empathy: Love in the crossfire of political warfare

Doing Theology, Psychological growth, , , , , , ,

While I was ignoring podcasts, a rebellion against empathy was bubbling in them. Post-WW2, Eurocentric, therapeutic moralism was under attack! I was not completely ignorant of these rumblings, since Rush Limbaugh was like a non-resident member of my Central PA Church, and Trump has been getting away with various forms of grabbing for years. But I was still shocked when Elon Musk, who does not lie and dissemble as well as Donald Trump, parroted a line of reasoning that seems to be taking hold.

Elon on Joe Rogan

Musk spoke out on the Joe Rogan Experience. Young men who listen to Rogan, among others, are being taught they are fearful empathy-robots who will lose their country if they don’t grow a pair. I thought that must be an out-of-context exaggeration when I heard about it. But then I found a person who makes transcripts of Joe Rogan episodes (!). I had already reacted on hearsay when I wrote my congressman. Then I found out he actually taught it!

Since I work on connecting to people empathetically all day and hope they feel safe enough to explore who they are and who they want to be, I was understandably alarmed. So I wrote the 20 congresspeople on my list, as follows:

Elon Musk got on the anti-empathy bandwagon with Joe Rogan last week. In his own autistic way, he justified why he cares more for humanity (which he thinks Tesla and SpaceX will save) than for the people right next to him. This is consistent with his neurodivergence. He thinks his heartless capitalism will save us from overspending our love on nonsense – and he will decide what is nonsense.

He said, “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.” He slightly qualified that with “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide.” After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, he claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.” In truth, empathy is a “bug” that threatens his lust for power. He needs our resentments to outweigh our regard for other people, and ourselves.

Senator, please help us oppose him. Help us focus on our connectedness and our shared regard for the people being harmed by DOGE, Musk, and Trump. Please keep this administration’s victims front and center in your narrative. Uplift the stories of people whose lives are being lost, endangered or undone. Please help us build a narrative around our shared humanity, rather than grounding our politics in contempt. Form a more perfect union. “Love as I have loved you” is not the downfall of civilization.

I hadn’t explored the Rogan podcast yet, or I might have mentioned that Musk goes on in the conversation to lament if he walked the streets of San Francisco in his MAGA hat, he would get harassed and maybe beat up. I thought, “Oh, so you would like some empathy instead of being bullied!” He yearns for empathy as those empty of it usually do.

The anti-empathy movement

I missed the anti-empathy movement as it was percolating. But it was prevalent enough for Paul Bloom to write a book about it and get a review stored by the NIH. In the review, Trevor Thompson checks out the binary argument the author conducts, beginning with his title: Against Empathy. The Case for Rational Compassion. The book takes a strong line against empathy, arguing that it is not only not useful, but positively detrimental to human progress. Bloom says empathy leads to biased, shorted-sighted, and practically useless action. What Musk might call “civilizational suicide.”

Bloom is working with a reduced definition of a very large and varied human experience. We are all wired for empathy and express it on a broad spectrum. Even autistic people experience empathy on all sorts of levels and have all sorts of neurodivergent struggles with it, in just a different way than neurotypical people do. Yet Bloom says empathy is merely the “act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.” — as if it were just Bill Clinton performing “I feel your pain.” He seems to think most people are just unconsidered reactions to their mirror neurons — irrationally sending useless children’s gifts to the scenes of mass shootings.

Simplistic and debatable, but gives a whole picture

Researchers also name “cognitive empathy,” which Musk could have called “rational compassion.” The label states the obvious: we don’t just feel empathy, we think about it, too. People can react with any of their faculties to the empathy they feel, and generally do. When we feel the pain of another, we may also understand their experience, or respond viscerally, automatically to it, or care about it. Or we may metabolize the pain spiritually and suffer it. We might ignore it or mock it. No one is a robot (yet).

There is a noisy, Christianity-claiming faction with a lust for power dominating the government. Members of it are mounting an argument that love – especially love for strangers – is a distraction, the Bible notwithstanding.

The bandwagon seems to be bulging with new adherents. Last year Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian podcaster wrote a popular book called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Lately, Joe Rigney, a Minnesota pastor and theologian, published The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits (for which, he laments, he gets no empathy). He  redefines empathy as self-immolation: “If someone’s drowning, empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away. Empathy jumps in. Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore.”

Of course people do foolish things and get exploited. Their empathy might make them a sitting duck for people like Elon Musk if they stop mentalizing. But I think most of us know that humans created civilization with empathy. It is one of our most basic and best instincts. We can be trusted to work out the daily decisions we have to make about it and not get killed. It is not always that easy, since the U.S. government has relied on empathy to get Marines to kill and sacrifice themselves. Even if we don’t want to protect loved ones from “the enemy,” the soldiers want to take care of their comrades in the unit, who pulse together like a common set of neurons.

Jesus will not destroy civilization

When Elon Musk gets ahold of empathy, you know it is being used for something except empathy. He’s not pondering how to best help people or how to alleviate suffering. He’s hard at work finding ways to de-prioritize alleviating that suffering – all the while assuring us he is rooting out the waste in the budget, saving those hard-earned dollars previously thrown away on people who don’t deserve help or should help themselves or might be trans. He’s muting the voices of the dispossessed — it has always been a slave economy, after all. Musk notwithstanding, I find hope in the fact that few people, including the Pope – would accept that the interests of power should be prioritized and the least powerful forgotten.

Jesus does not forget the powerless. Here is a bit of what the Bible actually says about empathy:

  • “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
  • “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17)
  • “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
  • “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered” (Proverbs 21:13).
  • Jesus wept (Luke 19:41).

In building his robots and longing for Mars, has Musk forgotten what it is to be human? Has he forgotten that history shows how empathy knits societies together? Has he missed how empathy leads people to volunteer, which then boosts their mental health? Hasn’t he heard that kids who have low empathy are more likely to bully?

Have all these bullies missed learning what happens when we ignore pain and mute the cries of the suffering? Maybe. It happens.

Any post featuring Elon Musk gravitates toward Nazis. So let me end with this warning. Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book about it. He said, after all his work examining the psyches of those who committed the most horrendous acts of World War II, he had come close to finding a definition of the nature of evil: “It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants,” he said, “a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

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Today is Patrick of Ireland Day! Get to know him better at The Transhistorical Body.

It’s a replay of Belshazzar’s feast of the billionaires

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Spiritual direction, The Mission, , , , , ,

The feast of the billionaires is playing on our screens day after day. It is an age-old story:

King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them.  While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone. (Daniel 5:1-4)

Didn’t we just have a present-day version of Belshazzar’s feast playing out in the TV series Billions for seven(!) seasons? I think so. I even watched a couple of the sordid seasons.

One of the series creators, Brian Koppelman, talked to the Hollywood Reporter about the series finale in 2023. The interviewer wondered if the ending were not a strangely happy one for rather dark story. While the main character took a real hit, most of the players ended up a lot richer. Koppelman explained:

Any director, any actor, writer, any cinematographer and editor. We would always say: The thing you need to understand about these people is they only feel alive, or the most alive, when they’re engaged in battles that to them feel existential and very difficult. So it’s funny, that when you say “happy,” I understand what you mean by “happy,” in that it’s not tragic. But if you think about it, Bobby Axelrod ends at a table, and all he’s really learned, after all the time he’s been behind his desk, as he looks at the hungry faces of the pigeons that want to get fed, he says, “Let’s make some fucking money.”

Bobby has no doubt he can make it all back. It is what he does. Don’t you suspect that same story, with the same assumption, is being played out in the U.S. government’s executive branch right now? For example, Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world, now mucking around in our data –if he loses 100 billion in the pursuit of absolute power, don’t you think he assumes he can make it back? It is what he does.

While there are undoubtedly some ideologues in our government presently, and some religious people, too, it is mostly a feast of the billionaires we are witnessing. They were hungry to get to the table and do something, to engage in a battle that feels existential and very difficult. They yearn to have a battle.  They have “praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone” which are the money-making machines of their own design. But their gods demand more and they demand more of their gods. It’s an old story.

But the handwriting is on the wall

You know you’ve told a good story when the most dramatic part becomes iconic. Like Rhett saying, “Frankly my darling, I don’t give a damn.” Or Captain Kirk saying “Beam me up Scotty” (which he never actually said, exactly). Or, in my house, the Wicked Witch saying, “What a world! What a world!” In the story of Belshazzar and Daniel, which is full of iconic images, a main one is this strange hand:

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking. (Daniel 5:5-6)

I think we have to admit that the men at the U.S. billionaires feast might ignore a human hand writing on a wall. They are drenched in A.I. after all, and own it. And they are surrounded by deceivers, so their senses are probably a bit blunted. They are also, generally, bullies, so they are used to making someone else’s knees knock.

I think they will need something else to get the message. I hope what they get is about 50 million human feet on the streets and 100 million boycotters to relentlessly deliver it. We really need that to happen before there are a thousand dead children, millions of lost jobs and a world thrown into meltdown because of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions.

No one can read it.

The way Christians and most people use the phrase: “the handwriting is on the wall,” is to lament how someone got the word, how the truth was out there for anyone to see, how the circumstances were telling them the obvious, but they could not read it. They could not understand the language of truth. Or as Jesus might say, “They did not have eyes to see.”

My parents would use the phrase to predict dire things to come. They would see me acting out and warn, “It this keeps up…Well, the handwriting’s on the wall.” I think that’s a direct quote. I did not know what was coming, and my knees knocked a few times. “We’re not stupid, but you might be,” was the gist.

Belshazzar summons his “enchanters, astrologers and diviners” (Daniel 5:7-8) to figure out the mysterious message the hand has written. None of them can figure it out. Trump summons Steve Bannon, Paula White, the latest far right TV media personality or whoever wrote Project 2025 and none of them can read the handwriting on the wall.

In our case, our feast of billionaires (maybe that is what one calls a herd of them) not only don’t procure eyes to see, they famously “double down” on their lies, their invisible ink. After Trump got skewered for saying he could imagine Gaza as another Riviera he posted this video on Truth Social:

His doubling down on lies was countered by SNL:

It may end badly for the billionaires

Belshazzar’s wife hears about what is going on and reminds him there is an actual wise man in the empire who interpreted a dream for his dad. They go find Daniel and the king tells the seer what is going on.

Daniel finds it easy to tell him the truth. First he tells him the story of his father, who did evil and did not follow God and ended up like an insensible animal eating grass out in the weather. He frankly tells Belshazzar he hasn’t learned a thing from his father’s fate and is presently repeating his folly.

My father, Goldwater conservative that he was, would be a Daniel if he went to  the present billionaires party, reading the handwriting on the wall. He would have said, “Americans overthrew their king to begin with, and then we beat Hitler, Hirohito, and every other tyrant we faced 80 years ago in the war.” Daniel was confrontive like that:

But you, Belshazzar, his son, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all this. Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven. You had the goblets from his temple brought to you, and you and your nobles, your wives and your concubines drank wine from them. You praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand. But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways. Therefore he sent the hand that wrote the inscription.

“This is the inscription that was written: mene, mene, tekel, parsin (numbered, numbered, weighted, divided in Aramaic)

“Here is what these words mean:

Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” (Daniel 5:22-28)

It used to be that stories about billionaires parties in the U.S. ended with the rich guys losing to scrappy people from the lower classes who rely on goodness. It’s a Wonderful Life comes to mind, of course (1946), and Elysium, back in in 2013. But one of the Oscar nominees, Anora (possibly the least redemptive movie I have ever seen) shows oligarch Russians successfully exercising absolute power, while a woman stuck in prostitution and a man forced to be a henchman are left with an ambivalent, barely flickering moment of hope.

Billionaires are looking normal these days. Everyone knows what an “oligarch” is. Right now, we are in the middle of a billionaires party and it seems plausible for Trump to be scheming to get Ukraine’s rare earth minerals for a song. It does not seem outrageous for Elon Musk to go to the first Cabinet meeting and then say he means to cut 4 billion dollars a day in government spending from now to September [link].

Some Christians are serving Trump like he has a divine right to rule. There was a prayer by the HUD Secretary, Scott Turner, at the Cabinet meeting the other day (Trump called it “grace”). But I think he was praying from an imperial point of view. He thanked God for the anointing they have to serve as the cabinet, among other things. I don’t think his sense of privilege is unusual. Unfortunately, I think a of of Christians, especially in the U.S., read Daniel 5 from Belshazzar’s viewpoint like Secretary Turner must. They are Constantine-descended Christians exercising their Roman-Empire-infected, slaveholder religion. They pray, “Lord, who is going to get the kingdom; how will it be divided; shall I bet my  future on the Medes and Persians?”

There are always wise people

The funniest part of Daniel 5 is when Belshazzar tries to get Daniel to dress up and sit down at his ludicrous feast.

“I have heard that you are able to give interpretations and to solve difficult problems. If you can read this writing and tell me what it means, you will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around your neck, and you will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom.”

Then Daniel answered the king, “You may keep your gifts for yourself and give your rewards to someone else. Nevertheless, I will read the writing for the king and tell him what it means.” (Daniel 5:16-17).

“You can keep your gifts” is a good Philly response. Or maybe it is like Zelenskyy saying, “I’m not playing cards.”

Even in the dysfunctional, short-sighted kingdom of Belshazzar, there was a wise person available. I think God has people stationed all over the world who keep salting it with love and truth. I don’t think I can imagine what it would be like if they were not there.

Jesus followers read the Belshazzar story from Daniel’s viewpoint.

  • We’re not authoritarian. Although Daniel’s character, spirituality and compassion caused him to rise to a leadership position in the empire, he had no illusion that he was ultimately in charge. Creation belongs to God and we should get used to mystery. We’ve been bought with a price, saved by grace, welcomed into a joy that does not come by our own striving; it is a gift. We don’t earn our place in the world by following the latest usurper of God’s prerogatives. Jesus sits on the throne as a wounded lamb.
  • We read the handwriting on the wall. We develop the skills needed to exercise our spiritual awareness. We listen to God and don’t live squashed by an “immanent frame.” Ultimately, as freed people who live Spirit to spirit with God, the Body of Christ IS the handwriting on the wall.
  • We tell the truth, even if the powers-that-be might make us suffer. Belshazzar decked out Daniel in the finery he promised, even though he didn’t want it, and even though his interpretation was that the king was going to lose his empire. It appears Belshazzar not only could not read the handwriting, he could not hear the interpretation and expected the next day to be just like this one. It was something like Trump saying he won the election in 2020 and made telling that lie a prerequisite for receiving the privilege of following him into disaster. Or like Pilate publicly washing his hands, as if that would absolve him, as the blind crowd, led by blind guides, shouted “We have no king but Caesar.” In the face of such nonsense, even backed by violence, we can’t help telling it like we are in Christ.

The feast of the billionaires is an age-old story, redundant. It would be boring if it were not so deadly. It is astounding that someone will go ahead and play it out again when history is replete with so many ways it does not work out well. The folly of the present cabal of oligarchs has only become more evident as they have emerged from their protective bubbles and into public view, feasting on the spoils of the American Empire, led by the loopy Elon Musk.

They can’t read the handwriting on the wall, even though the populace is already in the streets after only one month of official chicanery. It never ends well.  If you don’t believe the Bible is history, there are a lot of other books to tell you the story. But know this, there are always wise people popping up from nowhere, it seems. The first protest I went to via 50501 was organized by two young women who had never organized a protest. The journalists who deserted their coopted news media are finding ways to create a new news media, which is very exciting [link] [link] [link]. Even Facebook is alive with examples of wise people speaking up.

Let me emphasize the wise people emerging in the church as I close.  A lot of them may be slow to pop up, since their institutions are very old and riddled with corruption, poor leadership and a terrible reputation. Yet the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is hard to repress, just like Daniel demonstrated in the last days of the rapacious Babylonian Empire. Last week I was moved to be with a small group of mostly twentysomethings ready to start a new church within the walls of our Episcopal Church. They had little awareness of church planting, but they knew it was time. They want spiritual reality, authentic community, and a chance to make a difference. Doesn’t everyone? No amount of oppression ever thwarts that desire. And Jesus is among us to make it come to fruit.

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Yesterday (March 2) was John Wesley Day! Get some lessons from the relentless mouthpiece and organizer for the gospel. A true world changer.  Visit him at The Transhistorical Body. 

Sanctuary: The government wants to approve our altars

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , ,

Church member can’t find sanctuary in their own sanctuaries. It is still a rare occurrence, but as soon as Trump’s mass deportation plans unleashed the dogs Biden had on a leash, ICE went to church. Some denominations (including Episcopalians and Mennonites, where I connect), recently sued the government for violating their religious freedom. They cited this particular story of ICE coming to the church’s door.

In 2022 Wilson Velasquez fled the gangs in Honduras with his family and entered the U.S. illegally. They presented themselves to U.S. Authorities requesting asylum and he was outfitted with a GPS ankle bracelet. (You can buy one for your kids!). When they got to Atlanta to stay with relatives, the first thing the family did  was find a church. Wilson got a work permit and a job at a nearby tire shop. After a year, they decided to help a church planter start Iglesia Fuente de Vida in Norcross. They led with the music team.

According to Christianity Today:

Media accounts largely agree about the day’s events: At roughly a quarter past noon [on January 26], an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside and locked the doors. Wilson was listening to the sermon when his phone rang with an unknown number. When he silenced it, his ankle bracelet—known in Spanish as a grillete, or shackle—began buzzing. His phone rang a second time, and Wilson rose, flustered, slipping out the back of the sanctuary. The usher met him and said there were agents in the parking lot, asking for Wilson by name.

Moments later, Kenia’s phone flashed with a message from her husband: Come outside.

Running into the daylight, Kenia found him handcuffed in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. “What’s happening to my husband?” she asked the agents. Her mind raced to make sense of the scene. Wilson had made all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office. He had the government’s permission to work and had an appointment on a court docket. He was deported once nearly 20 years ago—a significant strike on an immigrant’s record—but otherwise had no criminal record.

The agents told Kenia they were looking for people with ankle bracelets, then they drove Wilson away.

The denominations are saying their right to practice their religion is infringed upon when the government stops a fundamental act of worship: to welcome the stranger.

Jesus said, “If you welcome the stranger, you welcome me.” With deep conviction and joy, we are trust that we exiles have a home with Jesus, who welcomes us into the presence of God.

Protests in St. Louis against Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive order on immigration. Wikimedia Commons

Experiencing and being sanctuary is basic: “Love one another as I have loved you,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

So the denominations argue that in the U.S. system:

  • Houses of worship should have the same right to safety as individuals have in their homes.
  • The government should not establish a particular religion (like the cult of Trump).
  • Individuals and groups can practice their own religion so long as the practice does not run afoul of “public morals” or a “compelling” governmental interest.

It is true, compassion may be losing ground as public morality. And it is true, ICE may wantonly decide snatching a church member during worship somehow satisfies a compelling interest. But we make noise when that happens, like hikers in the back country scaring bears before they get too close.

Practicing our faith regardless of coercion has always been a Christian virtue — and sheltering strangers is a main way we live our faith.

The anti-sanctuary government

The theology of sanctuary developed over centuries, from Biblical times to the present.

The story of the Exodus is about captives of an oppressive government in Egypt who are miraculously freed. They flee for their lives and look for a place they can flourish in a land God promises them. The new law of Moses, which identifies them as a nation and keeps them together and healthy, repeatedly refers to Egypt when it addresses how to care for strangers:  “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21).

J.D. Vance, who schools Germans on Fascism, also sought to school the Pope on Catholicism. The Catholic convert said we should Google “ordis amoris” to see how he justified telling the faithful watching Fox News it was God’s order to love in concentric circles. He said, if you properly love your family and those near to you, you might have enough love left over to get to strangers a thousand miles away. Regardless, it is family then America first. In a rare show of meddling, Pope Francis wrote a letter to U.S. Bishops condemning the Trump administration for “mass deportations” and even indirectly criticized Vance’s for improperly using ordo amoris to defend Trumpist nationalism (see The New Republic).

The MAGA crowd are catechized with alternative facts that go against the Bible and tradition. Walter Masterson got some TikTok views by interviewing MAGA rally attendees about whether Jesus would be welcomed if he arrived in the U.S. as a refugee (see YouTube @ 18:42). Their answer: “If he had the right papers.”

The Emperor’s Darth Vader, Stephen Miller, deployed his America First Legal Foundation to teach various governments how the authorities would be coming after them for preserving the due process of the undocumented. In a Dec. 23 letter, San Diego Supervisors were told: “We have identified San Diego County as a sanctuary jurisdiction that is violating federal law.”

The legal shock troops of MAGA announced they had identified 249 elected officials in sanctuary jurisdictions who, they said, could face “legal consequences” over immigration policies. The California Attorney General’s office and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass were notified [link]. In January. the Oregon Governor Tina Kotek also said she would stand by the state’s sanctuary law despite threats from Miller.

Our history of wrangling

Churches in the United States have a long history of getting into good trouble with immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, hundreds of churches formed networks to protect migrants fleeing political violence in Central America. The Sanctuary Movement, as it called itself, drew the ire of the Reagan administration. Immigration authorities, then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, never arrested migrants inside houses of worship. But they did send paid informants to spy on churches sheltering migrants.

The government arrested dozens of church leaders in Texas and Arizona, ultimately convicting eight of them for “criminal harboring.” The trials sparked protests outside INS offices across the country and made for bad optics. Since then, the Department of Justice has not prosecuted any churches for providing sanctuary.

During the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, more than 1,000 churches pledged to join the New Sanctuary Movement and offer shelter to migrants facing deportation. No one knows exactly how many immigrants took advantage of the offer, but stories abound. In 2019, ICE threatened some immigrants taking refuge in churches with fines of up to half a million dollars (it eventually backed off on the fines).

Alexia Salvatierra, a professor of missions and theology at Fuller Theological Seminary who cofounded the New Sanctuary Movement acknowledges that many undocumented immigrants have no legal right to residency. The Movement aims to buy time for people being denied due process to resolve what may be legitimate claims. The “Dreamers,” for instance, who were brought to the US as minors, have been in legislative limbo since 2001. “There were certain people who had a deportation order, but there would be a legal remedy for them if they could get deferred deportation and fight their case over time,” Salvatierra says. “For some of those people, it made sense for them to live in churches or to live with families that were connected to the church to allow them the time to be able to fight through this broken system.”

Sanctuary is a core Christian distinctive

Like I said, the theology of a “sanctuary church” regarding refugees is deeply rooted in how the Bible and tradition teach Jesus followers to provide refuge to the vulnerable, to see all people as created in God’s image, and to act on our moral responsibility to protect those fleeing persecution. “Welcoming the stranger” is a core Christian distinctive. Churches are natural shelters and advocates for refugees or they are unnaturalized churches. The Body of Christ and our buildings  provide a sacred space where those in need can find safety and support.

The ELCA laid out the argument about why they are a sanctuary denomination and it may help us all figure out how to express our faith these days:

  • It’s in the Bible

The Bible contains numerous stories and teachings that exemplify the concept of sanctuary. In the Old Testament if a person accused of manslaughter grasped the “horns of the altar” they were supposed to find temporary refuge (see 1 Kings 1 and 2 for Adonijah and Joab). “Cities of refuge” were designated where such a person could flee for permanent asylum. There are repeated calls in both the Old Testament and New to care for the stranger and the marginalized: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” is now folk wisdom from Heb. 13:2.

  • Everyone is made in the image of God

Refugees, regardless of their legal status, deserve dignity and compassion. They are Jesus in his distressing disguise.

  • Compassion and justice are fundamental

We need to act with compassion towards those suffering from persecution and advocate for just immigration policies that protect refugees.

  • Telling the truth regardless of the cost is crucial

Churches have a prophetic duty to speak out against injustice and challenge oppressive systems that force people to flee their homes. Violence and cruelty are not the answer.

  • We must salt the society with truth and love

Jesus is everyone’s refuge. The sanctuary in which we live extends beyond our individual lives and beyond the physical spaces of the Church.  That’s why we actively support refugees through advocacy, providing resources, and fostering community integration, even when we are threatened and even when we find common cause with advocacy groups who do not share our faith.

  • Offering sanctuary is worship

We do not just hear the Word, we do it. Having a mindset contrary to much of the world but aligned with the mind of Christ is normal. It may seem strange in the eyes of others to welcome the stranger the same way God has welcomed us into eternity, but we do it. Making and giving sanctuary is a demonstration of the heart of the gospel. Walking alongside immigrants and refugees is worship. It is not merely a political statement; in essence, it is an act of faith. It does not matter if the government approves of our altars, or not.

War is burned into the U.S. culture: A warning 

A life in the Spirit, Spiritual direction, The Mission, , , , , , , ,

The greatest skill the United States of America has is making war. My veteran dad was proud of that. His pride helped propel me into a meaningful life. Ever since I decided to follow Jesus, proactive peacemaking has been an everyday aspiration. One of the reasons I felt called to stay in the United States, even though I thought it could harm my children, is this: the U.S. A. is a major mission field for the Prince of Peace.

Joint Task Force – Bravo website: Nov. 24, 2024
NGOs retrieve 180,000 pounds humanitarian aid from Soto Cano Air Base (Honduras)

The country where I became a citizen by birth, is history’s largest war machine, by far. Presently, it has 800+ military bases around the world. It rules the air, land, sea, space and, probably for at least a few months, prevails in technowar. It spends more for “defense” than the next twelve largest militaries in the world put together. China is a distant 2nd and Russia is 3rd.

So I am not writing to debate my title; the truth of it is rather obvious. I just want to demonstrate the truth of it, once again. You did not need the last paragraph’s stats to agree that war is burned into the U.S. psyche. You just have to watch our movies, play our video games, look at our national sport, and listen to our language of “shock and awe” to verify the fact that our societal amygdala is wounded.

Researchers say about 20 million U.S. Americans a year demonstrate PTSD symptoms. For many people the symptoms are transitory. But we therapists who listen to a lot of people know that the vestiges of trauma are hard to dislodge. When you live in a country where violence is foundational, where war is considered essential, where the most honored people are the winners of conflicts, and where our political life has degenerated into opposing encampments, most of us expect some projectile to hit us any moment, one way or another. Many of us haven’t slept well for years and even endless screen scrolling can’t distract us enough from the fear that’s built into our lives.

The War on Drugs

The war on drugs is a prime example of our bellicose assumptions.

When Richard Nixon, Trump’s grandfather, was president, he called for a major assault on drug use. People called it his “war on drugs.” The description stuck. It is exactly the way one would expect the U.S. to approach a problem — and not solve it, as is evident all around us. In fact, the war on drugs created a worse problem, including the cartels stationed on the southern border, for whom Trump promises, you guessed it, a war.

However, Nixon did not invent the war on drugs. In Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream: The First And Last Days of The War on Drugs (2015 with a 2018 afterword) he reveals the real instigator: Harry Anslinger of Altoona PA, married to the favorite niece of Andrew Mellon, the richest man in the country. I’m a little late to Hari’s book but the internet is full of articles and blogs where parts of it are lifted wholesale and presented as fact without reference. It is still popular.

Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, beginning with the administration of Herbert Hoover, then under Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy – an unprecedented 32 years. He zealously advocated for and pursued harsh drug penalties, in particular regarding cannabis, which he got included with regulated drugs like morphine. As a propagandist for the war on drugs, he focused on demonizing racial and immigrant groups. And he used the power and influence of the U.S. after WW2 to force the whole world to fight drugs the American way. Hari notes when the Swiss and Portuguese decided to stop the war in their countries, they still had to face international treaties that enshrined a compassionless approach.

I could see the war at work but I, like Johann Hari,  never knew about this well-connected bureaucrat who found a way to make his little department into the DEA. Hari tells his story with verve. Anslinger apparently said in a radio speech:

“Parents beware! Your children…are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.”

The infamous 1936 film Reefer Madness referenced one of the murders Anslinger falsely attributed to marijuana and which the yellow journalists of the Hearst newspaper chain falsely asserted as fact.

Just four months after the passage of the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937, which made selling pot illegal if not registered and taxed, Anslinger wrote an article in the FBI Law Bulletin, linking marijuana to instances of rape, assault, murder, and madness. He called it a more dangerous drug than heroin or cocaine when viewed with regards to causing crime and insanity (article).  In 1948 he told a congressional hearing, “Marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.”

This story should not astonish me. It is the American way. But I am still flabbergasted.

Now a war on the USAID

Musk and Trump with their war of words

In the footsteps of Anslinger and Nixon, young jackboots have been let loose in the “deep state” to root out corruption and anything that seems “woke.” The Nazi-tinged Elon Musk promotes the war like Harry Anslinger on Ex-Twitter, telling mostly outright lies in order to grab the power to gnaw the meat off the bones of the institutional carcass.

Ron Kraybill, a respected voice from the Mennonite branch of the family with worldwide experience, wrote about Musk’s assault on the USAID on Facebook last week:

You may think [our military might] makes us secure and safe. But a military presence that vast, often heedless to local populations who see no benefits to themselves, also earns us plenty of resentments, even when our warriors are not in combat. When our bombs, missiles, and shells kill people who see themselves as defenders of their freedom and homeland, or innocent civilians – well, how would you react if you were in the shoes of their families and communities?

One of the few things we bring to the world for the stated purpose of assisting the well-being of others is assistance channeled through USAID. In 2023 we spent $43.6 billion on USAID. For the military, $820 billion. That’s a ratio of about twenty to one in favor of weapons. Now Trump/Musk are ending even that tiny investment in the social and economic thriving of our neighbors on the basis of falsehoods. And we would like the world to appreciate us more?

As people later found out, Harry Anslinger didn’t even believe marijuana was as dangerous as he advertised — as he had been repeatedly told by researchers. But he did believe people of color were dangerous and he thought wielding power over the world from his important office was crucial. I suspect Musk and friends are much the same.

Marco Rubio said “foreign aid” was the least popular thing the federal government does when justifying Musk’s attack. It is true, the supremely capitalist country is wildly self-interested, so giving anybody anything seems illogical. In truth, the whole point of USAID is also about securing American interests. But at least it helps some people and shares the wealth a little bit. Among the many things the government does which I find immoral and detrimental, the USAID stands out as something a Christian could easily defend, even subject to the God-free Constitution, as it is.

War has a way of killing the winner

This post is another warning, in case you need one, to never surrender to powermongers, liars and the rich drunk with their wealth. They are the ancient enemies of goodness and charity. Proverbs 26:18-19 is picturing Trump:

Like a maniac who shoots deadly firebrands and arrows,
so is one who deceives a neighbor
and says, “I am only joking!”

In the U.S. the maniac has a vast arsenal of “firebrands and arrows.” He presides over a society imprinted with war and traumatized by the use and abuse of power. Lying is his native language and he deludes a host of followers who believe all his lies as a matter of faith — he’s a true wolf in sheep’s clothing, a devil disguised as an angel of light. The War on Drugs is followed by the War on Terror, the War on the Borderlands, and now the war on the government, which may soon be a war on us all, starting with the most vulnerable.

The vulnerable is who I hope to attend to in this troubled time. I hope the vulnerable find community in the church, where the Lamb of God sits on the throne, where love, even of enemies, heals war-torn hearts, and where truth reinforced by the Truth, himself, gives us courage to take our daily stand for goodness and charity. Like the resurrection demonstrates, the wins of murderous have a brief shelf-life.  Like Jesus says, the meek will inherit the earth.

Don’t hunker down. Expand your tent

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For many years, now, even before the pandemic, we have all been scrambling to find a new place in an upended world. Our institutions, from the federal government to the classroom, all seemed to be deteriorating, Our churches, associations, families, marriages feel threatened or unsustainable. More and more young people have begun to live alone, with the workplace as their main place to relate outside their bunker — and even then much of that relating has been consigned to a screen, sometimes in their bedroom.

Booming business for bunkers

Now that Trump has taken the helm, pardoned a slew of criminals and installed billionaires in new thrones (one, at least, giving a Nazi salute for the cameras), half the country is wondering what to do. And from what I hear, one of their solutions is to “go to their tents:” don’t watch the news, hunker down, shore up their family or small group of friends and try to survive. That is understandably defensive. And it is not a new response to a social mess.

But it is not the right time to go back to our tents. It is time to infect the society with truth and love.

The Biblical Trump

When Rehoboam, perhaps the Trump of the Old Testament, became king after his father Solomon died, he had a choice. He could lighten up on his father’s grandiosity or follow in his footsteps. Solomon had built an oversized kingdom on the backs of his people: high taxes and conscripted labor to build a lavish temple and palaces big enough for his many wives, stables and more. The people were tired of it. The king was a one-man 1% collecting all the wealth.

The elders, like the Episcopal bishop, and Catholic Archbishop preaching to Trump last week, asked Rehoboam to lighten up. He told them to come back later and he’d tell them what he planned. Then he went and talked to his cronies who lived with him in his bubble. They advised him to double down. In our context their advice would be, “Tell them they must say the election was stolen. Tell them you’re going to pardon bitcoin criminals. Tell them you want to conquer Greenland.” In Rehoboam’s context it was, “Tell them your pinky has more girth than your dad’s loins. Tell them, ‘If my dad set on you with whips, expect me to  set on you with scorpions.’”

The elders did not like his answer. Their response was so legendary the storytellers compiling the history could quote a song about it: “What share have we in David? / We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. / To your tents, O Israel! / Now, see to your own house, O David!” (Today we’d cue up Le Mis). They took the place name “Israel” with them and left Rehoboam with just the tribal area of Judah. The call, “To you tents, O Israel!” is reminiscent of how the tribes organized themselves in the encampments on the way from Egypt. It was like another exodus from an oppressive ruler.

I think a lot of the people I know are unwittingly or deliberately going to their tents. They are leaving Mark Zuckerberg’s predatory social media, boycotting Amazon, not touching anything smelling of Musk, turning their exhausted backs on Trump and the next outrageous thing he says or does. That’s understandably defensive. But I don’t think it is worthy of us.

The vision of an expanding tent

In the 580s BC, King Zedekiah of Judah chose the wrong ally. (Trump might be deciding, “Europe or Russia?” right now). Babylon destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and exiled the elite, including the prophet Ezekiel. Other citizens fled to Egypt. The Assyrians had previously done this to the Northern Kingdom in the 720’s BC. A prophet among the exiles in Babylon, speaking in the spirit of Isaiah, prophesied Israel’s return to the place of the ancestral tents. His vision is the antidote we need to the poisonous atomization to which we are tempted to surrender in our own exile.

In Isaiah 54 the prophet has God speaking to a “barren” people whose tents are empty of children. They are desolate, as you may well feel this week. Discouraged. Exhausted. Afraid. Instead of hunkering down in exile, he calls them to respond to a vision of something better, something only God can do.

Enlarge the place of your tent,
And let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings;
Do not spare;
Lengthen your cords,
And strengthen your stakes.
For you shall expand to the right and to the left,
And your descendants will inherit the nations,
And make the desolate cities inhabited.

Historically, the prophet is talking about returning to Israel, which the Persian Empire eventually allowed. But I think its broader meaning, a spiritual meaning, calls me to make a bigger tent, not a smaller one, because we need to gather ourselves and build something ancient and new to meet the challenges of the latest tyrants. We need to shore up or re-establish a community where the love of Jesus reigns.

To be honest, Trump Christians believe he is the new Cyrus returning them from exile and making a place for their tribe to again rule God’s chosen nation, the United States. I think that is a ruinous delusion; you can decide for yourself. I don’t think Trump or the U.S. is exceptional or chosen, just a decent port in the choppy ocean of history. We don’t need to fight for the control of the nation as much as we need to salt it with the grace we enact within and from our tent.

Jesus tabernacling

The ultimate guide for our ongoing exodus is Jesus, who is pictured as an expansive tent. The key verse in John uses an ancient image that calls us away from our division and isolation and empowers us to not only envision but practically extend our tent pegs in expectation of an ingathering.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. — John 1:14

The more literal translations accurately trade “dwelt” for “tabernacled.” I agree it was John’s intent to reference the big tent, the “tabernacle of meeting” the Israelites set up during their sojourn where God met them. Jesus is the tabernacle where the world meets God face to face. Jesus is the tabernacle from where the people-God-calls-out of the world gather to meet in truth and love.

Now is not the time to isolate, avoid, wait or play defense. At least that is not Jesus’ strategy for the good life. Now is the time to relate: to God and to one another. The antidote to every disaster is to stick with God and love one another in practical ways. Many people know this and are making it happen, but you and I need to do it, too.

During the pandemic and because of the Evangelical/Catholic delusion about Trump, the church took a hit. You may still be out of church. You may have turned your back on Jesus altogether and explored the many alternatives cropping up. But many of my readers wish they could find some place to be the church with integrity and action. Exhausted as you may feel, now is the time to find it or build it.

We need the church now, as much as ever

Thirty years ago we planted a great church for the “next generation.” Little did I know what would hit us during the pandemic, and I thought Trump was just a brief, worst nightmare. It was a great sojourn for me and hundreds of other people.  Seeds of that work are still ripening even now.

Even though many churches have taken a hit, there are plenty of revived or reviving churches to join. My friend just joined a new church in Baltimore. If I were in Southwest Philly I’d sojourn with Salt and Light. If I were in Northeast Philly I’d probably be with Oxford Circle Mennonite. In my neighborhood near St. Joseph U., I’m part of the newly-expansive St. Asaph’s. I dare say most churches are not fully on the Trump bandwagon and certainly are not in favor of scaring undocumented people to death or tormenting trans folk. I think most believers know dominating others, lying, or having a devotion to violence and greed will never be OK. They want real stuff.

Jesus is still tabernacled among us, full of grace and truth. We need to meet him personally and meet with him together with others for our mental and spiritual health, in order to experience our deepest loves and desires, and to keep the world from falling off the cliff of its own self-destruction. Maybe more than ever, we need to gather around Him, share our spiritual gifts and natural strengths, do our part in making the love that will not only benefit us but make a better future.

God bless you as you do the good you do in the school, workplace or neighborhood association. But “me against the world” will never be enough. It is likely to make you a minion of TikTok. The people of God need to be with God and each other in their basic tent of dwelling, their portable, flexible, developing homeplace, not only in their hearts, but in their face-to-face relationships and joint action. There is no time to lose by lamenting and laying low.

I rejoined the church two Lents ago. I started a new small group, and we are about to start another. I decided to give what I have to a local expression of the Body. It feels right. I feel a bit hopeful. And even in my uncertainty, I feel like I’m in the tent where I belong. What is God giving you to be and do to meet the challenge of this wild time in history? I doubt the call is, “Go to you tent.”

***********************

Today is Mahalia Jackson Day! Check in with her at The Transhistorical Body.

Which industry enslaves you best?: 1 Cor. 7:21-23

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Were you a slave when you were called?
Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.
For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person;
similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.
You were bought at a price;
do not become slaves of human beings.
1 Cor. 7:21-23

What did your family or friendship circle talk about over the holidays? At our Christmas brunch, for a few minutes the conversation turned to slavery.

The education industry

I have a grandson ready to enter college (and highly qualified to do so!). The biggest question is: how much is it going to cost and how much debt is going to be accrued? I asked, in an apocalyptic tone in line with our times, “Can you avoid becoming a debt slave?” After all, Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

President Biden tried to give borrowers some relief by plugging some holes in the leaky federal student loan system, like the  one leaking out the loan forgiveness built in for public service. He was not too successful, with the Congress and Courts as they are. Here’s a story about it from The Hill:

Lisa Ansell, an educator from California, was one of the people who got their loans cancelled in 2021 when Biden made those changes, after she was denied eight times.

“I should have been eligible for public service loan forgiveness in 2017, which would have been the first cohort, because public service loan forgiveness was signed into law in 2007. I applied in 2017 and, of course, I was denied, no valid reason. We know that the Department of Education likes to invent reasons to prevent people from receiving their lawful cancelation,” said Ansell, the California chapter president for Student Loan Justice.

Ansell said she was relieved, but “what I felt was anger and resentment because I had been kept in indentured servitude to the Department of Education for close to five extra years, and because of that, I was never able to save up any money.”

While Biden forgave the most student debt of any president, his efforts affected only a small portion of the 45 million borrowers.  (The Hill)

These stories are so painful for us Boomer college grads! My excellent college education in California was completed before the state stopped considering it an investment in the future. The school debt slavery so many experience now all started with Governor Ronald Reagan.

When Reagan assumed office in 1966, he changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for the tuition-based system there is today. Once he became president, he continued his quest. {Great article describing in in the UC Irvine Campus Newspaper from 2023]. The “intellectual curiosity” to which the university was devoted created protesting Berkeley “brats” he said. He preferred a campus-as-business model working to create more profiteers — at least the few who could make the cut.

Since Reagan, college has gotten more and more expensive. It is amazing, really. Just think, the average American saved $5,011 in 2022. That means it would take them about 75 years to save up enough cash to send one child to a top-rated U.S. university. If your child wants to go, you’ll either need to get very rich or sell her to the debtors. (CNN 2023)

The average tuition at U.S. private colleges grew by about 4% last year to just under $40,000 per year, according to data collected by US News & World Report. For a public in-state schools, the rise was less, about 1%. But it always goes up. Another take on the stats sees that small rise as a glass half full, since 20 years ago it climbed 68%!

At highly rated or selective schools, which are most likely to get you the lucrative job or your chance to be part of the 1%, the price tag increases substantially. Harvard University charges about $58,000 in tuition and fees, per year, for undergraduate students. When you add in housing, food, books and other cost of living expenses, Harvard says you should expect to pay over $95,000.

We’re used to being rolled over by the “anti-socialists” who believe the rich deserve to rule (just like Proverbs lamented above, perhaps with a picture of Elon Musk in mind),  so we  kind of think it is common sense for slavery to debt to be part of getting an education. This guy explains how it happened to us:

While we were at it (Merry Christmas!), we enumerated other systems that have gone through the same kind of process until what was once a sphere of the “common good” has ended up in the hands of people skilled in making profit/slaves. I just want to touch on them.

Healthcare / insurance industry

There are many reasons healthcare is so costly (link). But the big ones in my mind are mergers and insurance. Big health systems have eaten up smaller rivals until they can basically charge what they want.

Worked into the fees they charge are paying off insurance companies for fear of malpractice claims. So insurance companies have their hands out all along the way, as Luigi Mangione pointed out. On average, a single person will pay $12-25 a day to the insurance slaver or they will be personally liable for the astronomical cost of a hospital visit or procedure, which will be allowed by the master, or not.

Like with universities, healthcare is a good investment for profiteers, since everyone needs it. An investor can be assured that profits are available since the cost for drugs and medical care can go up to whatever can be tolerated by raising the cost of insurance. My insurance toll goes up every year.  A recent stay in the hospital for a family member for a one-night surgery cost over $100,000.

Porn industry

The average age reported for first viewing pornography is 12. Almost half of the reporters (44%) went looking for it, while slightly more than half (58%) encountered it accidentally. It is hard to miss. The total adult entertainment revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate  of 5.3% from 2024 to 2030, reaching nearly $248.18 billion by 2030.

There are legal arguments about what is obscene and so regulatable. But from listening to my twentysomething clients, the porn industry is not a discussion about personal choice, it is a slaver. Like any other addiction, there is an introductory path on the way to enslavement and profit engineered by an industry. Monetizing sexual desire is a growth industry. Under the spell of profit, people tend to think that is self-evidently appropriate.

Phones/gaming/social media industries

I got an ad for Royal Match on Bible Gateway (!) as I wrote this. That seemed about right.  We’re all getting squished or drowned no matter where we look and we have to complete some crazy puzzle (and fast!!) or someone is going to die. Our movies, games, and notifications are all full of this anxiety. That anxiety is not our fault, no matter what the powers that be tell us.

It is profitable, somehow, to produce endless ads for this game and loop us into it. The ads are incessant lures to get me hooked so I play the game on the subway instead of relating. Then the phone can report how much time I’ve spent with it every week and I can worry about that. There is nothing benign in our “economy.” No tools are provided for mere creation, we are the host for giant corporations to drain. The phone is like Neo connected to the Matrix.

The prophets made that movie in 1999! Lots of people listened to them, but they got rolled over anyway (maybe the medium is the message). Besides, even by 2011, only 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. But by 2024, 91% of them did. Now we are enslaved to it. I can’t leave the house without it, I might need to satisfy a 2-step verification to get to my money or need Siri to tell me where the nearest Chipotle is.

Sorry

I’m kinda sorry I want you to be ramped up with me.

I will look for something more uplifting to talk about next time. I know most of us are upended by Santa Ana winds in January spreading fire in L.A. Trump is setting Canada and Denmark on edge for some reason. And Jimmy Carter is dead. Anxiety is in the air and we need some relief.

But seeing what we are up against at least gives us some juice to move with the ever-rebellious Paul, and not bend the knee to the norms of a sin-fueled world. “You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings.”

Ronald Reagan opened the door to the American henhouse and the foxes are finally in charge of it, now — in Paul’s time, it was Rome eating up the world. But as Paul and Jimmy Carter exemplified, you don’t need to offer yourself up to be breakfast. You might even change the world, as a result.

Spiritual Bypass — a new resource article

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction,

In John 8 Jesus proclaims he is the light of the world. His presence is a challenge to all who listen to Him. John records he said to the “Jews who had believed him . . . ‘the truth will set you free’” (John 8:31-32). But there were many others who were not set free. Many very religious people had a difficult time unseeing what they saw was obvious: they were already free. They responded to Jesus, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” (John 8:33).

Often the truth about ourselves is the hardest truth to see, particularly when our view of the self is consciously and unconsciously tied to our religious practice and belief. The Jewish leaders saw themselves as descendants of Abraham. With this firm understanding of who they were in the world intricately intertwined with their religious practice and belief, they could not consciously imagine that they were not already where they ought to be. Nevertheless, Jesus insists each of them is “a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

They were caught in spiritual bypass. When religion is used as a defense, it is twisted to help us avoid a deeper truth. As a result, it might cause us to miss seeing reality facing us in our own backyard. Jesus presents a new way.

That should get you started.

I reduced an academic paper Dr. Gwen White wrote in 2005 for my many clients who are facing the interesting and challenging reality that they use their faith as a defense against facing their psychological needs and, surprisingly, entering their next stage of spiritual growth. In the article I’ve provided a link to the original paper housed at CircleCounseling.com where you can find the referenced work, an extensive bibliography ,and a case conceptualization. 

To continue reading, please select the “Spiritual Bypass” link from the right column or follow this link.

 

Listening in the era of lies

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We were all a little confused about lying before Trump came on the scene — if you can remember a time when he did not dominate the air. Even when we were lying, then and last week, most of us wondered if it was the right thing to do. But we also had our reasons to do it.

Psychology will back us up; there are many reasons humans lie. There is bound to be an evolutionary psychologist out there who has “proven” we survived as a species because we are so good at deception. We’re still conflicted about it, however.

Science implies there are facts and there are unproven hypotheses — and we should be on the side of facts, since they are real. But all us humans, if we think about it, know it is difficult to tell one straight truth about ourselves, we are all so complex. At least once a week, I dispute what my wife claims to have said to me — and she may claim it was just an hour ago!

But she, and the rest of us, can’t really prove much of what we assert, even when it comes from the depths of us. And when we look around, it is difficult to have a sure grasp on what is true about almost everything else, the universe feels so mysterious and beyond our complete understanding.

Now we have Trump, ready to impose a reality of his own making – science, common sense, and morality be damned. Some people are gleefully adopting a life of lying and have become, with him, a relentless wave against the common institutions and assumptions Americans hold.  Punditry dashed to their computers to explain how Trump won, even though he is a proven, unrepentant prevaricator. How could anyone elect a proven liar? F.D. Flam wrote in Bloomberg:

Trump won with surprising decisiveness, despite his evasiveness and failure to justify his extraordinary claims. It’s tempting to conclude that we live in some kind of post-truth society. Perhaps, instead, we live in a society obsessed the truth, but we’ve lost our appreciation for explanatory depth and different perspectives. At the same time, we’re just as persuaded by a speaker’s confidence as ever.

Most of what passes for “telling it like it is” comes down to Trump making completely subjective judgments with a tone of certainty — that some of his enemies are “losers” or “morons” or “low IQ” or that one of his rivals somehow has a face that’s not fit for office. Some might call this brutal honesty, but there’s nothing honest about it. The Week Magazine calls it “maniacal overconfidence” which “sounds to some people like forthrightness.” In that sense, he is telling it like it is — in his own self-serving head.

In my territory, I can’t ride down the elevator or go to a party without hearing how hard it is to be one of those morons and losers. “Maniacal overconfidence” seems like an overly sweet way to characterize what Trump is full of.

The voice of Jesus

I’m not a pundit, of any merit, at least. But I had to make a few contributions to what people were saying on Facebook and such after Trump won. I was mainly concerned that we all confront the lying before we all conform to it, since it is alarming how quickly the media adapted to “Mr. President” as if he were introducing a new normal. For Christians, I think not conforming comes down to pondering John 8 again if we want to hang on to truth and love, as I do. I still believe in the promise from Ephesians 4: 14-16:

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Paul obviously couldn’t care less about what society finds normal. I think he is channeling Jesus, as we all aspire to do if we follow Christ. That’s Jesus, who says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

In John 8, Jesus is having an amazing dialogue with religious opponents who are absolutely sure they are living out the truth as best as anyone can. They are just as sure they are speaking God’s truth as Donald Trump is sure he was spared the assassin’s bullet so he could personally make America great again. Most of us are so unsure about the truth and too sure alternative facts cause conflict, we don’t get into it with people on elevators or at  parties, even though Jesus apparently would. He tells his opponents:

You don’t even understand what I’m saying. Do you? Why not? It is because You cannot stand to hear My voice. You are just like your true father, the devil; and you spend your time pursuing the things your father loves. He started out as a killer, and he cannot tolerate truth because he is void of anything true. At the core of his character, he is a liar; everything he speaks originates in these lies because he is the father of lies. So when I speak truth, you don’t believe Me. —  John 8:43-45

If your first thought after reading this was, “Do I even believe there is a devil?” that’s OK. There is so much theologizing generated by John 8, we might never get done with it. Stick to what Jesus is asserting, don’t stick with your own defensive response. I think the point is, “You need to hear my voice or you will never hear the truth.” Negatively, that is, “If you pursue the things the father of lies loves, everything you say will come from that core.” We’ve got to ponder that before lie-lovers control us inside and out.

Listening in the day of lies

I don’t think Donald Trump is new. He is just the terrible bloom of a society adapting to the media and providing false-self images for it to feed on.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won every electoral vote except for Minnesota’s, the home state of Walter Mondale. For his first term, he had handily beaten an actual Christian trying to be president with the Iran hostage deal. He later did one of his masterful jobs of lying when he explained the Iran-Contra mess. Reagan was the beginning of all sorts of evils, but his main legacy is using the screen so well. We used to watch him speaking and say, “He is lying, but people forgive him because he looks like he believes it. I’m tempted to believe him myself.”

I did not believe him. He galvanized my faith to stick with The Way The Truth And The Life no matter how effectively the father of lies carpet-bombs my consciousness.

Fortunately, people in my feed were trying to keep me listening last week. I appreciated how Bryan McLaren summed up the process of listening to the Truth and hanging on to it in the middle of anxiety. He really takes himself seriously, as we probably should too.

@brianmclaren

If you’re afraid, anxious, tired … election. #terrified #tired #trump #harris

♬ original sound – Brian D. McLaren

I don’t think we can listen to the voice of God unless we can learn to hear what is in the silence. So this is one thing I posted. I love how this little tune is usually repeated, second verse same as the first. It makes us wait, slow down, and enter the peace that passes understanding. That is where we are most likely to hear from God.

I also don’t think we can hear the voice of God unless we talk back to, or shout back at, the voices that compete for God’s place in our thoughts and feelings. If we don’t step up, we could be “blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” Then Jesus might say, “So when I speak truth, you don’t believe Me.”

Fortunately, several of my friends were not having it. Their minds turned to a defiant song we used to sing in our old church. I dug out a recording from Internet Archive.

Click the picture to go to the song

That song is good shouting back. Sometimes we sang it in a group of 100 or more. It was a good way to reroute some neural pathways.

I am not sure there has ever been a day of lies like this one, since there has never been the kind of media which surrounds us and trains us. But maybe I’m taking myself too seriously, too. After all, Jesus was talking about people who were in such unwitting collusion with the father of lies, they could not recognize the Son of God, for whom they were purportedly waiting, even when he was talking to them face to face!

I feel sorry for those guys. And I feel sorry for us, too, since were are inevitably a lot like them and lying is still extremely typical of human beings. Our media has made it a worldwide industry. But if McLaren is right, and I believe he is, from all the lying the Truth is born again and again.

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Today is Lucretia Mott Day!

Speaking of someone who was “not having it!” She is a premier example of standing up for truth and justice.

Visit her at The Transhistorical Body.

I will always long for community

Building community, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

Dan White is a kindred spirit I have never met. We’re just Facebook friends. As his story leaks out, snippet by snippet, I admire him more and more as I watch him heal and further develop as a healer. He was deeply engaged in an organic, neighborhood-based church with some nouveau-Anabaptist sensibilities as a community member and pastor. I haven’t heard the whole story, but he was cast out. He posted this the other day:

6 years after I Ieft, I was able to walk my ole neighborhood in Syracuse, NY. I left in a lot of pain. A couple from our Church heard I was in town and asked if we could meet up. I had immediate panic that it was probably a surprise attack. I was not going to accept their invitation but heard the Spirit say – “it’s safe, go.”

How many Jesus followers and people of all kinds are feeling a similar dread when they think they will see someone who hurt or abused them? In Dan’s case there was some healing. But so often there isn’t.

Broken community can really hurt. Many of us from our former church know a lot about that. We’re scattered to the four winds. A book was written to take a skewed look at our demise. It is like salt in the wound. I’m not out six years yet, like Dan, and I already walk in all my old neighborhoods and sit with some old relationship groups. I’m not raw or afraid. But when my new pastor asked about my past last week, I could still get emotional.

Community matters

I will always long for community. I think that is how it is meant to be.

But then, I have never lived alone, not once. I know I am rare. The builders in Philadelphia are building hundreds of apartments designed for one person. About 34% of the population of my city already live that way. The builders are responding to the market demand for isolation.

Unlike those developers, I have been trying to build community for my whole adulthood. The church is a community of love gathered around Jesus. Building that community means a deliberate attempt to connect heart to heart, soul to soul, mind to mind and strength to strength. It is loving like Jesus in truth and action.

Communities other than the church also have such traits in their ideals (like my condo association and the Republican party). But I think we need Jesus to pull it off — the entities I mentioned are decidedly not succeeding. Even when we try to follow Jesus we blow it big time. The promise is one day we will experience it in its fullness. The glimmers we get in our time are miraculous, since the hostile environments in which we bloom are strong.

First Xmas of Sierra St. Household 1981. Verifiably not hippies.

Did I build it or did it build me?

A recent book that fictionalizes my story says I first explored community in a hippy commune. I admit to being hippy adjacent, but if I took the name hippy, it would be a disgrace to the whole idea. So much for journalism. What we did when we moved in together was get deliberate about our life together. We had a common mission and were tired of commuting to our relationships. So we created an intentional household. Acts 2 gave us the solution we needed.

Demo day for the church building we built.

Eventually, that household planted a church. The intentional community was personal and the church was public. The church just celebrated its 40th anniversary.

After we were in Pennsylvania for a few years, we felt moved to plant a new kind of church community in the thirsty but resistant territory of Philadelphia. I loved it. I was a bit lonely at times since most of my comrades were 20 years or more younger than me. But the whole thing was so filled with the joy and laughter of love, I still smile to remember those decades.

Maybe communities grow up like children

Most communitities resemble families. And like families, they grow and change. People move out of the house. People bring new people into the family. Its changeable, even if you don’t want it to be.

So far, all my children and their families live in the Philly metro. I could walk to the home of one of them tomorrow and steal Halloween candy. But we don’t share a roof or even a church now. I miss that, but I don’t regret their growth. Community is always forming, or at least trying to. If it is unformed or deformed it tends to die.

Ultimately, maybe a bit like Dan White experienced, our previous congregation blew up. It deformed big time and people tell stories about it. I don’t really know why it died, for sure; the leaders surprised me with an invitation to leave, so I did. But if the journalist is right, the destruction had a lot to do with power struggles and conflict over individual rights philosophy. Score one for the developers.

We don’t get it right all the time. Friendships die. We cut people off. Children move to Germany. The government bombs Gaza. We get divorced. We undermine churches no matter how well we build one. [One of my most-read posts]

But the need for community will always surface. We make families. We connect in love and build communities. And if we don’t, we want to. If we are outside looking in, we feel lost.

You can expect some love to present itself

Jesus came to seek and save the lost. And he has a lot of friends. They are building community.

Some friends wanted to come over while my wife was housebound, but they caught Covid bad. So we took our first post-surgery outing to have dinner at their house last weekend. The food and conversation felt sweet. I felt a sigh of relief to be loved when so often I doubt I will be.

Remnants of our former church survive. But for hundreds of people its institutional death-match was a huge loss of community. Now it is a case study in loss. People are still recovering, years later, tainted by conflict and cut-off. They’re like couples who lost a child, or had to forgive an affair, or who split because of abuse. The former loves seem unreachable. Now they’re looking to connect in a sea of one-bedrooms, wondering what to do.

I think most of us will find a new way. Dan White has. We recover because we must. We need the love. It is out there to be found.

Over 100 years old and building new community.

I’m surprised I found a new place at St. Asaph’s Episcopal, walking distance from our home. I’m back in a little church. When my wife was laid up from surgery, they brought us food. Then a person from a former place brought herself — a friend from the California church flew out to care. Friends from our former Philly church checked in and prayed. There was a lot of  deliberate loving! There was new, conscious tie-building. It was the love that cannot be killed rising up again.

Conversion: The smoking woman and the dejected church planter

A life in the Spirit, Spiritual direction, The Mission, , ,

Our dear friend from California visited last week to catch up and cheer up. She is such a great guest! She is a kind listener, so she got me telling stories from my early forties when I left her in California for the wilds of Pennsylvania. It was a time in my life when so much was changing! She teased out bits and pieces I had not considered for a while. For instance, she had not heard many specifics about the sufferings and joys of church planting.

First baptism six months later.

I told her a few stories, but I am not sure she got many accurate specifics. The older we get, the more we remember the results of an event or our interpretation of it, rather than remembering the basic who, what and when, etc. (Levine 2002). So a story I told her about a fulcral moment in my midlife history is true, but not in a scientific way. It feels a little like a story from my beloved The Little Flowers which, if not factually true, should be.  I told her I almost never told one important story. She suggested I should, so I am about to.

I gave the telling a trial run at my spiritual direction group. One of the members of our group was about to meet me at the time I was making the memory, a long time ago, now. He said, “I have never heard that story.” I think he was a little disappointed in me, since he had heard many more, less important stories. He suggested my children would benefit from knowing it, so in case I did not tell them, here I go.

The ineffectual church planter

When I came to Philadelphia to plant a church, I had a full head of steam and plenty of conviction. I even had the support of the Brethren in Christ, who generally saw urban areas as far off worlds, at the time. I had inspiration but I did not have a very specific plan. I intended to “make relationships” and let the church organically unfold. This did not go over well with my bishop who thought a phone campaign or some other methodology would work better. After I began, I thought he might be right.

My basic plan entailed walking the streets of downtown Philly and showing up at various street corners, schools and institutions looking for the people God had already contacted who I would gather to form a new church for a new generation. Before I established an office at 4th and South, this was a very dubious process. It was just me and God snooping around.

One day this snooping seemed especially fruitless and downright stupid. I was trudging back to our home in West Philly, head down, defeated. I had nothing. What’s more, I doubted every reason I had moved my family to this unknown place. “No one will talk to me; why would they? I’m not interesting; I’m too old to meet the people I’m looking for. I’m not cool. I’m not nearly as extraverted as I need to be. I’m shy about getting rejected for being overtly Christian. I’m fishing without a hook.”

By Roger Ge in the Daily Pennsylvanian

I did not want to go directly home because I was in a bad mood. It was like I had been hunting for my hungry family and did not have the skill or luck to bring home some meat. “We are all going to starve!” So I sat down in one of the secluded seating areas at Penn to sulk. Looking back, it was like I had a screen up between my mind and the Holy Spirit, because I just did not want to hear it. “Say what you will; I am not listening.” This was unusual, to say the least — I’m not sure I had ever done that. I sat there like I had a spiritual migraine, moving as little as possible, eyes squinted against the light.

The smoking student

Before long, a young woman sat down on one of the other benches to smoke. She was dressed in a mildly punk outfit, her hair bright red. I involuntarily flinched at her presence and curled away a bit. I tried to ignore her, but her smoke wafted my way. She distracted my pity party. But I stayed resolutely rooted in my disgust.

I was succeeding at being inert until she took the few steps across the seating area and stood in front of me, cigarette in hand. “Excuse me” she said. “I feel like you are someone I should be talking to.”

My first reaction was she was trying to help me, I looked so miserable. So I was embarrassed. But I managed to say, “OK. I’m Rod.”

She sat down next to me and looked at her feet. I remember her name, but I don’t recall the details of her story. I probably threw away the journal in which I recorded them. But it was a sad story. It was an afraid story. She was considering ending her life, she felt so alone and unloved.

I told her a bit of my story too. She was surprised I was a Christian and had no idea what a church planter was. But she could relate to how terrible my day was going. She said about my failure, “Maybe I am the only one available today.”

She wanted to hear about faith. “I have nothing else to lose,” she said. I don’t remember how I presented Jesus. And I don’t remember exactly how she received him.

My conversion

I do remember what meeting her did to me, however. I learned two lessons from that encounter which stayed with me for the next 25 years and still inform how I see myself and others.

The first was crucial: It really does matter how much I suck. I hope we have stopped saying “suck.” But it hit the nail on the head then. I was sitting there sucking as a church planter and God nudged someone into my lap. It is exactly what I had hoped would happen in one way or another. One of the reasons I have rarely told this story is my interpretation is too miraculous for me. I don’t like to promise God’s intervention because then I will have to explain Gaza, or Trump, or something. But I took her appearance as a sign. She might as well have been singing with the heavenly host.

The second revelation was equally important: I have no idea what God is going to do. It became inescapable that anything might happen, including things I had never before imagined possible —  things could happen even if I was resisting, or had given up hope! The worst kinds of situations were likely to be filled with God’s presence. Two losers being depressed at Penn save each other. It is so unlikely, it must be God.

I told my friend, I think I became a Christian that day, too – an actual, adult Jesus follower. I had been a pastor for years and had not been doing terrible things. But I had never quite experienced all those stories in the Bible: Thomas doubting then seeing, Peter sinking then reaching out his hand, Paul wandering into Philippi and meeting the only woman at the place of prayer, the Psalmist praying, like I sang in an old song, “From the ends of the earth I call to Thee, when my heart is faint.”

I was right about God’s ability to create something out of nothing. But being right is different from being present when it is happening. I was right about being less-than-able to do what I was called to do, but I was wrong about what God was able to do. I knew the stories about Gideon, the Samaritan woman at the well, and others, but I had never been like them very much, yet. They were probably fortysomethings.

I have forgotten many of the specifics of that day — and that whole year, to be honest. But I do remember the meaning of them. I embarrassed myself plenty of times and felt awkward and out of place countless times, but I was never likely again to think my mild suffering was useless. Sucking actually proved to be an advantage for the mission I was given.

And I became much more adept at expecting God to do the unexpected, even more than I asked or imagined, as Paul told the Ephesians. I was converted that day to a faith that relishes uncertainty, because I came to know God who does not live in my mind and principles. My hope is frail, my memory is weak, my imagination is narrow. God is someone else, altogether — and continues to pleasantly surprise me.