Fears for our Country, Exasperation with People: Is there Hope?

 Over and over, as I listen to my church people (and non-church folks too), I hear many expressions of fears for the country, and exasperation over the way others think and feel. Our United Methodist Publishing House asked me to write a book on Religion and Politics. I said yes, and began thinking up titles, like We’ve All Lost Our Minds or Jesus Must Be So Embarrassed. Easy to find fault and cast blame – but the publisher wants a book that analyzes what’s gone awry and yet clings to hope, and dares to suggest how we might fix some things and be healers. I won’t attempt to summarize a 140 page book here, but let me mention a few things.

People are in a deep funk about their country. But there’s so much to love. We can be grateful for the free space we have to disagree, to vote, to get involved (or not). We have traffic and other laws. We have brilliant founding documents on liberty, the separation of powers, and freedom of religion. We have national parks. We have my hometown and beautiful children. We have heroes who remind us of what actually is possible during times of fear and funk.

David Chappell’s A Stone of Hope, a book that demonstrates clearly that evil was held in check and the country was changed by the church, and nobody else, in the 1950’s, quotes a poem from Seamus Heaney: “History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.”

Are we so cynical and jaded we can’t envision, anticipate, or even pray for some great tidal wave, something God can do? If we cling to and live into what God might just do, we’re liberated from our fears, and liberated to do something. I just finished a great book by my friend Vickie Barnett about “Bystanders,” that vast majority of Germans who knew what was going on but just shrugged and did nothing. They felt overwhelmed and powerless.

But were they? Barnett points to the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, population 3,000, which rescued 2,500 Jews, mostly children, from the Nazis. The silence of other towns was a thundering approval of Nazi atrocities. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, there’s a garden celebrating the few who had courage and did something, with the inscription “Whoever saves one life saves the universe.”

We’re not called to be bystanders, or to fume in the privacy of our dens. Do some little something. Have some courage. Talk to somebody; listen to somebody. Don’t let your politics be your idol – a bad habit easy to spot in the other guys. Our God is above and beyond party divisions, and we can calm down and get busy if our trust is vested in the true God.

There’s so much damage from politics as waged in recent history. What gifts does the Church bring to healing? We are people with hope, not naïve optimism, but a long-range belief in that arc that bends toward justice. Reconciliation is supposed to be our strong suit, not blaming or cringing. We are supposed to know how to love, how to engage respectfully, how to bring faith to life in the real world, with resilience, tenderness, toughness.

My premise, which can’t be dismissed as naïve, or we’re toast, is that we aren’t stuck in an endless spitting match that feels like that nightmarish trench warfare of World War I, immense carnage to gain a few feet of turf, only to lose it the next day, everyone losing. There was a break on Christmas Day when both sides lobbed gifts to their foes before meeting in No Man’s Land to sing carols together. Fear for the country is paralyzing, and invites the very disaster we fear. Do a little something today, and something else tomorrow. Find a friend. Make a friend. Pray. Where else is there to turn just now except to God, and to others who love their country?

Review of The Odyssey: Unheroic, Disenchanted... and Long Fight Scenes?

    We saw “The Odyssey” last night. Well, it began mid-afternoon and ended last night! I rarely review movies. Not my strong suit – although I’m of more value than Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live who’d launch into a review, then pause to say “Now, I’ve not actually seen this movie…” I saw it. Didn’t take a bathroom or snack break either. Let me tell you about it – theologically and culturally, I hope.

   I had tangled expectations going on, not just because of the hype, but because I’ve always treasured Homer (although I’d take The Iliad over The Odyssey any day!). I re-read The Odyssey over the past month to ready myself. That alone was a great gift of the movie coming out.

   I felt a bit like I do when viewing a movie or TV series about the Bible. I know I’ll be jarred and annoyed, with a bit of an elitist sneer that “the book is way better than the movie.” But this one has that Christopher Nolan brand, and I knew lots of people would ask me my assessment of it. And people I know well and whose opinions I respect had already shared glowing reviews with me.

   The costumes, boats, scenery, and buildings were super well-done. I felt like we were back in the Bronze Age. The dialogue wasn’t very Bronze-Age-ish or Greek-ish, but no worries. There was some solid acting, but I’m no judge of such things.

   Four people we know sat on the row in front of us. Several times one would turn to me and say “You’ll get a sermon out of this, I’m sure!” Probably not. Despite being dazzled by cinematic technique, and digging a few moments, I was on the whole very disappointed. I’m a fan of Matt Damon (I mean, “Good Will Hunting”? “Bourne”? – great stuff). But his Odysseus was brooding, uncertain, pulsating with regrets, and nowhere near as wise, charming, brilliant, and compelling as Homer’s Odysseus.

   Not Damon’s fault! Nolan gave him a script. To Nolan (who seemed bent in the overall plot of the film to be saying Civilization is crumbling and we’d best do something before it collapses) I’d say Our civilization desperately needs heroes. You’re putting one on the big screen, but he looks decidedly unheroic.

   He looks unheroic because of another huge flaw in the film. One reviewer, Leah Schnelbach, rightly named “the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey.” In Homer, the gods are everywhere, active, and due considerable reverence as they push the plot. In Nolan, there are vague allusions to Poseidon being very angry and hurling some storms – feeding, I fear, into modern notions that God is not a good blessing but a problem. Athena appears on most pages of Homer, talking a lot, disguising herself as various characters, hugely impactful. In Nolan, a woman (I had to guess it was Athena) once in a while is sitting near Odysseus, more like she’s his therapist instead of the warrior goddess who wears armor and wields a spear.

   Damon as Odysseus hears others speak of the gods, and his replies reveal he is bent on defying them. I’m okay that this is inconsistent with Homer, but it’s so very modernistic, isn’t it? There’s a lot of chatter in the film about “the Law of Zeus,” the Greek tradition of hospitality as a must. I wish I’d known at the beginning to count how many times various characters appealed to “the Law of Zeus.” Zeus begins with a z, and for me the boring repetition of his name left me with a zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

   Zeus’s Law is utterly unsuccessful as a plot driver, and I’m sure Homer would say hospitality doesn’t come into play when city states are attacking one another or when someone’s stealing from your home. Homer’s Zeus wasn’t the author of a Miss Manners book of how to welcome strangers. Zeus was the king of the gods, a harsh enforcer of justice, and a philanderer.

   But my biggest complaint about the film is that it is flat out TOO LONG. It wasn’t the 3 hours; many of my favorite movies (“The Lord of the Rings”? “The Godfather”? “Dr. Zhivago”? “Ben Hur”? Even the biblical “Ten Commandments”?) are 3+ hours long. It’s a absurdly lengthy fight scenes. Yes, Homer’s Odyssey had violence. But Nolan fed into what must be the public’s taste for lengthy depictions of men stabbing, smashing, hurling, swinging, on and on, on and on, so boring. You could easily understand that in the plot there was a fight in just a minute or two. I wish I’d timed Nolan’s brawls.

   So what is it about our culture that digs extended and savage combat scenes? Homer was far more high-minded, reporting on fighting, but leaving us with a feel of nobility, personal tragedy, victory and sorrow. I should have seized on the beginning of any fight scene and gone to the bathroom or the snack bar. Boring, and troubling. I told my wife as we drove to dinner that I have a lone exception to my loathing of these monotonous scenes. In “The Lord of the Rings,” we have some extended battles. But there’s movement, real shifts in dynamics, and the unlikely hero pops up now and then (Eowen? Merry and Pippin?). And humor: in the thick of peril, Legolas and Gimli taunt one another as they count how many orcs they’ve dispatched. It’s funny, and defuses the violence.

   Okay, this review needn’t ramble on as long as Nolan’s film. I’m glad I saw it. Sort of.

History Matters - Now More than Ever

    I snapped up a copy of David McCullough’s new History Matters the day it was published. He’s always been reliable to reward his readers with hours of being absorbed in some moment in history, and you feel you know and have befriended people who matter: Harry Truman, Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams – the list goes on and on.

   McCullough died 3 years ago, and so his daughter lovingly gathered various unpublished essays and has gifted us with them. The title is pitch perfect. History Matters. I’d add Now more than Ever. In our vapid anti-intellectual day, when history increasingly is ignored or revisioned beyond recognition, history really matters – and McCullough shows us why (and it’s not so you can score and win on Jeopardy). Listen to McCullough with me:

   “History shows us how to behave. History teaches us what we stand for. Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant. It’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude. I hope that we will become a people who are about the past because we care about the future. I hope that we will become a people who are less self-centered, self-conscious, and selfish.” That’s one small window into the treasure of these essays, and you can’t read those words without noticing why History Matters, and we’d best pay attention before it is too late for us, and we’re doing nothing more than writing a new chapter of history that will be a dark, embarrassing chapter in some future chronicle of history.

   There’s humor, a McCullough trademark. When asked why he had a horseshoe nailed about the door to his office for good luck, the great physicist Neils Bohr replied, “I’m told it works even if you don’t believe it.” McCullough finds some little marvelous detail which tells you everything about a person and a moment in history. Harry Truman got a call urging him to come to the White House. Not knowing Franklin Roosevelt had died, he ran (not “walked” but “ran”) there – stopping first by his office to get his hat (what McCullough calls “a nice period touch”).

   Truman matters, as does George Washington, and McCullough’s essays on these two should be read by every American today before we carry on as a people. This pair of essays exposes not just the best of these two remarkable men, but also the best in all of us, the ideals for which we might strive. Of Washington, McCullough draws our attention to the painting in the Capitol Rotunda of him handing over the command to Congress after the Revolutionary War. “This man who wouldn’t give up, who wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t give up no matter what, gives up the most important thing – power. He’s turning over command. No conquering general had ever done that. And when King George III heard this was going to happen, he said ‘If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.’ And he did. And he was.”

   And then Truman. He pushed through an unheard of (in those days – 1948!) a Civil Rights program – while he was running for President. His advisors told him he would lose if he did something that troubling to so many. Truman responded that, if he lost for that, he would have lost for a good cause. And there’s much more in McCullough’s short essay. Brilliant – and hugely important for us.

   I could say Read History Matters! I’d better say, since we’ve forgotten how to behave or what we really stand for, History does matter, so read history. It’s rude and ungrateful not to.

My Wager on Carbon

 After reading some glowing reviews, I snapped up a copy of author and environmentalist Paul Hawken’s new Carbon: The Book of Life, which eloquently demonstrates what we should already know: carbon feels nowadays like a problem (“carbon emissions,” “carbon footprint,” etc.), but carbon is the stuff that animates all of life, mine as I type, yours as you read, the world’s.

While praising carbon, and while dazzling us with the marvel that carbon is, Hawken is like a vigilant, protective parent as he frets over what humanity has done and persists in doing to this carbon-enlivened world we delight in. I am sure a high percentage of the American population will rush to politicize and thus dismiss his concerns. But count me in the camp of those in my neighborhood whose yard-signs say “Science is real.” And I am glad that there are scientists who knows things and are way smarter than I am.

Let me share a few of Hawken’s thoughts – and ask (even if you think worrying about the environment is only for the politically naïve) if we might be wise to take seriously and heed all the warning flares. A wager (the wager, really): Supposing all the educated scientists are wrong about the impending peril. If we conserve, if we protect this beautiful earth, no harm will be done – and wouldn’t we rather risk believing climate change will be catastrophic, doing something, and turning out to be wrong? than dismissing climate change as a fake problem, doing nothing (or adding to the problem), but turning out to be wrong? What moves so many people to bet the future of the world on science being a hoax?

Okay. Some of Hawken’s warnings: “If human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed, civilization will be.” “The current lifestyle of the world is maintained at the cost of a terrifying future.” “Commerce is eliminating life on earth to pay shareholder dividends.” Ouch. “We are trying to design life on our own terms even while we are killing life on its terms.” “There is a tacit assumption that the current fossil fuel-based energy system can be swapped out for renewables and the privileged can continue to live the way they do; this is magical thinking.”

As a Christian theologian, I can only say that the Bible quite clearly implies we are to be careful stewards of the beautiful earth God has entrusted to us. St. Francis of Assisi is something of the patron saint of conservation - and rightly so. He wasn’t scared of a future, though. He was so enraptured by the glories God crafted that he did not wish for a single voice in that great chorus to be silenced. Creation isn’t ours for the taking. It is God’s, and ours is to glorify, and cherish.

At the end (don’t be anxious about a spoiler alert!), Hawken underestimates things by saying “The cascade of troubling information about the future is staggering and dispiriting.” Then he wisely reminds us that “Without fail, meaningful change begins with one person, one idea, one aspiration, one audacious dream. Uniqueness is your birthright… Plant it and see what happens. Pessimism and gloom are cobwebs; brush them aside.” Indeed, “You can’t be both cautious and courageous, we must choose…Where you are is where you are most effective. The power to act does not lie elsewhere. Everyone on Earth comes first; there is no second.”

Cruelty and Compassion: "I am like you. This troubles me."

  On Wednesday I had a great conversation with friend, author and inspiring merchant of love and hope Julie Wood. You can watch! Her book, Changing the Message, narrates the cruelty inflicted on her beautiful son Ben – in the church, his happy, safe place – which sent him into a downward spiral, eventually taking his own life. A youth pastor, spewing vile condemnation at a vulnerable kid for being – although still too young to have had a romantic relationship – gay.

   I admire Julie’s courage and resilience, and her determination to save even one life, or one more person being treated as any less than a lovely child of God, when she sits in front of people and bares her soul, her deep woundedness. And yet she has a vast heart overflowing with love – even daring to understand mean people. No small feat, this daring to understand.

   In our conversation, I read some lyrics from Craig Hella Johnson’s moving, mind-boggling “Considering Matthew Shepard,” a profound setting to music of the story of the young man brutally murdered for being gay in Wyoming. The most poignant moment comes when gays and lesbians reflect on Matthew’s killers:

   “When I think of you, and honestly I don’t like to think about you. But sometimes I do. I am so angry and confused. Late one night I had a glimpse of something, I don’t even like to say this out loud, it isn’t even all that true, but I wondered for a moment, am I like you in any way? I pray the answer is no. I bet you once had hopes and dreams too. Some things we love get lost along the way. That’s just like me. I am like you, I get confused, I’m afraid, I’ve been reckless, unthinking, intoxicated, I’ve come unhinged and made mistakes and hurt people very much. I am like you; this troubles me.”

   Julie resonated to this thought, pondering how we are all broken, and how if we hurl rage toward those who seem so evil, we become like them. She asks What happened, what trauma happened to the youth minister who scathingly condemned Ben to hell that twisted his created goodness into monstrous meanness?

   Mind you, there’s forgiveness and there’s forgiveness. Finding a space of understanding, and letting go of understandable, natural recoiling against someone who did something horrible to you and yours never can imply that it was all right. We demand this never happen on earth, ever again, and then meander toward a place of compassion, even for the one who is so terribly wrong, and hope.

   In our agonizingly divided world, with so much toxic rancor, I wonder if Julie might be showing us a way forward. We get confused. We’ve made mistakes and hurt others, including ourselves. I am like you. This can be, albeit with the conviction that the standard for Christians, and for all people of goodwill (and this isn’t optional) is that we resist as zealously as we can any who do harm. We stand with those who are adversely impacted by what’s going on. That’s not partisan. That’s not even exclusively Christian. That’s just human.

Holy Land Pilgrimage, 2026!

   Come with me to Israel to explore the places where Jesus walked and so many Bible stories happened! From the Sea of Galilee to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from Bethlehem to Magdala and Caesarea: moving, transformative places we will see together. More details are forthcoming - but for now mark your calendar for April 28-May 9. I've led two dozen pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and showing it to others is one of my great joys in life. Tentative cost will be around $4,750, which includes flights, accommodations, and on the ground travel. Reach out to me at james@mpumc.org with any questions or to express interest! 

Thinking Out Loud: How United Methodists Read Scripture

    Sometimes I think of my years in ministry as a long quest to share with others my love affair with the Scriptures. I’ve always hoped people would see in me what I saw in my Old Testament professor, Fr. Roland Murphy. What students of his recall is that he would read something from the Bible, and then make a deep, guttural Hmmmmm, like a bear having just swallowed a delicious hunk of meat. The best thing about me is my abiding affection for this book.

   How puzzling, slightly offensive but mostly exasperating then to find myself and so many friends who share my love characterized by those disaffiliating from our denomination as lacking reverence for or taking a dim view of Scripture, or recklessly believing what we wish while shoving Scripture aside, or resorting to twisted interpretations. We United Methodists revere the Bible as the inspired Word of God.

   We are honest, humble, and even hopeful as we acknowledge that faithful Christians can and do disagree on how Scripture speaks to us, the church and the world. Being fallen, sinful creatures, we Christians have a nasty habit of reading our biases into the text; we have blind spots, which is good reason to seek and delight in disagreement. We read, and listen with humility, intense curiosity, wary of agendas, especially those that mimic the political ideologies of the day.  {Parenthetically, a new and wise theology of how to interpret Scripture that spans the gap between conservative and progressive biases – and is winning prizes now from both, is Christopher Watkin’s brilliant Biblical Critical Theory.}

   Many of us pastors were schooled to adopt a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” For me, I have suspicions about how we’ve harmed others in our spin on texts, and about how we may have mis-read things unwittingly – or self-indulgently. Marilynne Robinson perceives a “hermeneutic of self-protectiveness,” which is ultimately a “hermeneutic of fear,” a “hermeneutic of other-ing,” which does not long for and is not open to fresh winds of the Spirit.

   Ours is a “hermeneutic of grace,” or at least we strive for this. Like a Geiger counter seeking out good (Fr. Greg Boyle’s image), we look for reasons to embrace, to encourage, to welcome any and all into the family of God – which we see clearly as the heart of Scripture. “There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And so we never weaponize the Bible. It is bread for the hungry. It is, as Luther envisioned, the swaddling clothes in which the Christ child is to be found.

   God gave us Scripture, not as a blunt instrument of judgment, or a batch of escape clauses for modern people who want to live as they wish. The Bible is an invitation to holiness, to the freedom the Spirit gives us to be who we really are. How do we discern the Bible’s perspective on this or that issue? The Bible, clearly, engages in conversation with itself. We do our darnedest to weigh all of Scripture, Scripture interpreting Scripture, to nose out the heart of it all, the big canvas, not just one brushstroke.

   In the Bible’s conversation with itself, we regularly notice a wariness of the Bible as a smorgasbord of rigid rules and judgments passed. To ask How do we read Scripture? is actually to ask, What kind of Church is God asking us to be? Many churches, over the centuries, have assumed God is asking us to be the Moral Police of the world. We’re no good at being the Moral Police, and truth be told, no one out there is waiting for the church to dictate to them what is right and what is wrong. No one is listening. Many out there will forever be alienated from such a church that reads the Bible for such a purpose.

   What kind of Church is God asking us to be? The documentary, “Finding Harmony,” follows choral conductor David Brown as he shows up in Springfield, Ohio, tacking up signs in windows saying “Come and Sing With Us,” with date, place and time. He invites passers-by, the checkout guy, the waitress, any and everybody. All kinds of people show up, old, young, white, black, conservative, liberal. They sing – together. He gets them talking, and people are surprised to find themselves listening to stories they’d not heard from people like themselves, and sharing stories with former strangers. They listen, they love, they sing – and they work on a Habitat house together.

   God asks us to be a Church that joyfully says “Come and Sing With Us,” a church that listens, shares, and digs into the Bible together, not looking for ammunition, but a meal to be shared. This is how we can reach the disenfranchised, the skeptics, the non-believers, the jaded, the wounded. The Bible is all about finding them and bringing them to the table, as Jesus tantalizingly portrayed things so marvelously in Luke 14. It is only reading Bible well that will help us get beyond the polarization in all those debated terms, like racism, inclusion, immigration. Scripture unburdens us from the endless debating with the simple affirmation that, in God’s realm, there are no debated people.

   As Christians, we are blessed by listening carefully to how non-Christians read our texts. If I confer with a rabbi friend in sermon preparation, I'm always wiser. Then also, as Christians, we take Jesus as the key to our hermeneutic. What in Scripture is in sync with Jesus, who is the heart and embodiment of God, and what is out of sync? No genocide, no burning of adulterers, no passing judgment on others, all in Scripture - and why? Not because we don't like it, but because it's just so out of kilter with all Jesus was about.

   We aren't fundamentalists, or literalists - although we try as best we are able to read a given passage as it was literally intended. Of course there are mistakes, dates, some misspelled names, and even theological confusions - which we know based on Scripture's own conversation with itself! 

   We United Methodists resonate with what Rowan Williams wisely wrote – that what is in the Bible is what God wants us to read and hear – which doesn’t mean Jesus is endorsing everything that every character in the story says or thinks. God is saying “This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to me; Where are you in this?  We do not have to work on the assumption that God likes those responses.” Genocide, polygamy, slavery and the devaluing of women are all supported by voices in Scripture. But we know God doesn’t like those – not based on our feelings, but on the rest of and the heart of all of Scripture.

   To the issue of the day: is LGBTQ+ inclusion only possible if we set aside Scripture? Or do we welcome and bless them (or affirm they are already blessed!) by our reading of Scripture? Conservative rabbis, who read Scripture way more fastidiously than any Christians I know, affirm same gender relationships based on the same book many Christians use to debate and judge them.

   For us, we state at the outset that we are speaking of holy people striving to follow Jesus, and holy relationships of commitment before God. We see the fruit of the Spirit on clear display in the lives of our LGBTQ+ members and couples. We need one another in church, reading Scripture together.

   All of Scripture leads us to a robust theology of Creation, and a deep trust and delight in its diversity. Willie Jennings (in his Acts commentary): “Differences among people do not occasion God’s anger but God’s delight... Difference is not an impediment for relationship , but the very stage on which God will create a deeper and richer reality of communion with the divine life…. Pastors and church leaders have made themselves the high priests of segregationist practices. They have settled for the love of their own people instead of a love that creates a people.”

   And he is careful to clarify that we aren’t jettisoning holiness as the singular pursuit of life with God. What might the Spirit reveal to us about what is holy and what isn’t? “Obedience must take flight with the Holy Spirit into an uncharted world where distinctions between holy and unholy have been upended, in a moment where purity is expanded to cover what had been conceived as impure.” This is the project of the entire New Testament, isn’t it?

   There’s no avoiding the fact that the Bible which we love so dearly was written on the other side of the planet from where I live, and 2000+ years ago, in a very different culture. The average listener to Paul, at the mention of homosexuality, would have thought of those Romans who creepily endorsed older, wealthy men having a young slave partner. And, of course, some United Methodists would conclude this fits into Rowan Williams's category of things Bible writers simply heard wrongly. But if we are talking holy, committed relationships, then we are willing to err, humbly, on the side of hospitality.

   I suspect many, though not all United Methodists would resonate with the way Paul Chilcote summarizes things: “With regards to our siblings in the LGBTQIA+ segment of our family, scripture reveals three things in particular. 1) All people, regardless of their sexual orientation or identity, are God’s beloved. 2) Relationships based on love among our siblings in the LGBTQIA+ community can be expressed in sacredness, fidelity, permanency, and monogamy. These high standards apply to all those created in the image of God. 3) As beloved children of God all LGBTQIA+ siblings are invited to use their gifts to the fullest possible extent in the embodiment of God’s vision of shalom. Just as in the case of women, the doors to ministry in the life of the church should be opened to these faithful siblings as well.” Such is our best, humblest and most hopeful reading, taking hospitality in hermeneutics and ecclesiology as the indispensable key.