My Bonhoeffer Book and Video links: Why he matters right now

 My Bonhoeffer Book, and Videos:

   Why He Matters Right Now and How He Can Help Us

   I’ve never been as excited to have a book published as I am right now. Reading the Bible with Bonhoeffer: A Study in Discipleship and Courage has just rolled off the press, and I’m pumped up about it, and proud of it – mostly because I am sure no figure in Christian history matters so much right now as Bonhoeffer. His living in the face of, and his profound theological response to evil and chaos inspire me, and will inspire you. Beyond that, his reflections on prayer, community, family, church, and religion itself are eloquent, wise, and thought-provoking. I love Bonhoeffer.

   There are lots of books on Bonhoeffer! But I feel mine is special, balanced, thoroughly researched, and focused on how and why Bonhoeffer matters for us in our world right now.

   So check out any or all of these things. The publisher, Abingdon Press, put out a 2 minute video preview which captures the spirit of the book.

   There’s the book itself! Reading the Bible with Bonhoeffer: A Study in Discipleship and Courage (←that’s the Amazon link, but you can also get it also from Cokesbury) – which is also available in e-book/Kindle.

   You might enjoy – yourself, or with a group – our 6-part video series featuring content (me talking) and Bonhoeffer places in Germany (where I visited and have brought video and photos home for this). These 12-15 minute videos are available in DVD, and are also downloadable online from Amplify Media. If you buy the book, you get a code that provides you access to the videos.

   Recently I spoke on Dietrich Bonhoeffer: What I Learned Visiting His Places, and Why He Matters Right Now, which you can watch. You might even want to travel with me to see where he lived and died in April 2027!

   Back in April, 2025, I gave a one hour multimedia presentation on his life and theology: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Why He Matters Now and Always

   As an introduction to Bonhoeffer, back in 2010 I published a short introduction to Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in my Heroes Found Faithful series.

9/11 turns 25: Recollections and Reflections

   I’d not thought ahead to realize this Friday will be the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 – the 9/11 – until I spoke the other day with my friend Geoff, whose brother George died in the Twin Towers. George had phoned his brother shortly after the attack, reporting that he was helping others to get out of the building, and not to worry about him. Geoff recalled to me with gratitude the love and care from his church and pastor that carried him through the intense grief which, of course, still lingers.

   His call prompted me to remember, and to reflect on all that has transpired, what has changed, how we are different, and the meaning of it all now at age 25. First, to remember.

Recalling 9/11/2001

   Like you (if you’re old enough to have been around then!), I know precisely where I heard the news, with whom I watched the unfolding horror, and the absolute urgency of needing to speak with and hug those I love but took for granted earlier that morning. The school announced it was fine to pick up your kids, or let them stay at school. I picked mine up, and immediately.

   We all felt helpless, watching the utter and devastating helplessness of the unrescuable; I wonder about the long-term paralyzing effects of these harrowing images etched in our souls. Things went from horrible to much worse – and twice, as one tower fell, then the other.

   By noon on 9/11, a steady stream of people with a crazed mix of emotions, numb, panicky, teary, enraged, and confused, not knowing what else to do, showed up at churches like mine, even though it was a Tuesday. Sanctuaries were packed on Friday in response to President Bush’s appeal for a day of prayer. Much was said that week about God. Many predicted a sweeping national religious revival, that we would rise up from the ashes like the phoenix. I was more sober, guessing church attendance would boom for two or three weeks, then settle down. I was wrong. By Sunday number two, we’d returned to the way things had been.

   I could not sleep that week, and spent the wee hours in my children’s rooms, watching them sleep, grieving that they would grow up in such a violent world, praying for children I did not know by name whose parents had died in the attacks, or in efforts to rescue others.

   On 9/11, I’d been at WBTV for a few hours on the local news with another pastor, as they wanted religious people on hand to offer commentary. When off camera, he and I explored what we might preach come Sunday. He’d chosen Psalm 46. My mind drafted toward Psalm 102:

   “Hear my prayer, O Lord. Do not hide your face from me. For my days pass away like smoke, my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is smitten. I forget to eat my bread. I am like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake. I am like a lonely bird on the rooftop. My enemies taunt me. I eat ashes like bread.” Days of utter destruction, evil, and terror are well-recorded in Scripture. I couldn’t rush to easy theological clichés. We dwell with the sorrow, like the Psalmists of old.

The Troubles of the World

   Sadly, instead of turning to hope in God, unity among Americans, and peace in the world, we rushed to payback and a swelling of national pride. President Bush vowed to rid the world of evil. We’ve not rid our own hearts of evil! And the world is, if anything, more widely haunted by evil. Today, we are mired in an unwinnable war in the Middle East – again – even though Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are long dead.

   The troubles of the world are so overwhelming we feel impotent. We are more judgmental of people who are different. And I suspect we are less willing than ever to ask hard moral questions about the way we pursue security. We may be meaner than we were 25 years ago; but if we are, it is because we are scared. Today we’re as angry with the other half of America as we were then with the Taliban or whomever else wrought terror from far away.

   Religion hasn’t helped. If anything, religion has been discredited. Wasn’t it a crazed, twisted faith that motivated the killers? And who looks more foolish? Those who say God orchestrated the events to judge us (as some did)? or those who’d naively believed God would always protect us? And now, as a reflex of our fears, insecurity, and malformed souls that perceive difference as danger, we have churches waving flags and worshipping a muscular, automatic-weapon-toting Jesus, as if God wishes us to fight terror out there and even in our own country with more terror.

   I’ve visited the 9/11 memorial a few times. We always find George’s name by the pool. I imagine survivors, widows who’ve grown old, those who were little kids then who have little kids of their own now. The grief that abides. And I’ve tried to puzzle out, in my mind, what might be any blessing to come from 9/11. Where’s the hope, the wisdom, the plan?

Wisdom from 9/11?

   Some theological lessons reside there. If there’s a God, this deity isn’t a genie who shelters us but not others. If there’s a God, it must be a God who cares about all people, all countries, and until we think about a good God in all places, and the way that goodness in God can and should manifest itself through all religions, we will shrivel into permanently frightened, angry victims.

   As a country, we now know what all other countries have experienced through history. Think about it: 9/11 was just a sip, barely a taste of what Ukraine, Gaza, and a great many other places have repeatedly experienced over months and years. Perhaps knowing, we can sympathize, and not intimidate so much as befriend, and maybe move toward the forgiveness and reconciliation that are at the heart of our faiths. We’ve learned that the immense power we wield (as our military still dwarfs all other militaries combined) cannot insulate us from harm; perhaps we can learn to ask how our bigness might foster understanding and peace. Perhaps it’s high time to reclaim the moral high ground.

   Where should 9/11 rank among the days? To me, 9/11 is like 12/7/41, or the day my grandfather died, or the day a tornado touched down and killed a friend, or a shooter rampaged through Virginia Tech – tragic days, solidly and thankfully in the past. Evil probably loves so much attention being lavished on such a dark, violent day. 

   More crucial, and hopeful world-changing days in the past for us Americans might be not 9/11 but 7/4, when the good of independence was declared, or 1/1/1863, when the unjustly enslaved were emancipated. My children’s birthdates merit pomp and circumstance, for they are days that celebrate life, not death. Is Ground Zero sacred ground – a place where evil pumped its fist? Or is it the labor and delivery room? Or our sanctuaries where we pray and hope? or the classroom where a student gets a bold idea?

   What dates changed history? Christians point to Easter, Jews to the Passover liberation from bondage in Egypt; other traditions have their sacred, life-giving days as well. A graduation?  A wedding?  These are days with a future, with hope and joyful optimism.

   After 25 years of grieving, fear and anger, might our next 25 become a season of a revival of courage and hope? Can we be the people who get back up, unified not by rage or apathy but by hope, the kinds of people envisioned by those who signed on 7/4, the noble who celebrate Easter, Passover, birthdays, weddings or graduations? We reached out for meaning and help, love and hope, on 9/11. Might the best memorial be a new reaching out, and forward, so the phoenix of goodness does finally rise from the ashes?

 

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.

Uncantankerous Christians: a Reply to Marilynne Robinson

    Recently I’ve been devouring the great novelist Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant and wise essays – including one in which she laments the hijacking of the term “Christian” by the extreme, shrill, far right “ranters and politicians.” This newfangled version of religion is, like most of our public chatter nowadays, vapid, vulgar, and even violent. It’s not that Christianity has been watered down; it has somehow transmuted itself into something nationalistic, militaristic, very white, angry and judgmental, anti-immigrant and pro-guns. The poor are reviled, books are banned, and science is ridiculed. Alternatives are greeted with a sneer.

   Robinson is puzzled, not just by this perversion of “Christian,” but that “the old mainline,” the “learned and uncantankerous,” while objecting strenuously to all this, are “unaccountably quiet about it. She suggests they must feel lonely, and their inefficacy is obvious. She wishes they would speak up.

   As a mainline guy who is uncantankerous, I suspect we are quieter than we should be. Why? Is it a kind of courtesy toward others, thinking religion isn’t a topic for pleasant dinner conversation? or a restraint on arrogance, a humility that expects and finds wisdom all over the place, not only among those who believe as we do?  

   Let me be one to say out loud that we grieve the toxic travesty that masquerades as Christianity. There are Christians, and Churches, and in large numbers, that aren’t angry or cocky. We refuse to bow down to the idols of political ideology. We care that, in our Bibles, the poor are never vilified or blamed; the poor are blessed, and we are responsible to care for them and walk with them. Immigrants, strangers, and refugees are never despised in the Bible; ours is to welcome, help, share and understand. We treasure life in the womb, and are passionately committed to what unfolds after birth – and for all.

   “All” seems to be one of God’s favorite words, if the Bible is any indication – as is the word “with.” God is with us. We are to be with others, not against them. The “ranters and politicians” Robinson worries about want power to impose their agenda, and they will do anything to stay in power. Voter suppression is a weapon for the far right to stay in power, as is gerrymandering. Show a gerrymandering map to a child, and she will laugh. Lines aren’t drawn to bless all. Lines are zigzagged like a slippery salamander so the gerrymanderers might cling to power. The Christians who forged this country wanted a representative democracy and a balance of powers, not curtailing who gets a say, and never concentrating power on any one person.

   God does not gerrymander. God does not look down and draw a squiggly line: “These guys are in. Those are out. These get the blessings. But nope, not those over there.” God’s map is deep and wide, including and empowering, not suppressing, all.

   How can we be sure that mainline, uncantankerous Christianity is truer than that of the ranters and politicians? Noting the agenda of the far right, Robinson wryly declares “I am moving toward the conclusion that these Christians, if they read their Bibles, are not much impressed by what they find there.” Jesus wanted swords put down. But they are sure Jesus and his disciples would carry automatic firearms and thus avoid his violent end.

   Doesn’t the Bible say “If you have the world’s goods, and see someone in need, but close your heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” “The Samaritan is your neighbor.” “Love your enemy; turn the other cheek.” Robinson reflects on the Bible’s ideas that “the first will be last” and “judge not,” and the company Jesus kept, she can only conclude that “We have it on good authority that prostitutes and sinners might well enter heaven before us. It is difficult to respond to this with a heartfelt Amen if one has found comfort in despising people in whom Christ clearly finds great value.”  

   God gave us the Bible, assuming we’d be willing to let it correct our ideological confusions and our personal delusions. The push to shift funding from public schools to private Christian academies? Isn’t it truly Christian to want every child to become as educated as possible, not just Christian children? Fretting over how history is taught? Aren’t the lessons of the marvelous achievements and also the embarrassing flub-ups together what we all need to learn and ponder so we might rise up and improve not just ourselves but all of us and the world? Bible people fear no knowledge, trusting our leader’s promise that the truth will set us free. 

   There are many Christians and Churches who delight in human difference, delighting in God’s creative wizardry as a gift to liberate us from narrow-mindedness and to make us wise. We aren’t terrified by other religions, believing God has strewn wisdom all over the place, and trusting that when all religions are their truest, best selves, antagonisms fade, and peace might just happen. We know what we don’t know. We are curious. We strive to be hospital, humble, and grateful. Our biases aren’t enshrined, but suspect. Sacrifice for others is holy. We are neither angry nor judgmental, which is to say we are not entirely given over to our fears. We believe beauty matters, that love is always the way to life. We are Christian.

On Being a Patient: My 2 Week Hospital Stay

   Given my profession, a place I often go is the hospital, where I’ve spent countless hours and much love, care and tears. Never though, until April 19, did I find myself admitted as a patient inside one. Instead of ministerial garb, there I was in the blousy green gown with a gaping opening in the back. Hard to discern whether to cling to your tattering shreds of dignity, or just surrender to No shame.

   I got my start in life in a hospital as a patient, sort of, if a baby in the nursery counts. And I may make my exit out of life in a hospital too. Such odd places, life and death, survival and decline mingled hauntingly in a single institution. I recall as a young pastor holding hands with an older gentleman as he breathed his last. Just as the nurse declared “He’s gone,” the violins (was it Brahms?) on the loudspeaker announced a baby had just been born. C’est la vie.

   In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom tells of the day that his friend and teacher Morrie Schwartz was told he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Outside, the sun was shining and people were going about their business. A woman ran to put money in the parking meter. Another carried groceries.” Morrie was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. “Shouldn’t the world stop? Don’t they know what has happened to me?”

   Not that you want others to know. In our culture, which idolizes health, progress, and quick fixes, there’s almost a sense of embarrassment that you haven’t just whipped this thing. I was in the hospital way longer than anybody anticipated, and I could feel both concern but also shock that I wasn’t home quickly. Tells us a lot about how good modern medicine is, and about how we therefore blanch over the idea of extended suffering.

   I’ve always loved hospital visitation, that holy chance to represent God’s church to people under duress; I knew never to stay long (rule of thumb learned day 1 in seminary). As a patient in some misery, I found myself super honored someone would stop by. But I could muster zero hospitality energy, and I asked Lisa to hold folks at bay. I texted one visitor later to apologize for being rude. She understood. I hope. A couple of visitors just poked their heads in and waved. I felt so loved! – and relieved.

   What to make of God and a long hospital stay? A lovely poem about illness by John O’Donohue speaks of “a courageous hospitality toward what is difficult, painful and unknown.” On day 1, tethered to equipment and flat on a bed, I thought, “I’ll pray a lot.” It’s embarrassingly difficult to pray when you’re fending off constant nausea and a splitting headache – and various professionals zigging and zagging in and out to run tests, poke, stick, listen, prod. I veered quite a few times toward utter despair. I do know enough to recall that the Bible is full of despair. It’s not something that mortifies Jesus. He is very close to us in our despair.

   One of those professionals turned a light bulb on in my soul. A new nurse introduced himself: Martin. He asked how I was. This was at my nadir, the worst day and maybe hour ever. I said “I’m despairing that I’m not getting better. I may never get better.” He said, “You’ll get better.” I asked, “Is that a promise?” He laughed and said, “No, it’s medicine.”

   Two things about that. We talk a lot about hope, or faith, as if it’s something in us we have to do, and strongly if possible. But we hope in God, we believe in God. It’s not our earnestness and positive thoughts about God, but God that saves us.

   And then: medicine. We pray for cures. And God knows I might have prayed for more sick people in my lifetime than anyone you’ve ever met. God heals most often through the smart, hard-working, valiant professionals we call doctors, nurses, the IV team, the X-ray and CT scan people who are God’s handymen, delegates, worker bees, elves… so don’t go as far as you can go with medicine and then ask God to overcome what they can’t fix. God is already there when after your physical, the internist orders up an extra test. God is even in you, God’s delegate, in your body, the Temple of the Holy Spirit: when you feel pain or discomfort (as I did to start all this), it’s God saying “James! James! I wired you with these warning signals! Go see my people down there who can help!”

   I have a friend who heard I was laid low, and said “God sure has a way of slowing you down.” I can’t think for a moment God thought “James is just wearing himself out being so busy! I’ll jerk this colonic volvulus thing in his gut, and then he’ll cool his jets for a while.” But there is a simplification, a cutting to the core of what really matters. O’Donohue’s poem suggests illness might become “a lantern to illuminate new qualities emerging in you,” and that this light might “release whatever has become false in you.” Once it became evident I’d be in the hospital for quite a few days, and I’d emerge sub-par whenever I got out, I cancelled a week of busy things to do in about ten minutes. Important and urgent, some of these things! But all tumbled rapidly off the table of what really matters – as did trips to Colorado and Peru planned for my sabbatical. Funny how little they mattered in the face of a health crisis!

   For me, and I pray I can cling to this more zealously than I clung to my last shred of dignity being prodded in that green gown, it’s understanding what really matters – that is, what it is to be human. To be human isn’t to make mistakes. To be human isn’t to consume or maximize fun. My fellow human temporary boarders in the hospital? Not one of us wanted to be there. Yet everyone one of us very much wanted to be there. Like life on earth: it’s a pilgrimage, we’re passing through – but gosh, it’s such a cool space. And it took me a week to realize I didn’t know the political or religious affiliation of any other patient or professional. Lovely. Calming. Healing.

   We are alive in these bodies. It’s precarious, always – which is what makes it such a treasure. I’m here. My wife and kids are hovering nearby. Life is good. Life is hard. Life is… life. I’m a person who matters, if only in this small space to not many people. Which is why I made it a point to ask every professional her or his name – and where are you from? No one responded with merely a city or state. Always a story. So many stories: people with jobs, but dreamers, lovers, with their own issues and gifts and glories. I might just wear this hospital wrist-band forever to remind me of just that. Being human. That’s all God asks of us. That’s all God asks us to ask of one another.