A Thanksgiving Reflection

   Thanksgiving! When we take a day off to celebrate with families reunited and get stuffed fuller than the Thanksgiving turkey! It is a day we remember what we are thankful for. What are you thankful for? Shortly, we will have a time for everyone who wishes to share what they are thankful for. But I can explain that right now:

I am thankful for - the fork!

As table utensils go, the fork is a recent invention. The knife was first, of course, dating to prehistory. The spoon also dates to the Stone Age, literally. But forks date only to ancient Greece, and then they were large cooking utensils, not for the dining table. In the 600s, table forks were invented but used only in the Middle East. Table forks did not appear in Europe until a thousand years ago, and then only in Italy. The Italians were very slow to adopt them, not using them widely until five hundred more years passed. Forks did not reach France until 1533, but the French thought using them was an affectation and their adoption was very slow. The first table fork reached England in 1608, where they were promptly ridiculed as effeminate and unnecessary. Over many years, forks came to be adopted by the wealthy, who had them made from expensive materials intended to impress guests.

The first Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth Colony was in 1621. There were no forks. The pilgrims and their guests used knives, spoons, their fingers, and cloth napkins to manipulate their food. So, I am thankful to have a fork to make eating Thanksgiving dinner easier.

The connection between food and giving thanks that reaches back thousands of years. As the children of Israel prepared to cross into the Promised Land, Moses told them,

When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. … 8 “The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.” You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house (Deuteronomy 26:1-2, 8‑11).

Giving thanks to God has a connection with food about three millennia old. The ancient Jews knew of course that life depends on food. But they emphasized that their lives were sustained by the presence of God. After all, not only had God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, he had sustained them with manna as they wandered in the Sinai. They understood that filling the soul was as important as filling the plate.

There was once a man who was struck by a city bus and was critically injured. He was rushed unconscious to a hospital and went immediately into emergency surgery. The surgeon barely saved the man’s life after several hours on the operating table. The victim regained alertness five days later. The day after that, the surgeon stopped in to see him. Incredibly, the injured man launched into a litany of complaints about the care he had received in the last 24 hours – the food was cold, the nurses were slow when summoned, the TV was too small and too far away, the room was either too hot or too cold, and so on.

The surgeon interrupted, “Look, you were almost dead when you got here! I worked on you for five hours! I repaired both your shattered legs, set your broken arm and three ribs. One lung was punctured, and I saved you from suffocating. You were gashed across your head and I sewed it up. Your heartbeat was irregular, and I got it stabilized. A little gratitude might be in order!”

“Okay, doc, thanks,” the patient answered, “but what have you done for me today?”

Probably everyone here has had a moment like that doctor, being informed of perceived failure to meet someone’s else’s demand. One day in Galilee Jesus miraculously fed more than five thousand people, starting with just five small loaves of bread and two fish. That night Jesus left the area. The next day the crowd tracked Jesus down.

John 6:25-35

25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?"

26 Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal."

28 Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?"

29 Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

30 So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"

32 Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

34 They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Jesus said the only reason the people followed him was because they saw him as a sort of walking grocery store. It was time, Jesus said, for the people to work for the food that endures for eternal life. The people asked what they needed to do to perform the works of God. Jesus answered they needed to start with believing in him because God had sent him.

They asked what sign, or miracle, Jesus would perform so that they may see it and believe in him. Now, just the day before the people had miraculously eaten their fill because of Jesus’ power, but now they said to him, what have you done for us today? It seems a strong sense of entitlement people often have is no new phenomenon.

Baby boomers like me were raised by the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War Two. Much of what my parents’ generation went through is out of place with how my age group knows life. Pulitzer Prize winning author William Manchester wrote of how his mother would cut and re-sew bed sheets to make them last longer. My grandfather, born in 1900, told me of young men he knew in the 1930s who worked ten-hour days on a farm to earn a dollar a day, and were glad to do it.

Yet my age group saw none of this. Robert J. Samuelson wrote of us baby boomers, “We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. In our new society most workers would have rising incomes and stable jobs. … Poverty, racism and crime would disappear. … We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. After a while we thought we were entitled to them as a matter of right.”

Yet, as author Mike Bellah points out, when our parents told us how things were, they failed to tell us how things usually really are. In telling the stories of the Great Depression and the Great War, the generation who lived them wanted to create in their children a sense of gratefulness that those tribulations were over, but what they often created in us instead was a sense of entitlement. Why? Says Bellah, “Because of what they didn't say. What our parents failed to tell us is that conflict and want are part of humankind’s future as well as its past. There have been no utopias in history, and as long as the human condition remains the same (imperfect people living in an imperfect world), there will be no utopian tomorrows either.”

Since Jesus's day the human condition has remained the same – imperfect people living in an imperfect world. This new millennium is only twenty-one years old, and we are already shocked by its events. It seems depressingly much like the last one – and the one before that.

So, we may say to Jesus, what have you done for us today? And what sign will you give us so that we may believe in you?

In John, Jesus does not perform miracles on demand; in fact, John's Gospel doesn’t even use the word miracle. Jesus does signs that attest to his identity as the one sent by God, on whom God has set his seal, the mark of authenticity. The constant theme in John is that those who believe without seeing miracles or appearances are blessed. When we say, however sophisticated our words may be, what has Jesus done for us today, what sign can he give us so that we may believe, Jesus’ answer is always the same: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes will never be thirsty.”

Christ has nothing to offer us except himself. And that is more plentiful than we imagine. Perhaps we should be thankful this Thanksgiving not for things; I doubt that this year mere stuff is what we are thankful for, anyway. Despite the violence, despite the threats, despite the uncertainty, despite our politics, we may be thankful that we can rejoice in the Lord always and that the Lord is near. The peace of God will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

   Thanksgiving, then, is not really a once-a-year celebration, except in a secular sense where it handily marks the day before Christmas shopping frenzy. Thanksgiving is for Christian people a continuous state of praise that acknowledges to God what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Thankfulness enables us to face the future with hope, for it is by thanking that we remember. To thank someone is to remember what he or she did for you. To remember what God has done is to be filled with hope, because God isn’t finished with the world or with us. As God has done, so God will do, and as God has given, so God will give. 

Thanksgiving is a joyful noise, a glad worship. Despite outwards circumstances, our hearts in faith do heed what the psalmist announced: The Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness lasts to all generations.

Bridging the Gap Between Scientism and Classical Theism

I know you have been anxiously awaiting when you can read my M.Div. thesis. Well, good news! Academia.edu has used AI to turn it into a podcast! And their page also used AI to create 12 slides of its points. They are below.

My thesis, or as Vanderbilt called it, Senior Project, is entitled, "The Disjunction Between Scientific Materialism and Classical Theism: A Process Solution." Before getting to the podcast and slides, here is an intro to the subjects concerned.

What is classical theism?  In classical theism, God "is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to "save it." Classical theism draws on "intuitions and assumptions of Greek philosophy as much as biblical images," says Tyron Inbody. 

Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God "as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality." This idea of impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers emphasized God's sovereignty as unchallenged, absolute power, wholly righteous and gracious. God was understood to have "absolute priority and decisiveness" in divine election. 

Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. "The concept of God's omnipotence is located at the center of classical theism," wrote Inbody, and so is at the heart of theodicy problems. (Theodicy is the theology of the problem of human suffering and evil.)

What is Scientism? Scientism is faith in science. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of our day, it is considered self validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are  provable using the scientific method:

    (1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth; 

    (2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as  reality really is.

The challenge of the new, scientific ways of understanding the world resulted in theological liberalism, which attempted to ensure Christian faith in a world dominated by the increasing power of science. However, "Attempts to render God and the modern world view compatible have been unsuccessful," observed David R. Griffin in God and Religion in the Postmodern World. This has led either to religious pantheism or insulation, which define the disjunction between scientific materialism and theism.

And so, here is the podcast. Slides are below: 

Nag, nag, nag!

Luke 18.1-8

1 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ”

6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Now think of this situation. A powerful magistrate, insensitive to public opinion polls or the will of God, is pestered day and night by a widow who is evidently so poor she cannot hire an attorney even to get her case listed on the docket. She nags the judge day and night. He eats dinner, the phone rings, it’s her, nagging for justice. When he pulls up at a traffic light, she pulls up beside him, rolls down her window and yells for justice. When he goes to his kids’ soccer games and cheers for the team, she is there screaming for justice. He can’t sleep and gets the shakes. His hair is turning gray. Finally he grants her petition just to be rid of her.

Obviously, Jesus is not making a positive comparison between this judge and God. In the end, the judge is not redeemed. He grants her request purely from pragmatism, just to shut her up. That’s not justice. He never actually hears her case, apparently. He just goes in one morning and has the clerk of court draw up the paperwork finding in her favor. Note that the unnamed other party of the case never gets a voice.

And Jesus explains that if even a crummy judge finally grants petitions, then how much quicker will a wholly just God answer those who cry out to him? But when the Lord returns, will he find people of persistent faith?

There are some real difficulties in just accepting this parable at face value. Probably almost everyone here has prayed in earnest for something that God did not grant. We pray for sick people to become healed, but they aren’t, not always. We pray for marriages to be saved but some fail anyway. Cathy and I knew a couple in our church in Virginia who had one child. They wanted another one or two. But the doctors had told the mother that there was some problem and that the odds of her having another baby were small to the point of vanishing. 

So they prayed and prayed and prayed and tried and tried and tried. The doctors prescribed fertility drugs to no avail. They were as persistent and faithful as the widow in the story. The doctors could give them no medical hope, so they turned to God. Nothing is impossible with God, right? And what could possibly be wrong with asking God for another child? The God of Jesus loves children, clearly. Finally, it sunk in that they were never going to be blessed by either science or religion with a second baby. And I think it killed their faith in both.

So when this passage in Luke seems to indicate that God will quickly grant our petitions, it is easy to be skeptical. People of faith know that it simply is not true that anything we ask for in Christ’s name will be granted. We know that Joan Baez's song, "Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” misses the point; in fact, missing the point was the point of the song. God is not a cosmic vending machine for which prayers are the currency. No one of minimally mature faith really thinks that God is anxiously waiting to be our personal genie in the lamp, always prepared and able to grant us wishes. Anyway, wishes usually are trivial in nature. It's the life-shattering things that can show the fragility of faith. Over time devout Christians discover that loved ones die young despite prayers, careers are shattered, or jobs lost despite prayers, children do drugs, marriages break down, what have you, even though the most heart-wrenching prayers are offered in true faith.

I have to say I don’t have magic Methodist foo-foo dust to sprinkle on that problem. The best I can offer people wrestling with that is where I come out on it. First, as Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, although the full flower of God’s love is not necessarily going to be realized by us in this here and now. As a matter of faith, I keep on trying to serve God because I believe another thing Paul wrote, that our present sufferings do not compare with the glory God has in store for us (Rom 8:18). That is the best I can do.

Jesus was no dummy. He surely knew ordinary people of genuine faith who did not have the benefit of being the son of God like he did. Those folks endured and were confounded by prayers that were apparently unanswered by a just God. So I think Jesus structured this parable pretty carefully.

Widows were specially mentioned in Jewish law. There were numerous commands in the Law of Moses to care for widows. Judges were under special admonition by religious law to be scrupulously fair, especially when dealing with matters relating to person-to-person cases. 

 Once Jesus has explained that God’s compassionate nature is the opposite of the unjust judge’s, Jesus’ plea to pray without losing lose heart takes on a different tone. The God to whom we pray is compassionate, ready to respond to the needs of the powerless and oppressed. But we should not pray selfish prayers, “concerned with petty issues, or irrelevant to God’s redemptive purposes” (NIB). We should pray first of all to be agents of God’s redemptive work in the world.

Like any parable, this one invites the hearers to find God inside the story and to place themselves inside the story somehow. The central figure is God, and the central lesson is the call for justice. But where do we find God in the parable? God can’t be found in the part of the judge; Jesus own explanation of the parable does not permit that. 

What if we consider the widow as the God figure? The prophet Micah wrote “what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). This is exactly the requirement that the widow is making of the judge – to act justly and to love mercy within the law. By doing so the judge will learn to fear God and walk humbly with him.

This reversal of roles isn’t so far-fetched. If God is willing to become one conceived as human, born in a barn, and endure the shame of dying on the cross, then I don’t think a Scriptural portrayal of God as a powerless widow is beneath the holy dignity. 

This characterization moves the focus of the story away from prayer and its potential to be answered or unanswered by God. Instead, we see the persistence of God’s demands for human beings to act justly and love mercy, and we see the human tendency to do anything but that. How long will we scoff at God and set God aside before God wears us down?

We have in so many ways “the power to relieve the distress of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” If we think of God as a powerless widow – one of the “least of these” whom Christ said represent his presence in history – then “the call to pray night and day is a command to let the priorities of God’s compassion reorder” the priorities of our lives (NIB).

So we are called to re-examine our faith. Faith isn’t just believing beliefs, but also doing the work of Christ in the world where and when we can. If we do not believe, in faith, that God has turned a deaf ear to us when we call, then integrity demands we not turn a deaf ear to God when he nags us to work for justice in the world. We must not be deaf to those who cry out in need to their fellow men and women.

When the Lord returns in power, will he find us faithfully acting justly and loving mercy? That is the question. The question is not, "Will I be cured?" The question is not, "Will I find a new job?" These are all important questions to be sure and more than deserving of prayer. But they are not the questions Jesus addresses in this parable. This parable is about persisting in prayerful work for justice, not in competition with an unjust Lord, but in cooperation with a just and loving God. 

So another way of looking at the parable is that of the widow was able to achieve justice by persisting against an unjust judge, then how much more quickly will our God of ultimate and perfect justice respond to our persistence in conforming to God's will? It will be difficult; we will suffer setbacks. But God will never brush us off and will always persist with us. 

How long will it take for God's justice to be established? From now to the Second Coming, according to the parable. How long should we persist in demanding justice and working for it? From now until the Second Coming, according to the parable. This time frame shows that the persistence and work called for here is not only for individuals, but for the Church in all its history. The Church itself, in its institution as well as its membership, must be persistent in discipleship and dogged in seeking justice. 

Will Willimon was serving as dean of the Duke University chapel until he was elected bishop in 2007 and assigned to the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. He once told a story about this passage that goes like this:

A person I know works for the telephone company, in the area of customer complaints. She has a tough job because she must represent the demands of the company, and at the same time, she must try to be open and caring about customers. She told me about a person who called her, complaining about some grave problem with her telephone service. My friend said, while this was a bad problem, it did not come under company guidelines. In other words, it was the customer’s problem, and not hers. 

The customer, a widow, living alone by herself on a fixed income, persisted. My friend said, “During the conversation, she at last said something that really got through to me. She said, I’ve always loved and respected the telephone company. Since I was a young child, coming home alone, my mother always told me, if you have any problem, just call the telephone operator and she will help. I trust the phone company to do what is right.”

My friend said that a light went on in her brain and she realized that this was not merely a complaint about bad service. It was a discussion about the character of the phone company. Was this a company that cared, a company that valued its long term relationship with a customer, a company that could be trusted? My friend reached out and solved the woman’s problem. 

In the same way Jesus's parable calls us to ponder what we really believe about God. Is God someone who can be trusted even when our prayers seem futile? Jesus says yes but tells the parable in a way that also calls us to examine ourselves. The discussion is about the character not only of God but of each one of us and of the Church itself. God can always be trusted. But can God trust us? That is the chief question the parable presents, and the one we must answer affirmatively. 

What's your pearl?

 Here is a true story that I read a few years ago. 

An aging woman decided to move into the city to a retirement home. She had a big sale to downsize. One thing she did was slap a "for sale" sign on her late husband’s pride and joy – a 1963 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing that he had bought in 1972. She remembered that he had told her the Mercedes was collector’s item worth one hundred thousand dollars not long before he had died fifteen years ago, so that’s what she priced it. One shopper saw the for-sale sign in the car’s window, and he immediately wrote her a check for twenty-five hundred dollars to hold the car for him for the day. Then he went to the bank and opened a home-equity line of credit. On the way there he called his broker and cashed in mutual funds. Then he maxed out his Visa card on a cash advance. He wound up with a certified check for $100,000 and drove back to buy the car. He knew what the widow did not: in the years since her husband died the car had increased in value to $250,000. 

That man was willing to take risks to obtain something of tremendous value. I knew a man in Nashville who told me a long time ago that he was offered the opportunity to become one of the original investors in the franchise license for all of Nashville for Wendy’s restaurants. He turned it down because he did not want to be diverted from the business he had already built up. Later, of course, he wished he had invested.

 Would you pay a hundred thousand dollars for an ordinary orange? Eleven millionaires drowned when
the Titanic sank in 1912. One who survived was Arthur Peuchen, who left $300,000 in a lockbox in his cabin. "The money seemed to mock me at that time," he said later. "I picked up three oranges instead." A hundred thousand bucks each. 

What is of ultimate value to us, so much so that we would sacrifice almost anything else to obtain it? Jesus spoke about that Matthew 13.44-45:

44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

In the ancient world a large, flawless pearl would have been something like the Hope diamond of its day. Ancient literature tells of single pearls worth millions of dollars in modern value. When this merchant found such a pearl, he cleaned out his stock and sold his personal possessions to buy it. The merchant apparently did not come out ahead financially; he just changed assets at an even value. There is no hint that he sold the pearl later. For all we know, he simply kept it.

But this story is not really about an actual pearl, is it? What Jesus seems to be trying to communicate is the importance of knowing first, what is of ultimate value and second, what will it take to obtain it. 

Contrast this parable with the story of a young man, also told in Matthew, who asked Jesus what he needed to do to gain eternal life. After a short conversation, Jesus tells him, "Sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, then come and follow me." But the man said no. Matthew says he went away sorrowful because he had “many possessions.” Jesus offered him ultimate value, and the young man declined because, he thought, the price was too high. 

Take a moment to think briefly about what this parable means for you.

Matthew 13 is a series of parables, one right after another. Parables are narrative stories that set up a situation at the beginning, show a kind of “twist” in the middle, and end with a punchline. This parable does that, too, although not very obviously. In fact, I think that all of Matthew 13 from start to finish is one long parable about the kingdom of heaven and what it takes to be in it with the punch line in verses forty-nine and fifty, which tell of severe judgment at the end of the age. It’s quite grim. 

So, for anyone who understands the parable of the pearl to mean, “The pearl is the gospel, and we should be willing to surrender everything for the sake of the kingdom,” I think that is a very valid interpretation. But I also remember what our bishop, Bill McAlilly, likes to say about his son’s soccer coach, who would always ask his players after a goal was scored, whether by his team or the other: “So what? Now what?”  

The parable of the merchant is about doing whatever it takes to be in the kingdom of heaven. That’s fine. So what? Now what? 

That is the hard part for me because it forces me to ask, “What is my pearl right now?” Because you see, everybody has a pearl. What’s mine? What’s yours?

What is it that I treasure more than anything else – so much that, like the merchant once he gets the pearl, I am not willing to part with it, ever? That’s my pearl. Everyone here has a pearl, also. So, take a moment now and think about the answer to this question: What is your pearl? What is more important to you than everything else? What is it that would make you give up almost anything else to keep? 

When I served a church in west Nashville, I did some volunteer ministry at Lighthouse Ministries, a live-in center for men suffering from addiction issues or homelessness. I remember counseling a young man who just would not follow the rules of living there. He said in one session with the director and me that he really wanted to go home to visit his mother over Christmas but of course he had no money even to take a bus to Jackson, Tennessee, where she lived. The director said that funding could be provided, but it was not simply free. He had to follow the rules and go through the process of making his life better. He said that was too hard and there were too many things out of his control. I asked him, “You can make your bed tomorrow morning, right?” He nodded. “Well,” I said, “that’s in your control and it is one of the rules here. Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Do the things you can control.”

His pearl was to spend Christmas with his mother. It was a good goal. I remember a discussion about this parable by Vanderbilt Professor Amy-Jill Levine. She said that after class one day where they talked about this parable, a young female student came to her and said, I know what my pearl was. I did give up everything for it – all my money, all my possessions, I even ended my marriage for it. It was alcohol. I was willing to give up everything I had to get the next drink. 

When I ask myself what my pearl is, I also cannot avoid asking, Is that what my pearl should be? Is my pearl a good one? 

Professor Levine also talked about leading a Bible study at River Bend prison and discussing this parable, where an inmate told her that his pearl was freedom, to be released from prison. Another said that his pearl was simply staying alive while he was in prison. 

Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning not long after he was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp near the end of World War Two. The Library of Congress lists this book as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. Frankl lost his entire family in the camps – his wife and children did not survive. 

But Frankl wrote about all the things the Nazis, with all their evil designs, could not take away. He wrote of people who entered the gas chambers praying the Lord’s Prayer or the ancient prayer of the Jews, the Shema Israel. He told of starving prisoners who went through the huts giving their meager bread ration to others near death. Such acts convinced Frankl that a person’s ability to choose one’s attitude, to control one’s inner life, no matter the circumstances, was the single human freedom that no earthly power could ever destroy. So even the worst that this world can throw at us cannot take everything. Frankl did not talk about parables, but he did find his pearl, to be in control of his inner life. And that was how he found freedom in the camps, even surrounded by death at every hour. 

What’s your pearl? Should it be?

The error I have made so far in talking about this parable is individualizing it, as if Jesus was talking to and provoking thought in individual persons. Yes, there is a lesson for each of us in this parable and my lesson and yours won’t necessarily be the same. But there is a lesson for us together also, with the same focusing question: What is the pearl of our church? What is the centering and central focus of our life together as the body of Christ? Is that focus what should be our focus? 

So, I ask this question of the whole church: What is it that we do, that if we stopped doing it, would lead us to think we had surrendered a central, vital element of being a church belonging to Jesus Christ? 

Here is a second question: Is there anything that we are not doing that, by its omission, is already surrendering central, vital element of being a church belonging to Jesus Christ?

And here is the third and final question. Does it matter – does it really, truly matter enough for all of us together – as a church – to do whatever must be done to take hold of that pearl?

These are hazardous questions. If we are honest with ourselves individually or with ourselves as a congregation, we would have to admit that, as W. Edwards Deming pointed out, the main purpose of human organizations is to maintain the status quo. 

The first time I thought about this for myself, I came to understand that my pearl was just that: preserving the status quo. I understand that the prospect of change can be disturbing. At the outset it can seem like entering a dark room blindfolded. Yet as Sam Cooke sang in 1964, “A Change Is Gonna Come” whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we are prepared for it or not. And there are only three ways to deal with change: 

1. Make things happen, 

2. Watch things happen, or 

3. Wonder what in the world just happened. 

Over time, I came to realize that no matter how wonderful the status quo feels, it is not possible to maintain it. The only place the status quo is maintained is a cemetery. As Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead” and, “God is the God of the living.” To be alive is to change. 

So, in the coming months and years, what changes to our status quo are coming? And what would we like the changes to be? Here is a template I use: 

First, rediscover and renew our calling from God as Christian ministers and lay people, as individual disciples and as connectional Methodist church people. Jesus told Peter he would make him fish for people. Do we remember when we got hooked by Jesus? Is it still fresh? Or did we get stuck in a rut, which is to say, did we devote our energies to preserving the status quo?

Second, are we intentionally making disciples or just accepting people into membership? We should discern together and put into place together an intentional path to discipleship. It cannot be enough any longer simply to accept people into membership and leave them free lancing afterward. No longer can we say, “We have Sunday School classes and Bible studies and women’s groups and community ministries, and we hope that one of them is right for you.” Jesus did not give us the mission of making church members, but of making disciples. 

Of course, we will have to figure out just what a disciple is, but I will leave that for another day.

Third, do we see all the people, including both the people of our fellowship, whether members or not, and the people of our larger community? William Temple observed, “The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, since I think we would agree that police, fire and rescue departments and the US military also exist for the benefit of non-members. But Temple’s point is still sound: Jesus didn’t begin the Church in order to convey member-benefit packages to church people. 

Now, we do benefit, and very richly. But not in ways awarded by other organizations. Jesus put it this way to his disciples just before he was arrested: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. So, do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Fourth, how shall we preserve that of our church which is excellent and gives glory to God, of which there are many examples? It is true, that as Sebastian says in The Tempest, “What's past is prologue,” but it is also past. We cannot plan for the past, only for a church we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren. 

Personally, I am optimistic! After all, Jesus said, "Do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For people who don’t know God wear themselves out themselves over such things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. So, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, then all those other things will be given to you as well."

Good words to live by and plan with. Thanks be to God!

Christian faith and capital punishment

I wrote this in 1999 on the occasion of Tennessee about to commit a convict to death for the first time since 1960. 

John 8:3‑11

3          The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group

4          and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.

5          In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

6          They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.

7          When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

8          Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9          At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.

10        Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11        “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

 Robert Glen Coe is on death row at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of eight-year-old Cary Ann Medlin of Greenfield. It was a particularly cold-blooded murder, and Coe was justly convicted of the crime.

Coe deserves to die for what he did.

Coe’s original execution date has come and gone. He is still alive due a temporary stay of execution during which his attorneys are asking for more reviews of his case.

Tennessee has not executed anyone since 1960. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down all existing death sentences as unconstitutional. But in so doing, the court laid out conditions under which the death penalty would meet constitutional requirements. Subsequently all but a handful of states revised their criminal codes to meet these conditions, and executions resumed in 1977 with the firing squad death of Gary Gilmore in Utah. In 1979, Robert Coe brutally murdered Cary Ann Medlin.

The death penalty is one of the social issues which finds Christian people on all sides. Christian churches have wrestled with it throughout their history. As early as the second century, executioners, magistrates and judges could be denied the Lord’s Supper because of their part in state executions. In late medieval times Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote against harshness in judicial sentencing. Yet both Catholic and Protestant churches either carried out or condoned death penalties until modern times in America and elsewhere.

In the passage from the Gospel of John of the woman caught in the act of adultery, the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus accurately state that the law of Moses requires her to be executed for her adultery. Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man commits adultery with another man's wife – with the wife of his neighbor – both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” This code is repeated in Deuteronomy. Let us note that the Law required that both the woman and the man be executed, but the scribes and the Pharisees, all men, somehow avoided taking the guilty man into custody. (The double standard was no less alive then as now.) Even so, the woman was indeed guilty, having been caught in the act, and according to the Law she deserved to die. “What do you say?” the men asked Jesus.

Jesus signals he won’t accept the question on the terms it is offered by crouching to write on the ground with his finger. “When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the scribes and Pharisees as well as to the woman. . . . Jesus treats the woman and the scribes and Pharisees as theological equals, each as human beings to whom words about sin can be addressed” (NIB).

Jesus offers all of his listeners an opportunity to break from old ways of justice, determined by the power of condemnation and death, to enter a new society where grace can endure even when punishment is called for. This new society with its new standards is the Kingdom of God.

At its core, this story in John is not really about the woman or her sin. Nor is it primarily about the self-righteous certainty of the men who accused and convicted her. The story is about how Christ challenges both crimes and punishments that contradict what Christ stands for. Jesus was certainly not sympathetic to the sin of adultery. He pointed out elsewhere that only adultery justified divorce. Jesus did not try to excuse her adultery to the men. In fact, Jesus didn’t seem very concerned about the woman at all – his directed all his attention toward the men who wanted to take her life. Faced with this unmistakably severe transgression of the law, Jesus questioned the cut and dried, hard-hearted manner in which the authorities sought to impose justice. Perhaps Williams Shakespeare was thinking about Christ’s words when he wrote in The Merchant of Venice–

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

...

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself; ...

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

Jesus condoned neither the crime the woman committed nor the violence the men wish to do. He recognized that they were both gripped in the sinful cycles of their past. If both the men and the woman are to be freed, they must all renounce their former ways. Jesus final words are spoken to the woman but are also addressed to the men with stones. The woman did deserve to die according to the Law, but all her accusers finally realized they did not deserve to kill her.

Jesus challenged both the woman and the men to peer into their own souls and stare in brutal honesty at themselves. By doing so they all, actually, received a blessing from the Son of God – ‘I do not condemn you’ – followed by a command, “Go and sin no more.”

 There is no denying that the Law of Moses lists a large number of offenses for which death is prescribed. Exodus lists murder as one, but simple assault on one’s parents is also a capital offense. Then, a few verses later we discover, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death”  (Exod 21:17). And we are also informed, “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. . .” (Exod 31:14a). How many of us would like to plead for our lives against that charge?

As far as I know, Christian proponents of the death penalty cite only the Judaic Law to support their position, never the Gospels. Yet Jesus said that love is the heart of the Law, and that God is a God of life, not death. If there is any theological support for the death penalty to be derived from the testament of the Good News of Jesus Christ, I have yet to see it, and I have done a great deal of reading on this subject over the years because I used to support the death penalty. What turned me from supporter to opponent of the death penalty finally was realizing that the Law of Moses is not the ultimate revelation of the nature and character of God or of God’s will. God is most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whose fate was to be executed by the state. Luke twenty-three records that even as the Romans nailed him to the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Robert Glen Coe is no Jesus Christ, and American justice is more fair than Roman justice, but Christ’s prayer still calls us to reflect whether we really know what we are doing when we push the buttons that cause lethal chemicals to flow into the veins of a man strapped to a gurney.

 There is an organization called, “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Its executive director is Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered. These are Renny’s words:

“At about 10 o’clock at night, there was a knock on the front door. My mother was lying on the couch watching the Celtics playoff game. My father was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, and he got up to answer the door. As he did, a couple of shotgun blasts rang out, ripped his chest apart, and he died in front of my mother. From that day, from that moment, I became the survivor of a homicide victim. And in the aftermath of that I had reason to contemplate – on numerous occasions and in some depth – how we deal as a society and individually in the aftermath of murder.”

We talk a lot about victims’ rights in the legal system. And we should, because for a long time the victim of crime was seen mostly as a witness to the crime rather than someone whose life has been shredded by violence. Relatives of murder victims feel emotions that others cannot comprehend. Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Welch wrote:

      “All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family has, even going back to my grandparents. Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate – you can’t think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged – I mean, fry them. We didn’t need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my feeling, that was my emotion. You no doubt saw McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them. The police presence around Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was the very deterrent that kept me from being on death row in Oklahoma today. Because had I thought that if there was any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so.

    “For about the next eight months, I struggled with the thought of what’s going to happen to [McVeigh and Nichols], how am I going to get some peace. [The death penalty] sounded so wonderful to me at the time. I thought about that over the next eight months. I also remembered the statement that Julie had made to me driving across Iowa one time in her junior year. We heard a newscast on the radio about an execution that had happened in Texas the night before. Julie’s response to that was, “Dad, all they’re doing is teaching hate to their children in Texas.” I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, but I remembered her saying that. Then after she was killed, and after I got past [the] initial period, this kept echoing in my mind. I had this anguish about what was going to happen. The trials hadn’t even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once they’re tried and executed, what then? How’s that going to help me? It isn’t going to bring Julie back. I asked that question for a period of two weeks probably. I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. After I was able to get that revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press reporter one day that I did not believe in the death penalty.”

Renny Cushing wrote that survivors of homicide victims want three basic things.

1.    They want to know the truth, how it happened that somebody that they loved could be taken from them. They need to know the truth just to help them get back some control over their lives.

2.    The second thing they want is justice. With murder, said Cushing, the only real justice possible would be to exchange the life of the murdered person with the life of the murderer. But no exchange is possible because we can’t bring the murder victim back, no matter what we do to the killer. So we have to do the best we can to secure justice. One of the ways to do that is to restore the sense of security that’s been lost by families and society by the murder. And that means killers need to be separated from society. Both the surviving families and society need the security of doing that, to hold offenders accountable.

3.    The third thing survivors want is healing. Healing is not an event. The death penalty focuses upon a single event, raising the expectation that if you simply extinguish the life of someone who took a life, the execution itself will be a healing event. It’s a mistake, says Cushing, that if you just kill the killer it will all be better, and you’ll feel better, and you can just go on. The reality is, though, that healing is a process that goes on all the time. It is part of the burden that homicide survivors come to grips with, that healing is a process that will go on for the rest of their lives.

Cushing wrote, “I came to realize that those who were affected by his killing were not just [my] family, not just the people in the community. It also involved the families of the people who killed my father. The idea that I would be healed, that any murder victim would be healed, by inflicting pain upon the family of a murderer” is not true. Grief is not a zero-sum game. “My pain doesn’t get eased by inflicting pain on [them].” The death penalty just creates more victims. “One thing with the death penalty, there’s a kind of finality. When we kill people who kill our loved ones, we forever preclude the opportunity for those of us who want to figure out how to have an interactive forgiveness. The existence of the death penalty in and of itself becomes a barrier to victim healing. I don’t want to live in a society where, in the aftermath of murder, policy prevents people from healing.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:38, 44). Gandhi put it this way: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

 In the movie Saving Private Ryan, set in World War Two, Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, who is assigned the mission of finding Private Ryan to take him out of battle because all three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed in action. With a squad of men, Captain Miller sets forth. Before they find Ryan, two of Miller’s men are killed. One of Miller’s men rebels because he can’t make the math come out right – two of his friends dead before they even find this one faceless Ryan. He demands Captain Miller tell him why Ryan is so important to him.

Miller’s answer surprises them all. “I don’t know Ryan,” Captain Miller says. “I don’t care anything about him. I just want to go home. And if finding this Ryan makes that happen sooner rather than later, well then, that’s my mission.” With that Captain Miller walks to the body of their medic, who was killed shortly before, to pull it into a newly-dug grave. After a few moments the others join in to help. There is no more dissension. They will save Private Ryan, not for Ryan’s good, but for their own.

I don’t know Robert Coe. I don’t care anything about him. I have practically no sympathy for him. I won’t even try to argue that he does not deserve to die. I oppose his execution not for his sake but for mine. My call as a Christian disciple is to reduce violence, not condone more death. To the powers and principalities that seek to take life for life, I say, “Not in my name nor in the name of the Lord I serve.”

Some night soon Robert Coe will be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber. There will be a group of selected witnesses there, of course, but you and I will be there, too, because we are the ones who finally make our laws. We will be there, and in each hand we are holding stones to throw at him. I pray that we will someday soon reach the spiritual maturity of the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus faced down, so we can drop our stones like they did. Perhaps we will finally realize that although Robert Coe may well deserve to die, not one of us deserves to kill him. _____________________

Statements by Renny Cushing and Bud Welch are found at http://www.mvfr.org. I have minimally edited them for length and clarity for hearing.

America’s Crisis Questions

John 18.28, 33, 36-38a:

   28 Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover. 

   33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

   36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

   37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

   38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

The question Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” is, I think, the second-most important question in the Bible, hence the second-most important question facing all humanity all the time. The most important question is the one Jesus asked his disciples one day on the road to Caesarea-Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” Unless we answer that one rightly, we will never answer the second one fully. 

Pilate was a politician. He had already answered the first question – who is Jesus – by saying he had been told that Jesus was a pretender to the kingship of Judea. Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world,” which Pilate seemed to take as Jesus’ confession of some kind and, hearing Jesus’ explanation, simply waved it away as irrelevant. 

I think one lesson of this passage is that we should not let politicians define what truth is. 

That we as a nation have been allowing that for many, many years is not bearing good fruit for us. It does not take a Nobel laureate to observe that America is not today a “United” States. So I will try to explore what we as disciples of Jesus Christ may do and say that promotes peace and exhibits the spirit of Christ in this tense time. 

I think our beginning point is to look in a mirror. Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he lamented,

The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent, or often vocal, sanction of things as they are.

This we must not do. America will not be better until Americans are better. In the 1830s, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and later wrote, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” He attributed America’s goodness to its churches. While we should not ascribe too much goodness to our forebears of 180 years ago, we probably can agree that we will not “make America great again” unless we, not politicians, decide to make Americans good. 

And that, I think, relies on how we church people give answer in the way we live, what we do, and what we say to the two most important questions facing the country today: 

1. Who do we say Jesus is?

2. What is truth?

Today, I will address the second one. 

There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that makes my first point: 

"Archaeology is the search for facts, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Doctor Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." 

Truth and fact are closely related, of course, but they are not the same thing. People rarely fight over facts. What they argue about is what the facts mean, what is the Truth that the facts indicate. Both sides have the same facts, but both arrive at a different "truth."  

Truth is important and so is truth's relationship to facts. Every one of us operates every day on what is known as the "correspondence theory" of truth. For example, when doctors make diagnoses, they correspond symptoms and test results to disorders, ailments, or diseases. So do mechanics when determining what makes the pinging noise under the hood of your car. In either case the decisions about health or auto repairs rely on a correspondence between certain facts and certain conclusions that are true, or most likely true. Correspondence of facts to truths means that some conclusions must be false. Falsehoods don't correspond to facts. 

But two other claims about what is truth are alive and well in America today. One is relativism, the notion that something can be "true for you" and another thing "true for me." We can each have our own personal truth regardless of facts. But relativism is tolerable only for trivial matters. You may love cauliflower while I despise it. "Cauliflower tastes good," is true for you and its opposite, "Cauliflower is awful," is true for me. And we're both right. But it does not matter. 

However, when the stakes of truth are significant, we all drop all pretense of relativism. Horace and Edna may be wallowing in relativism when it comes to cauliflower, but if Horace is a University of Tennessee graduate and Edna a University of Georgia graduate, and it's football season, well ... . 

This relativism has become today rooted in emotionalism, the insistence that truth is a consequence of how someone feels about a topic, and ensuing hostility toward anyone who crosses that line. A law professor wrote that it is increasingly difficult to teach classes about law relating to sexual crimes such as rape because of the emotional, hostile reaction of students. Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College, wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.” 

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.”

Some people think that the truth of a statement is related to whether it "works." So a religion may be true for Horace if he sees some benefit to it, but false for Edna if she sees none. The danger of thinking truth is whatever works is that the perceived benefit might really be bad. "Cigarettes are good" works in the sense that many smokers report a soothing or relaxing sensation when they smoke, but the fact remains that cigarettes can kill. 

 

Vladimir Lenin refined the Marxist idea of Revolutionary Truth, which means that any claim that brought the Revolution closer or more successful was truth, even if it contradicted an earlier statement. Nazi propaganda was the same way. Surely nothing more need be said about that understanding except it is sadly alive and well in American politics today. 

 

Christian faith and practice rely on correspondence, not relativism or utility or the idea that truth is whatever supports our cause. On the first Easter morning, the women went to the tomb and observed certain facts: the stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, they saw Jesus alive. So they told the disciples, "He is risen!"

  

Yet more than corresponding facts to truth is necessary. As the apostle James pointed out, even the demons know that Jesus rose from the dead, yet demons they remain. John Wesley admonished that we may affirm the truth of one, twenty or a hundred creeds and yet have no saving faith at all. 

 

Life throws us many ways for us to affirm what we think is true. But the majority of them do not challenge us to live transformed lives. Acknowledging propositions is one thing, probing what we believe and for what we will stand firm is quite another. How do we discern what we believe, whether in religion or politics or other endeavors? What we believe is crucial because what we believe impels what we do. Belief, like truth, should correspond to facts but in believing we seek not only to know what is true, but who and what we can trust. 

 

But there is such a thing as a moment of truth, when we have to confront what we trust and are compelled to decide how deeply we hold our beliefs.

Pilate told Jesus, "Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" Such a bald statement of power would certainly have been a moment of truth for me. Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above." It was not a diplomatic answer but a naked challenge to Pilate's power and authority. No one, Christian or not, can doubt that Jesus believed completely what he had claimed about himself and trusted that God would deliver.

 

Moments of truth are fraught with risk, forcing is the issue: What do we believe? Who do we trust? What shall we do? What shall we risk? What do we fear? What do we love? And I think that as a nation, those questions loom before us disciples of Jesus Christ at this time.

 

Bonnie Kristian, a columnist at Christianity Today, wrote before election day in 2020,

[Disciples] should proactively “seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14), but making peace is not a project that begins when battle lines are already drawn. Ideally, it begins in time to keep us from drawing them at all. The word Jesus uses for “peacemaker” in the Sermon on the Mount appears just once in the New Testament, but its [root words] show up together one other time, in James 3:18.

“Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness,” James says, and to be a peacemaker is to live with the “wisdom that comes from heaven” (v. 17). This wisdom rejects “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” which lead to “disorder and every evil practice.” It is “peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (vv. 14, 16–17). In worldly politics of animosity, selfishness, domination, disdain and rotten fruit, prejudice, and bad faith, that is the wisdom we need.

What do we believe, we Americans? Do we really believe that the truth is self-evident that all persons are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are properly instituted to secure these rights, as our Declaration of Independence says? Do we say that this declaration corresponds to facts about the nature of God and God's purposes in creation? Do we trust that this American experiment will endure and indeed expand?  

Yet even mounting apathy, dismissal, and indeed enmity toward the American idea is not my greatest fear. Revelation chapter two records the words of Christ as revealed to John: 

1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: . . . 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate the wicked, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” (Rev 2:1a-4)

Sometimes I wonder whether we American Christians often treat our religion as a mere commodity, to be swapped in or out of our lives according to what suits us at the time. Have we adopted religious relativism, where niceness and tolerance are prized more than truth and faithfulness? Has politics itself become America’s main religion? Could it be that Christ holds something against us, in spite of our good works, because we have forgotten that he is to be our first love? 

John 21 records Jesus and his disciples one morning not long before Jesus died. 

 15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs." 16 A second time he said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." 17 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. 18 Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go." 19 ... And after this he said to him, "Follow me."

My greatest fear is that we will not feed or tend Christ's sheep, and that when he leads, we will not follow. I think that is why Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved him. He was setting Peter up for a crisis moment when Peter would have to confront what he believed about Jesus and his love for him.

We all have the same challenge. So here are the things I try to remember in this political season:

1. Jesus does not endorse any political party or their platforms. To say he does is to claim that corrupted political ideology (which is all of them) suborns Christianity and that the work of Christ necessarily is done through the corrupt organs  (which is all of them) of a corrupt political party (which is all of them). 

2. My enduring purpose must be to glorify God, not politics or politicians.  

3. I must get the plank out of my own eye before I worry about the speck in others’. Am I promoting peaceful resolution and reconciliation, or am I part of the discord and anger engulfing our country today? 

4. Do I pray fairly and inclusively for all? I may not urge God to crush the other side of my political aisle! 

Finally, let us remember John Wesley’s advice to the people called Methodist in October 1774.

Let us pray both as citizens of America and of the Kingdom of God that we will hold fast to what is true and good. May we have courage, resolution, commitment, and wisdom as a nation, but especially as ones to whom Christ has said, "Follow me."