Category: Witness

Grief, Healing, and Action

Many of us are grieving the reelection of Donald Trump to the office of president of the United States of America. We have seen his cruelty. We remember his separating children from their parents at the border. We have seen how he demeans and taunts others. We have seen his racism, sexism, and xenophobia. We have seen how he hooks into people’s fears, grievances, and prejudices. He manipulates and abuses human weakness for his own purposes.

So we grieve. We grieve the state of our union, our relationships to one another, our divisions.

Joe Biden has often said “That is not who we are,” when speaking of the kinds of actions and attitudes expressed by Trump. And yet the extent of our embrace of Trump makes him a mirror that reflects us as a nation. He certainly is not the only mirror, but he is one that reveals something of what is valued and pursued in our nation and how we view one another.

The truth is we are all broken. We need healing. We need deliverance. From anger. From self-absorption. From fear. From grievances. From the way we view and judge one another. We need to be freed from the hooks that a Trump can hook into.

We need to love one another. Those of us who are followers of Jesus have learned from Jesus that we are to serve one another with compassion and to witness to the love that is near and available.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)

Harassed and helpless describes the human condition. In our helplessness, we need compassionate action in our lives. When we have come to know that compassion, we must share it. We must exercise it.

Compassion does not judge others; it does not write them off. But it does discern. And it does not remain silent. We must speak the truth in love. We must speak to the underlying egotism and self-absorption that alienates us from one another, alienates us from knowing or caring about what others are going through, confines us to our own felt needs and agendas and views of the world. Alienates us from Love. We must speak deliverance.

And then the compassion we experience must continue to move us outward in doing justice. When, for example, Trump starts rounding up millions of undocumented people, putting them into internment camps, separating them from spouses and children, in order to process them out of the country, we must stand in the way. We must speak out. We must call others to give witness to the injustice and work to make right what is wrong. Rather than add to the darkness, we must be light in our society.

Filed under: Compassion, Healing, Love, Serving, Society, WitnessTagged with: ,

Nations Become What They Decide To Be

The decisions we make manifest themselves in what we become as human beings. If we decide to get back at others for what they said or did that hurt us, and make a habit of such reactions, we become someone who operates from hurt and anger. On the other hand, if we decide to act from a place of love for others, regardless of how they act toward us, we become lovers of humanity—yes, of a broken humanity. If we have a habit of doing what Jesus instructs his followers to do, “turning the other cheek,” “loving our enemies, “praying for those who persecute us,” we are on a path of growth into our true humanity as children of God.

Our decisions determine what we become. We decide for our humanity or inhumanity. We decide to be lovers or reactors. We decide to give to or to get back at another human being. We decide what we become.

Nations decide what they become. In our nation, a congress, a president, a supreme court, and “we the people” decide what we will be toward each other and the world.

As a people, we have opportunities to decide what kind of nation we will be. We can be tribal in our decisions, reacting against others (owning the libs, or detesting MAGA people). We can make decisions from grievances and the despising of others or we can make decisions from a vision of wholeness and compassion.

In a democracy, even a partial democracy like the United States, the decisions of “we the people” regarding who and what kind of leadership we want, in some measure, provide us with the nation we have. The less we are an autocracy and the more we are a democracy, the more clearly “we the people” are responsible for what we get.

We are responsible for choosing a government that seeks justice for and the uplift of those marginalized or a government and nation that marginalize. We know that it is possible to decide for a government that annihilates a people as the Nazis did. Or, as we did, decide to institute slavery and then, with its abolition, decide for the continued marginalization and oppression of a people by implementing Jim Crow laws and by terrorizing a people with lynchings as the South did or by establishing racist policies, actions and mores as the North did.

Of course, if we care little for anyone beyond ourselves, our family, “our people,” our religion, then we will give little attention to the effects government and societal decisions have on people other than ourselves. We will not spend time trying to understand how others are affected by laws, policies, mores. We will, by our support, ignorance or simply not caring, keep in place laws and mores that maintain the oppression of others outside our circle. (Slavery remained for 250 years, Jim Crow laws for 70 years through a combination of support and/or apathy from a majority of Americans.)

However we think about our decisions as a people and a nation, we see what we have decided by what we have become. Germans must come to terms with the nation they became, a nation that was responsible for killing 6 million Jews. Many, at the time of the Holocaust, may have excused themselves by saying they were not voting for genocide, but the truth is the seeds were there in the rhetoric of Hitler and others.

Americans must come to terms with what we became, a nation responsible for the genocide of millions of Native Americans through displacement and massacre, and the death of millions of Africans who died in the Middle Passage and millions who were brutalized as slaves. Of course, coming to terms with our past means acknowledging the truth of our past. Our oppressive actions locally and globally remain, unless we acknowledge our wrongs and repent. Trying to rewrite or ignore these aspects of our history only binds us to past decisions and future acts of oppression.

We continue to decide what we become—especially by our decisions toward those who have been marginalized, excluded, pushed aside in our nation. Of course, what we become as a nation comes from the decisions of a cross-section of the electorate. What many of us would like to see is not even on the ballot, but must be lifted up and worked for though doing justice, loving mercy and living faithfully. Therefore, Jesus calls the children of humanity, who are also children of God, to be light in the darkness. We are to be witnesses to what we have come to know of the love of God.

Jesus spoke of the age we live in as an “evil age.” In this age, we are to witness to what we have seen and have come to know of our true humanity created in the image of God. Like yeast, we are to have an effect on the whole; we are not to force something on others, but to effect the decisions of others and our nation by our witness to the love of God that is good news for the oppressed, heals the brokenhearted and welcomes all.

Filed under: Decision, Humanity, Justice, WitnessTagged with: , ,

The Ten Commandments, Separation of Church and State, and Cultural Change

Louisiana passed a law that mandates the Ten Commandments to be hung in every public classroom in the state. On the face of it, if you exclude the first four of the ten commandments, the other six express what most people would regard as ethically desirable: Honor your parents, do not murder people, be faithful to your spouse, do not steal, do not bear false witness against your neighbor, and do not covet what belongs to your neighbor.

The first four are of a more religious nature. The first two call us from idolatry (the worship of images, extensions of our imaginations, and therefore of ourselves). The third has to do with not taking God’s name in vain and the fourth with keeping the seventh day holy by making it a day of rest.

The first four commandments clearly make this a religious document, that and the fact that these commandments are expressions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is disingenuous to treat them otherwise in a nation that calls for the separation of church and state. It does not work to define the Ten Commandments as an historical and foundational document in the formation of the nation. They remain an expression of ecclesial traditions.

Furthermore, it is clear from the comments made by the mandate’s supporters that the intentions behind this law are directed to infusing a particular Christian worldview into the culture of the state. Clearly, there is a problem with the state espousing a particular religious view. It is a problem for the state and for the religion. We have had a nationalist Christianity from our nation’s inception which was capable of supporting slavery and the dispossession of the land from people indigenous to it. This was a Christianity without Christ—a civil religion, supportive of nationalist goals, and wrapped in Christian rhetoric.

Also, the idea of mandating or forcing a particular Christian view onto a nation and culture has nothing to do with the ways of Christ. This mandating of laws as a way to reform culture was not the way Christ operated. He proclaimed the nearness of God, of God’s reign or governance, and called people to turn to God. He called them to trust their lives to God. He focused on the first commandment that calls us to turn from idols to serve a living and true God. (Along with common idols such as power, money and pleasure, we can make an idol of the Bible, our particular beliefs, our forcing our beliefs on others, our self-made-righteousness, etc.)

The other commandments, within Jewish and Christian scripture, mean very little without the first. Jesus said the central call of God, as the Hebrew Scriptures express it, was to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbor as ourselves. From a place of trust in and love of God everything else about being truly human, made in the image of God, follows.

The reality of Christ and of God’s presence come not from politicians crafting legal mandates but from those who are light in the world. To his followers who were coming to know the reality of God’s presence, Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (from whom all good works flow).

Jesus reserved his harshest judgment for religious leaders who hammered people with their laws. He said, “Woe to you experts in the law! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.”

Jesus represents an entirely different approach to people and to personal and cultural change. He said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jesus operated by invitation, not mandates.

The change we need is a deep change in the human heart that laws do not reach, but which love does. This change cannot be forced. Mandates crafted by politicians, arrogant in their ability to force through legislation, do nothing to heal and liberate. Love and mercy bring true healing and transformation.

Filed under: Discipleship, Grace, Society, WitnessTagged with: , , ,

A Christian View of Christian Nationalism

By “Christian,” I mean a follower of Jesus who has come to view the world from the experience of “being in Christ.”

By follower of Jesus, I mean one who is being led to:

  1. Bear suffering in order to serve others. 1
  2. Serve rather than seek dominion over others.2
  3. Love rather than judge or condemn others.3
  4. Love enemies and pray for them.4
  5. Love our neighbor as ourselves, no matter who our neighbor is.5
  6. Do justice, love mercy and live faithfully.6

By the experience of “being in Christ” I mean that we:

  1. Participate in the reality of the crucified and risen Christ so that we die to the old in-turned self and rise to “walk in newness of life.”7
  2. Participate in Christ’s love.8
  3. Be led by the Spirit, rather than by religious rules, principles and beliefs which the “flesh” (the ego-centric self) loves.9
  4. Operate by God’s grace through faith, rather than legalistic moralism.10
  5. Trust ourselves, others, and all creation to God, rather than act like we are the ones who have the answer.

When Christian nationalism is viewed from the vantage point of following Jesus and participating in the reality of Christ, it is seen merely as nationalism with a Christian facade. It is an idolatry of the nation undergirded by Christian rhetoric, particularly in the form of “Christian” laws and principles.

Those who seek to bring back the “Christian foundations” of our nation hearken back to an earlier Christian nationalism, one, at least in part, inherited from Europe. They hearken to a kind of Christian morals and mores that existed as a dimension of our nation alongside its constitution, a Christian morality that for many included the institution of slavery and the dispossession of the peoples indigenous to the land. In other words, a Christianity far removed from the message and life of Christ—a Christianity quite capable of horrendous evil.

The present Christian nationalism carries forward the elements of this earlier nationalism, above all in its White (and male) supremacy. It downplays our history of racism, oppression, and injustice and discounts the primary roots of the American revolution and constitution in Enlightenment values.

Of course, there has been another much smaller stream of Christianity (which included European American Christians) that engaged in movements for the abolition of slavery, pressed for peace among nations, and sought social justice.

Above all, it has been African American Christians who, from their lived experience, brought radical clarity to the unchristian reality of our nation. Frederick Douglass called the Christianity of the slave-holding South and those Northern churches that continued to support their Southern counterparts as “sham religion.“

Black Christians continue to offer a critique and an alternative to White Christian nationalism. White Christians must listen to their voices—which means we must repent of our arrogance. By listening with open hearts, we will receive from those who experience the oppressive nature of White Christian nationalism.

The call to follow Jesus and participate in the Christ reality is a call to repent from all Christian nationalism, from all idolatry of nation and of whiteness and of ourselves, and all attempts to have dominion over others. Freed from idolatry, we are freed from feeling like we must secure “our Christianity.” We are freed from safeguarding what we have built (our false Christianity) and therefore freed to serve others.

Jesus calls his followers, not to dominate and bully others, but to be salt and light in the world, to be witnesses to God’s love and mercy in word and in action. At the heart of our witness is a welcoming love toward others that does justice, loves mercy and walks humbly with God.

  1. “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23 ↩︎
  2. “But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” Matthew 20:25-28 ↩︎
  3. “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” Matthew 7:1 ↩︎
  4. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:44 ↩︎
  5. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 19:19 ↩︎
  6. “The weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Matthew 23:23 ↩︎
  7. “We were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.” Romans 6:4 ↩︎
  8. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Romans 5:5 ↩︎
  9. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Romans 8:14 ↩︎
  10. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Ephesians 2:8 ↩︎
Filed under: Discipleship, Grace, Justice, Racism, Society, WitnessTagged with: , ,

War and the Limits of Morality

”When the statesmen and lawyers
And preachers of duty disappear
There are no more robberies either
And the world is at peace” – Chuang Tzu (or Zhuangzi, 4th century BC)1

Chuang Tzu, in the above quote, views moral principles as supports for all kinds of wickedness and a barrier to peace.

President Biden is a moral man and speaks the language of morality and principles, a morality that provides lofty rhetoric for the support (in money and weapons) of the genocidal war in Gaza. But, of course, war of all kinds has been given principled and moral support. We do all manner of evil in the name of the good or of God.

President Harry Truman, after the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rationalized the use of nuclear weapons for gaining and maintaining peace: He promised “recommendations to the Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.” And he gave thanks to God that the Germans failed in their attempt to produce the atom bomb. He said “We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans…did not get the atomic bomb at all.” (There are nine nations today that have nuclear warheads and, of course, we are no closer to peace.)

With our moral justifications, we are able to reason that war makes and maintains peace, blind to the reality we continue to live.

Like Chuang Tzu, St. Paul saw the limits of principles to live by. For him, the most that moral law could do is to be a disciplinarian until we come to be in Christ. It puts some constraints on us but does not keep us from evil.

For Paul, our morals and principles to live by lead to self-righteousness and the judging and condemnation of others. Moral reasoning brought about the death of Jesus. Paul’s morality, before he came to be in Christ, brought about the persecution of the followers of the Way.

As the alternative to moral principles, Chuang Tzu calls us to be open to the Tao (the Way), Paul calls us to be open to the Logos (the Word). Paul writes, ““The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart (Romans 10:8).” As with Jesus’ “reign of God,” the needed word and direction is not far away; it is near. But to receive it, we must become open by the self-emptying of our lives. Jesus tells us we must relinquish ourselves in order to find our true selves and receive true discernment and direction.

Paul tells us that the children of God are led not by a set of principles or laws but by the Spirit. The Spirit opens us to the living and active word and to the way we are to walk in. With the Spirit there is discernment and the next steps that Love gives us to take.

Nations will continue to go to war and support war and justify their actions in moral terms and with principled rationales. In the midst of this, God calls forth witnesses who will live and speak from the word that is near.

In this present evil age, their witness points to a future with hope, a future not of our own making, a future that does not arise from our ideologies, moralities, and principles, but rather comes as a gift of God. This witness springs from those who empty themselves and are open to the Word and Way that is near.

The prophet Isaiah speaks such a word of hope from a place of relinquishment and openness. Placing God’s future before us, he then calls us to walk in the light of that future:

God shall judge between the nations
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more.
O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!

Isaiah 2:1-5
  1. Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, p.68 ↩︎
Filed under: Peace, Spirit, War, WitnessTagged with: ,

Preparing For War In A World That Goes Hungry

“On March 9, 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration submitted to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Budget request of $842 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD), an increase of $26 billion over FY 2023 levels and $100 billion more than FY 2022.”

U.S Department of Defense

“We need $40 billion dollars per year to feed all of the world’s hungry people and end global hunger by 2030.”

U.N. World Food Programme

Consider it: $842 billion for war preparation versus $40 billion for ending global hunger.

At this point in human history, we have so excelled at preparation for war that we are capable of ending life on this planet in a great conflagration. War preparation, itself, daily contributes to the loss of life. In our fixation on ever more effective ways of killing, we ignore men, women, and children who are dying of hunger. We do so by spending obscene amounts of money on implements of death and on preparing men and women to end life, money that could be spent to save life. This commitment to war as a solution is one of the few major issues that receives bipartisan support.

There is an alternative:

Tertullian (155-c.-240 AD), reflected on Jesus’ words to Peter: “Put your sword back into its sheath.” He wrote, “The Lord in disarming Peter henceforth disarms every soldier.” When will we believe this? When will we choose life? And not be selective about it? All life is precious, life in the womb and outside the womb, young and old, saint and sinner, broken and whole.

But we would have to believe that Jesus, in disarming Peter, disarms every soldier. We would have to believe that Christ opened the way for fullness of life. (“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”) In a world that believes in the power of death, we would have to believe in the power of resurrection. We would have to believe in life: trust in life to overcome death, peace to overcome war, love to overcome hate, faith to overcome fear, hope to overcome despair.

What if we replaced the Department of Defense with a Department of Peace? What if we specialized in peacemaking rather than war-making? What if we studied war no more? What if we loved our enemies and prayed for them? What if we did justice and showed mercy?

Yes, such a change would take a complete reorienting of our lives, a recentering at the core. It would mean our spirit would be moved by the Holy Spirit. And yes, it is hard to imagine this on a societal and global scale. We know that, in this age, there will be “wars and rumors of wars,” and that “nation will rise against nation (Matthew 24:6-7).” The human condition, without a spiritual revolution, demands it.

No other response to military aggression can be conceived—except by the kind of spiritual vision we encounter in someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who at an ecumenical conference in 1934, raised the question of what might happen if peace were dared, “What if one nation should meet the aggressor, not with weapons in hand, but praying, defenseless, and for that very reason protected by ‘a bulwark never failing’?”

Of course, Jesus spoke, not of nations, but of his followers as a “little flock” and indicated that few would respond to God’s call. Few could imagine something so outlandish as trusting in God in the face of military might and crucifixion. That being true, start with that truth:

Little flock, take up your cross and follow. Jesus, in disarming Peter, disarms you. Having been disarmed, do not sign up to be armed again. Instead, choose to do justice and love mercy and do the work of peacemaking. Witness to the new life, the life that comes from being reconciled to God and to one another.

Nations will continue to operate in the way they always have. Egotism, arrogance, and hegemony will reign—and be supported by false religion. In the world as it is, witnesses are needed. Jesus calls forth those who will be light in the world. He calls them to be witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” so that all might know where unconditional love and wholeness is to be found, and where true peace and justice reside.

In being witnesses to what God is doing through Christ, we prepare for the “age to come” when “the wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6).”

Filed under: Discipleship, Peace, War, WitnessTagged with: , ,

Ethnonationalist Christianity

In 1932, a year prior to Hitler becoming chancellor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his grandmother in which he gave expression to the coming struggle:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we are going to get is a big, völkisch [ethnic] national church that in its essence can no longer be reconciled with Christianity, and that we must make up our minds to take entirely new paths and follow where they lead. The issue is really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better. The greatest danger of all would be in trying to conceal this.

Bonhoeffer, Theological Education, 11

We, who are Christ people in the United States of America, face the same danger Bonhoeffer pointed to, a danger that has long been with us. The issue is Americanism or Christianity, idolatry of nation or worship of the “living and true God” (A phrase St. Paul used to contrast the worship of God to the idolatry of ourselves and our imaginings (our false and therefore dead gods). This issue has been especially true of a White American Christianity with its roots in European American religous history entangled with the establishment of a nation. One of the the outgrowths of this entanglement has been an ethnic nationalism in Christian garb. Beyond the American experience, to one degree or another, the history of Christianity has been a history of ethnonationalism.

In our idolatry of nation, we confuse and subjugate a form of Christianity to nationalist values and agendas. Historically, this has meant that scripture and Christian rationales have been used to support all manner of national decisions and positions: establishment of slavery, removal of indigenous peoples from their land, going to war, who can vote, etc.

A Christianity, subordinate to nationalist ideas, ends up with a distorted usage of its own concepts. As an example, Christians have often mixed American notions of liberty with Christianity. What does it mean, after all, that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” The clear meaning of the New Testament is that we are freed to love. In Christ, we are being freed from arrogance and egotism, so that we can experience and live out the unconditional love of God.

Freedom in Christ is not “freedom to do our own thing” in the sense of operating out of our attitudes, prejudices, lusts, and misplaced values. It is the freedom of the love of God which moves us out to others. Among other things, it moves us to care about the freedom of others to live out their own callings and purposes. This liberating love brings healing and deliverance to individuals and societies. It is about compassion (which means to “suffer with”) and mercy (which makes us available to the needs of others).

This unconditional love of God does not bully others. There is no looking for a political “strong man” to side with us. This love has us operating in quite the opposite way, as in St. Paul’s words, this love “is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-6).”

This love does not judge and condemn others. Jesus, “God’s Anointed,” said he did not come into the world to condemn but to seek and to rescue the lost. He comes revealing God’s love for all.

A Christianity that worries over its own rights rather than the rights of others and seeks a dominant place in society that excludes others is not the Christianity of Christ. It is not expressive of Christ who goes out to all and ministers to all in whatever condition he finds them.

It is hard to imagine that Christ sought to have followers who would spend time trying to secure positions for themselves from which they could dominate and silence the voices of others. And yet this is the way of an ethnonationalist Christianity, for it simply borrows from the ways of a nation with a White supremacist history. Of course, it often does so without recognizing or acknowledging it. Sin incorporates blindness; it chooses blindness.

Far from having a special position and recognition in the world, Jesus let his followers know that (when they are truly following him) they would experience many trials from a world that runs from the God who is Love, a world that forms into clicks, parties, nations, and alliances that prepare for war. In the New Testament, Christians are called out of this kind of world and way of operating.

A Christianity that seeks dominance in the world joins itself to the way the world operates. It takes on the idolatries of the world and its nations. It loses spiritual discernment and therefore loses a witness to Christ. It ends up witnessing to the power of egotism and bullying. It gloats in having supremacy over others rather than serving others. And it adds to the divisions. Rather than, in Bonhoeffer’s words, being a “people for others,” it becomes a people for itself, its religion, and underlying that, its ethnicity.

There clearly is a conflict between an ethnonationalist Christianity and a Christian identity that is being formed in Christ. Growing “in Christ” increasingly frees us from the idolatry of nation, ethnicity and dominance. It frees us to serve others across all self-serving, fear-creating boundaries, for we have entered a life, in Christ, which chooses love over hate, mercy over judgment, peace over war.

Furthermore, in Christ, we have come to acknowledge our broken condition, a condition we share with all humanity. As we grow in this knowledge, we realize we are in no position to be self-righteous and condemning of others.

We also know that nothing about this radical brokenness we experience changes without the transforming grace and mercy of God and that, while we undergo a spiritual conversion, we remain broken. We are on a path of being healed with the knowledge that God is not through with us.

We also recognize others who are undergoing this foundational change and spiritual reorientation. We join with them that we might grow in this reality together. (Some may have no explicit relationship to Christianity whose encountered forms they may have had good reason to flee, but who nevertheless experience the “Christ reality” of “letting go” and trusting themselves to grace and love.)

With this change in our lives and knowing the source of the change, we realize that we must acknowledge and witness against a false Christianity—one we may have been caught up in. We must confess the sin of an idolatrous White supremacist and nationalist Christianity. In Christ, we are coming to know it by its fruit. And, in Christ, there is forgiveness and a new way to walk in.

We must bear witness against this false Christianity, not only for the sake of those who know little or nothing of the Christ reality, but for the sake of those who have come to be in Christ, but who are attached to churches that have radically melded together a form of Christianity with an idolatry of nation and race.

We encourage siblings in Christ, in the nationalist churches of our land, to exercise discernment regarding their church leaders. They will know them by their fruit (which includes their messages). The Spirit will help them recognize what is of Christ and what is not. The Spirit will help them to recognize what messages appeal to their own idolatries and what messages liberate them from their idols. We are all responsible for exercising discernment empowered by the Spirit.

We must discern and then give witness to what God reveals to us.

Filed under: Love, Spirituality, WitnessTagged with: ,

The Present Age and the Age to Come

St. Paul writes of the “the present evil age.” Jesus speaks of the “age to come”—as Paul does also.

We experience the present age as evil. We experience violence, mass shootings, road rage, all kinds of rage, deep divisions in our society, breakdown in relationships and families, mental health struggles with our youth, racism in police departments, politicians motivated by personal power rather than a holistic vision, and, of course, the roots of our problems in the selfishness, arrogance and greed that are a part of the human condition. We live in an evil age.

The flip side of all this, of course, is that it is our experience of the goodness and beauty of creation, including of humanity made in the image of God that enables us to see the starkness of evil. It is human compassion, mercy, care for justice; it is human beings forgiving one another and being reconciled to one another that puts the existence of evil into sharp relief. As we grow as children of God made in the image of God, we increasingly recognize what we have lost of our humanity. We recognize something of the depth of evil in this age, and we long for a time when everything will be made right.

When Christians celebrate the resurrection to eternal life, they look, in part, beyond the present evil age to the age to come when we will know the fullness of our true humanity in God.

In this present age, we get a taste of this resurrection life. In Christ, we have the experience of dying and rising, dying to a false self and becoming alive to our true humanity in God. But we remain in a battle. We are up against “spiritual principalities and powers of darkness.” We are in a great struggle, and so we look forward to the day when the battle will be over and all things will be made right.

We stretch out for that day. We view what we are going through in this present age with a vision of the age to come when “God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.”

St. Paul kept hold of this vision which sustained him in the midst of the evil of this age. He was able to face battles because he believed in the resurrection. Paul made it clear that this belief enabled him to put himself in danger. He was able to fight, in his words, “wild animals at Ephesus” where a crowd came against him. He was able to face the mob and jail and beatings because of the resurrection from the dead. He could freely face death because it was not the end.

When I think of movements toward justice, I think of those who have kept the future before them—a future with hope that makes present action possible. It is a vision of what could be, what ought to be, a vision of a world where justice reigns that sustains present action for change. The most expansive vision for such action is that of the age to come when everything will be made right.

In this present age, we journey into mystery toward that future age. St. Paul: “Look, I will tell you a mystery! …. We will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…. (1 Corinthians 15:51-52).”

There is no blueprint for this journey, for living out our days in this present age, but there is the leading and empowering of the Spirit. And there is the assurance of faith that there is an age to come when we will know fully what we now only know in part: We will know the fullness of the resurrection in the presence of God.

Filed under: Humanity, Spirituality, WitnessTagged with: ,

Light In The Darkness

I have previously written about “The Coming Collapse” and the sowing of injustice that operates like a parasite eating its host. It reaps the death it sows.

The words from Psalm 10 express this reality: “In arrogance, the wicked persecute the poor—let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.” They are caught in what they have devised! They reap what they sow and do not see it coming. But how much will evil destroy before there is nothing left to destroy? In the face of evil, love must act, doing the work of justice and mercy.

It does not matter how we think about what we are sowing, the seeds we sow will determine what is produced. We can put a religious facade over our actions and deceive ourselves about our oppressive ways, but the outcome will reveal what we have sown. We reap what we sow, and we know the activity of both love and evil by their fruits. The one will produce justice, mercy, and life, the other oppression and death.

The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures often proclaimed a “word of the Lord” directed to what is being sown—to the evil sown—and what is about to be reaped. The reaping is seen as God’s judgment, but that judgment is also inherent to human actions. If we act against our true selves, as beings created in the image of God, we experience God’s judgment as the judgment of our false selves, our phantom selves that are being wasted away by evil.

It is possible to think of human history in this way—and our present time. Frederick Douglass recognized the destruction that slavery brought not only to those enslaved but to slave owners. Abraham Lincoln viewed the Civil War, which brought a greater loss of life than all other American wars combined, as the judgment of God inherent to the evil of slavery.

In our own time, we see democracy—which our nation has made so much of, whatever its form—being eaten away from within. A growing number of people would prefer autocracy if it were their autocracy, their hold over government, in order to maintain or achieve their positions over others. Many are afraid of equality in a multi-cultural nation. They are afraid of the voices they have sought to silence. In their actions, they end up silencing love and justice. They sow oppression and reap destruction, theirs and their nation’s.

With evil sown comes much hurt and breakdown and injustice. What we hear over and over again in the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, and the New Testament is that God is with the broken: the poor, the needy, the outcasts, the imprisoned, those who are oppressed. God is their comforter, protector, and deliverer. If we want to be where God is, be with those experiencing oppression. Sit with those who hurt (It makes no difference, their class, ethnicity, gender identity, political party or any other way they may identify themselves). Be with those our former president called “losers.”

And also call out those who are oppressing others so that they may be warned of the coming judgment (the reaping) and turn back to their true humanity made in the image of God. Call them back to the love of God so that they may receive mercy and be changed. And then each of us must keep turning to God so that, in the words of the old Shaker hymn, “by turning, turning we come ’round right.”

God calls forth those who will be light in a world of oppression, who will do justice, love mercy, and operate with compassion. Such people may or may not have a set of “religious beliefs” but they will have the experience of real compassion which literally means to “suffer with” and which always comes from the God who is Love—as does all that is expressive of our true humanity, all that is real. Those who act with compassion will be witnesses to a humanity made in the image of God and will be light in the darkness.

Filed under: Compassion, Evil, Humanity, Justice, Racism, Suffering, WitnessTagged with: , ,

The Love of God and the End of War

My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine, to the children who are being traumatized and to their parents who are trying to protect them, comfort them, get them out of harms way, as they endure the shelling and bombing of their cities. Along with the rest of the world, I have watched the massive gathering of Russian troops and their entrance into Ukraine in an effort to bring Ukraine under the control of Vladimir Putin’s government. The blatant disregard for the will of the Ukrainian people, the bombing of their cities, the growing number of civilians killed, and the largest movement of refugees in Europe since World War II has focused the world’s attention and brought widespread condemnation.

I also feel for the situation of young Russian conscripts who thought they were involved in a military training exercise and would soon be back home, only to find themselves sent across the Ukrainian border into a war where their mission was to kill other human beings, many of whom had deep Russian ties. They were being treated as fodder for a war machine.

And then I think about this war in relation to the wider global reality of war. Our world is at war. Wikipedia names 5 current major wars in which there have been 10,000 or more combat-related deaths in the current or past year, 18 current wars with 1,000–9,999 combat-related deaths in the current or past year, 41 current minor conflicts (100–999 combat-related deaths in current or past year) and skirmishes (fewer than 100 deaths in current or past year).

Afghanistan has experienced 1,450,000–2,084,468 fatalities; Yemen, 377,000; Myanmar, 150,000–210,000; Tigray, 23,600–100,000; Ukraine (beginning in 2014), 13,300+.

We are a world at war. Nations go to war regularly. Autocracies go to war. Democracies go to war. Autocracies and democracies both do wars of aggression. Russia has gone into Ukraine on the pretense of addressing Nazism and genocide. The United States went to war in Iraq on the pretense of addressing weapons of mass destruction. Over 100,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. I felt for the children of Iraq the way I feel for the children of Ukraine. In the case of Iraq, children were being traumatized by American bombs. Whatever nation goes to war, the outcomes are the same: people killed, maimed, traumatized, and their support systems destroyed.

Furthermore, it is apparent that humanity sees little in the way of an alternative. The United States has been involved in war somewhere for most of its history. And a nation’s citizens generally support their nation’s wars, anti-war protests not withstanding. War has had a kind of inevitability attached to it. It is an extreme symptom of our spiritual condition: we are a humanity centered in upon itself rather than in God (who is Love), our true center.

If we have begun to experience a recentering of our lives in God, we must bear witness to what we have come to know which includes a growing spiritual understanding of why humanity chooses war. Given the human condition, war appears to be the only thing available for the people of Ukraine in their situation—and they take it up with courage and determination against great odds. Thomas Merton, in a journal entry for March 1, 1966, speaks to this. He writes these words at a time when the United States had over a 184,000 troops on the ground in Vietnam. He writes of his “sorrow at the fabulous confusion and violence of this world, which does not understand God’s love.” And then he states what he must do: “I am called not to interpret or condemn this misunderstanding, only to return the love which is the final and ultimate truth of everything, and which seeks all [humanity’s] awakening and response. Basically I need to grow in this faith and this realization, not only for myself but for all.”

It is the experience of God’s love that allows us to step out of the inevitability of war and of killing one another. This love encourages us to not “sign up” for war but rather witness in word and action to the spiritual reality of an unconditional love that Jesus says is capable of loving our enemy. Operating from this love means, in Jesus’ words, praying for those who persecute us and, when hit, rather than returning the same, turning the other cheek. But this love does not only mean not reacting to another’s aggression with the same kind of aggression; it also means confronting evil, confronting injustice. Jesus called out injustice. He was a “sign that was opposed.” His words and actions were subversive to the established order, and they brought about his execution. The unconditional love of God involves being willing to die for the sake of others.

We have seen this kind of action, at times, on an individual level, and we got a sense of this kind of action on a social level in the non-violent action of the civil rights movement. We do not expect it on a national level. There would have to be a massive spiritual awakening for that to happen. So, we do not spend time “condemning this misunderstanding” of how to respond to aggression, but rather witness to “the love which is the final and ultimate truth of everything.” Jesus said that he did not come into the world to condemn the world but to seek and to save the lost. In a world that condemns itself to war and death, those who have experienced the unconditional love of God must live more deeply in it and bear witness in word and action to that love so that, in Jesus words, we are a light in the world, a light that reveals the only alternative to war.

Filed under: Humanity, War, WitnessTagged with: ,