I almost hesitate to promote this, because it wasn't really intended to be a piece. I just sort of sat down and it came out. Maybe someone else out there has the same type of day today, and it'll speak to them.
https://t.co/xSMUDOrHcC
David French has an excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times entitled “The Divine Right of … Presidents?” It highlights the folly of abandoning separation of church and state and embracing the melding of church and state. He writes:
“When the church abandons its rightful role as the conscience of the state and instead seeks to curry favor with the state, there is a real-world consequence. If you take an already grandiose man (whose commercial brand is his own name) and fill him with a sense of divine purpose, you can uncage a tyrant.”
He also calls out hypocrisy of the Great Christian Profit Franklin Graham, noting that “Graham pretended to believe Trump’s absurd explanation of the image” of Trump as Jesus and Graham’s defensive attack on Trump’s detractors rather than deserved castigation of Trump for the blasphemous image. As French notes, when Trump does something wrong, Graham always finds someone else to blame.
Watching so many who are enthralled by Trump reminds me of my college days in the 70s when so many were enthralled by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: Their longing to walk the path of righteousness obfuscated the fact that they were being led astray by pernicious pied pipers.
And just like Jim Bakker, Donald Trump has mastered the PTL scam … shout Praise the Lord to get them to Pass the Loot.
https://t.co/HZoez8EGdz
It’s not that many evangelicals are consciously choosing Trump over Jesus. It’s more subtle than that.
They’ve come to believe that Trump’s way is not fundamentally at odds with the way of Jesus.
Today we remember that God washes our feet.
The fingers that crafted the universe scrub scum from between toes.
The hands that painted the cosmos wash feet painted with dirt and sweat.
The One before whom all angels bow gets on his knees to labor as a slave.
We become clean, he becomes filthy.
In doing this, Jesus our God gives us a humble epiphany, a revelation of who he is. He is the God who makes his glory visible in lowliness and servitude.
He is the God who gives
-his cheek to the betraying lips of Judas
-his face to the slapping hand of the high priest
-his countenance to the spit of the Sanhedrin.
He is the God who gives
-his head to the thorns
-his feet to the spikes
-his side to the spear.
He is the God who embraces rejection, shame, torture, and death, to give himself to you.
And here is why: because that’s who God is. He is the God who is love. Therefore he loves you by giving to you. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. What he gives you is nothing less than himself.
God gives, you receive. This is everything.
He not only washes your feet; he washes you clean, body and soul, through the holy bath in his name. He fills the baptismal font with water from his spear-pierced side and kneels there to wash off the dirt and sweat and grime of your evil.
He feeds you himself, his body, his blood. Every natural food we take into our bodies is transformed into our bodies. We don't become corn on the cob or hamburgers. But the supper of our Lord is different. This food transforms you into that which it is. You, the church, are the body of Christ. You are what you eat.
So, come and eat. Come and drink. Come to the lowly God who has joined you in your lowliness that he might exalt you in himself.
On Maundy Thursday, let us recall, with thanksgiving, how fitting it all is:
How fitting that humanity, which plunged into death by eating forbidden fruit, should receive life and immortality by a meal provided by our Savior, the Last Adam.
How fitting that sinners, their unity rent asunder by hatred and violence, should be gathered into one communion by partaking of the one loaf, baked from many scattered grains.
How fitting that we, who are hard pressed and beaten down by evil, should be comforted and uplifted by drinking from the Lord’s cup, filled with the blood of grapes that have been trampled and pressed underfoot.
How divinely and beautifully fitting, on this holy Thursday, that we have our feet lovingly washed by the very God from whom we once ran in terror and shame.
Here is our God, Jesus Christ, who comes not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Had Jesus come with a sword to destroy all evil--there would have been no one left afterwards. Instead he came not with a sword in his hands, but with nails in his hands. He came not to bring judgment but to bear it.
“This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather.”
All men and women, especially Christians, are called to fix their gaze on those who suffer, on the pain of the lonely, and on those who are emarginated for various reasons, for without them we cannot build a just society. Only together can we build communities of solidarity capable of caring for everyone, in which wellbeing and peace can flourish for the benefit of all. Caring for the humanity of others helps us to live our own lives to the full.
If Christianity is to have anything to do with Christ, then it must look like Jesus.
The followers of Jesus are to be like Jesus.
Following Jesus means actually following Jesus—in how we live, in how we talk, in how we act, in how we love.
My father, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
The crises we are witnessing around the world remind us how urgent his warning remains. When militarism becomes the default response to conflict, the human cost grows heavier for families, communities, and entire generations.
Nonviolence calls us to choose another path. In our shared World House, peace rooted in justice must remain our moral imperative.
#MLK #Nonviolence #Peace #BelovedCommunity
Before anyone steps into political office in the United States, they should be required to complete rigorous ethics training and anti-corruption education.
Character should be cultivated before authority is granted.