The post Christian Nationalism appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

In those moments, you do not take sides, or take a stand, as a pastor.  You lean in.  You listen.  You love.  You hold space for discernment and prayer and decision-making.  These are sacred moments.

The Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson this week has subverted this tender and deeply personal process.  It deprives women and their families of their personal liberty to make decisions.  It gives states legal authority to determine what is best for them, for their families, and for their futures.  

Some of us are fortunate to live in states that currently will not revoke a woman’s right to make decisions about her reproductive health, but many Americans in other states will be denied this fundamental right.

It’s a fallacy to believe that you cannot advocate for life and advocate for a woman’s right to choose.  I have done both as a pastor—honoring the sanctity of human life while supporting a woman’s sovereignty over her own body.  These are not incompatible values or irreconcilable ethical standards.  But our national debate has made them so.    

It’s also a fallacy to hold that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights in the US, among them “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  This, sadly, is not true for all of us, as evidenced in Friday’s Supreme Court decision.  A woman’s liberty and right to self-determination has been diminished; her pursuit of happiness has been impaired.  And while this decision will impact all women, it will most acutely impact women of color, and women who are poor.

The abortion debate is usually framed in the context of a “life-based” ethics versus a “choice-based” ethics, but this framework fails to address the deeper implications of a post-Roe world in which “life-based” ethics are now legislated and imposed by some states rather than freely and willingly practiced by individuals. 

What is the work of ethics?  

The work of ethics is to prescribe the good we ought to do, rather than the good we must do, in contributing to the greater good.  

In my theological and biblical view, the greatest good to which God always calls us is only achieved by the power of God’s persuasion, a divine beckoning or calling or wooing toward life and love.  The greatest good is never achieved by coercion or control or compulsion that limits our freedom or agency to respond to, or to resist, that divine calling.  

In this way, “life-based” ethics and “choice-based” ethics are not mutually exclusive.  They are, in fact, inseparable.  A truly “life-based” ethic must always be grounded in choice.  

This is not just a vague biblical concept.  It’s the very glue that holds together the entire biblical story of God’s loving, redemptive action in the world.  

God never coerces us or compels us to do anything against our will.  God, out of great love for us, always persuades us to make the best choice possible among all the choices before us in any given present moment.  This is why we can faithfully and reasonably affirm both the sanctity of life and a woman’s sovereignty over her body.

So what can we do now?  

We can stand with women and girls until all of them are fully endowed with “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

We can stand with women and girls until they are seen and valued and empowered and entrusted to exercise fully sovereignty over their bodies, minds and spirits.

We can stand with women and girls until we arrive at the day when reason, not power, when love, not legislated patriarchy, will lead us to a more equitable society.

And we can stand with children, until not one child is unwanted, neglected, voiceless, powerless, or imperiled by violence, abuse, disease, and poverty.

We can stand with children by feeding them, mentoring them, caring for them, seeing them, befriending, and loving them.

Today, we can stand for women and girls and our nation’s children.

We can walk with them, march for them, advocate for them, until they are most fully free and most fully alive.  

This is our choice.  This is our call to action.  This is our prayer.

And the good things we pray for, may God give us the strength to work for.

The post A Christian Response to Dobbs v. Jackson appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

The movie, “City Slickers,” captured the longing spirit of an entire generation in the early 1990s.  An unhappy Manhattan yuppie on the verge of turning 40 is roped into vacationing with two middle-aged friends on a cattle drive in the Southwest.  The trio pays big money to live the cowboy life, helping a team of ranchers drive cattle from New Mexico to Colorado, all while trying to navigate their own personal mid-life crises.  

Along the way, they meet the ill-tempered, intimidating trail boss named Curly—a stereotypical tough and crusty cowboy who teaches them not only how to be real cowboys, but how to be real humans.

In one memorable scene, Curly is riding alongside Mitch, one of the city slickers, when their conversation turns existential.  Mitch looks at Curly and asks if his life makes sense to him. 

Curly replies: “You city folk.  You worry a lot… You all come up here about the same age.  You spend fifty weeks getting knots in your rope and you think two weeks up here will untie them for you.  None of you get it.”  

Curly pauses and says: “You know what the secret to life is…?  One thing,” says Curly, holding up one finger.  “Just one thing.  You stick to that, and everything else don’t mean nothing.”

“That’s great,” says Mitch, “but what’s the one thing?”

Curly gives him a long stare and says, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.” 

What’s the “one thing?”  It’s what we’d all like to figure out.  The secret of life, the meaning of life.  Who among us cannot relate to the plight of Mitch and his friends, buried by the endless routines and toils of their lives, longing for something more meaningful?

We leave little margin in our lives for finding and making meaning.  We rush from activity to activity, moment to moment, caught between distractions and daydreams.  From dusk till dawn, every second of downtime can be so filled with diversions and drudgeries that we often fall into bed unsure of what we accomplished in any given day.

“City Slickers” was prophetic for its day.  In the 1980s, diverse forces conspired to speed up the pace of life.  Fax machines, pagers, and cell phones made people available in ways they’d never been before.  Women had entered the workforce in droves.  Traditional gender roles and responsibilities changed.  The cultural zeitgeist shifted to a celebration of individualism where “having it all” and “doing it all” became the new aspiration.  

At the time, futurist Faith Popcorn noted that Americans were quickly feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, and overstressed.  80% of Americans said they were looking for ways to simplify their lives.  The pace of life was too fast; our time too stretched; our roles too many.  

This “societal schizophrenia” gave birth to the cultural trend Popcorn called “99 Lives.” 

Popcorn predicted that time would become the new money, and that we’d be willing to spend money on products if it meant we could buy more time. 

“99 Lives” is about searching for mechanisms to recover personal time and avoid over-scheduling.  It allows us to do more in less time.  Today, we call it “stream-lining,” “multi-tasking,” and “life-hacking.”  Because there’s not enough time in the day, we look for efficiencies.  

This 99 Lives trend gave us some amazing innovations in the 80s: microwavable foods like HotPockets, Le Menu, and “L’Eggo by Eggo.”  

Food on the go, like Go-Gurt—because, apparently, some parents didn’t even have time to get their kids a spoon.  

Dr. Pepper Gum—because who has enough time to drink and chew gum at once? 

VCRs.  Books on Tape.  ATM machines dispensing not only cash—but stamps, light-rail pass, and movie tickets.

Today, the trend has given us Door dash, HelloFresh, Instacart, and same-day denture delivery.

You can even buy a car from a vending machine and have it delivered to your driveway by tomorrow.   

Why?

Because we only have so much time, and we have all these things we want to do before we run out of it.

Jesus wasn’t a big fan of multi-tasking, streamlining, and life-hacking.  He knew how it would invariably lead to exhaustion, emptiness, and even enslavement—the three chronic conditions of modern life.

Exhaustion.  Do you ever feel tired all the time, like you can’t keep up the pace, like you’re overloaded and worn out?

Emptiness.  Do you ever say, “I just don’t have anything left to give; I’m stretched to the limit; I’ve given so much to others that the well is dry and I’m running on empty”?

Enslavement.  Does it ever feel like you’re stuck, running in circles, trapped in some loop that keeps repeating, over and over?

Exhaustion, emptiness, and enslavement—the evidence of a deep spiritual struggle that speaks of loss of meaning, balance, groundedness.  

It’s rarely easy to spot when it happens to us.  But we can all spot it when it happens to others.  

That’s why we’re given this story in Luke about Mary and Martha—to show us what it looks like when we’ve lost sight of what matters most.

Jesus stops by Martha and Mary’s place for dinner one night.  Jesus is an extra-ordinary guest in the home of rather ordinary people.  Martha sees it as an opportunity to pull out her best China, chill the chardonnay, kick on all four burners and do the full-scale Martha Stewart routine.  This meal will be a labor of love.

So she cooks the meal, sets the table, cleans the kitchen, washes dishes.  

Mary, on the other hand, never leaves the table.  She sits at Jesus’ feet all night, listening to his every word, oblivious to Martha’s plight in the kitchen. 

Martha seems to be overworked, underappreciated, exhausted, frustrated, grumpy, empty, and trapped 

Mary appears to be something like a Christian Dali Lama, the portrait of contentment and peace.  

Predictably, Martha finally snaps.  Elbow-deep in soapsuds, a scowling look of resentment on her face, she says, “Jesus, don’t you care that my sister has abandoned the kitchen to me?  Tell her to help me!”  

Can you see Martha waving her wooden spoon, standing at the kitchen doorway in her apron and hair net glaring at her freeloading sister? 

And we say: Poor Martha.  This is what happens when we don’t focus on Jesus and we worry about the wrong things.

But before we make Martha into a caricature, remember she’s simply doing what was expected of any first century Jewish woman: entertaining and feeding her guest, offering hospitality, serving Jesus in the only way she knows how.  

And by all the cultural expectations of the day, her sister Mary, is not.

And yet Jesus says, “Martha, you’re all worked up over nothing.  Only one thing is essential, and Mary has chosen it.”

That’s the punch line of the story, but like the City Slicker, Mitch, we say, “That’s great.  But what’s the one thing?”

It’s easy to say that Mary’s choice to sit at Jesus’ feet all night was better than Martha’s choice to work in the kitchen—although given the choice, I’d much prefer sitting to doing the dishes.  

Was Jesus suggesting Martha’s work wasn’t important?  That if only she were less busy, like Mary, she’d be happier?

Maybe.

But I think the deeper truth is not what Mary and Martha chose to do, but how they chose to do it.  

There’s a time to go and do; there is a time to stop and listen.  A time to cause and a time to pause.  Knowing which and when is a matter of spiritual discernment.  If we were to ask Jesus who we’re supposed to be, Mary or Martha, his answer would probably be “Yes.”

Martha’s problem is not that she’s working too hard.  Her problem is that she doesn’t know, in that moment, what her true work really is.  

Does that sound familiar?

There are times in our lives when fulfilling our necessary roles and meeting the expectations of others who are counting on us is a beautiful expression of following the will of God.  We are all Martha, to some extent. Martha makes the world go around.  The world wouldn’t spin without her.  She’s the one who changes diapers, repairs the air conditioner when the fuses blow, does the grocery shopping, changes the oil every 3,000 miles.  

Martha makes the world go around.  Her work isn’t glamorous.  It’s often overlooked, unnoticed.  And yet, where would we be without Martha?  She’s all around us, and we are her.  For all of us, there are common tasks that must be completed in our lives – some of which give us meaning, many of which feel like drudgery, but all of which, when we do them, constitute acts of deep love and faithfulness.  

But in the midst of a busy life, we need to cultivate the spirit of Mary within us—that desire and permission to sit in stillness and silence, to pause to hear the Word of life, the whisper of Grace, without which our lives are meaningless, without which our work leads only to exhaustion, emptiness, and enslavement.

Maybe what both Curly and Jesus know about the secret of life is this: we can’t be in two places at once. 

Mary’s attention seems to be undivided.  She appears to be fully present in the moment.  

Martha, on the other hand, seems torn—as if she’s trying to be in two places at once, and not fully present in either.

The writer, Bob Benson, wrote about his custom of never going to bed without kissing his kids, whether they were awake or asleep.  One night he bent over and kissed his son, Patrick, on the cheek and quickly stood up to leave the room.  He was tired and in a rush to get to bed.  But his son’s question stopped him cold and brought him back to his bedside.  He son said, “Dad, why do you kiss me so fast?”

Why do we often allow the most meaningful moments of our lives to go by so fast?  In search of 99 lives, we forget to live the one we’re living in the here and now.

There’s an old Radiohead song that goes:

Sometimes I get overcharged

That’s when you

See sparks

They ask me where the heck

I’m going?

At a thousand feet per second

Hey man, slow down

Slow down, idiot…

One of the myths of life and love in the modern world is that “It’s not quantity, but quality.” 

That’s a lie—an excuse for not showing up and being fully present in the moment.  

If we really believed that it’s not about quantity but quality, we’d have no problem going to work on Monday and telling the boss that we’d like to put in fewer hours for the same pay because it’s the quality of our work and not the quantity that counts.

That’s not called quality time.  That’s just called part-time.

The “one thing” Jesus is trying to teach Martha is that life and love are comprised of two kinds of time: a time to work and make a difference, and a time to pause to reflect on what kind of difference our work is making.  

The great pianist, Artur Schnabel, once said, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists.

But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.”

It’s all music.  The work, the rest, the quantity, the quality.  It’s all part of the beauty.

Writer Kate Daniels describes a typical evening in her home.  She and her husband come home from their jobs, the kids are trying to do their schoolwork, but are mostly squabbling while she prepares a meal.  The dog overturns the kitchen garbage can and runs away, leaving garbagy paw prints all over the house.

At the end of the day each family member is tired and overstimulated.  She knows in her heart that each is seeking love, and healing, and nourishment.  But all too often weariness, frustration, and irritation boil to the surface, and family conversation is bitter and sharp rather than gentle and kind.

“Try as I may,” Daniels writes, “I have a hard time browning the ground turkey I’m planning to mix with canned spaghetti sauce for the glory of God.”   But, she adds, “I try to find the poetry that exists, even here.”  

It’s all poetry, all music, all beauty. 

“Only one thing is essential,’ says Jesus: to find beauty in the toil.

Kathleen Norris wrote about the endless struggle of caring for her husband, who was battling cancer.  There was a lot of worry and drudgery in caring for him through his cancer treatments, But she said she also encountered peace, and goodness, and even joy in it all—nestling in front of the TV and laugh themselves silly watching reruns of Bugs Bunny cartoons; the goodness they found in so many of the doctors, nurses, aides who found many small ways to offer them kindness; the joy that came when she remembered to be grateful for the sheer wonder of life itself: the beauty of creation, the miracle of her marriage, the love of family and friends.

“My Christian religion… is not about sweetness and light and unattainable holiness.  It gets down to the nitty gritty.  The Jesus I encounter in the scriptures is the same one I find in the daily newspaper, on the street, in my home, in my low and high moments, and even in my place of drudgery.  And when I recognize who it is that is with me in all the busy-ness of life, I do feel myself—my weak, weary, and withered self—to be every bit as rich as a queen.”

Our take-aways for today:

We can never be in two places at once.  

The music resides in the pauses between the notes.

Only one thing is essential: to find beauty in the toil.

The post Slow Your Roll appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

Have you ever uttered that phrase at some point in your life?

You walk through the door after a long vacation or road trip—exhausted, relieved, thankful to have finally arrived—and you say, “Home sweet home.”

You’ve been away at college, and after a long semester of homesickness, you pull into the driveway and that wave of nostalgia washes over you, and you say, “Home sweet home.”

At the end of a long day at the office, or a long stay in a hospital, or a long two weeks away at summer camp, you walk through the front door, drop your bags, take a deep breath, and look around—“Home sweet home.”

Where did we first come up with this phrase, “Home sweet home?”  

It turns out it originates from a song that became a huge hit many years ago.

No, not the one by the 80’s hair band, Motley Crue.

It comes from an opera song first performed in London back in 1823, and which 50 years later became a wildly popular ballad in the United States during the Civil War era.  Homesick soldiers sang it karaoke-style in bars and saloons.  

Home, home, sweet, sweet home

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!  

And it’s true.  There really is no place like home.

Over the last two years, the pandemic has taught us that home is not only where we find peace and belonging; it’s also where we feel safe and secure.  Home is another word for refuge from the harsh, precarious, unpredictable realities of the world.  

In the 1980s, futurist Faith Popcorn detected a deep shift in the way Americans were living their lives.  The nightclub-discorama dance-party scene of the 1970s was losing steam.  Restaurants had tables sitting empty on Saturday night.  Nightclubs were sitting vacant.  Instead of going out, Americans were turning in.  They were worn-out, overstimulated, exhausted – and technology made it easy to simply stay home.  

Cable TV began beaming movies into our homes.  Microwaves became ubiquitous.  60% of Americans had VCRs.  

Americans were staying home so much that in 1990, they made 4.2 million babies—the highest number since the baby boom of 1960.  

Soon, with the advent of the Internet, we could shop from home, work from home, bank from home, and even meet and chat with strangers from home.  

With fewer reasons to leave our homes, we improved them—with home theater systems and big screen TVs, “man caves,” gourmet kitchens, home gardens and spas.  Then we protected them with gated communities, home security services, and the historic proliferation of gun sales.  

Martha Stewart, home improvement stores, and TV shows “This Old House” all led to the cultural trend Popcorn calls “cocooning.”  It’s the impulse to stay inside when it gets too tough and scary to go outside.  To pull a shell of safety around ourselves as protection against threat of disease, crime, terrorism, pollution and the unknown.

Humans have been cocooning for millennia.  Our earliest ancestors lived in caves even shaped like cocoons, where they protected themselves from weather, disease, animals, and enemies.  

Today, home is our sanctuary.  If we’re fortunate to have a home, we know how vital having a good one can be for our peace of mind, our sense of belongingness and acceptance.  

But while the pandemic taught us that staying home might save our lives, the growing “silent pandemic” of our generation—loneliness and social isolation—reminds us that leaving our homes can be life-giving, even life-saving.  

We need to get out more.  We need community, relationships and connection more than ever before.  These are indispensable to our wellbeing.  

Even Jesus discovered the value of leaving his cocoon.  His home was the “house of Israel.”  Good Jews of his day rarely ventured outside of this spiritual home—mostly for reasons of ritual purity and their collective identity as God’s “Chosen People.”  Jews stick with Jews.  This was fundamental to their survival as a people.  

But one day Jesus left the cocoon of the “house of Israel” and discovered that it wasn’t so dangerous out there after all.  It was a pivotal, life-changing moment for Jesus.  He left the protective shell of his cocoon and crossed a border that good Jews were never to cross.

Have you ever come up against a border in your life and dared to cross it?  

Perhaps your whole life you’d always seen a particular issue only one way, and suddenly you found yourself leaning up against that barbed wire fence in your mind that’s always kept you from seeing it any other way.  For once in your life, you could actually see what’s on the other side, and suddenly, what you’d always been told or believed, didn’t quite add up anymore. 

We all have these signs posted in our minds that say, “No Trespassing,” “Do Not Enter,” “Danger,” but sometimes we realize that what’s beyond that border is not dangerous after all.  

In the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 15:21-28), Jesus has one of these moments.  He’s on a road trip when he crosses into gentile territory and is met by a woman who begs him to heal her sick daughter.  

“Lord… have mercy on me!  My daughter is full of demons.” 

They couldn’t be more different from each other.  She’s a woman, he’s a man; she’s a Gentile, he’s a Jew; she worships idols, he worships Yahweh.  They’re separated by language, worldview, geography, race, religion.  They from different tribes.  

In response to her request, he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 

In other words, “You’re not my people.  I cannot help you.”  

It’s the last thing you’d ever expect to hear from Jesus.  “You’re not my responsibility, so I can’t help you.”

Some scholars suggest that Jesus is just testing her faith.  But I can’t think of any other place in the gospels where Jesus puts destitute people to the test.  Jesus doesn’t play games with people in need.  He doesn’t test anyone to see how far they’re willing to go before finally answering their prayers.  This desperate woman is not a believing Jew to begin with.  She knows nothing of Israel’s God.  She has no “faith” to test.  This isn’t a story about the testing of a desperate woman’s faith.

So why, then, is Jesus so reluctant to help her?

Maybe his reluctance is intended to slow down the whole scene, just a little, so we can see clearly, unmistakably, what it looks like when someone crosses over one of those archaic divisions to prove that there’s no one, not anyone, who lives outside the love and reach of God—not even those who do not believe in God; not even those who, like this Canaanite woman, worship a different god.  No one stands outside the circle of God’s concern.

If this story were captured in a movie, this is the scene where Jesus stops, turns, looks into the camera, and says, “Are you watching this?”

That’s when Jesus utters one of the most un-Christian statements that ever came out of his mouth.

“It’s not proper to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs.”

It’s an insult lost on most of us today.  These days, we are obsessed with our dogs—infatuated, really.  We dress them up in ribbons and bows and designer sweaters.  We push them in strollers, take them shopping, send them to doggie psychiatrists and day spas.  

But Jesus isn’t talking about our furry friends.  He’s talking about the feral scavengers of his day that lived in the streets, digging through garbage, eating whatever they could find.

“It’s not proper to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs.”  

In other words, “You are a dog.  You’re not human.” 

It’s an astonishing statement.  But before you get angry with Jesus or assume he’s broken his halo, let me tell you what I think.

I think Jesus is playing the part.  I think he’s playing us, mirroring our own human impulse to otherize and exclude, to not see people as children of God worthy of mercy.  

Jesus isn’t saying that it’s right to believe and act this way.  He’s simply showing us what we look like when webelieve and act this way and then cloak our words and actions in religious garb.

In this shocking scene, Jesus wants us to see all those borders in our world that we refuse to cross.  Some are visible, and some we work overtime to keep invisible: borders of race, class, religion, politics, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity.  Borders that separate Sunnis from Shiites, Irish Catholics from Protestants, Palestinians from Israelis, conservatives from progressives, blue collar from white, queer from straight, rich from poor, Christian from Muslim.  

It’s rare for people to cross those borders.  It’s just the way it is.

But this Canaanite woman refuses to believe that.  

She persists long enough for Jesus—for us—to see what lies on the other side of that barbed wire fence in our minds, to see her as she really is, not as some scavenging dog, but as God’s beloved.  

She won’t give in.  Like that game where two children look stare into each other’s eyes, each trying to make the other blink first.  She will not blink. 

“You’re right,” she says, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  

It’s the best come-back line in the Bible.  

There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says, “If someone calls you an ass, put a saddle on your back.”  

This brave woman wears the saddle to expose the flawed logic of Jesus’ tradition.  

It’s Jesus who blinks. 

It’s his teachable moment for us.  Jesus is hoping we’ll come to our senses, that something in us will change.  He’s made himself the fall guy for our sakes and honored the Canaanite woman as the hero of the story.  She has made us see her for who she really is, and how the ancient boundaries that separate us can be erased, if only we were brave like her.  

And in the moment Jesus recognizes her as truly human, her little girl is healed, which is how it always works.  When we see each other—even those on the “other side”—as truly human and beloved by God, that’s when all the world’s children are healed.

The writer of Ephesians puts it this way: 

“Remember that you were once… aliens… and strangers…, having no hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near…  For he is our peace… and has broken down the dividing wall… that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two…” (Ephesians 2).

Jesus is the border-crossing, boundary-breaking embodiment of God’s love.

Did you know that lobsters never stop growing?  The largest lobster on record, about fifty years old, weighed in at forty-five pounds.  What many don’t understand is how risky it is to mature as a lobster.

Every few months a lobster sheds its exoskeleton.  Releasing its shell is a tiring process that leaves the flesh exposed and vulnerable.  In order to grow, it must regularly let go of that spiny, tough exterior that makes it look so intimidating.  Failure to rid itself of its outer shell would mean death by the very structure it previously created. 

When a lobster’s inner being has outgrown its shell, the shedding process ensues.  

The lobster swallows large amounts of water, causing it to swell.  Eventually the internal pressure begins to separate the part of its shell that protects its head and body, called the carapace.  

Next, the lobster pops its eyes out of their holes, rendering itself temporarily blind.  Then begins the slow struggle of wrenching the flesh of its large pincer claws through its much smaller joints.  After the claw-flesh is free, the lobster is finally liberated with a flip of its tail.  

But once free, the lobster flops around, exhausted, helpless, and vulnerable, as it waits for its new shell to harden.  

If you’ve ever seen the cooked meat of a lobster, you’ve likely observed the pinkish color on its outer edge.  This pink is its emerging shell.  The lobster’s new outer structure is birthed out of what was there before.

The lobster is a metaphor for what’s called “adaptive presence.”  It knows what we all know: that if we don’t leave behind the protective shell of our cocoons, we die.  We live and grow by daring to break free from all that confines us.  

This past week, the break-up of the United Methodist Church got underway.  The Global Methodist Church was launched last Monday in response to the majority of Methodists who, for decades, have been trying to break out of the oppressive shell of policies that have done great harm to the LGBTQ community for too long.  The traditionalists who have advocated for those policies for years have formed the new Global Methodist Church.  

But they will take that old, restrictive shell with them.  

For us, that shell is just too small and confining.

It’s now up to the United Methodist Church to grow into something new, bigger, more fully inclusive, and courageous—to finally erase the border that has kept some people out.  

It will not be easy.  We’ll still need to bring people with us.

Thirty years ago, a bishop laid his hand on my head and ordained me.  We did not see eye to eye on the issue of LGBTQ equality and inclusion.  As bishop, he had enforced those regressive policies on pastors whom I knew and cared deeply about.  

But after his retirement, he had a change of heart in which he came to see the debate on sexual orientation in a new way.  His eyes were opened, his heart expanded, and he confessed openly that he had been wrong. 

In a much-publicized sermon, he said, “For most of my life… I went along with the prevailing view on this issue.  It seemed like common sense to me.  But it was my experience that showed me that I was wrong.”

He said, “There is truth and value at the center of religious faith which is unchanging and ought to be honored…  But we must not forget that God is ever ready to do a new thing… that the God we worship is not a static God, capable only of speaking to us from two, three or four thousand years ago.  Rather, God is living, alive in this moment, revealing new truth to us here, now.”

Three take-aways:

Jesus is the border-crossing, boundary-breaking embodiment of God’s love.

Every cocoon eventually becomes too small and confining.

God is alive in this moment, revealing new truth to us here, now.

The post Leave Your Cocoon appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

It’s a question futurist, Faith Popcorn, has been asking for decades.  Popcorn is an expert in cultural and consumer trends—the “Nostradamus of Marketing.”  As a future-caster, she’s identified sweeping societal movements in business, politics, and human behavior that predict how Americans will think, what they’ll value, and ultimately, what they’ll buy.  She advises dozens of CEOs of some of the largest and most successful companies in the world.

I’ve been following Popcorn’s work for over three decades, when she predicted the explosive growth of home shopping, home delivery, home businesses, home theaters, home schooling, and TV shows about home improvement.  This was years before Amazon, Netflix, HGTV, and Door Dash.  

I remember when she predicted that one day, instead of leaving our houses to rent a video from Blockbuster, we’d just download movies to our TVs through a streaming service.  

And I thought, “Yeah, right.  Whatever, Faith Popcorn.”

She claims a 95% accuracy rate in seeing what lies ahead. 

Her work has always informed my thinking about where the church is today and where it needs to go in the future.

If we knew everything about the future of the church, what would we do differently today?  How would we communicate our message, design our ministries, invest our resources to reach new people with the gospel?  What human needs would we seek to meet?  

Popcorn has identified seventeen global trends that reveal the future.  In this new series, we’ll look at seven of these trends through the lens of the Christian faith.  

How are these trends impacting our lives and our world right now—for better and for worse—and how we can live in ways that offer a Christ-centered, life-giving alternative to the cultural trends around us. 

Today, we’re exploring the trend Popcorn calls “Clanning.”  Clanning is about belonging to a group that represents common feelings, values, or ideals, where our own belief system is validated and normalized.

Few of us would doubt that clanning is a universal human phenomenon.  We’ve been clanning since we first inhabited this world 200,000 years ago.  It’s how our species survived.  Without a clan we’d get eaten, go hungry, or die from sickness.  There’s strength and security in numbers.  Teamwork makes the dream work, right?

Today, not much has changed—except that there’s a whole lot more tribes.  Today, we look for our people: Sigma Chi, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Broncos Fan, Christian, American, conservative/progressive, Democrat/Republican, Ford/Chevy, Mac/PC, Fox/CNN, Coke/Pepsi, cats/dogs, west coast/east coast, ski/ride…

Personally, I’m a Ford driving, Mac using, dog loving, Diet-Coke drinking, skier.  

Our clans are even more narrowly defined than that now.  We’re not just looking for one of these groups anymore.  Today, clanning means we’re looking for one kind of very specific group of people: the Sigma Chi-pledging, Broncos-cheering, Presbyterian church-attending, Chai Tea-drinking moderate-unaffiliated voters who get their news only from Facebook, are members of the local shooting range, and raise backyard chickens—preferably the Plymouth Rock variety.

That’s a pretty small clan.  If you can find it, wow—you’ve really found your people.

But isn’t this close to the truth in today’s world?  

We seek out, sort out, highly specific people who think like us, look like us, believe and act like us. 

This is how we feel safe, affirmed, and valued.  It’s how we often find our identity and belongingness in the world.  And this kind of clanning can save lives: Alcoholics Anonymous, grief groups, scouting and youth groups, churches, cancer or abuse survivor groups, bungee-jumper support groups. 

But when our clanning weeds out those whose thoughts, opinions, interests, values, or beliefs are contrary to our own, something in us begins to atrophy and die.

When our clanning makes hard distinctions between “us” and “them,” that’s when our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our churches, our school boards, and our very country become so sorted and segmented and polarized that close-mindedness and mistrust and hostility soon define our whole way of life.  

This is how we lose our common life and surrender our commitment to the common good.  It’s how we become tribalistic, exclusionary and extremist.  It’s how communities die.  It’s how compassion dies.  It’s how God’s Spirit within us dies.  

We can’t strip this human impulse for clanning from our nature.  But we can follow the lead of Jesus, who gave us a new strategy for divine clanning.  It was a simple strategy, yet highly controversial in the first century world: he hung out with sinners and tax collectors.  

Jesus expanded the traditional clans of his day to include those who, by all outward appearances, and for many social and political and philosophical reasons, were so unlike him and his people.  In the gospels, these people are often called “tax collectors and sinners.”  It’s a common phrase in the gospels.  It meant something like, “That one group of schmucks and all the rest of the good for nothings of the world.”

Tax collectors were pretty schmucky.  We meet one in our text today.  His name is Matthew.  He’s more crooked than Bernie Madoff, and more intimidating than Tony Soprano.  He’s a first century mobster, a Jew who works for the Roman Empire.  

In other words, he one of us but he’s on the enemy’s payroll.  

Which makes him a traitor.  As a tax collector he could stop you on the street and assess duties on nearly everything in your possession.  If you had a cart, he could taxe you for each wheel, tax you for the animal that pulled it, and tax you for the merchandise that it carried.

At the end of the month he sends in a portion of his collections to the Roman governor and anything over that amount he’s free to keep—and he keeps a lot.  The heavier the tax, the wealthier he gets.  And the more his own people suffer for it.  

And for that he is hated and cursed.

One day, Jesus sees him on the street, at his tax collecting desk.  Jesus says to him, “Come and follow me.”

Matthew got up and followed him.  

We don’t know why he got up and followed Jesus.  We don’t know if there is more to the story—if he had some dramatic conversion right there at his tax desk, or if he was just curious. 

But he gets up, and together, he and Jesus go to Matthew’s home, where Matthew that very night throws a big party.  Maybe it was a celebration party, and coming-out party—as in, “I’ve given up my old tax-collecting miserable life, and today, I’m a new person.”

We don’t know.  What we do know is that all his friends come to the party.  And the only friends he has, of course, are fellow tax collectors.  The house is filled with tax collectors.  It’s like a tax collector convention.  It’s a schmuck reunion.  

But also, some “sinners” drop in, according to the story.  

We don’t know exactly what is meant by “sinners.”  But they say misery loves company, and tax collectors probably found a lot of it.  

“Sinners” is just a label for the big bucket of every other miserable soul in the neighborhood.  It probably included prostitutes, money changers, loan sharks, a handful of televangelists.  People whose ways are shady and whose money is dirty.

When the Pharisees go looking for Jesus, they find him at Matthew’s house, eating, partying, talking, laughing.

Jesus and the schmucks. 

For the Pharisees, it’s more like Jesus and the neo-Nazis.  Jesus and the Proud Boys.  Jesus and Putin’s acolytes.  Jesus and the devil.

At that dinner with schmucks, Jesus has scandalized is own clan.  He’s crossed every boundary, crossed the line in the sand, crossed his own people and God himself.

The writer, Donald Miller, told the story about a question one of his teachers asked his elementary school class one day.  The lesson was on values clarification, and the question was this: if there were a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat were a male lawyer, a female doctor, a crippled child, a stay-at-home mom, and a garbage man, and one person had to be thrown overboard to prevent the lifeboat from sinking, which person would you choose?   

Miller says that he can’t remember for sure, but he thinks his class decided to throw the lawyer out of the boat.  He says, “I do remember that the class did not hesitate in deciding who had value and who didn’t.”

Why is it that we humans so often function as though there’s only so much room in our lifeboat?  Do we really believe that there’s not enough room in the boat for everyone, that at the end of the day, someone must be thrown overboard?  

The Pharisees worked so hard to keep the tax collectors and sinners out of their lifeboat.  And here’s Jesus, pulling them aboard, one by one.

Why?

When the Pharisees complained, Jesus said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do” (Matthew 9:12).

Jesus never forsook his clan.  He was a faithful Jew who loved his own people.  But his mission was to build a bigger clan by healing the sick.  He began that mission by calling twelve sketchy suspects to be his disciples.  He then sought out a handful of other people, men and women, who became his close friends, some of whom had their own sketchy pasts.  

It turns out that, if you want to make sick people well, you actually have to seek out and find and hang out with sick people.  Who’d have known?

If you want to redeem the world, you actually have to seek out those whom the world has labeled irredeemable.  Go figure.

If you want to win over the enemy and the adversary, you have to befriend them. 

And so, at every turn, what does Jesus do?  Jesus builds a bigger table.  Then he goes out and gathers more people.  Building and gathering.  Over and over.  Never checking religious credentials first.  Never requiring proof of vaccination from the spiritual ills of the world.  Just expanding his clan, making people well.  

All because they needed a doctor.

That was Jesus’ mission. 

It’s not entirely the fault of the Pharisees that they didn’t understand.  They loved their clan so much they that they were simply willing to do anything to protect it—to keep out the imposters and the predators.  You know what they say about finding just one rat and the house.  And here they find Jesus sitting in a house full of them.

Some Christians still love to blame the Pharisees for everything, labeling them as exclusivists, uptight “legalists” who were always trying to catch a cloud and pin it down.

But we all wonder where the boundaries are, don’t we?  We all wonder if engagement with the enemy means endorsement.  If compassion somehow means compromise.  If respect somehow means resignation.

But if Christ is at the center, there are no boundaries that should separate us from anyone.

The Pharisees are furious because they do not understand this truth.  In response to their protests, Jesus says, “Go and learn what the Scriptures mean when they say, ‘Instead of offering sacrifices to me, I want you to be merciful to others’” (Matthew 9:13).

Jesus says it has to be learned.  It’s not a natural human impulse.  For us, clanning means there have to be rules and consequences and boundaries and obligations.

But for Jesus, clanning means:

Human compassion eclipses religious compulsion.

Love transcends the law.

Mercy surpasses sacrifice.

What about your clan?  How big is your table?  Are you building and gathering?  

The length and width of our table determines the breadth and depth of our compassion.

Shortly after Pope Francis entered office, he gave a message that shocked many Catholics, and many Christians, around the world.  Francis said that to be a Christian in the modern world is to meet all people, whether they are Christians or not—even atheists—at the place of doing good works.  He spoke of the need to meet each other on our common ground.  He said, “The commandment for everyone to do good is a beautiful path towards peace.  If we, each doing our own part, do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will create a culture of encounter.”  

A culture of encounter.  It’s an evocative image for Christians.  It’s the kind of clanning Jesus calls us to do.  It’s what Jesus created in every community he entered—a culture of encounter.  To meet others, regardless of who they are or what they believe or where they’ve been or what they’ve done.  To find in them what matters most to them, the good in them and the good they long and hunger for, and to befriend that part of them.  A culture of encounter.  

Someone told me this week about an encounter he had recently with a neighbor.  As an openly gay man, he doesn’t always feel safe or accepted in every personal encounter, and his neighbor is one who, at least by outward appearances, didn’t feel very safe to him—if for no other reason than the Confederate flag that his neighbor flies in his front yard.  

One day the neighbor was outside, sitting on the driveway, with his face in his hands.  He was crying.  My friend was walking by on the sidewalk at the time.  He stopped and addressed his neighbor by name, and asked him, “Why are you crying?”

The neighbor said, “My sister was just diagnosed with cancer.”

My friend paused for a moment. Then he said, “My sister has cancer, too.”

Then he sat down beside his neighbor, and they cried together.

Three take-aways:

God desires mercy not sacrifice.

The length and width of our table determines the breadth and depth of our compassion.

If we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will create a culture of encounter.  

The post Expand Your Clan appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

Before she leaves town, she pools together all of her liquid assets, and she calls you and the rest of her trusted managers into the conference room for a staff meeting.  In the conference room, on each of your chairs, is a briefcase full of cash—enough cash in your briefcase equal to about twenty years of your current salary.  Now, because each of you earns a different wage, your briefcases contain different amounts of cash, but the multiple remains the same: about 20 times your annual earnings.  You can do the math.  Think about your annual income and multiply that by 20.  What is it for you?  $1 million?  $2.5 million?  $20 Million?  In this story, we’re talking about big money.

The boss gives the briefcase to you with no specific instructions, but she reminds you that she’ll be back someday.  In the meantime, you are to run the operations, keeping the business profitable, using the resources she’s now entrusting to you to grow the company.  She’s not giving you this cash; she’s simply asking you to manage it wisely while she’s gone.  

“I’m giving to each of you more than enough to keep the company running and to make it profitable while I’m gone,” she says.  “You know our business strategy; you know the vision and values of the company; you know the market share and what strategies have worked in the past.  But it will be up to you to decide what to do with the money.  You’ve seen how I’ve run this company over the years,” she says, “so just do what you’ve watched me do.  Just do your best, until I return.”  

Then, just like that, the boss walks out the door—and there you are, under those bright lights, with this briefcase sitting in your lap.  Can you feel the weight of that briefcase?  Can you feel the gravity of your boss’ expectations?  Can you feel the blessing and the burden that comes from knowing that she actually believes in you— actually believes in your abilities, your commitment to the mission, your trustworthiness.  

When the boss returns someday, what will she find in that briefcase?  Will there be more, or will there be less?

When Jesus tells this story in Matthew 25, he’s preparing to say goodbye to his disciples.  Jesus is about to leave them.  His arrest and crucifixion are imminent, and his disciples will be left to take over the business until he returns. 

What is that business?  

In the three years Jesus has been with them, he’s been teaching them about what he calls the “Kingdom of God.”  At the very heart of his teaching and ministry is this concept of the “Kingdom of God.”  It’s so central to his teaching, in fact, that he refers to it more than 80 times in the gospels.  

For many of us, perhaps, when we hear the word “kingdom” we might think of royal thrones, political might, statecraft, spies, armies and weaponry.  In this world, kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall, and how long they endure depends largely on how effective the king is at defending his throne and defeating enemies both within and outside the kingdom.  In the kingdoms of this world, political might is the currency that fuels the survival and progress of the kingdom—making politics a zero-sum, winner-take-all, game.  In the kingdoms of this world, you’re either a friend or an enemy of the king, which divides a lot of kingdoms and makes a lot of kings paranoid.      

But when Jesus speaks of the “Kingdom of God,” he’s referring to an entirely different kind of kingdom, run by an entirely different set of ideals.  The Kingdom of God is not an actual place so much as it is a community in which the guiding ideal and animating spirit is not political might but divine compassion.  Compassion is the only currency in the Kingdom of God, and that currency is exchanged whenever people take care of each other, genuinely trust and respect one another, willingly share with and serve one another, freely forgive one another, and even daringly love their enemies.  In the Kingdom of God, this divine compassion is the currency that heals every social division, rules every relationship, and makes every living thing an essential part of the fabric of the community.  In the kingdom of God, there are no friends and enemies, there is no “them.”  There’s only “us.”

Jesus made this Kingdom of God his sole business, because he believed it was Israel’s only hope.  He believed that if the people of Israel lived according to these Kingdom ideals, they could be saved from the yoke of Rome.  Under Roman occupation, Israel was fracturing in a million different pieces—and inching closer and closer to self-destruction through violent opposition to Roman oppression.  If it came to blows, Israel had no chance against Rome.  There had to be a better way than violence.  So, Jesus offered a way of life that would nonviolently end the oppressiveness of Roman rule by living according to the ideals of God’s Kingdom.  

Living this Kingdom life was Israel’s only hope.  Practicing this compassion was Israel’s only chance.  And Jesus was so convinced of this, and so committed to living this way of life, that he put his own life on the line to fulfill it. 

So, sensing that his life was coming to an end, he tells a story about the day the boss has to hand over to his servants the currency that fuel the business of the Kingdom of God: compassion.  What is in that briefcase that rests on your lap is God’s stockpile of divine compassion.  Jesus gives it to us, saying, “I have poured this compassion into you, and now I expect you to pour it into the world.  Do not sit on it.  Do not bury it.  Do not guard it for yourself.  Invest it, take risks with it, grow it—because the world depends on it.  It’s your only hope.

Here we are, on the day of one of the most contentious elections of our lifetimes, and I am asking you today to feel the weight of that briefcase on your lap.  The same compassion that God has poured into your life is the compassion God expects you to multiply in the world.  If there was ever a time to multiply it, it is now, in this moment of deep division, when it feels like our country is fracturing in a million different places.  The only currency that can heal that division is the divine compassion that comes from living the Kingdom life.  It is our only hope.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the Mitchells, lifelong Democrats, who planted a Biden sign in the front yard of their home in suburban Pittsburgh.  Next door to the Mitchells, the Gateses—lifelong Republicans—planted a Trump sign in their yard.

These two families, close friends for 14 years, divided by political ideology.  You’d think it was another one of those stories about how today’s politics have ripped apart our relationships. 

But the story was about how another sign that stands in each yard has kept them together.  Both the Mitchells and the Gateses have handmade signs in their yards that read: “We (Heart) Them” with an arrow pointing to the other house.  

“There’s so much hate,” says Chris Mitchell, who came up with the idea.  “We want to send a message” that people on opposite ends of the political spectrum can actually like each other and be civil.

Two families, divided by political ideology, but fiercely committed to living the Kingdom life grounded and rooted in the currency of compassion.

Chances are you’re feeling disillusioned and disheartened by the widespread divisions that our political climate has created in your social fabric.  Mental health professionals actually have a name for this: it’s called Post-Election Stress Disorder (PESD).  Anxiety, anger, fear, and conflict fatigue are common symptoms of PESD.  If any of these describe what you’re feeling right now, two days before the election, I want you to know you’re not alone.  But you can chose another way.  You can commit yourself to living the Kingdom life.

If it helps, I want to share with you four keys to living the Kingdom life in the final days leading up to, and beyond, the 2020 election. 

First, resist assigning ultimate meaning and value to any political candidate or any political issue.

Sometimes we confuse and conflate the Kingdom of God with the political pursuit of the common good.  Sometimes we overinvest ultimate significance in what are actually penultimate, immanent concerns.  

We may disagree with someone over immigration or Obamacare, but if we can remember that such disagreements are, in the end, merely political disagreement, not metaphysical ones, then we leave a little room for God to work.  Whenever we assign ultimate value and meaning to any political solution or agenda or candidate, we creep ever closer to religious extremism that weaponizes faith—and where does that end?  Just five years ago, a man in Colorado Springs, in the name of God, opened fire on a Planned Parenthood facility, killing three and injuring nine people.  

Whenever we assign ultimate value and meaning to our politics, we creep ever closer to a “functional atheism” that assumes that ultimate responsibility for everything rests entirely with this policy or that candidate.  We edge God out.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues about which we should take a stand.  Our baptismal vows as Methodists obligate us to “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”  Dismantling systemic racism, stemming climate change—these are matters about which God is profoundly concerned, and which call us to faithful action.  But even still, such action has its finite limitations.  At some point, the Kingdom life must trust in God’s infinite capacity to fix whatever mess we humans have created in this world.  

Remember that much hinges on this election—but not everything.  In the post-election aftermath, keep things in perspective.  Remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who says, “Ah Lord God!  It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm!  Nothing is too hard for you.” (32:17)  

Trust the wisdom of the farmer’s proverb, which says, “God doesn’t settle all accounts in October.”

Multiply what’s in that briefcase and leave the outcomes to God.

Second, refuse to stereotype, scapegoat, demonize or otherize.  

As with any election, there will be a winning candidate and a losing candidate, one of whom may have campaigned on values more closely aligned with your moral and religious framework.  If your candidate loses in this election, you may feel what psychologists call “moral injury:” the sense that your deeply held beliefs and values have been betrayed or violated, or even that the will of God has been subverted.  Millions of years of human tribalistic thinking have taught us to project or transmit whatever disillusionment we are feeling onto others—as though the other represents everything that’s wrong with the world and must now be excluded from our “tribe.”  

Leave some room in your tribe for the other.  Avoid binary thinking that categorizes people in terms of good/evil, light/dark, friends/enemies based on political preference. 

Remember that the twelve disciples of Jesus couldn’t have been more different from one another: among them was Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector.  One was labeled by the state as a terrorist, the other consider by Jews to be a outright traitor.  In the Kingdom of God, Jesus made them kin. 

In the words of the late theologian, Walter Wink: “When we demonize our enemies, calling them names and identifying them with absolute evil, we deny that they have that of God within them which still makes transformation possible…  We conclude that our enemy has drifted beyond the redemptive hand of God.”

Third, understand that not all conflict is bad, and not every compromise is wrong.  

There is so much chronic conflict in our society that we don’t know how to live with it in healthy ways.  The fight or flight instinct kicks in, and we either run from conflict or we hurt each other.  The Kingdom life offers a third way: compassion.  A compassion that is courageous enough to speak up and advocate for what is right; a compassion that is humble enough to compromise.  

Where there is no conflict, it’s a sign that our compassion is not radical enough.  Where there is no compassion in our conflict, it’s a sign that our politics and our religion has grown toxic.

Remember that the gospel is not politically neutral.  It has something to say about our obligation to the poor, the immigrant, the oppressed, the sick, and the prisoner.  Because of this, whenever Christians do politics, conflict is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to be insoluble. 

The results of this election cycle will not heal the political polarization in our country.  But if you want to live the Kingdom life, and multiply that divine compassion in the world, ask yourself: “Am I tough enough to be kind?”  

I hosted a national call with faith leaders this week to talk about leading through polarizing times.  One of my friends, Rev. Gary Mason, joined the call from Belfast, Ireland.  Gary is Director of “Rethinking Conflict,” and has helped broker peace treaties in Ireland, the Middle East, South Africa and Palestine.  He said something on the call that reminded me just how radical our compassion needs to be.  He said that Christians need to stop hanging out with people who are only like them.  Do you want to live like Jesus?  Do you want true peace?  Then you’ll have to eventually sit at a table with a member of the Proud Boys, or a white supremacist, get to know them, and listen to their story.  

Not all conflict is bad, and not every compromise is wrong.

Finally, practice the politics of compassion.  

Politics is far more than about how we vote or who we vote for.  It’s more than policies, platforms, or party affiliation.  The word “politics,” from the Greek, “polis,” means “affairs of the cities.”  To do politics is to be concerned about the affairs of the communities in which we live, and to do politics as Christians is to ask, “What does Jesus say about how I should live in my community.  What’s my responsibility to the people with whom I share the sidewalk?”   

To live the Kingdom life, to multiply that divine compassion in the world, requires us to transcend “issue politics,” to roll up our sleeves, and work for the kind of community we want to live in.  We can’t do that by simply voting.  According to our parable, the boss will return someday, and will ask us: what did you do with the treasure I left you?  Did you sit on it?  Did you bury it?  Or did you invest it, risk it, let it ride?  Did you multiply my compassion?

Remember this week that if you want to live the Kingdom life and multiply that compassion, you’ll have to step away from the cable news talking heads and the social media echo chamber, roil up your sleeves, and serve the real needs of your community: share your bread, feed the hungry, check in with the lonely, care for the sick, practice compassion.       

In other words, change what’s changeable, control what’s controllable. 

This is the Kingdom life.  And it’s the only way to multiply that compassion in the world. 

The late writer, George Bernard Shaw, wrote about this kind of life.  It’s a noteworthy ending on this All Saints Sunday, two days before a national election.  He said,

“This is the true joy in life:

being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;

being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.

Life is no “brief candle” for me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

Four take-aways for today:

Resist assigning ultimate meaning and value to any political candidate or any political issue by trusting in God’s infinite capacity to fix whatever mess we humans have created.  

Refuse to stereotype, scapegoat, demonize or otherize.  

Not all conflict is bad, and not every compromise is wrong.  

Practice the politics of compassion.

The post Election Day Survival Guide appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

One of our problems is that we think in terms of binary categories: right/wrong, left/right, conservative/progressive, Coke/Pepsi, Ford/Chevy.  But we don’t actually live our lives in a binary world.  In the U.S., partisan loyalty among the American voting populace is almost evenly divided—not in two camps, but in three.  An April 2020 Gallup poll found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, 30% identified as Republicans, and 36% as Independents—and even the Independents do not reliably lean one way or the other.  

This means that, on an average day—whether you’re at the office, the gym, the local pub, the supermarket, or at church—unless you’re at a decidedly political event like a rally or a march—there’s a pretty good chance that only about 1 in 3 people gathered around you in that moment think even remotely like you about any particular issue or policy; there’s at least a reasonable chance that at least two-thirds of them might actually disagree with you.  But there’s a very good chance that you share enough common ground with those same people that you could find some agreement upon what is best the common good.   

We are not nearly as divided as we are led to believe by certain politicians and media outlets.  Our life experiences and political perspectives may be vastly different from each other; we may land in different places and advocate for opposing ideas.  But uniformity has never been the objective of democracy; nor is it the ultimate pursuit of Christianity.  We do not have to think alike.

But as the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, once said, we do have to love alike.  And a politics of compassion can help us do that.

But that means that we have to agree to certain core commitments embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.  

I’ve written about two of these commitments: the first is kinship.  Jesus created a new kind of family—a family based not on pedigree, geography, borders, social status, ethnicity or religious affiliation, but on radical acceptance that makes space for difference.  Jesus taught us that the length and width of our table determines the breadth and depth of our compassion, so he built a bigger table of welcome and inclusion, and anyone who sat at that table was considered family—regardless of who they were, what they had done, or what they believed.  

How long is your table?  How deep is your compassion? 

The second commitment is kenosis—a Greek word meaning, “self-emptying.”  Jesus shared a radical solidarity with people that freely and willingly surrendered the self for the sake of the common good.  By taking the form of a servant, or “doula,” Jesus, like a midwife, helped to birth a new kind of world—one grounded in justice and mercy. 

In a world that grasps for power and privilege, are you emptying yourself of power for others, birthing something new, hopeful and life-giving?

In this post, we’re exploring the third of our three commitments of a politics of compassion.  I call it delight: a way of living and being in this world that sees the Imago Dei—the image of God—in all living things, and therefore finds deep joy in simply being with others in ways that defy the transactional, reciprocal modes of connection that often determine our relationships.  

Delight.  We all know what it feels like to delight in something or someone.  In Hebrew, one of the most evocative words for delight is “châphêts.”  It means, “to bend towards, to be inclined towards an object or person.”  To delight in someone or something is to move toward it, to bend toward it with curious pleasure.

Matthew, our youngest, turned 17 this week.  On his birthday I recalled a certain afternoon when, as a toddler in diapers, he sat on my lap and, for the first time in his young life, bit into a ripe red apple.  I was the first to take a bite of that apple.  He observed carefully, judiciously, and when he gave me that knowing glance, I held the apple to his mouth.  He leaned toward it, sunk his four front teeth into it, and all at once, something washed over him in that moment that I can only describe as pure joy, pleasure, rapture.  He re-focused on the apple, leaned in a second time, took another bite, and again, I witnessed that physical expression of simple pleasure that happens whenever human curiosity meets glad consummation.  Even now, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.  I cannot explain why exactly.  I could only tell myself in that moment to remember it, to never forget that this is what it means to be truly human, to be fully alive and present: to bend in curiosity toward the strange and unknown world and to discover unimagined joy in the encounter.           

To delight is to bend toward the essence of a person or a thing and to find joy, pleasure, and wonder in it.  But delighting is so foreign to our modern way of life.  We tend not to delight in others, but to use others for our own selfish ends, or to exploit the resources of the natural world for our own profit.  In our competitive, transactional pursuits we leave little time and space in our lives for delight.  

But Jesus knew delight.  He bent with a merciful curiosity toward others, regardless of who they were or what they had done.  In doing so, he turned a world of objects into a communion of subjects—and took delight in them.

The gospel tells us that one day Jesus happened upon a tax collector named Matthew.  

As a tax collector, Matthew conspired with the occupying forces of Rome—which, as a Jew, made him a traitor among his own people.  He would stop people on the street and assess duties on nearly everything in their possession.  A cart could be taxed for each wheel, for the animal that pulled it, for the merchandise that it carried.  If he spotted you on the streets, you’d have to pay up.  He gave you no other choice.

Because tax collectors weren’t employed by the Roman government, they had to make their living by skimming off the top.  At the end of the month, they’d send in a portion of their collections to the Roman governor; anything over that amount they were free to keep—which  meant that the more they taxed their own people, the more their people would suffer, and the wealthier the tax collector would become.  

Matthew worked for the enemy at the expense of his own countrymen, and for that he was hated and cursed.  We don’t know much else about his story, but we do know that he must have been a miserable man—if for no other reason than that he made everyone around him miserable.

Until, one day, along comes Jesus, who bends toward him in gracious curiosity and says, “Follow me.”  And just like that, the one who is despised becomes a disciple, the betrayer becomes the beloved.  Before the night is over, Jesus is hanging out with Matthew and his network of other tax collectors, sitting at a table, throwing a party. 

Outside Matthew’s condo, the Pharisees outside are losing their minds: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 

Jesus says, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”

Doctor Jesus, whose only medicine is companionship and delight which heals the broken and, in doing so, takes one more tax collector off the market and restores the common good. 

To heal the broken and restore the common good, Jesus has to cross the “difference divide”—a line in the sand drawn so deeply, so long ago, that it was never meant to be crossed.  But Jesus steps across it anyway, and turns historic enemies into friends.

How did Jesus cross that line?  

By taking delight in the despised, seeing in Matthew not the enemy to be condemned but the very image of God longing to be restored.  It’s a politics of compassion that bends in delight toward the unknown, the feared, the stranger—for the sake of the common good.

How can we delight in others—even in those with whom we disagree?  I want to offer you three rules for delighting in difference.

The first rule: If we do not bend toward difference we will succumb to indifference.

Years ago, I was standing on the littered corner of Sixth St. and San Pedro in Downtown Los Angeles with a group from my former congregation.  Sixth and San Pedro is Skid row’s “Ground Zero,” the tent capital of America’s homeless.  More than 4,300 people call it home.  

We’d just finished building a small classroom in at makeshift afterschool program for homeless teens.  As we made the mile-long walk to our car, a stranger on the corner stepped abruptly into our path: “Where you from,” he asked?  

I tell him that we’ve come from San Diego to work at the Center.  He sizes me up, then reaches out his hand for mine and says, “We’re real people here, you know?  But you people come through here every day and never really see us.  You look the other way and keep walking.  You can’t even look at me.”

“I’m looking at you,” I say.  “I see you.”

Over the next ten minutes we get to know this man who calls himself “Supreme.”  He’s in his late twenties, a native of New Orleans who washed up on the shores of Skid Row six years earlier, after Katrina.  Everything he owns is contained in two large trash bags, which he holds in each hand.  He once sang in his father’s gospel choir with his brother and sisters, which is how he got the name “Supreme.”  He’s been on the streets for so long that nobody knows where he is.  “I have made my mistakes,” he confesses.  “But I’m trying real hard to make it right.”  

To take delight is to bend toward difference, and that day, a man named Supreme bent toward those who were completely different from him and taught us that delight is the antidote to indifference.  

The opposite of compassion is not hatred or hostility.  If compassion is to feel something so deeply in your gut that you are moved to action, then the opposite of compassion is to feel nothing at all and so to not be moved at all.  The Greek philosophers had a word for this: “apatheia,” the isolated, unfeeling, uncaring response to human need.  Apathy. 

Think about a time when someone has bent toward you with curious delight and attention—the kind of attention that made you feel in that moment like the most important person in the room—simply because they asked a question in a way that made you the only person who could answer it: “Why did you become a doctor?”  “Where are you from?”  I like the question that Krista Tippet asks every one of her guests at the beginning of her public radio show, “On Being.”  “Tell me about the religious or spiritual background of your childhood.”

If you want to cultivate delight in your life and see in the face of another the very face of God, then bring an unusual and inexhaustible curiosity toward the other.  As the philosopher, Simone Weil said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

If we do not bend in delight toward difference, we will succumb to indifference.  Jesus says to Matthew, “Follow me.”  And then, quite unexpectedly, it’s Jesus who follows Matthew home for a party—bending toward difference.

The second rule for cultivating delight is this: outlast your discomfort with difference by staying at the table.  

There are moments in our conversations with others who are different—and I just had one this past week with a neighbor—when you realize you don’t believe the same things, or don’t see the issues the same way, and you want to hit the eject button immediately.  They’re talking a different language, they’re highly confident in their perspective, it’s the de-ja-moo moment when you’ve heard this bull before, and you just want to get back to your own tribe.  Ask yourself: “Can I stay a little longer?  Can I outlast my discomfort with difference?”

Some of my closest relationships are with those from whom I wanted at first to distance myself—either out of misunderstanding or a judgmentalism that turned out to be misguided.  What I’ve discovered is that true delight comes when you can bend toward people as they are, not as you wish they were; and when you can live your life as you are, not as you hope other people think you are. 

Compassion takes time and patience to cultivate.  So have grace with the pace of it.  There’s an old farming proverb that says, “God Doesn’t Settle All Accounts in October.”  Sometimes you plant seeds, but nothing seems to come up.  But remember: God doesn’t settle all accounts in October.

The Chinese Bamboo tree is a good reminder of this truth.  When you plant the seed of the Chinese Bamboo tree, the seed lies dormant for four to five years—sometimes longer.  Nothing.  But at some point, usually during that fifth year, quite unexpectedly, a shoot breaks the surface.  In just two weeks it reaches a height of 14 feet.  In six weeks, it reaches a height of 90 feet.

Outlast you discomfort by staying in the room with difference.  Things just might change.  You just might be changed because of it.

The third rule is for cultivating delight is this: don’t compare the best in yourself to the worst in others.

The satirical online newspaper, The Onion, ran an advertisement some time ago that said,

“I don’t have the time to get to know every person I encounter in the course of my daily life.  So thank goodness I have a handy little device at my disposal that helps me know how to deal with just about anyone I come across: stereotypes.  Stereotypes are a real time-saver!” 

Jesus told a parable about two men who went to the temple to pray: one was a tax collector, the other a Pharisee.  One was a Volvo driving elitist and the other a pick-up truck driving redneck driving with a gun rack.  One was a dogmatic atheist, the other a United Methodist minister.  Jesus says,

“The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance.  He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.  For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 

I like a good stereotype as much as the next guy.  But the late theologian Walter Wink, had it right when he said, “When we demonize our enemies, calling them names and identifying them with absolute evil, we deny that they have that of God within them which still makes transformation possible.  We play God.  We write them out of the Book of Life.  We conclude that our enemy has drifted beyond the redemptive hand of God”^[1]

It’s sad but true: even our adversaries are children of God; and even in us, the image of God is often obstructed by pride and certainty.

As psychologist Gordon Livingston says, “Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.”  

Jesus calls us to bend in delight toward difference for the sake of the common good.

And so our take-aways today:

Bend toward difference or you will succumb to indifference.  

Outlast your discomfort with difference by staying at the table.  

Don’t compare the best in yourself to the worst of others.

^[1] Jesus’ Third Way, p. 49.    

The post A Politics of Compassion: Delight appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

I know that mixing politics and church can be precarious.  The popular sociologist and pastor, Tony Campolo, once said that mixing church and politics is like mixing ice cream and manure: it doesn’t do much for the manure, but it sure does ruin the ice cream.  

I don’t want to ruin your ice cream, but I am convinced that, whenever we come to church to worship a God who created all things and called them good, our worship quickly becomes feckless, even idolatrous, if we are deaf to God’s timeless command to care for that good—to preserve and steward it like gardeners of the earth.  This is the work of politics—to cultivate and safeguard and labor for the common good so that all life might flourish in the garden that is our world. 

But it’s such hard work—and it’s made only harder when we value partisan opinions over people and principles over practice, turning politics into a zero-sum game.

Luke Bretherton teaches political theology at Duke Divinity School.  In his latest book, Christ and the Common Life, he describes the work of politics as a “dance between conflict and conciliation” as we negotiate a common life together.  It’s an evocative image—politics as a dance between conflict and conciliation, between disagreement and concession, debate and compromise—for the sake of the common good in which all of life can flourish.  

But have you noticed that the kind of politics that dominates our national debate and our personal conversations often looks less like a dance between partners and more like an MMA cage fight between enemies?  It’s so hard to watch, and yet it’s so hard to take our eyes off of it.  It consumes us as we consume it, until finally it divides us and sends us back to our corners in the ring.  

Isn’t it time to leave the cage and reclaim that dance between conflict and conciliation for the sake of the common good?  

We can only do that by committing ourselves to practicing a politics of compassion embodied in the life of Jesus.  It’s a politics that puts people over ideology and practice over theory.  It’s a politics that is grounded in three core commitments, the first of which we explored last week, called radical kinship. 

Jesus built a table long and wide enough for anyone and everyone to sit at—not only his friends, but even his enemies, his deniers and betrayers.  At that table, he ate with democrats and republicans, the filthy rich and the dirt poor, the beautiful and the unlovely, the born-agains and the backsliders.  At that table, he called every one of them family, because Jesus was less concerned with standing on the right issues than standing in the right places—with anyone, anywhere, especially those on the margins who could not stand up for themselves.  He practiced a radical form of kinship that transcended cultural, religious and social distinctions, erasing the margins that divide us and drawing us unto himself to form a new community

Today, we’re exploring the second of these three core commitments.  It’s called kenosis—a Greek word found in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians.  In this letter, Paul describes the primary activity of Jesus’ mission on earth as one of self-emptying, and the word Paul uses here in verse 7 is “ekenosen” (ἐκένωσεν), the root of which is “kenosis,” which means “to empty oneself.”  Paul describes kenosis this way,

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

 who, though he was in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be exploited,

 but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave” (2:5-7).

According to Paul, Jesus was given a choice of how he would use his divine power and privilege.  As God incarnate, how would he relate to other people—especially his enemies?  As Messiah, how would he carry out his reign in the heart of a hostile and violent Empire? 

As one who was in the form of God, and equal to God in every way, Jesus had at least two choices before him: would he “exploit” that divine power for his own self-gain, or would he give that power away for the sake of the common good.

Unfortunately, our modern translation of this passage misses the mark.  The Greek word translated here as “exploit” is “harpagmon” (ἁρπαγμὸν), which doesn’t at all mean “something to be exploited;” it means, rather, “something to be grasped.”  

The root of “harpagmon” is “harpy.”  According to Greek mythology, harpy were half-human, half-bird creatures.  They had faces pale from hunger, but most haunting were their giant claws which they used for grasping their prey.  The ancient poet, Ovid, described harpy as “human vultures.”

Suddenly, Paul’s words take on new meaning for us.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.”

Grasping is the chronic illness of our human species. 

Do you remember the 1970’s movie, Jaws, when Brody and Hooper catch the huge tiger shark and open him up in the laboratory?  Do you remember what they found?  Out of the shark’s stomach they found some fish fragments, a paint can, a clock, a Louisiana license plate.  Brody says, “A tiger shark is like a garbage can.  It’ll eat anything.” 

Our culture is obsessed with grasping.  Grasping after stuff.  Grasping after wealth and influence and celebrity.  Grasping after titles, status, “followers” and “likes” and the latest shiny objects.   

And so much of our politics is about grasping after power and control.  Our democracy has, for the most part, been reduced to election cycles and political statecraft, votes and approval ratings—grasping for power rather than gardening for the common good.

But Paul reminds us that there is an antidote to all of our grasping that can heal the division and restore the common good.  He calls it “kenosis”—the act of “emptying oneself” for the sake of others.  

Two men, complete strangers, living in Orlando—Kevin Rathel and James Crocker.  Rathel had contracted the COVID-19 virus.  He was on a ventilator, fighting for his life, when a family friend,  John Stemberger, intervened.  Stemberger had heard a news report that some victims of the disease had dramatically improved after receive a plasma transfusion using the blood of those who had contracted the virus and survived.  Stemberger worked his broad network of connections to find someone who survived the virus and whose blood type matched that of Rathels.  But his search turned up no one.  Until, out of the blue, Stemberger received a call from someone on an unrelated matter.  Stemberger responded that he didn’t have time to deal with the matter—his friend was sick, he was looking for a match. The man on the other end of the line, James Crocker, said, “I had the virus.  I was hospitalized.  I survived.”  The blood type was a match.  The next day, Crocker went to a blood donation center, and by that night, Rathel received the transfusion.  Four days later, on Easter Sunday, Rathel came out of his coma, and the doctors told him, “You’re alive and you’re going to make it.”  Within a week, the wheeled him out of the hospital as the medical staff applauded.  But the real hero was a complete stranger, James Crocker, who gave of himself—emptied himself—for the sake of another.^[1]  

Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.”  Kenosis—laying down one’s own self-interest for the sake of others. This was Christ’s purpose in the world—even on the cross.

Theologians have debated for centuries over the meaning of Christ’s death.  Some have described it as a ransom payment that rescued a sinful humanity from the powers of death.  Some have described it as a temple-like substitutionary offering—that Jesus was the lamb whose blood was shed to atone for the sins of the people.  Some have described it as a matter of divine justice, which demanded that one person pay the price for the crimes of the many— and that someone was Jesus. 

There is profound meaning in all of these descriptions.  But I’ve always been drawn to the Apostle Paul’s description of Christ’s death in Philippians.  Paul says that Jesus was nobody’s victim.  He wasn’t some helpless lamb who had no choice in the matter; nor was he a blank check upon which God signed his name to pay humanity’s debt.  Paul says that Jesus chose to empty himself for us on the cross.  Nobody took his life from him.  Jesus voluntarily gave his life away, out of compassion.  He emptied himself, says Paul, to show us how deeply and profoundly we are loved by God.

If you’ve ever seen a child, or a spouse, or a friend suffer from illness, or addiction, or depression, or abuse, you’ve likely felt deep in your body this kind of self-emptying compassion.  You may have found yourself saying, “If only I could bear that pain for you, if only I could crawl into that hospital bed and take your place, if only I could give you my full heart in exchange for your broken one, I would.”

It’s this same mind that was in Christ that, according to Paul, ought also to be in us.  To cast your eyes upon the broken and abused world and to be moved by a deep willingness to pour out your very self for the sake of its healing and flourishing.

According to Paul, there are two qualities of the kenotic mind that serve the common good.

The first is a willingness to mid-wife a whole new world.  Paul doesn’t use the word mid-wife.  In the Greek, the word is “doulou” (δούλου), which is translated as “slave or servant.”  Paul says that Jesus took “the form of a slave.”  But the word “slave” is so fraught with deep and historic trauma for so many people in our country that it misses the mark.  Slavery implies coercion, violence, dehumanization, the loss of human agency and self-determination.  Our national sin of slavery has yet to be fully redressed and healed, and that history blinds to the real promise of what Paul is trying to say. 

That Greek word “doulou” has the same root of our modern word, “doula,” which many of you know refers to someone who provides emotional and physical support to an expecting mother during pregnancy and childbirth.  A doula is not a doctor.  A doula has no medical training.  But doulas can be indispensable in the birthing process and have been clinically proven to produce better birth outcomes for mothers and their newborns. 

That’s the kind of servanthood we are called to practice.  To take the form of a doula.

What if we, as people of faith, conceived of ourselves as mid-wives of a whole new world—to practice a new way of caring for one another, so that all of life would flourish?  If we conceived of ourselves as a mid-wives, would it impact how we think about public policy, how we solve some of the biggest challenges of our day, like immigration, or health care, or climate change?  To take the form of a doula, and to breathe with an imperiled world through the ache and contractions as a new world is birthed into existence.

Shortly after Lori and I were married and I took my first appointment as a pastor, we rented a little place in a sketchy, crime-ridden neighborhood.  It was all we could afford at the time.  We were 23 years old, so naïve but eager to make it on our own.  Just after we moved in, an older couple knocked on the door.  Cecilia and Manuel.  We called them CC and Manny.  We were always complaining that we were broke at the time, but CC and Manny were poor.  They stood on our front porch that day bearing homemade tamales.  They spoke halted English, but we became friends.  They were doulas, so to speak.  

They’d bring over homemade tamales every week or two.  When the water line broke, there was Manny, with a wrench in one hand and a dozen tamales in the other.  When grass grew too long, there was Manny with his mower.  When our first child was born, there was CC, offering us a baby-sitting deal: “I give you tamales, you give me la nina.”  They were always there for us, looking after us like mid-wives.  CC and Manny.  

To practice a politics of compassion is to breathe alongside this fragile world and mid-wife a new future into existence.

But Paul mentions one other quality of the kenotic life.  Paul calls it humility.  “Being found in human form, he humbled himself.”

To have the mind of Christ is to humble ourselves.  Our English word for humility comes from the Latin word, “humus.”  It means “ground, or earth.”  It’s also used describe mulch or compost.  So to humble yourself is to be close to the ground, to keep your feet on the earth, to remember that, with every breath you take, you’re closer and closer to becoming mulch someday—so don’t take yourself so seriously.  

The late Henri Nouwen was a well-known and highly regarded Catholic priest and professor of theology at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale.  Then, almost all at once, in 1986, he left it all behind in search of deeper fulfillment and meaning in his life.

He went on a sojourn through Latin America, thinking he would give his life in service to the poor, but he could not force a sense of call in the slums of South America.  When he returned to the US, he accepted an invitation to come to Toronto and live at the L’Arche—a community created by Catholic priests and lay people where able-bodied and disabled people share life together, spending time in meals and at prayer, living side by side.  

At L’Arche, Nouwen developed a close connection to a young man named Adam who was so disabled that he could not speak, or bathe himself, or dress himself.  Nouwen wrote about how terrified he was during his first weeks with Adam, how frightened he was that at any moment while he was trying to lift or dress the fully grown man, he might erupt in an epileptic seizure.  He talked about the patience required to sit with Adam over the course of the hour it would take him to eat his meals.  Nouwen wrote about how it got easier; eventually the anxiety faded, and the need to get everything right fell away.

Nouwen says that, over time, Adam taught him a lot about God’s love in very concrete ways. He taught Nouwen that being is more important than doing, that we get so caught up in doing a thousand things just to prove that we are worthy.  But what Adam seemed to say to Nouwen was, “I don’t care what you do as long as you will be with me.”

After months with Adam, Nouwen wrote of a particular moment when he suddenly realized that Adam was not just a disabled person, less human than me or other people.  He was a fully human being, so fully human that God even chose him to become the instrument of God’s love. He was so vulnerable, so weak, so empty, that he became just heart, the heart where God wanted to dwell, where God wanted to stay and where God wanted to speak to those who came close to God’s vulnerable heart.  Adam was a full human being, not half human or less human, says Nouwen.  “Suddenly I understood that God loves the poor and God loves Adam very specially.  God wanted to dwell in his broken person so that God could speak from that vulnerability into the world of strength, and call people to become vulnerable.”

That is kenosis, that is self-emptying.  “Being found in human form,” says Paul, “Christ humbled himself.”

It’s the antidote to all the grasping and shouting and partisan outrage that defines our culture and dominates so much of our politics, and it is our only hope: to humble ourselves like Christ, and dare to speak from that vulnerability into a world of strength.  

Three takeaways for further reflection:

In a culture of grasping we are called to give our lives away.

The Kingdom belongs to the mid-wives of a just and compassionate world.

In our humility and vulnerability we find our strength and our peace.

^[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/opinions/coronavirus-plasma-donor/index.html

The post A Politics of Compassion: Kenosis appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

With 91 days until the November 2020 Presidential Election, U.S. Americans are about to enter one of the most contentious political seasons in recent memory.  How do we transcend the politics of contempt that dominates our country and turns friends into adversaries based solely on partisan loyalties?  Despite our differences, can we find enough common ground that we can work together for the common good?  

Last year I preached a sermon series on eight of the most controversial issues of our day, including racism, immigration, climate change, Islamic Extremism, to name a few.  I explored these issues through the lens of Scripture, reason, experience, and centuries of Christian tradition.  St. Andrew’s worship attendance during those eight weeks grew by an average of 18%.  The series will be published as a book by the same title next month. 

What I’ve come to believe is that, not only can talk about politics in church, we must talk about politics in church—because when we’re in church we should be at our most political.  By “political” I don’t mean “partisan.”  The word “politics” comes from the Greek, “polis,” meaning “affairs of the cities.”  Some might argue that “politics” comes from the two words, “poly,” meaning “many,” and “ticks,” as in “bloodsucking parasites.”  But to do politics is to be concerned about the affairs of the communities in which we live.  And to do politics in church is to ask, “What does the gospel of Jesus Christ say about how I should live and act in my community, and what my responsibility should be to my neighbors who live there?”   

This is the politics of Jesus, and it’s vastly different from what typically passes for politics in America today.  It transcends partisan politics and asks us: what kind of community do we want to live in, and what kind of neighbors will be?  We can’t answer those questions by simply pulling the lever in the polling booth because, when it’s all said and done, Jesus will not ask us how or for whom we voted.  Jesus will ask us, “When I was hungry, thirsty, sick and in prison, did you care?  When I was your neighbor in disguise, your fellow citizen, a stranger, did you love me?”  This is the only kind of politics that matters to Jesus.

And it’s this kind of politics that I call “a politics of compassion.”  It’s not exclusive to Jesus.  You’ll find it in all three Abrahamic traditions.  But Jesus embodied it most fully—not only in his life, but also in his death and resurrection.  Jesus’ compassion for others—especially the outcast and the powerless—was so radical that he upset the government and was deemed a political threat to the Empire.  His compassion for all of humanity, even his enemies, was so unquenchable, so unstoppable, that he gave his own life to redeem it.  His compassion for all that God had created was so unconquerable that he rose to life again to reconcile all of creation to God.

Compassion—in the Greek, the word is “splagchnizomai” (Σπλαγχνίζομαι).  The root word is “splanxna,” meaning bowels, or gut.  In the ancient world, it was the gut, not the mind or the heart, that was perceived as the center of human emotion.  To have compassion is to feel something so deep in your gut that you’re moved to action.  Even today, we speak of “feeling something in our gut,” or having “butterflies in our stomach,” or our “stomachs turning” when we experience something uncomfortable.  

Have you ever felt something in your stomach whenever you’ve been moved with feelings like grief, sorrow, affection or empathy?  A deep compassion for a person in their plight comes not from the intellect, but from somewhere deep inside the body that holds the wounded memory of what it feels like to be that person in that moment.

Compassion was the answer to everything for Jesus.  It was his politic—his way of living and acting in his community.  For Jesus, compassion wasn’t a “warm feeling” or an emotion that blinded him to the truth.  Compassion was an ideal that inspired him to work for the common good: to heal the sick, to feed the hungry masses, to liberate the oppressed.

What do we mean when we speak of the common good?  For Jesus, the common good was the context and the conditions which make possible the flourishing of all human life—not just the few, not just the wealthy or the spiritually worthy, the powerful or the privileged, but all human life, beginning with the widow, the orphan, the poor and the oppressed.  At the center of the common good were all those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”  Jesus had compassion for them.  But the common good included others, too.

His disciples asked him: what about the lepers, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, Jesus?  Compassion.  Okay, but what about this Roman soldier who is pleading for you to heal his sick child?  Compassion.  But what about our persecutors and enemies?  Compassion.  Then where exactly do you draw the line, Jesus?  King Herod, Pontius Pilate, Emperor Tiberius—what about them?  Compassion.  Why?  So that all of human life may flourish as daughters and sons of God.

It was a politics of compassion for the sake of the common good.  How do we practice this kind of politics?

I believe that there are three core commitments intrinsic to a politics of compassion, the first of which is radical kinship.  A politics of compassion requires an uncompromising devotion to radical kinship with those who seem so unlike us.

The New Testament Letter to the Ephesians describes what this radical kinship looks like.  The letter was written to the early church in Ephesus that was struggling with the question, “Who do we include in our community?”  In that community, the Jewish converts to Christianity believed that they were the true and exclusive heirs to God’s grace.  As Jews, they had the heritage, the bloodlines, the lineage as God’s Chosen Ones.  They saw themselves as the insiders.  But then, thanks to Paul’s preaching, along comes all these pagan gentile converts—these uninvited outsiders who heard the message of Jesus and believed that they were included in God’s family, too.  

Jews and Gentiles, historical archenemies, all together in one place.  It didn’t go well.

As it happens even today, a fight broke out in the church over who should be in and who should be out.  That’s when this letter to the Ephesians arrives, describing God’s vision for a whole different kind of family—a radical kinship that transcends every earthly distinction and division.

Christ is our peace, it says, 

“He has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…  His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two… and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross…. He came and preached peace to you (Gentiles) who were far away and peace to you (Jews) who were near.  For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household…. (Ephesians 2:14-22).

It’s a word of unity and peace for a world of division and contempt—including our own world.  God may have destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, but doesn’t it seem like we humans have been trying ever since to rebuild it all over again? Our nation has never been more divided than now, and we are months away from another presidential campaign that will be more contentious and divisive than ever.  

For people of faith, what’s the antidote?  It begins with radical kinship—the devotion to a family that expands beyond your familiar tribe.

Jesus created a new kind of family that transcended bloodlines, tribes, social ranking, purity codes and orthodoxy in favor of boundless compassion and a deep sense of belonging.  How did he do that?  Read the gospels, especially the Gospel of Luke, and you’ll see how absolutely simple it was: he just sat down at dinner tables with people and ate with them.  It was as simple as that.  The table became a metaphor for radical kinship.

Jesus did what nobody else was doing at the time: he sat down at a table and fellowshipped with sinners, tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, the ritually unclean, the poor.  But before they all could get up from the table, Jesus invited Pharisees, Roman officers, the powerful, and the wealthy to sit down at the table with them.  Then he looked at all of them with compassion and said, “All of you, every one of you, are now my family.”  

Someone came to him one day and said, “Hey, Jesus, your brothers are outside looking for you.”  And Jesus said, “They’re not my family anymore.  These people here at this table are my family.”   

You can often ask someone why they’re prejudiced against a certain kind of people, or why they vote for one party over the other, or why they’re so rigid in their opinions or beliefs, and you’ll often hear the same reply:  “Well, my father believed this way, my grandfather believed this way, everyone in my family has always believed this way, so I guess I just believe this way.” 

But here’s the lesson of Jesus:  

The length of our table determines the depth of our compassion.  As our table lengthens, our heart expands. 

How long is your table?  Does it welcome and include those who think or believe differently than you, or whose life experiences are far from your own?  When we sit at the table of Jesus and look around, we realize that we’re all the same, and that we’re all different, and yet we’re all welcome.

I was fifteen years old when I took a job doing light chores for an eighty-three-year-old widow.  She lived alone in a single-wide mobile home, and every Saturday morning she would give me a list of things to do—sweep the patio, pull the weeds, trim the hedges, wash the windows.  

At around 10:30, she’d call me inside for a break, whereupon we’d sit at her table and talk over cookies and milk.  

At noon, she’d call me in again: potato chips, a ham and cheese sandwich, pecan Sandies and a soda.  At the table, we ate and talked.  

At 2:30, more cookies and milk.  

I didn’t understand at the time the exact nature of my work: seven hours of chores, and an hour and a half of conversation, once a week, for three straight years.  I was often pulling weeds that were no longer there, washing windows that still sparkled from the week before, vacuuming her already spotless floor.  

But at her table, she shared with me her life story: about her late husband’s inventions, her trip out west in the days of the Dust Bowl, about the day she learned how to drive and the day she was told that she could no longer drive.  She learned about my life story too: about my family, my girlfriends, my plans for the future.  Her name was Rose Pringle, and she taught me that the length of our table determines the depth of our compassion.  As our table lengthens, our heart expands.  

Compassion is about making space for others who are unlike you, but just like you.  It’s about bringing the other in toward yourself, erasing the margins.  

There’s another truth about radical kinship: 

The forest is only as healthy as the individual trees found within it.  None of us flourishes if some of us are suffering.

I’ve been reading Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees.”  Wohlleben writes about stumbling across a patch of strange-looking mossy stones in a preserve of old beech trees that grows in the forest near his home.  He’d passed these stones many times before without paying them any attention.  But that day, he stopped and bent down to take a look.  

They were an unusual shape: gently curved with hollowed-out areas.  Carefully, he lifted the moss on one of the stones.  What he found underneath was tree bark.  These were not stones, after all, but old wood. 

He was surprised at the hardness of the wood, because it usually takes only a few years for beechwood to decompose in wet conditions.  But what surprised him was that he couldn’t lift the wood.  It was attached to the ground in some way.  He took out his pocketknife and carefully scraped away some of the bark until he got down to a greenish layer.  Green? 

This color is found only in chlorophyll, which makes new leaves green; reserves of chlorophyll are also stored in the trunks of living trees.  That could mean only one thing: this old piece of wood was still alive!  He then noticed that the remaining “stones” were arranged in a circle with a diameter of about 5 feet. 

What Wohlleben had stumbled upon were the gnarled remains of an enormous ancient tree stump.  All that was left were vestiges of the outermost edge.  The interior had completely rotted into humus long ago—an indication that the tree must have been felled at least four or five hundred years earlier.  How could the remains have clung onto life for so long?

It was clear that this stump was getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots.  The surrounding beech trees were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive.

It turns out that trees are social beings.  They share food with their own species, sometimes even with their competitors.  The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. 

On its own, a tree is at the mercy of wind and weather.  But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores and shares water, and generates much-needed humidity.  In the protected environment of a grove, trees can live to be very old.  Healthy trees send nutrients to sick or injured trees.  Every tree is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible.  The forest is only as strong and healthy as the weakest and most vulnerable trees within it—and so, together, every tree is committed to working for the common good.

Trees possess a grace and wisdom that’s often lacking among humans.  If only we could grasp this simple wisdom that our only hope depends on our capacity to work together for the common good, knowing that we’re only as strong as the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Woodrow Wilson once said that “A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.”  The same is true of our society.  A politics of compassion, rooted in kinship, makes the whole forest flourish.  

One last truth about radical kinship: Jesus never calls us to take the right stand on the issues of our day, but rather to stand in the right places—with the outcasts and those relegated to the margins

Radical kinship always turns nobodies into somebodies

Father Gregory Boyle puts it this way: “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship.  You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

Sister Mary Rose McGready was the Director of Covenant House, a shelter for homeless teens in New York City.  McGready told a story about a girl named Kathy who came to the shelter one Tuesday morning, ragged and dirty clothes on her back, and holding a little aluminum paint can in her arms.

From the second she stepped inside, she made it clear that she and the paint can were a “package deal.”  Whatever she did, wherever she went, the paint could never leave her hands.

She took the can with her to the cafeteria, to bed, into the shower.

“Do you want to tell me what’s in it?” asked McGready.  For a long time, Kathy didn’t answer.  She rocked back and forth, her black hair swaying across her shoulders.  Then, one day, she said, “It’s my mother…. It’s my mother’s ashes.  I got them from the funeral home.”

A label on the side of the can chronicled all that remained of her mother: date of birth, date of death, name.  That was it.

Kathy explained that she never knew her mother, who abandoned her as an infant.  She ended up living in foster homes.  But when she decided to try to find her mother, she learned that her mother was in the hospital, dying of AIDS.

She explained that she finally met her mother the day before she died, and that her mother told her she loved her.  

McGready said that when she reached out and hugged Kathy, she cried in her arms for a long time.  McGready said, “It was tough getting my arms around her because she just wouldn’t put the paint can down.”

We’re all carrying around that can.  Every single one of us.  It contains the ashes of some old wound, or something lost. We’re all searching for someone who understands.

Radical kinship is made possible not when we take the right stands, but when we stand in the right places with the right people, turning nobodies into somebodies.

This is a politics of compassion: a commitment to the common good, grounded in radical kinship.  It’s how we answer the question: what kind of community do we want to live in, and what kind of neighbors will be?

As we prepare ourselves for the November 3 “cage fight”—otherwise known as the 2020 national election—let’s remember these three truths:

The length of our table determines the depth of our compassion.

The forest is only as healthy as the individual trees within it.

Jesus calls us to stand in the right places, with the right people.

The post The Politics of Compassion: Kinship appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.

Surviving the slaughter on Omaha Beach led him to deep introspection.  He thought about what he would do with his life if he ever made it home.  Having witnessed the atrocities of that battle, how would his life be different than it had been before he had left?  Surveying the carnage along the shoreline, he pledged that if he were ever given the chance to return to his family, he would never waste another minute of his precious life.  He would give himself to some higher purpose or calling.  He would do better.

George, like both of my grandfathers, did return home from war.  They each made good on their foxhole promises.  My uncle, however, who years later fought in Vietnam, was not as lucky.  He died in a firefight in Duong Lam while dragging three of his fellow wounded Marines to safety.  Thirty years later he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for his bravery.

Memorial Day reminds us that some soldiers come home from war and some do not; some get a second chance to start over again, while others fall on the battlefield dreaming of how life might someday have been different for them.

The coronavirus pandemic has been likened to a kind of war.  We honor our front-line workers who put their own lives at risk to save others.  Daily, we count our fallen, who now total nearly twice those lost in the Vietnam War.  We wait for a signal that might point to an end—a viral ceasefire at the least, or even a vaccine to defeat the virus.  But most of us fight this war by staying home and binge-watching Netflix between Zoom calls and Instacart orders, all while debating the ethics of mask-wearing on after-dinner walks.

Call this pandemic what you will, but we have this rare moment in our lives, and in the life of our nation, to dream of the kind of world we want to live in when this is all over.

We can’t go back to the way it was before it all began, because a country that can be brought to its knees so quickly by an adversary so small was sick far before this virus ever invaded our shores.  If you’re like me, it’s hard to acknowledge this.  Our pre-pandemic life was good for many of us.  But coronavirus has exposed some deep and chronic diseases and disparities in our national social fabric—in our nation’s very soul—that call us to genuine repentance.

That word, repentance, can be such a loaded word for many of us.  We often associate it with feelings of remorse and regret.  In ancient times, the Hebrews marked a season of repentance by wearing sackcloth and ashes, tearing their clothes, and fasting—in essence, generally feeling miserable about themselves and the choices that they made as a people and a nation.

Remorse is an appropriate and necessary expression of repentance.  But genuine repentance requires not simply remorse, but right action brought about by a changed mind.  The Greek word is “metanoia.”  It means, literally, to go “beyond” (meta) the “mind” (nous)—to  think beyond our old and tired answers that do not seem to work anymore, to get out of our minds altogether and into our gut (the seat of human compassion), trusting that “right loving” is more important than “right thinking.”

What has the coronavirus pandemic revealed about our society that calls us to national repentance—a changed national consciousness that leads to greater compassion and collaboration for the sake of the common good?

For one, COVID-19 has exposed the deep inequities suffered by people of color.  Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately at greater risk than whites for contracting and dying from coronavirus.  This is due, in large part, to chronic poverty, inadequate health care, hourly wage jobs with greater exposure to spread, and the lack of benefits like sick leave and PTO.  When, due to racial profiling, young black men are afraid to walk in public, or into a store, while wearing a mask, we know we’ve yet to genuinely repent of, and redress, our nation’s original sin of slavery and racism.

COVID-19 has exposed a broken health care system that had left 28 million Americans without adequate care before the pandemic, and now leaves at least another 32 million Americans not only jobless, but also without the health benefits that their jobs once provided.  Lack of health insurance can mean not only death for those who contract the virus, but death for those among the general population exposed to persons who lack access to testing and treatment.  We all live downstream from one another.

COVID-19 has revealed the disparities between how we value a human life and how we value our American way of life.  Are some lives more dispensable than others for the sake of a thriving economy?  Will we allow some to die in order to restore our former way of life?  These are existential and consequential questions.

COVID-19 has exposed our broken immigration system and the xenophobia upon which our nation’s immigration policies have long been founded.  Chinese-Americans in particular, and Asian-Americans in general, are now held under deep suspicion and scrutiny due to the politicization of the virus’ origin.  Immigrants from Latin America, who make up a significant portion of the meat packing industry’s workforce, remind us that our economy is reliant upon those who are willing to take the low-paying, high-risk jobs that few of us are.

COVID-19 has exposed our unsustainable abuses of Earth’s resources and our human contribution to increased greenhouse gas emissions.  Air pollution has dropped by 30% in the US over the last two months.  Fuel demand has dropped by 28%.  We know that the virus was a zoonotic event, originating from the human consumption of infected wild and domestic animals—a consequence of global hunger and food shortages that are entirely solvable by greater collaboration among first-world nations.  Perhaps Americans on both sides of the aisle can finally find common ground on green solutions that may not only save our economy and feed the world, but may also help us avert a greater climate catastrophe in the future.

And COVID-19 has exposed the deep emotional wounds of an American populace that is profoundly lonely, socially isolated and disconnected, depressed and dissatisfied with modern life.  The annual suicide rate in the US is projected to double in 2020.  Deaths of despair, especially from alcohol and opioid abuse, are projected to skyrocket.  We were all longing for deeper human connection before this pandemic, and social distancing has only exacerbated that longing.

It’s time to explore the power and possibility of metanoia, or repentance, for such a time as this.  The truth is that the vast majority of us will get a second chance.  Like my friend George, we now have this rare moment in our lives, and in the life of our nation, to reconsider the kind of world we want to live in when this is all over.  And now is the time, like our ancestors before us, to repent: to think beyond the old and tired answers that no longer seem to be working, and to get out of our minds, knowing that “right loving” is more important than “right thinking.”

Will we make good on our foxhole promises?

The post Foxhole Promises appeared first on Mark Feldmeir, Author/Pastor.