Never The Chameleon

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It behooves me to begin the proclamation today by saying that Amos, and John the Baptist, and the Psalm all have words to offer us after the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

We may well have core disagreements with our leaders, and they may even be faithful and righteous objections.

But the way to steward them is, as Amos did, by way of candid speech rather than cowardly violence.

God is not a God of hate nor of viciousness, and therefore those who follow God are not either.

Instead, as the Psalm for today says, we “speak peace to God’s faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to God.”

May we as a nation become far more inclined to peace, may we as Christians model that peace, and may former President Trump and the others touched by yesterday’s violence and ensuing grief be restored to health in every way.

With that:

WHAT an honor to be here today, and, if you’ll take me back after today, for the next two Sundays to boot!

We’re going to get to these texts, especially the Amos text, but before we do, it seems a good idea to introduce you a bit to how I theologically tick.

I’m what’s called a systematic theologian.  My passion, the thing that makes me vocationally giddy, is to help people think about what they believe, why they believe it, and what difference their beliefs make in their lives and the greater world.

Often, this process isn’t about learning something new. Instead, it’s about reconsidering something you thought you knew. Faith words or concepts or traditions that are familiar might, in fact, have very different meanings for different people, and might not mean what we’ve assumed they do.

It turns out that fussing with and sussing out definitions helpfully centers theological conversations and claims. As luck would have it, there are several basic terms and frameworks relevant to the texts for today to keep me happy all day long. I promise I won’t keep you here all day long.

Let’s start with the two most basic ones: Gospel and salvation.

The word “gospel” is the English translation of “eu-angellion,” namely good (eu) and angellion (message, or news—think ‘angel,’ for this is where we get that word.)

News is something that happened, and which makes a difference in someone’s life.

Today, for example, we have news in our family! It is Karl’s birthday today!  [Karl suffered a traumatic brain injury at 3]. The big 2-3 for him! Happy birthday sweet man! Now, because none of you knew me when Karl was born, July 14 2001 was not a newsy day for anyone here, but it sure was for me!  And yet, while only a few of you have known me, now to one degree or another you all do. Insofar as that’s true, it’s news now to you to.

Of course, there are more substantive ways in which news affects us: water mains break in town, tornados rip through communities, the election or defeat of politicians, deaths of those we love.

News, you see, is news only if it is an event which matters.

Christians say that we have good news.

Moreover, we say that the good news is the very gospel.

But when I ask people what the gospel is, they will often say “Jesus loves you,” or “Your sins are forgiven,” both of which, for the record, are holy and true.

Neither, though, are the gospel.

They are statements rather than an event.

So what’s the gospel event??

The resurrection.

We are Christians because we believe that Jesus is risen from the dead.

That news, this crazy notion that Jesus did not stay dead, as dead people are wont to do, mattered not just “then” back in Jesus’ day, but even now!

Because we believe that Jesus is risen, we believe that no death—as in no death, a la Paul: neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord—lays claim over us.

Death might like to think it still has power over us.

It might be a fan of trying to make us think it does.

But it does not.

The gospel, then, is that Jesus is risen. Death has a word, but it is no longer the last one.

So second, salvation.

For a mess of reasons, not least of all because our Good News, the Gospel, has an obvious fixation about death, the word ‘salvation’ has tended to be associated with what happens after we die.

But that’s not the meaning of the Greek word we translate as ‘salvation.’

That word is ‘soteria.’

The definition of soteria, in Greek, is not “what you get in heaven,” or, for our more conservative Christian siblings, what happens to you, as in “being saved,” after you accept Jesus into your heart.

Nope.

Soteria means ‘health, healing, and wholeness.’

As in right now.

This is why you hear Jesus say things such as “Today salvation has come to this house.

He wasn’t announcing that anyone in that abode was going to tip over. He was saying that in him, one can find health, healing, and wholeness.

Jesus the Christ: he’d be our third notion for this Sunday.

The word ‘Christ’ is actually the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Mesach” or “messiah.” Often, I fear and joke, people think that “Christ” is Jesus’ last name, like we had Joseph Christ, Mary Christ, and then along came little baby Jesus Christ.

Instead, the word ‘Christ’ is a title, meaning the Chosen One, the One For Whom We Have Been Waiting, the Anointed One of God.

It matters to notice that the New Testament reveals that that title, Christ, was given to Jesus only after his resurrection.

That means that the early believers grounded Jesus as the Christ in the event of his resurrection.

But that also means that for those early believers, Jesus’ resurrection confirmed not only that he was the chosen one of God, but that what he was up to when he walked this world was utterly aligned with God’s vision, God’s mission, and God’s agenda for this world.

Second to last term? Christian.

We call ourselves Christians. Not Jesusians.

That means that we pay attention to Jesus because we believe that he is the Christ because we believe that he is risen from the dead.

Christ-ians believe that Jesus was the messiah.

That means that what Jesus was up to is what God is up to, and that Jesus’ agenda was God’s agenda, and so if we go to all the trouble to call ourselves Christ-ians, it is therefore what we, who publicly identify as followers of Jesus the Christ, are up to too.

Last baseline concept for today: The First Commandment: I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods but me.

Now, actually, this is more complicated than it sounds.

Notice that God did not say, “There are no other gods,” but rather “You shall have no other gods before me.” God, that is, knew that there are options.

This might shock us, because when we think of the word “God,” we tend to think of something or someone otherworldly, or some sort of supernatural superpower.

Martin Luther would like here to enter the chat.

In his definition of the First Commandment, he defines God not as something hyper pious, or overtly religious being. Instead, he said that God is that in which or in whom you put your ultimate trust.

Whatever you trust most is your god. This can be a being believed to be divine, of course, like trusting Zeus or, as the Hindus believe, trusting in many and various gods.

But it can also be a passing thing, like trusting in your safe position in a social group so that you say nothing when inappropriate and harmful gossip comes up; trusting in your security over your solidarity with those who could really use your voice; trusting in the values of wealth and privilege over God’s consistent and persistent concern for the least of these; trusting in your own regrettable deeds over God’s abundant grace.

The First Commandment, then, summons us to reflect upon and identify who or what our real god actually is, as opposed to who or what we say or think our real god actually is.

So, to review:

The Gospel is that Jesus is risen, which means we no longer need to fear death of any sort.

Salvation is health, healing, and wholeness now.

The word “Christ” is a title rather than a name, and means the Messiah, the one chosen by God for whom the faithful await. Jesus’ resurrection confirms him both as the Christ, and confirms his ministry and his way of life as the way of God.

Christian means those of us who believe that Jesus is the Christ, that his ministry and his way of life is the way of God, and that as his followers it is now our way of life too, not least of all by way of being ambassadors of the same sort of salvation—health, healing, and wholeness—that Jesus was.

The First Commandment reminds us that there are options for gods, there are alternatives. The question is in what or in whom we really trust, and if we say we trust it, with all my Lutheran colors flying, what does this mean?

With those notions in mind and heart, you might want me to say Amen, and I suppose I could, but we haven’t gotten to our texts of the day.

With this crash theological course behind us, let’s turn quickly to the Amos text of the day..

There’s this weird reference to plumb lines. Truth is, no one, not even the scholars, is exactly sure of what the heck this precisely even means.

What does seem clear is that there is a a metric, a gauge, a measuring stick that God has dropped down. God’s people have fallen short.

This plumb line is not the same standard to which the powers that be calibrate themselves.

Amos, not known for his tact, held—as does all of Scripture, which speaks of nothing (not prayer not sexuality not worship practices no really nothing)—more central to God’s concern for God’s people than economic equity. You see Amos’ fixation on the poor in chapters 2, 5, and 8.

Amos was compelled by God to speak to the wealthy and powerful, to recall them from their small-g gods, and to remind them of the identity of their capital-G God, and their yoked identity with this God.

It wasn’t only his concern for the poor that moved Amos so urgently. It was rather that Amos could see that if the people did not evidence a change in heart and in allegiance, then disaster would ensue.

At this point, the priest/king Amaziah called him a dastardly slur: Amos was accused of being a *gasp* prophet.

Prophets are the absolute worst, of course, because a prophet, biblically understood, is not some soothsayer or a fortune teller, but rather one who, as a spokesperson of God, knows God, perceptively sees the present, and its relationship to the future, and has the courage to say what is seen.

But listen to how Amos responds: “Yeah, see, I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” This isn’t my gig, he says. I’m just an aggie, a laborer of livestock and trees.

But then he says, basically, “Alllllsssso, it is the case that the LORD did take me from following the flock, and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel, so…yeah. I am speaking on behalf of God, which sorta makes me a prophet.”

Siblings in Christ, here’s the thing.

We are all called to be, and in fact are baptized to be, prophets.

We believe that Jesus is the Christ because we believe that he is risen.

That not just allows us but compels us to notice where death lurks and where it makes itself known, and then we become compelled to make Christ known in that place instead.

We know what death is, and what life is, because we know Jesus, who, as the late Father Robert Capon said, ministered to the last, the lost, and the losers. Those on the margins were re-centered. Those who were wealthy and privileged were invited to re-center themselves. Those who were condemned are forgiven. And baptized in Christ as we are, Jesus’ ministry—which stands in the legacy of Amos’ ministry—becomes our ministry, and so prophets that we are, we do the same.

Prophets are nothing but ambassadors of salvation, bearers of health, healing, and wholeness understood in the light of the gospel, the good news of an empty tomb.

What, I ask you, does this world need more than that right now?

What, I ask you, does this world need more than us right now?

Baptized prophets, summoned and sent to spread the gospel word that Jesus is risen, that salvation can be found in word and deed by those who follow Jesus, the Christ, the son of the God who envisions health, healing, and wholeness for the whole world.

In this somewhat ornery blog, I asserted that rostered leaders have been millstoned by systems and structures of the Church, ones which inhibit them from doing the very work they were called, by the Church no less, to do.

The work in mind, here, is the center of our calling, no millstone but the cornerstone of that which leaders of the church are to be about, namely to preach and teach the Word.

This Word (as we know, because we preach the Scriptures and also read them), is dangerous, unruly, subversive…and is also (to those who are open to receiving it), comforting, en-couraging, hopeful, and profoundly freeing.

We were baptized into this, and for leaders in the church, we opted to officially sign up for this too, denominational system or not.

Like, none of this comes as a surprise.

Trouble is, those who are employed by the church encounter surprising risks: to do what we are called to do invites unpleasant conflict ranging from unhappy council meetings to finding oneself no longer able to or welcome to serve a setting.

We can lose our contextual call and maybe even our livelihood.

Worse, our denominational system has no protection for those who do what the very institution, let alone Scripture and the Holy Spirit, have sent us to do.

With a nod to St. Jerome, let my spleen speak: this is completely messed up.

We may receive affirmation, yes, but “Well done good and faithful servant” does not the house payment make.

Those who are baptized and called to church leadership are also called to speak bold words rooted in the cross, and therefore also tethered to the gospel of the risen Jesus.

The challenge, of course, is that regardless of one’s partisan affinities, the faithful preaching of Scripture sounds political, because Scripture is political.

This truth alone makes it dicey to preach these days.

But I’m of the mind that we have tools in our theological and our Lutheran toolbox that provide ways and means to preach and teach the radical, inclusive, justice-oriented, and yea even political implications of the gospel, centered not in partisan agendas, but in God’s agenda.

The next three posts will be adaptations of a sermon series I offered during a stint as a supply preacher this past summer.  References to the actual congregation have been smudged, because the takeway is not context-dependent, but is text-dependent.

I offer them because I believe that they provide a low-hanging-fruit template for how preachers and teachers can offer not just a word, but The Word in these troubled times.

All the while they remain faithful to the texts, faithful to their call, faithful to their community, and faithful to the moment in which we find ourselves, a moment begging for direction, courage, and alignment with God.

Each sermon introduces and uses basic faith terms, and refreshes what was addressed in the prior sermon(s), reminding and building upon unapologetic phrases of the faith, and passages from our shared Book of Faith.

The first sermon was preached directly after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and so you will note my acknowledgment and my condemnation of it.

With that, the next post will carry the actual sermon, based on Amos 7:7-15 (God shows Amos a plumb line, Amaziah the priest scurries to the King to tattle on Amos, claiming that he was conspiring against him by speaking truth: Amaziah banishes Amos), Psalm 85 (the psalmist promises to listen to the Lord), Ephesians 1:3-14 (the reminder that we are baptized with the Holy Spirit and are sent with the blessing of the Lord), and Mark 6:14-29 (the beheading of John the Baptist).

(You can find the actual posts linked here, as they become available:)

Since the election results became clear, I have not been able to get Joel 2:12-17 out of my mind.

“Yet even now [Just that phrase alone, people, wells my eyes], return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.

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Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain-offering and a drink-offering for the Lord, your God?

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people.

Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast.

Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy.

Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”

How to Handle A Locust Infestation: Fast, Weep, and Mourn…

The context is this: locusts—it’s not clear whether they were actual locusts, or if the term were a derogatory, euphemistic reference to an advancing army, or both—but anyway “locusts” had swarmed Judah and annihilated the nation’s crops, and therefore everything and everyone else.

This was, of course, not Israel’s first locust rodeo: they knew of the locusts which had swarmed Egypt, and they knew who sent these locusts, and they knew what had happened to Egypt in the locusts’ wake.

But this time, the locusts descended upon Israel itself.

This time around, God was displeased with God’s very own people.

But Joel, well he showed up, and he showed up with an antidote: communal repentance.

Joel announced an invitation from the Holy One: “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning: rend your hearts and not your clothing.”

Now, truth is, I’ve been rending most anything I can get my hands on since the election, so much so that the word, like an incessant water drip, finally moved me yesterday afternoon to rustle up this very text, and to be reminded about what it had to say to me and to this moment.

In this passage, we hear that we’re to return to God, but with specific instructions to boot: we are to fast, and weep, and mourn.

And after we’ve done that, we are to rend our hearts.

Now I’ve never been great at fasting, but it is a standard religious ritual: fasting reminds us that we’re dependent on God, and it forces us to focus on that dependence.

Fasting humbles us.

Weeping comes when one cannot escape the trauma of what has or what will come to pass.

It is more than a good cry: it is a wail from the soul.

And when we weep before the Lord, we’ve been aptly reduced to the devastating knowledge that we’ve incurred God’s wrath, and we have earned it.

And so we mourn.

Mourning and weeping tend to overlap, of course, but they aren’t interchangeable.

When one mourns, one grieves something that is no longer, something that’s caused irreparable separation, something that can not be reconstituted.

Worse, in this case, we ourselves are the source of the devastation.

It’s not like some random astronomical event obliterated our existence, or some incomprehensible fluke suddenly decimated all that we had held to be lovely and true.

Nope.

Joel’s community know that they destroyed something cherished and holy, and they did it all on their own.

…And Then Rend…

So after all that, then, after fasting and weeping and mourning, all that is left to do is to rend.

It’s an odd word, ‘rend,’ one that we rarely use on the daily in our 21st Century vernacular.

It’s most often used for the ripping of clothing, not to make rags, say, but to embody all-encompassing grief and regret.

Rending symbolizes the destruction of something that protects us, that provides us dignity and cover.

There is no hiding when we stand naked before God and everyone.

No leaf can cover our shame.

But, and this catches us off guard, here in Joel, God actually says, “Keep your clothes on.”

I’m not interested in your bare skin, says God.

I want your bared soul.

Rend your hearts, says God.

Rip them apart with the same ferocity you would a garment.

And why?

So that our hearts, the epicenter of our life, are finally open to God, the creator of all life.

Deep. Exhale.

…And Then Drop Everything and Gather

So at this point, there’s nothing of us left: we are hungry, we are spent, we are agonizingly aware of our guilt.

And we have flayed and filleted ourselves before God, so that God’s presence can enter us again.

And then, notice what occurs:

God asks us to assemble.

This is ‘us’ writ large: the old, the young, the children, even the infants; the bridegroom and the bride, who most certainly have other activities on their mind.

Doesn’t matter.

God wants us to assemble in worship, of all things.

And there, collectively, we are to confess.

We confess, and we remind God of who God is: a God of mercy.

Precisely at the point where we have come to realize that we deserve perpetual judgment, we remind God—and we remind ourselves—that God is rather a God of mercy.

It’s not, of course, that we get off scot-free.

Let’s recall that at this point we are famished, exhausted, emotionally raw, and spiritually exposed.

Judgement happens, as it should.

But our God is a God who brings new things out of death, a God of transformation and restoration.

Our God is a God who holds onto covenant promises way better than do we.

So, Because of Luther, We Have to Ask, What Does this Mean?

With that, a couple of post-election, Joel-inspired take-aways here.

First, Love Does Not Always Win, Actually, And In Fact It Lost Spectacularly On Tuesday Night

This election was not most about how well Trump ran a campaign or how badly Harris did.

This election was about the victory of raw racism, bigotry, and a permission to be crude and cruel that has saturated the ethos of our nation.

It is about the basest of human instincts winning out over compassion, kindness, integrity, community, and love.

It is about the preservation of the self over the well-being of all, and the reduction of ‘neighbor’ to one who looks like, eats like, lives like, believes like oneself, and particularly if white, straight, and a conservative Christian.

Conversely, the people of God are to make like Micah 6:8 (“What is it that the Lord requires but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God?”) or Matthew, in which we hear of the Least of These being served by those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, cared for the sick, and visited the prisoners.

For starters.

On Tuesday, this country voted less for Trump and more for the now-normed permission to hate, and divide, and oppress, or to feign ignorance that we cast our vote for exactly that.

The majority in our nation knew who Trump is, they know what his agenda is, and they went for it.

For this right here, they said, y’all just sign me and the rest of us up.

Second, The Dems and the Church Swung and Wow Did We Miss

This election was enabled by two things.

Dems Meant (Mostly) Well, But…

The first of those two was the Democrats’ collective incapacity to understand the intoxicating power of cultic behavior which draws lines and defines who is in and who is out.

Dems went with logic.

We went with statistics.

We went with joy.

But without tethering these otherwise noble approaches with a willingness to approach, appreciate, and strive to enter into Insular-and-Fear-Induced Group Think, we Dems done got Othered, and we therefore done got beat.

We abhor the values of those who voted for Trump, but we were perceived as abhorring the actual Trump supporters.

In this way, we were…are…no better than what we accuse MAGA of doing.

So while we figured out how to talk about Trump supporters, we never really figured out how to talk to and with them.

We never really sought to understand—which is different than condoning, to be clear—why they were drawn to the rhetoric of division that Trump espoused with such finesse.

And with no relationship, we had no basis for change.

The second matter is, in some ways, more to Joel’s point, and as a Lutheran public theologian, more to mine.

The ELCA Meant (Mostly) Well, But…

As I’ve been saying now for years (I’m here speaking most directly to my own people, though perhaps these words are transferable to other denominations), yesterday’s election was very much thanks to two elements of how the ELCA opts to do the Lord’s work:

* The structure of the ELCA;

* The well-intentioned but pastorally- and theologically-suspect culture that encourages rostered leaders to avoid calling out racism, homophobia, bigotry, and hate, all in the name of “meeting people where they are” and “being a pastor to all the people.”

Turns out, though, that you can’t both-sides the God of Joel.

I know, I know, I just spoke about relationship.

But you can’t have a relationship with anyone without having clarity of self, and conveying that self with clarity.

Anyone who has sought out a new job or a new friend or a new lover knows what I’m saying here: you can try to be who you think the other wants you to be, but then they are attracted to Not You.

Such relationships either don’t last, or last at the expense of one’s own integrity.

So, in terms of the pastoral relationship, avoiding proclaiming the Hard Things is not, actually, pastoral to the oppressors.

Silence about their distance from the radical, merciful, but difficult ways of God leaves these privileged people both uninformed about their heresy and their blasphemy, and therefore unable to repent of it.

We rob them of the Word and we rob them of restoration.

And I will say the quiet part out loud here:

That pastoral silence is driven not a little bit by fear of chasing those who hold MAGA principles dearer than Christian ones, and their sustaining dollars, out of the congregational pews and into someone else’s.

In the name of pastoral care, the privileged become nothing but budgetary tools.

For this reason, the Church needs to rend its heart rather than continue to render the wealthy into mere dollars for God rather than beloved Children of God.

Moreover, the Church’s silence is not in the least pastoral to those who are oppressed.

Look at Project 2025’s agenda, which will, in fact, be the Trump agenda (Matt Walsh admitted on Twitter yesterday, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.”)

Tell me that these following communities—immigrants threatened with deportation [plans for mass deportation are reportedly already in the works]; women threatened with reduced access to birth control, forced pregnancies, and promised digital surveillance; children threatened with a stripped education and education defined by conservative Christian values; hungry people stripped nutrition funding; low-income parents stripped of access to Head Start; ill or disabled people stripped access to health care; any number of groups dependent on Civil Rights Laws, which are now promised to be eliminated or replaced with white supremacist and hetero-centric bias; political opponents to Trump who are threatened with prosecution and even assassination; media who will be punished for publishing news or takes critical of Trump; 2SLGBTQIA+ people facing reduced rights defined by conservative Christian theologies, including a return to outlawed gay marriage and legal denial of service because of sexuality and self-defined gender; the general public who will now have reduced or eliminated vaccine mandates; the environment because of reduced protections; and those who enjoy public land, now slated to be open for fracking and drilling—tell me that they are feeling the pastoral care of clerical silence today.

(Here is but one source detailing the above: do your own additional research to learn how substantiated these threats are.  https://www.bigtentusa.org/project-2025-threats/)

There is nothing of the above list which reflects the generous love of the God of whom Joel wrote and Jesus revealed and we leaders in the Church ostensibly, anyway, preach.

Now, I get it: colleagues of mine, I understand how bound you are.

I have written blogs and presented extensively about it (8 years ago I got myself in a mess of trouble by calling upon Amos: read about that here Time to Out-Amos Even Amos and here The Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center and Truth Mattering, and here’s another long blog about how the structure of the ELCA inhibits the leaders called to preach and teach the gospel from doing exactly that).

If you need more citations you just let me know.

This is a systemic problem.

We are simply trapped in a denominational system which pays obeisance to capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy rather than to the Gospel.

So to some degree, we are all the victims of a system and it is never good to blame the victim.

But.

But our boundedness is a systemic problem that itself is perpetuated by our silence and by our refusal to appreciate how dire and dangerous our quietude has been and now will be for the most vulnerable among us.

We have had the power to change it and we have not.

Now, these vulnerable people are the very people about whom God cares the very most and whom we in the name of God are most to protect, and we have abandoned them in the name of our denominational and vocational safety and in the name of pastoral care.

I am not sure which is worse here.

We. Are. Culpable. Directly for these election results.

Look at the post-election stats if you don’t believe me.

White religious people more than any other bloc voted for Trump.

Again.

Undefined Love Is Quite a Drug

Now, I’ve noticed that there are some leaders who as of yet see no need to fast, to weep, to mourn, let alone rend anything, least of all our individual or institutional hearts.

They seem to have missed this line from Joel: “Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.”

These folks are still trying to appease the powerful in their pews, still trying to minimize the consequences and erase the divisions, still trying to offer pastoral care that avoids Calling a Thing What It Is and instead they quickly revert to an announcement of mass and bland forgiveness.

If anything close to an admonition is extended, it’s to all get along, to remember that we are all loved by God, that we can still be friends even if we voted differently.

In effect, these religious leaders jump to the latter part of this passage from Joel while conveniently skipping over the meat of it.

(I’ve written a book, as an aside, about the toxicity—flagrantly displayed with this election—of our Lutheran fixation on justification to the expense of justice: “I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here I Stand Moment,” Fortress Press, 2019)

Yeah, so Joel would like a word, and so would God.

And both would like our rent hearts instead.

We’re To Have No Other God (And yes, we just opted for one of the false ones)

Lest we forget, though, this passage from Joel does not end with fasting, weeping, mourning, or rending.

Instead, it ends with a call to worship.

Worship God, that is.

With the hearts that are now open.

To God.

For some time, I have been of the public mind that the structure of our ELCA can’t bear the weight of our theology.

Our theology is vibrant.

Our structure kills it.

And our structure-based silence may well contribute to the killing of others, and if you think I’m being hyperbolic than you are not paying attention to the stakes.

A little apropos hidden nugget in this text:

Many of us will read these words “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,” and sing them with a familiar Lenten melody. They are so familiar to us.

But what might not be known is that they first surface in Exodus 34:6, in which God gives Moses the tablets, establishing a new Covenant, and says these very words.

And why is God asking for the return of the people?

Because they had bowed down before a Golden Calf.

And that is exactly, exactly, what our nation just did.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/golden-trump-statue-cpac-implies-he-s-king-gop-his-ncna1259362

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First Thing

Check on your queer, your trans, your immigrant, your people of color, your women (especially your young women), your disabled, your young adult, and your red state family and friends, along with those who are victims of sexual assault.

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They are the ones most frightened, impacted, and traumatized by last night and the next untold years.

Listen to them and assure them that you stand with them, and will surround them with care and protection.

No, really. This should be the primary task of today.

Second Thing

Create networks of support and communication immediately.

Ensure secure platforms and ways of contact, for Trump has promised retribution and violence to those who oppose and who work against him.

Foster friendships and trusted relationships.

We will need one another.

Third Thing

Establish starting now patterns of rich and regular self care and grounding.

We are looking at a long scary slog which requires internal resources that draw upon a fine balance of courage, stamina, and mindfulness.

Fourth Thing

Allow for grief, anger, fear, and joy. Feel guilt about none of them.

Fifth Thing

Know that while you are crucial to moving forward, the movement isn’t depending on just you.

Remember the geese who fly in formation, allowing for the strong ones to rest.

Make like a goose.

Sixth Thing

Honestly review how this could have happened.

What makes people vote for a racist, misogynistic, bigoted convicted sexual assaulter who demonstrably lies, threatens, calls an insurrection into being, and admires Hitler and Orban?

That is not (only) a rhetorical rant, but rather a question that we should be asking ourselves deeply.

Read up on and listen to those who think on these things.

And ask: what was done, or not done, by people, organizations, institutions, and systems to enable this result?

Reflect and call it out.

Seventh Thing

Do some deep dives on the Resistance Movement under Hitler, East Germany, Poland.

Resistance to fascists has been done before.

Learn from them.

Eighth Thing

Love this country, love one another.

Do not say or believe that we aren’t this—clearly we are—but rather say and believe that we are -better- than this.

Let love—not namby pamby or saccharine, nice love, but authentic, raw, messy, honest and risky love—animate and define us.

~~~~~

There will be more to add, but these were first-pass, tormented election night thoughts which tossed and turned me last night.

Now, to rustle up coffee, and to rustle up hope.

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