Shooting the Messenger while Ignoring the Message
The ethics of poverty and oppression, and the lengths we go to ignore them
Of all the events that unfolded in this past week of American politics, perhaps nothing was stranger to me than the response of Christians to Marriann Budde, who presided over the inaugural prayer service which occurred the day after the swearing in of the new president.
In her sermon, she looked the incoming president directly in the eyes and said, “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said.
“There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” Budde preached.
She said “the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” calling them “good neighbors” and “faithful members” of religious communities.
President Trump wasn’t happy and unsurprisingly, in a 1AM tirade of grievances about her, her words, and the service she led, demanded an apology. She refused to retract her words, offering instead an assurance that she would continue to pray for the president, as it is incumbent on all people who take scripture seriously to do.
Social media lit up as a result of her sermon and the subsequent Trump response, with lots of evangelical Christians calling her a false prophet, Jezebel, while others used the moment as evidence that women shouldn’t be allowed to preach. Other Christ followers jumped to her defense offering words of gratitude for her courage, and her willingness to speak truth to power. Christians who offered even the mildest forms of defense for her words, as I did, received words of condemnation as heretics, guilty of leading people to hell. In spite of the insults hurled my way, I still believe the words of her sermon were not only true, but perfectly and even divinely timed, as a new leader stares down four years of blank pages of history yet to be written.
I have two simple yet important truths to offer as a result of this event, truths that the mainstream press will miss, understandably. Sadly, though, Christ followers are also at risk of missing the two biggest lessons from this, and that is an indictment on the low state of things among people of faith, many of whom are so busy shouting at each other with the same rhetorical tools our culture uses, that they can’t hear what God is calling them to do right here, right now, in response to this moment in history. Here are the two lessons we can learn, both of which will become increasingly important in the days ahead.
Shooting the Messenger - A time honored and effective way of staying in the dark
“She’s a Witch!” …or a false prophet, or Jezebel, or an instrument of Satan, or whatever other pejorative and derogatory term you want to use as a means of saying, ‘because of her denominational affiliation, or her gender, or her stance on some particular doctrine (authority scripture, atonement theory, same sex marriage), you not need to listen to anything she’s saying today, even though what she’s saying today is entirely unrelated to those points on which you disagree with her. One point of disagreement invalidates everything she says’
The reasoning here should be so absurd as to be self evident, but because shooting the messenger works so well in the art of persuasion, leaders of all kinds, including church leaders, resort to this tactic. I quoted an author once at a men’s retreat on the first night of my speaking weekend and one man got up, went back to his room, packed his bags, and went home. When his friends called him and asked why he said, ‘I’m not going to waste a weekend listening to someone who quotes _____.’ At the end of the weekend, the man’s friends came to me, told me the story and apologized, saying they wish he’s stayed because they felt he desperately needed to hear what I had offered. ‘But’ they added, ‘we also want you to know that all of us talked long and hard after he left, debating whether we should also go home too. He nearly convinced us, but we’re so glad we stayed.’
The kind of thinking that says, ‘unless you agree with me on this and this and this and this and this… et al then you’re clearly misguided, if not overtly deceptive, and all that you offer, I will reject' is immature and dangerous. Behind it is our lust to label people and put them in bins. We (falsely) ‘know’ that people in certain bins lack any discernment whatsoever, so nothing they say can possibly have value so ‘No, I won’t be listening to you, other than to find errors and prove to you how wrong you are.’
If you read your Bible, you know that Paul quoted Greek poets who were polytheists, polyamorists, and holding to other beliefs contrary to the Bible. Still, Paul quotes them when trying to make a point with a Greek audience. He also spent time carefully reading all the inscriptions on the idols populating Mars Hill, and quoted them as well. An openness to finding truth wherever it might be revealed, whether in film, all kinds of music and poetry, and from all kinds of faith persuasions, matters for lots of reasons.
It keeps us in a posture of needing discernment. Those who are quick to label and dismiss are also quick to label as ‘orthodox’ or ‘annointed’ or ‘worthy’ and blindly follow. I can’t count the number of times someone has said to me, ‘because _____ taught this, it must be true.’ This kind of blind loyalty is, of course, on appallingly full display right now in the political realm, where wholly unqualified candidates are given thumbs up endorsements for cabinet positions because ‘if the one at the top thinks it’s fine… it must be fine.’ Anyone reading history knows how dangerous this is. Those who are looking for truth wherever it might be found don’t usually become cult followers. Rather than accepting everything, they ‘test everything’ as the Bible tells them to do. One of the great problems of our age is that we isolate out of the fear that our ideas will be polluted by outsiders. But God calls God’s people not to isolation, but discernement, so that they can live with wisdom right in the midst of culture. This is the far better, more generous and engaging way to go.
It keeps us humble and curious to learn. If I’m ‘testing everything’ then I’m not afraid to listen to a sermon by a Catholic, or an Episcopal, or a teaching by a Buddhist monk, or Taoist, or even a teaching on economics by a communist or a free market capitalist. Listening to someone is not the same as affirming everything they say. I attended a conference on Genesis in New York City once and listened to three top notch theologians debate the historicity of a Adam and Eve (NT Wright, Tim Keller, John Walton).
I learn from Catholics, Baptists, Eastern Orthodoxy, Taoists, eco-feminist mystics, conservative evangelicals, Sufis, and Benedictine monks, with the Bible as my bedrock anchor and reference point. My learning allows me to say things like, ‘perhaps some Buddhists take Jesus’ words about living in the present more seriously than many Christians’ all while not swallowing everything about Buddhism… or frankly any of the other worldviews and religions from which I draw. The same should be applied to politics, as we can learn from people of both parties without needing to swallow the whole party line.
The bottom line for those seeking to follow Christ is that all our seeking, sifting, conversing, discerning, and absorbing of truth should lead to us looking more and more like Christ, which means more peaceful, courageous, just, generous, kind, honest, and sacrificial. If that’s happening, your truth seeking is working. But this brings me to the second lesson we can learn from Marianne Budde’s sermon.
While shooting each other for millenia, Christians have often ignored the one thing we’re clearly called to do
Christians debate and divide over the age of the earth and whether the days in Genesis are literal or figurative. We debate and divide of atonement theory, which seeks to answer the question of what Jesus’ death on the cross means for humanity. We debate and divide over whether woman can preach, and whether the Bible is ‘inerrant’ or just ‘inspired’ or merely ‘authoritative’ along with more debates about which parts apply today and which don’t. which parts are metaphor or which are to be taken literally. We debate the date of easter. We debate sexual ethics.
Debate and Divide.
It’s what we do.
All this ends up being loud, hurtful, and loveless. And while we’re busy shouting at each other, we are far too often neglecting to embody and practice the SINGLE VALUE THAT CLEARLY RUNS THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE BIBLE, which is to care for people who are living on the margins.
In Paul’s letter to Galatia, he declares that ‘caring for the poor’ was the one thing he was most eager to do.
In Jesus words about judgement at the end of time he doesn’t say, ‘someone taught a literal seven day creation, but you convinced to believe in theistic evolution’ or ‘someone said the Bible was inspired, but you convinced them it was inerrant.’ Jesus’ basis of comending those destined for eternal reward?
I was hungry and you fed me, naked and you clothed me, in prison and you visited me.
And before Jesus’ time, God spoke numerous times about how caring for widows, orphans, and immigrants, were how the love of God would be made visible through God’s people.
The sad history of racism, economic oppression, xenophobia, complicity with genocide, colonialism, land theft, and oppression of woman, and sexual abuse carried out by the church is too long a list for this short piece. But suffice it to say thaqt the church, in many parts of the world and to many people, is known more by these atrocities than by its compassion for, and solidarity with the poor and other people living on the margins, the very people closest to both God’s heart and our calling.
So when Marrian Budde asked a new president to have mercy on those who are afraid, she was actually inviting the incoming president to make the very heart of God visible through his new policies and actions. That’s a good challenge for any president, from any party, at any time. But it was also prophetic, a revelation of that there’s a present and emerging performance gap in our American versions of Christianity.
No wonder she was met with so much disdain, hatred, and even death threats from other so called Christians. No wonder her accusers highlighted her views of sexual ethics, or their own views that woman shouldn’t preach. The shot at everything except the actual message, because the message was too convicting. Far better to distract.
The reality is that too many of us clothe our lives in god talk often choose debating shards over doctrine over coming together to care for those who are fearing for their lives for any number of reasons. The evidence of this malady was on full display this past week when a woman’s call to have mercy on people who are afraid with met with defensiveness, anger, and threats. I know which side I’ll stand on this one, regardless of her views on other issues, because she expressed the truth that God is for those on the margins, and as image bearers, so should we be.