It’s always the same old story. Location and time don’t matter. The greedy, rich, and powerful always take what they can from the rest of us, be they kings, khans, industrialists, or tech bros by the name of Henry, Genghis, Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Vance, or Musk.
Mythology is a way to tell the truth, and the Hebrew writings are a string of pearls, one myth after the other, one truth after the other, and the truths tell a grim story about who we are as human beings.
White, Christian, and nationalism are three words not to be taken lightly, three kairotic words that demand explanation and understanding. So here is our question: why does a movement describe itself as white, Christian, and nationalist?
The laws we have are products of a particular group, not universal truths. The question then becomes: who gets to say what? White land-owning founding fathers? Hateful white nationalist? The majority? A greasy wheel minority? In a sense, every rule or law arises out of a specific context, a given historical situation.
The chronology of the week is where the difficulty originates. Most Christians believe that first Jesus was crucified, and then he rose from the dead. The reality is that first came the resurrection and then the crucifixion. This is crucial.
The situation is complicated. Churches are not supposed to endorse candidates. Indeed, many churches have members who support Trump. Some members place more faith in Trump than they do in Jesus. Yes, literally.
The church must create places for dialog and it must do so before it is too late. This winter and next spring the various churches must organize discussions about who we are as the body politic and how we want to live.
The transition from a Medieval to an Enlightenment way of thinking does not come easily. When I was a kid in the Norwegian American Lutheran Church, a bigger-than-life portrait of Jesus praying in Gethsemane was stationed over the altar, a Sunday reminder that his all-important death, soon to come, was our salvation. Jesus loved us, this we knew because the Bible told us so. And the Bible did not lie.
We live in a world defined by the cheapness of human life, indeed, all life. Migrants and refugees are treated no better than the Amazon rainforest. And yet, as entanglement shows us and as the tolling bell reminds us, all is One.
We began with a description of human nature and used that to try to understand who Jesus was and how he was able to impact people, an analysis that bypasses much of the traditional theology about who and what he was.