Addressing the Real Problem!

Today we stand on a difficult precipice in the United States.

With the dawn of 2015 now a half-a-month behind us, much of the hope, promise, and enthusiasm that naturally comes with a change-of-calendar is fading away in the melee of media-driven hype, political banter, and irrational fear.  In many cases, it is Christian Faith that is being used as a highly influential tool of persuasion—for the good and the ill—when it comes to getting people to take “our” side on the issue of the day.

What’s a Christian to do?

In Mark 3:25 Jesus speaks the often quoted words, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Interestingly, he was speaking in response to allegations that he, himself, was evil and thus using evil to cast out evil in the guise of good.

Without comparing Jesus Christ to any human leader or governmental entity, it is noteworthy to at least draw a comparison to some of the rhetoric used in Washington DC. Generally, the other side is depicted in harsh, cruel, degrading, and even outright evil connotations.

President Obama is a deluded socialist (a.k.a. evil enemy of democracy).

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are tyrannical fascists (a.k.a. evil enemies of democracy).

Interestingly, if we take the implications of Jesus Christ in Mark 3:25 seriously, it is possibly also true that there is more at risk than political correctness.

If President Obama proves that he is right and the Republicans are wrong, America will lose.

If Mitch McConnel and John Boehner prove that they are right and that President Obama is wrong, America will lose.

Social media makes it even worse.

It does not take long on Facebook, Twitter, or similarly popular social media sites to highlight extremist rhetoric “proving” how right and wrong the clearly defined sides are. The implications are powerful! One had better be on your side or they are just as evil as those frighteningly destructive forces that are out to destroy our way of life. If we disagree, you are not merely wrong, you are evil and thus part of the problem.

In the meantime:

The economy lumbers along. Some get very rich. Some fall deeper into poverty. Some live paycheck to paycheck.

People cultured in violence use deadly force to destroy others in fear, rage, or a lust for power. Some may wear a hoodie and others may wear a badge—human lives on both sides of the law suffer. Blood continues to flow.

Terrorists continue to cling to fear-driven models of violence intended to bring some form of self-serving redemption and retributive violence continues to fuel the fires of hate.

Some cry for peace through force, others peace through surrender. Some decry the tyranny of power while others decry the tyranny of weakness. Violence continues to escalate.

And what will ultimately change?

Hopefully, we will!

The time for that change is now!

The government is not the problem

The media is not the problem

Immigrants are not the problem

Terrorists are not the problem

Seriously!

It is far too easy to blame the problem on factors, policies, presidents and politicians over which you and I truly have no control.

“They” are not the problem.

I am the problem. You are the problem. Together We are the problem.

As long as we continue to show love of God and Country by spouting off hatred and disparagement toward other Americans simply because we see the national issues differently, we are the problem. As long as we are hell-bent on undermining our national leadership, we are the problem. As long as we are determined to “take back our country” from Americans who have just as much right to live here just because they belong to another political party, we are the problem. As long as we are determined to force partisan control over seeking the common good, we are the problem. As long as we treat legitimate differences of opinion as battlegrounds in a war of dominance and control, we are the problem. As long as we are determined to demean the intelligence, degrade the humanity, and undercut the validity of others over political issues, we are the problem.

Galatians 6:7 is very clear that we will reap that which we sow. For many years now, the American people have been sowing intolerance, hatred, insults, mistrust, and outright hatred toward people and politics that differ from our own. We are the problem and we have been for a very long time.

In the name of God, Stop being the problem.

Instead of shouting the other side down, try listening and learning.

Instead of professing how ignorant they are, try understanding why they believe as they do.

Instead of taking up verbal (or worse yet, physical) arms to defend what you know is right and destroy those ideas you know are wrong, try affirming the humanity of others.

Instead of calling on the Name of God to justify your hatred of everything that you are so convinced God wants you to hate, remember that God’s ways are much bigger than your ways and God’s love is much broader than you may realize.

Instead of self-rigorously flaunting that you didn’t vote for the leader that you hate, try working to empower our elected leaders for success for the benefit of the nation!

Instead of decrying the failures of somebody else's religious perspective, focus on humbly perfecting the relevance of your own religious authenticity. 

Truly, we stand on a precipice of failure as a nation.

If we fail, it will not be the Obama Administration that brings over the brink, no matter how much you may wish to believe otherwise.

If we fail, it will not be the Republicans that bring us over the brink, no matter how much you may wish to believe otherwise.

If we fail, it will not be ISIS, Al-Qaida, or some other radical religious faction bent on hate and violence that brings us over the brink, no matter how much you may wish to believe otherwise.  

If we fail, it will be because good, honest, patriotic Christian Americans chose hate, fear, division, insults, dehumanization, and control over love, understanding, and grace.

The time is now!

How willing are you to be a part of the change?

As for me, I am choosing the path God’s love. I ask you to please join me.

Vote Genuine Biblical Values

Tomorrow is Election Day. Many people have already voted, and many will vote tomorrow. Many more, it is safe to say, are so disgusted by the political system that there is little or no desire to vote. I am pretty disgusted myself—disgusted by the poor choices we have in some races, disgusted by the candidates that are more concerned about degrading their opponents than in giving me a reason to vote for them, and particularly disgusted in the belief that fidelity to God and Country must be defined in strict partisan loyalty.

I write today as a Christian, a pastor, a voter, and an American who is concerned for the future of our nation. I vote according to my prayerfully and faithful understanding of Biblical values and I encourage you to prayerfully vote according to yours as well.  More importantly, I encourage all of us to hold everyone who will be elected to office tomorrow to be accountable to Biblical values, even when many of them have chosen not to manifest those values in their campaign.

            In Micah 3:5-12, the prophet denounces corrupt leaders who base their moral, ethical, and religious decisions in terms of how those decisions will best support their own individualistic gains. These leaders, the prophet boldly warns, will become clouded in their misapprehension of God’s truth that their effectiveness to lead and capacity to further corrupt the people will be destroyed by God.  Their God-given gifts of leadership, vision, and power will be mired in the rubbish of their self-centered and power-hungry motivations.

            As a result of the failed leadership and reckless abandonment of God’s values in exchange for selfish gain, the whole community—not simply the leadership—will succumb to the destruction of its shared moral failure and religious apostasy.

            It does not require much imagination to understand how this ancient prophetic vision can vividly play itself out in the United States. In fact, in its own way, the vast majority of the political messages we have been hearing is intended to remind us that if we, as faithful Christians and loyal citizens, do not vote the right way, our whole way of life is threatened.

            Given a message of such stark warning, combined with the barrage of negative rhetoric that has permeated this election cycle, it is easy to pinpoint all the moral degradation, evil inclination, and outright demonic values that threaten to destroy our nation. As Christians, we generally have no problem railing against those forces that run contrary to our faith. There is, however, another side to Micah’s prophetic message that we may be a little more reluctant to address. It is the side that faces a mirror!

            That other political party may be all wrong, but ours is not necessarily all right! The fact that that church understands biblical values differently from your church does not mean that either has all the answers or that either is going to hell for their misguided beliefs. Micah’s stark prophetic warning calls all of us—you and me—to take a hard look in the mirror and allow ourselves to stand honestly before God and challenge our own motives, morals, and values.

            The church has not always been right—even when it fervently believed it was living in accordance to God’s holy word.  Wars, poverty, starvation, inequality, injustice, slavery, hatred, and murder are all a part of the Church’s presumed “righteous” history. In virtually every such failure, the Church stumbled when personal gain, power, or profit was placed ahead of God’s ministry of justice, equality, and righteousness.

            I recall Joshua in his farewell address to the Hebrew People in Joshua 24:15 when he challenged with the bold words, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” I remember Moses in his farewell address in Deuteronomy 30:19-20 with the call to choose life by deliberately choosing to live out of God’s love. As Christians, when we go to the polls, ours is to make a choice of faith that will either reflect genuine Biblical values of God’s love, grace, and peace or secular idols that advance personal wealth, power, prestige, and control. What will you be choosing in the polls?

            What do you hope to gain by casting your vote this election? What do those seeking the loyalty of your vote hope to gain should they win this election? Who stands to truly benefit from any given outcome at the polls? What forces, institutions, and entities have the most to gain by investing their time, energy, and money into the election process? How will those values affect the common good of all?

            Yet our obligation to live a Biblical choice transcend voting. We then have a sacred responsibility to uphold that choice in the way we live in the world and in the way we uphold the political process from this point forward.

            In 1 Timothy the Bible calls on the faithful to hold true to the divine training and live according to the life they learned in Christ Jesus. It is faith lived out in “love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.” We must question our own motives, as well as those of the men and women running for office, as well as those already serving and those who will be serving following tomorrow’s election.

            None of these are easy questions to ask and undoubtedly, many reading this post will vehemently disagree on how they should be answered. Yet the sacred responsibility remains for all Christians. Do we support God and all of God’s love, or do we support the preservation of our own distinctive institutional, religious, or partisan values?

            As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord by choosing life in ways that enhances all life, and hold fast to the sacred teachings rooted in God’s love.

(Author’s Note: A version of this originally appeared in the Carlsbad Current Argus, Saturday, November 1, 2014) 

Praying for the Peace of Israel

            “I stand behind Israel!”

            “America must bless Israel!”

            “Our Salvation is Israel!”

            “I will never turn my back on Israel.”

            “Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed.”

            In light of the ongoing war in Gaza statements like these are again making their rounds in the political and religious discourse of America. Although well-intended and passionately believed, statements such as these are also frighteningly dangerous and Biblically inaccurate. As a Christian, I find the dangerously destructive Zionist mentality to be one of the most perverse distortions of God’s Word in our modern culture. Before we place a Christian label on the violence destroying Israel and Palestine, perhaps some prayerful perspective is order.

1.     The modern nation of Israel is largely supported by the United States because of political convenience and nationalistic fear. The religious incorporation of supposedly biblical priorities for blessing Israel were developed out of political ideologies largely rooted in Cold War Era fears and nationalistic pride. Lest we find ourselves worshipping at the idol of political correctness and sacrificing to the false god of partisan priorities, blindly supporting Israel out of presumed religious priority is a dangerously destructive path.

2.     Israel presumes to be a democracy, and thus an important ally to the United States in the Middle East, but it operates as a quasi-apartheid government with token democratic leanings. Additionally, Israel is a secular State with diverse religious factions and traditions. Nothing in the modern structure or constitution of Israel is defensible as genuine fulfilment of Biblical priority, prophecy, or Divine providence.  

3.     Blessing Israel is very Biblical, but turning a blind eye to Israel’s atrocities is not. By virtue of blessing, it must be noted that the blessing God gave to Israel was that it would be a light to the nations, not a brutal military regime and nuclear power that creates absolute enmity with much of the world. Throughout the Bible God demanded that Israel live up to its blessing by promoting justice, mercy, equality, and positioning itself as a light to the nations. Sadly, for all its greatness, Israel also fails tremendously in living into God’s definition of blessing.

4.     Israel has a right to exist as a free, sovereign, and protected nation. This does not mean that Israel has the right to hold entire populations in permanent refugee status, forced into perpetual concentration camps, and oppressed to the point of desperation. Such disregard for human dignity and equality is not to be blessed.  

5.     Israel has a right to self-defense and is perfectly justified in wishing to end the evil and indiscriminate rocket attacks and terrorist activities of Hamas.  Yet, before bombing Gaza and further destroying the lives of innocent Palestinians as if they were all less than human, Israel need look into the mirror and see the atrocities it has committed for over a half-century: illegal occupation, extreme racist and classist segregation, unwarranted settlements, military brutality, economic persecution, and over a half-century of indiscriminant violence against the Palestinian people. Such history is not to be blessed.

6.     Hamas is wrong. Just as Israel is wrong in their history of apartheid-like abuses of the Palestinian people, Hamas is equally wrong for their indiscriminate provoking of Israel and through the brutality of terrorist attacks. It is as the old saying goes, “Two wrongs do not make a right.” Yet, until one side takes a new approach at transcending the violence and hatred by true repentance and righting the wrongs of the past, both sides will be locked in mutual self-destructive sin and violence. Such a catastrophic failure of God’s peace is not to be blessed.

7.     Peace in Israel will never come by a sword (or rocket, or RPG, or terrorist attack, or military incursion, or through the destruction of tunnels). Peace in Israel can only come through the people of Israel and the people of Palestine laying down their arms, repenting of their long-held hatred, and seeking the true and genuine humanity of both sides. Calls for the United States and Christians to bless the violence of warfare in “blessing” and “standing with” Israel is as destructive to genuine peace as are the terrorist activities of Hamas. It was Jesus Christ who said that those who chose to live by the sword will die by the sword. Therefore, the idea of peace through military destruction is not to be blessed.

            I do seek to bless Israel, just as my God commands and the Bible I love so clearly records. Let my blessing of Israel never be called into question! Yet, rather than ascribe to a populist pseudo-blessing that only fuels the unholy violence, further distorts the authenticity of Scripture, and assaults the very people God loves, my blessing is in the form of prayers for peace—a genuine and Godly peace—for the Holy Land. Prayers that Israel stop conducting business as the regional bully and start living the blessing called for in scripture. I pray for the day when Israel may repent of its sins, truly live the sacred covenant of scripture, and finally become a light to the nations.

Quite frankly, this is a bitter and difficult path to take. A half-century of brutality is not erased overnight. Centuries of animosity, hatred, and mistrust do not evaporate quickly. Yet the peace of Israel is worth working for; worth praying for; worth sacrificing for. Now is the time to work and pray for the true Peace of Israel!