David Williams's Blog, page 23

SNAP, Pantries, and Christian Nations

Just about every Wednesday, a genial cadre of local Buddhists arrive at my Presbyterian church.  

They arrive in a van, laden with seven to eight hundred of pounds of food, which their temple has purchased to help support the efforts of our bustling Little Free Pantry.  Volunteers from the church join together with the nuns, hefting forty pound bags of carrots and onions.  Crates of potatoes and apples, pallets of canned soups and sauces.

All of it will flow through the Pantry over the course of a week, as folks in the community who need food support pull into our gravel parking lot.  It will join the generous donations given by members of the church, and by the good decent folks out in our little town.

When church folk started our Little Free Pantry...think a Little Free Library, only for nonperishable food...we'd not known what to expect.  We'd anticipated it to be a modest supplement to the nonprofit Food Bank that already exists in our community, just across the street, hosted by our Methodist neighbors.  It was simply something to handle the off-hours when those food bank shelves weren't available.

For a while, that was precisely what it was.

But debt-addicted America printed trillions of new dollars into the economy during the pandemic, which had the surprising effect of triggering inflation.  Golly, who coulda seen that coming?  And then, with costs rising ahead of wages, we cut back on the SNAP benefits that had been a lifeline for families during the pandemic.  The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program feeds tens of millions in our country, and after it was expanded during COVID, that retraction had a notable impact here in the trenches of food provision.  

Sure, the pandemic was over, but inflation had changed the entire economic dynamic, and millions suddenly found that affording little luxuries like housing, transportation, and food had become unmanageable.

Demand soared.  Suddenly, that cute little roofed box, with it's equally cute but larger Little Free Produce stand?  They weren't just out on the margins.  Every few minutes, another person stopping by, the flow increasing when the working day came close to an end.  When I arrive in the morning on Sundays, people are often waiting patiently for it to be restocked.  Our hard-working volunteers fill it, and fill it, and fill it.  Over the course of this year, we're on track to having moved thirty thousand pounds of food through the pantry.

Nearly thirty thousand pounds.  Through that little box.

Across the way at the local food bank, demand is up fifty percent.

This is the reality.  This is what's happening on the ground.  Up in the cold airless aether of ideological
blather, the conversations in the House of Representatives have turned to cutting SNAP further.  It's "bloated and broken," or so say those who claim to want to offer a "hand up, not a hand out."

Now, I don't have a problem with making programs more efficient.  I don't doubt there are layers of bureaucracy that could be trimmed away.  It's a food program, not a jobs program.  So do that, sure.  But anything that results in less food for the hungry, or that creates more bureaucratic processes, procedures, and protocols for people in need to negotiate?  That's not the kind of country decent folk want to live in.  

And I don't have any issue with empowering people to be self-supporting.  But the people who need food are working people.  They need those calories so they can work to support themselves.  Having food is a hand up.  Offering people platitudes instead of plates of food only makes sense if you're the sort of fool who thinks you can live by eating ideology.  It's indecent.

On a fundamental level, that's also not Christian, bruh.  It ain't Buddhist, neither, but being that I'm a pastor and Jesus is my Lord and Savior, I can only speak with authority about the former.  

Seriously.  There's a deep irony that the same folks who wrap themselves in flag and cross and declare that America must be a Christian nation?  They're the folks who want America to do exactly the opposite thing that Christians are commanded to do.

We feed people.  Because Jesus. Told. Us. To.  This isn't complicated.  He ain't your Lord and Savior if you don't do what he tells you to do.

Lord have mercy, have these folk even read their Bibles?

The Devil's Keywords

Here is a list, simple and straightforward.  It is a list of things we are meant to desire to be.

POWERFUL.  WEALTHY.  STRONG.  PROUD.  SAFE.

Throughout human history, those concepts have animated and driven many nations, and countless human beings.

But are these what you want to be, if you claim to be Christian?  They are not.  None of these states of being represents a meaningful expression of the basic moral orientation Jesus teaches.  

All of them represent the essence of what Christians...meaning, those who do what their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ asks of them...seek to avoid.

POWER? We do not desire power, any more than Jesus himself desired power.  When power was offered him, power over the whole world, he turned it down. 

WEALTH?  Wealth may be the goal of the prosperity gospel movement, but that fools-faith ain't got nothing to do with Jesus, honeychild.  Wealth, and the desire for wealth?  Jesus is real clear to those who follow him: those things imperil your soul.

STRENGTH?  Yeah, that's worldly power again, the ability to assert dominance.  

PRIDE?  Dear Lord in Heaven, that's a Mortal Sin, and something that the much vaunted "Biblical Worldview" fundamentally rejects.

SAFE?  Being Christian isn't about being "safe."  Jesus wasn't interested in being safe.  Neither were the apostles, or the martyrs through the ages.  There's nothing safe about the cross.

Invoking the name of God over this list of Antichristian values is so...peculiar.  

Almost like the man writing them is telling us something about himself.  I wonder what that might be.

A Harvest of Dry Leaves

For the last little while, my autumns have had a different rhythm.
When we first moved into our little suburban home, fall was a season of raking and leafblowing, as the dozens of mature trees that fill the rear third of our quarter acre shed their leaves.  Leaf piles would be made, then loaded onto tarps, then dragged out to the street to be vacuumed up and away by the county.
It was good hard work, but it always felt a little pointless, particularly when my boys reached the age when they no longer flung themselves bodily into the leaf piles.  Leaves fell, and I raked, and big trucks with vacuum attachments arrived to take them away.  It felt like a slog, just part of a machine.  
Now, though, I look up in the early autumn at the first tint of leaves, and I'm eager for them.
For nearly a decade now, I've mowed up the leaf-fall with my mulching mower, at least the leaves that fall on the wildly heterogenous ground cover that passes for my lawn.  The ground beneath the trees...again, about one third of my lawn...goes untouched, making for both good habitat and richer soil for the trees themselves.
The leaves I do mow are dumped into one of two five-by-twelve compost heaps in the shade of my back yard, where they sit for a year, mingling their carbon with twelve months worth of nitrogen-rich lawn clippings, the leavings from my kitchen, and a years worth of coffee grounds.  
That pile rising up waist-high in my back yard this season will slowly shrink.  Through the labors of billions of aerobic bacteria and tens of thousands of worms, it will transform into wheelbarrows full of rich, organic soil for my garden in the year 2025.  It becomes my tomatoes, squash, and beans.  It becomes my potatoes, garlic, and basil.  This next year, it may become okra, too, because bhindi masala is very delicious.
The leaves aren't debris.  They're not trash, to be taken away.  They're not a nuisance.  They're a harvest that feeds me.
When they tumble from the branches, rustling down like a brittle rain on the first sharp winds of winter, I receive them like manna from heaven.

Yes, You Can Have a Biblical Worldview

I have a biblical worldview.
I know, I know, I'm not supposed to. According to the critics, having a Biblical worldview means you're on the far right of the right wing, at least in the shorthand of our culture's false binaries. It means you're a literalist, that you worship the bible as an idol, that your lumpenfundamentalism would create a world that is six thousand years old, a creation in which all of time and space are lying to us about themselves.
According to the critics, having a Biblical worldview means that you don't see the nuances and subtleties of a radically polyvalent collection of ancient texts, that you don't understand the process of their creation or the formation of canon. Or worse yet, that you're somehow trapped in the moral bronze age, as ignorant and hateful as the Taliban.
For some, this is true. If a person says "I have a Biblical Worldview," that can be shorthand for "I'm so fascist Mussolini might find me problematic." It can also mean that you've created a Frankenstein's Monster, stitching together bits and pieces of cherry-picked texts to match whatever it is you happen to already believe.
This is true of both progressive and conservative, of left and right.
The Bible contains tension within itself. Of course it does. It's a library that spans thousands of years of human history. It argues with itself, the welcome arms of Isaiah and Ruth against the razor-wire fence of Nehemiah and Ezra. It struggles and debates with itself, Paul of Tarsus and his citizenship against John of Patmos and his Beast. War and peace, racism and tolerance, cruelty and mercy, all of these things are incontrovertibly "Biblical." The Bible is erudite and urban, and at the same time earthy and rural. It is beautiful and brutish, blunt as a bludgeon, sharp as a blade, harsh as a blow, gentle as the first light of dawn.
It is all of these things. So is history. That's one of the great strengths of a Biblical worldview. It's deep and rich and complex and real. It is human, but it's also holy.
It stands both within and over history. If you hold it as authoritative, it shapes how you understand all things.
If you say, "I have a biblical worldview," you aren't saying, "I critique and deconstruct the Bible." Sure, you can understand context and language, the impact of redaction, and the sausagework process of canonicity. But a Biblical worldview means you aren't Thomas Jefferson or River Tam, cutting and pasting and fixing, because if you are, you're not existentially engaged with the text. You've set yourself apart from it and over it, which means it is not part of your faith. It does not define you. You have inverted the relationship of faith.
Having a biblical worldview means taking the narratives of the Tanakh, Gospels, and Epistles as the narrative from which you derive primary meaning and purpose. It means you understand yourself as part of that story, and you understand that story as part of you. It's our metanarrative, people, Lord have mercy, have y'all forgotten that concept already? It's mythic, not in the shallow, sophomoric way that internet atheists define the word myth, but in a Joseph Campbell way, as the stories that shape us personally and culturally.
Our short-attention-span era has forgotten this, lost the power of ethos and worldview, as we stumble through the monkey-chatter of competing commodified consumer culture narratives that give us our ersatz alternatives to myth.
A Biblical worldview is not that. But it is something one can legitimately, actually, honestly hold.

Keeping Quiet In Evil Times, Revisited

Years ago, I wrote a post about an enigmatic statement in the book of the prophet Amos.  Amos was a righteous redneck who came roaring out of the sticks to proclaim God's anger at the social and economic injustices of eighth century Israel.  He condemned the corrupt and the self-serving, those in power who used power only for their own gain, and did so with bold, relentless sharpness.

Embedded in his book of prophetic challenge are these words, in which he describes times when greed and power control the reins of justice:

Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,  for the times are evil.  Amos 5:13

It's a statement that I and my Bible study class revisited recently during our study of the Minor Prophets, and we puzzled over it again together.

What does that mean?  Here, an ancient voice known for their rhetorical and physical boldness, who was willing to walk right up to the temple of the King of Israel, and to challenge it.  Here, a prophet whose vocal indictment of the corruption of power was enough that he was put on the eight century equivalent of a watch list, as a known enemy of the state.

And he's counseling...laying low and saying nothing?

On the one hand, that's certainly what wisdom, understood as a Biblical virtue, suggests.  Be careful what you say.  Be wary with whom you share your thoughts.  In all things, be circumspect, and do not speak if your speech might compromise you.  

When evil is dominant, your survival and that of your family can depend on remaining silent.

On the other hand, speaking truth in a time of oppression is terribly necessary.  To do so requires a different mindset.  It's not simply "being prophetic," because standing against injustice is not itself a prophetic act, no matter what they say in the fading progressive seminaries.  Unless you are driven like a ship before a wild wind, by dreams and visions and the power of God, you're not a prophet.  Prophets don't really have a choice in the matter.  Amos didn't.

Not everyone is a prophet, no matter what our egos tell us.  But any one of us can be a witness.  The prophet does put their lives at risk, but being a witness ain't safe, neither.  Nor is it wise, not in the most craven definition of prudence.

When you see and name an obviously broken thing, or refuse to sing along with the lies that rise from hatred, you call attention to yourself.  You are noncompliant.  You are subversive.  It doesn't matter if you refuse the path of violence, or you refuse to hate.  You threaten power.

When you threaten power, it ends badly, as it did for Jesus.  It was equally rough on so many early Christians, who insisted on being honest about their commitments and about what they believed was radically true.  In the common Greek spoken in the Roman Empire and used in the New Testament, the word for "witness" is μάρτυρα, or "martyr."  Unpleasant things happen when you speak truth in a time when falsehood reigns.

Yet that's what we're asked to do, if we're disciples of Jesus.

Given where we are in the long painful moral collapse of our republic, being imprudent may go hand in hand with speaking the truth of one's witness.

The Things We Want, The Things We Need

The movement towards electric cars has reached an impasse, one that was utterly predictable.

On the one hand, sure, EVs are less expensive to run, and over the course of the life of any given vehicle produce considerably less carbon than an internal combustion engine vehicle.  They are part of the necessary reduction in emissions that may help blunt the impacts of the climate crisis.

But they're also not the solution.  Particularly not in America.

Part of that is because we Americans have made some catastrophically unwise decisions about our infrastructure.  Despite rail having been central to our rise as a nation, the twin demons of profit maximization and planned obsolescence painted us into an unsustainable corner.  Our suburbs sprawl out endlessly, so decentralized that creating public transit to serve them is nearly impossible.  Rail systems are orders of magnitude more efficient, and well-run rail liberates the working classes from being slaves to car debt, so...yeah.  No rail for America.

We have no choice but to drive oversized SUVs, because our culture demands it.  Our entire system is maximally inefficient, because efficiency is the enemy of profit.  That manifests in the way that electric cars express themselves into our society.  American EVs are large, stuffed with doodads and gegaws and luxuries.  Because they are large, they have large batteries, because to move a big vehicle requires more energy.

Take, for example, the electrified version of America's bestselling vehicle: the Ford F-150.  It's a full-sized pickup truck, and the EV version...the Lightning...weighs in at well over three tons, four if loaded.  It's blisteringly fast, at four and a half seconds to sixty.  

To move all that mass that quickly requires a nearly 100 Kwh battery at a minimum.  It costs, modestly equipped, just over sixty thousand dollars.  On a sixty month loan, and at current interest rates, that's gonna run you just under a thousand dollars a month assuming a $10,000 downpayment.

As a counterpoint, let's look at the electrified version of Japan's bestselling vehicle: the Honda NBox/NVan.

It's a tiny little box of a thing, being a kei car, the wee little Japanese runabouts that are ideally suited for urban and suburban driving.  The ICE engines are limited to 660cc and under 70 horsepower, which means they ain't fast.  Think Volkswagen Beetle levels of acceleration.  But they fit a family of four in comfort in their passenger vehicle edition, and in commercial applications, can carry a remarkably amount of stuff.  They are highway capable, in that they'll putter along at 65 mph.  Just don't push 'em much faster.  The NBox/NVan does all of that, while sipping gas at the rate of 55-60 mpg.

The first electrified version will be the commercial NVan, which is perfect for delivery duties in a suburban/urban setting.  It's spartan, focusing on utility rather than frippery.  It's got a wee little battery, and about 120 miles range.  

The expected price of the electrified  NVan: $7,300.  It costs less than a downpayment on a Lightning.  The passenger version, the electrified NBox, is likely to cost considerably more.  Fully equipped, an NBox runs around $18,000.  Let's assume you get the most expensive NBox.

A thirty six month loan at current interest rates, assuming a $3,000 downpayment, and your payments are six hundred dollars a month less than a Lightning.

That's not chump change, and you'd save it every month.  Plus, you'd be paid off two whole years sooner.

For Americans drowning in debt and unable to afford the overstuffed behemoths that pad the profit margins of vehicle manufacturers.

But Americans don't want small cars, and certainly not small EVs, because we are good obedient little debt slaves who have been trained to only desire what we cannot afford.  Small isn't safe, or so marketers tell the gullible American womenfolk.  What about the children?  Small isn't powerful, or so marketers tell the insecure overweight American menfolk.  You'll look impotent!

That, and the American auto industry years ago paid off Congress to pass a law that banned these little cars from our shores.  We're not allowed to buy them.

The Only Negative Review of Baldur's Gate 3

Twenty years ago, I talked the missus into playing Baldur's Gate with me.  

I'd gotten a used copy of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for my Original Gangsta XBox, and realized that sitting together and going through the game side by side might be...fun.  There was character customization, of a sort, meaning you could upgrade armor and weapons.  It existed parallel to the Dungeons and Dragons world, which was a bonus.  I'd played D&D extensively as a youngling, and made a point of introducing my boys to the game (1E, of course) when they were old enough to get it.  

Baldur's Gate wasn't quite D&D, but offered simple, top-down, single-screen two player tethered old-school action.  A "dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash RPG," in today's far more granular gaming parlance.

We played through the entire storyline, thirty hours working together and laughing, and it was a hoot.  Simple, by today's standards, but the hours we spent playing it were a great time spent together as a couple.    It set the stage for occasional married forays into gaming together, like the recent, excellent IT TAKES TWO.  

So when the hype machine for the new Baldur's Gate got cranking I immediately perked up.  Unlike some dismal prior efforts in the franchise, this seemed to hold promise.  Most importantly, the game designers had remembered to include what is now called "couch co-op," meaning you can play together with an actual human being sitting next to you in the same room.  That's the secret sauce, the magical ingredient that makes playing a game optimal.  Sure, I do more than my share of online game play.  But being right there, together, absent the mediating structure of the game interface?  Nothing better.  It's fully human.  

The game has received nearly universal acclaim from the gaming media, and so...well...it felt worth a shot.

Rache was up for it, so I plopped down the eighty bucks for a PS5 copy, and we dove in.

It is, without question, a game designed by intelligent people who've done some remarkable things.  You can't miss it.  From that first moment, when you glance at the EULA.  That's the End User Licensing Agreement, that stream of legal folderol that you've got to scroll through during any software install.  It's..well.  It's funny.  Filled with Easter Eggs.  Still legally binding, of course, but funny.

It is remarkably well written, and stunningly well voice-acted.  The primary NPCs are brilliantly wrought and well designed, sure.  But the attention to detail goes waaaay down deep.  Every single NPC is well done, each with a distinct character model, each with a distinct voice.  If you have the ability to speak with animals, that extends to the cattle you pass.  Or random birds.  The world is chock-full to bustin' with beings to interact with, and every last one of them has a voice.  The attention to detail is granular and remarkable.

The combat, in turn-based mode, is perhaps the closest thing to actual Dungeons and Dragons game play I've ever seen rendered in a console game.  The initiative and saving throws required for certain actions, the little dice animations?  Wow.  For infrequent console gamers like my wife, the design gives a chance to take each decision point as they come, to adapt to the pace of the game and the dizzying complexity of its choices.

After an entire session dedicated to simply creating our characters, we played it for four evenings, putting in about seven hours of gameplay.  And then we stopped.  Just sort of petered out.

That was two months ago now.   She's not brought it up.  I've not suggested getting back into it, and am playing something else now.  I have, as much as it pains me to say this about something I dropped a nontrivial eighty bucks on, no real interest in continuing.

This game is considered the gold standard of gaming in 2023.  The reviews are reverent, almost awed.  It's considered so good among the gaming cognoscienti that other designers complain that it sets an impossible bar.  I can see the genius of it, and the intricacy of the design.  But I can't say, honestly, that I enjoyed it enough to keep playing it.  For me, it failed.  

Why?  Why didn't I, a lifelong gamer who has a soft spot in their heart for D&D, like Baldur's Gate 3?  

I mean, it's because I'm old, obviously.  

This is an age thing, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that's a major part of it.  I've been around for half a century.  I'm older than the Internet.  And that means that I have, baked into myself, a different understanding of life than the whippersnappers who enjoy this game.  

The two that stand out are Clutter and Character.

Clutter:  There's simply too much going on, too many choices, too much to think about around every single action.  This can mirror the pace of a book-and-dice game, sure.  But the sheer density of the game feels faintly claustrophobic, the pace of decision-making smothering.  My wife described it as "tiring."  "This feels like work," she said, and I'd have to say it did at times.  

Every choice requires another choice, and you have so very very many choices to manage.  In the warm collective storytelling and play of an in person book-and-dice game, that pace feels organic.  For me, in this game?  It felt faintly oppressive. 

The clutter also impacted the sense of scale, the sense that the world we were inhabiting outside of the cutscenes was a real space.  Things were too densely packed.  It took around four hours of gameplay to move a distance that felt less than the ten minute walk to my local library.  Wait, here's a new character!  Here's an IMPORTANT CONVERSATION.  Oooh, here's a thing!  Look at this!  What about that?  Here's a monster!  Here's a central character!  Here's another ten yards further down the path!  Or not!  Here's an abandoned temple!  Talk to this pig!  Get a sidequest from this cow!

The effect of this design was to make game progress quicksand-slow, and simultaneously a little ADHD.  Everything was overcomplicated.  For the Children of the Internet, whose minds have been rewired to expect everything to cause anxiety, this may feel natural.  

But again, I'm old.  Give me movement.  Give me purpose.  Give me progress.  A quest.  A story.  None of that was happening.

The oversaturation impacted any sense of forward momentum, of the overarching reason to be doing this.  If, six hours in, you're still dooping about a hundred and fifty in-game yards from your start point, talking to livestock?  The sense of narrative is gone.

Character

I was also, to be blunt, bothered by the amorality of the game.  Dungeons and Dragons, frothing glazed-eye fundamentalist critiques aside, was originally a game with a moral compass.  Quite literally.  Good and evil were core aspects of character design, compassion and power, empathy and greed, a propensity for chaos or order, all folded into the essence of character creation.  

But as the game has "evolved" along with our culture, the idea that morality is a central aspect of character creation has fallen out of fashion.  It's oppressive.  Probably racist in some way or another.

So when you're designing your character, choosing alignment...that orientation towards good or evil...no longer exists.  In that, it tracks with the de-emphasis of alignment in the book and dice, game, but still.  It's a devolution, a depersonalization, a descent into shallow mechanistic reductionism.  

I mean, this from a game that has made much hay from allowing you to explicitly select the appearance of your character's genitalia.  This was good for some guffaws from the wife and I, along with a few moments of ew, but what the hell does that have to do with character?  Sure, it allows for characters to have sex with Non Player Characters of any gender and gender identity, with the full frontal of your choosing. Or sex with characters in their animal forms.  Or sex with characters whose size and character models are similar to those of human children.  

So sex-positive!  So progressive and free-thinking!  So amoral, in a more-than-faintly skeevy pornified way.

It's been a bit since I did book-and-dice gaming with peers, but I'm reasonably sure that's not what role playing groups are like in person these days.  There's adults playing roleplaying games, and there's Adults Playing Role Playing Games, and someone somewhere seems to have gotten those two things confused.

Rache and I never got to that point, of course.

What we did encounter were central nonplayer characters who were mostly annoying.  A Hot Githyanki Fighter (Hot Githyanki?  Lord have mercy, when did that happen?) who is both cruel and hostile.  A Hot whiny, retentive cleric.  An utterly debauched and untrustworthy but Hot elven thief who assaults you.  All can clearly be members of your party.  Or lovers.  Though why you'd be interested in a relationship with these Hot Unpleasant beings is beyond me.

Kind?  Honorable?  Tolerant?  Merciful?   These traits weren't encountered.  Why would I care about these NPCs?  I didn't really see any reason to spend time with them, let alone go on forty hours worth of questing with them snarling and complaining and catting at each other in the background.

I know, I know, this is just the old man shaking his fist at a cloud.

But that we've gone from character being defined by good and evil to character being defined by penises and labia seems...well...something.

 Like, perhaps, that the clutter has done something to our character.

October Sunflowers

As the first deep chill of winter starts seeping into the season, the sunflower patch in the front of my yard is dying.  Almost all of the brilliant yellow blooms have been trimmed away as they faded, their seeds either feeding the birds, falling to earth, or seedsaved and stored in a jar for next year's sunflowers.  The largest stalks rest drying amidst the ivy on the front of the house.  They'll become kindling for winter fires, or stakes for the garden in the spring.  

I have harvested all that I require.

A few wan stalks do still stand by the sidewalk, lingering where once there was a riot of canary petals, one last splash of bright summer against the darkening days.

This morning, as I clacked away on my laptop transcribing an old written text, I watched an older man slow as he approached the fading display.  He walks through the neighborhood most mornings, clad mostly in black, his beard neat, a backpack on his back.  Sometimes he'll stop, as if something is caught in his mind.  There's an intensity about him.   When he stopped, abruptly, he brought that same focus to the dozen remaining blossoms.  I stopped typing, and watched him more closely.

I saw his eyes dart from flower to flower, his head shifting birdlike with each change in his gaze.  Then he stopped.  All of his attention, on one badly wilted compound flowerhead.

There was a pause.

Then, just as abruptly as he'd stopped, his hands lashed out.  One grabbed the flower, the other the stalk, and with the flower clenched in a fist, he twisted and wrenched at it.  Sunflower stalks are sturdy things, but he was not to be denied.  It tore away in his hand.

He looked at it, for a moment, considering the wreck of petals.

Then he raised the flowerhead to his mouth, and took a bite.  

Sunflowers are technically edible, all of them, although my one attempt at roasting and eating a whole head was only a reminder that "technically edible" is true for a surprisingly large array of objects.  My heliovore passerby began to walk on, briskly, still chewing, but then stopped.  He turned, walked back to the patch, where he stood, staring into the middle distance as he continued to munch on both seeds and flower.

Having preached out of Leviticus this last Sunday, I was reminded of Torah's injunction not to harvest to the edge of your land, and to leave what grows there for the stranger and the hungry.

I hadn't thought that'd extend to flowers, but apparently it does.

Our Dark Messiahs

This last week, I preached a sermon on messianic identity, and the charlatans, narcissists, and madmen who often claim to be God.  It was a scripture-grounded riff on a book I'd recently read about the life of Vernon Howell, who is far better known as David Koresh, the psychotic leader of the doomed Branch Davidian cult.

We human beings need meaning and purpose in life, and often mistake the overbright confidence of the huckster and the sociopath for said meaning and purpose.  I will, as is every pastors duty, make a regular point of reminding my little flock that this is a peril we all face, a trap that can close around every human person.

The first words to me from the first parishioner to leave the sanctuary were "You know, I kept waiting for you to say 'Donald Trump.'"  Which meant, of course, that they'd exactly gotten the point of the sermon.  That I don't bring politics directly into my preaching doesn't mean there aren't clear and immediate applications to our national life, and the conceptual through line between David Koresh and Donald Trump is alarmingly direct.

How, one might ask?  Isn't that a little hyperbolic?

Well, no.  No, it isn't.

I've wrestled mightily over the last few years with the connection between American Christianity and Trumpism, simply because it all seems so insane.  Trump is, in his life and in his values, precisely and exactly the opposite of Jesus. 

As evangelicals have wrapped themselves in rational contortions to justify their support for Trump, they've consistently referenced two flawed biblical figures.  The first, King David, who was both God's chosen and prone being overthrown by beauty and the moonlight.  The second, Cyrus of Persia, who served God's purposes even though he wasn't part of the covenant people.

This is precisely and exactly the reason that the Branch Davidians lined up behind Vernon Howell, and why Howell changed his name to "David Koresh," with Koresh being another way of saying "Cyrus."

"Look," evangelicals Christians say.  "God can work through broken, morally compromised people.  Trump may be morally compromised, but who are we to say that he's not an agent of God's intent?"

I've written elsewhere against this line of reasoning, which misrepresents both David's deeply repentant relationship with God and the wise, gracious openness of Cyrus.  These were fundamentally moral leaders.

There's a darker resonance, though, one that rose to mind as I prayed and meditated over my preaching.

When evangelical Christians say "Trump is like David," or "Trump is like Cyrus," they aren't just explaining away his immorality and obvious anti-Christian nature.  They're making a messianic claim about Trump.  They are implicitly claiming that Trump...like David, like Cyrus...is meschiach, the Hebrew word meaning "anointed," which Biblical Greek translates as "Christ."

This is a deeply dangerous assumption for the soul of the faith.

Trump Antichrist

Trump is again standing for office, defiant and shameless, unrepentant and doubling down.  He remains a deep threat to our republic.  Another season of madness seems to be dawning on our nation.  
But as difficult as that is, the United States of America isn't my primary concern, nor is it my primary life commitment.  
The corruption of my faith is my concern.  A significant portion of American Christianity sees Trump as a legitimate...even God-ordained...defender of the Christian faith.  This is, to the eyes of my soul, insane.  Demonic, even.  
Christ cannot be served, ever, by a lie.  
Nor can Jesus be served by blind partisan hatred, and that was my personal challenge.
After the riot he instigated on January 6th was over, my rage burned bright.  It was hard for me to focus, or to see those I care for deeply who had voted for and supported Trump with anything other than anger.  It was not good for my soul.  Hatred and resentment never is.  I wrote about it at the time, but that wasn't enough.  The anger remained, obscuring my vision, clouding my ability to show grace.  
"Trump Derangement Syndrome," it's mockingly called by those who somehow can't see him for what he is, but it did indeed feel like that.  It was a disease of the self, one that ran as deep as the delusion that blinds his followers.  I was becoming what I hated.
That hatred also tormented my Christian brothers and sisters.  On more than one occasion, I have been approached by another Christian troubled by how deeply they found themselves hating Donald Trump.  These are the gentle souls, the souls who live for missions of compassion and kindness, the sort of folks that one would describe as Saints of the Church.  Generous, thoughtful, welcoming, prayerful, and radically focused on Christ's peace.
"David," one said, embarrassed and horrified at their own thoughts.  "I just want him dead.  I can't stop wanting him to die."
I felt that hatred in myself, and so I did what writers do when they need to process something.  I wrote a book.   
I'd had the idea for it back in 2019.  I was already tired of my own anger, stoked every single day with constant provocations both real and imagined.  I'd had a dream, vivid and lucid as certain dreams are, in which I visited Trump as he wandered alone and despairing in Hell.  In that dream, to my great surprise, I found myself moved with a deep compassion.  It meant something.  I wasn't sure what, but it needed more articulation than a poem of average quality.
The idea for this book came to me, but I couldn't bring myself to write it then.  I was exhausted by his media omnipresence, the endless reality-television drama-queen vomit of his presidency.  There were already so many books about Trump, a veritable cottage industry of Trump-adjacent mammonist profiteering.  
I also had, at that time, other writing that consumed my attention, novels about A.I. and a book of theology about the odd weather we've been having lately.  
But after the riot, and the struggle I encountered in other Christians, and the spreading, sprawling thicket of falsehoods that to this day cast the pall of a dark alternate reality over millions of Americans who remain in Trump's thrall, I found that I had to write it.  For myself, and my sanity.  
Well, for what passes for sanity with me, anyway.
TRUMP ANTICHRIST is written in Satan's voice, the personified voice of hatred, of cynicism, of falsehood, of power.  It is, when I described it to my agent and to the editors who were kind enough to look at it, a bit of theopolitical satire, written in the least trustworthy, most seductive voice I know.  
Those editors gave it a pass, because it's weird, but also...notably...because they were afraid.  Of frivolous lawsuits.  Of less-than-frivolous threats of violence from Trump supporters.  
I don't blame them.  America is increasingly consumed by a peculiar and familiar madness, and the prospect of death threats from glazed-eye partisans isn't something one wants to bring on oneself as a business.
So I self-published it, and shared it with a few friends.  
It's a short, odd little book, one that serves several purposes.  
First, it is my own struggle to come to terms with how human beings who consider themselves Christian could follow a leader who is...in every single conceivable way...the diametric opposite of Jesus. There's a theological term for such a leader, and you know what it is.  That term is "Antichrist."  In the book, the voice of the fallen Divine Prosecutor makes that case, using both scripture and Nietzsche, because that's exactly what the devil would do.  He's not wrong, not technically.
That voice, though.  Let's talk about that voice.  The "narrator" of the book is chosen intentionally.
It's written in the same voice that whispers hatred and a hardened heart into my own soul.  The same voice that tells me that there is nothing more righteous, nothing more purely just, than hating my enemies.  
Second, and because that's the way the book is written, it's not the book you think it is.  Or even that I thought it was, when I began writing it.  
Sure, it skewers the desperate, obvious rationalizations that Christians use to justify supporting someone who incarnates everything they claim to reject.   But if you loathe Trump, and desire the destruction of those who follow him, and find yourself nodding along when Satan tells you exactly what you want to hear about them?  
What is that, precisely?   
It's the same evil.  When you toss the devil's coin, both heads and tails are evil.  The shadow cast by evil is still evil.  Blind partisan hatred dehumanizes and controls us, just as surely as it turns us to dehumanize our enemies.
You cannot fight evil with evil.  That doesn't mean you can't speak out when something monstrous rises.  That doesn't mean you accept lies as truth, encourage hucksters and profiteers and narcissists, or walk in silent lockstep with brutes and thugs.  You must resist these things.
But if you're crazy enough to consider yourself Christian, you are obligated to use other means.  To do that, you must break the spell that holds you.
You must be released from the power of the Enemy.