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by
Jim Wallis
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January 16 - February 23, 2020
It was the accused who raised the issue of truth by subtly reminding the judge of his highest obligation—find out the truth.4
We saw the opposite scenario in the recently concluded Impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The accused was interested only in hanging on to his power and did everything in his power to keep the judge, Chief Justice John Roberts, from learning the truth.
Politicians so often want to use “the truth,” deny the truth, manipulate and manage the truth, and seek to discredit any notion of the truth that is a threat to their power. But indeed, that is the very nature and purpose of the truth in our public life—to hold power accountable and even transform politics with an appeal to deeper and higher realities, to the things God cares about, to the common good. And that is why the truth indeed is a “threat” to power and why the current administration in the United States is so afraid of the truth.
an honest, hardworking, and informed press is critically important to genuine freedom in a democracy, and we see some of the best reporters at work right now in America—despite being under continual attack.
Immature religion creates a high degree of “cognitively rigid” people, utterly dualistic thinkers, and often very hateful and crusading people, invariably about a single issue where they focus all their anger.
What turns our anxiety into joy is giving thanks to the God we know, with whom we feel a relationship.
In a sermon on fear that my sister, Marcie Rahill, preached to her home congregation and shared with me, she describes how fear can create a “spiritual amnesia” where we forget God—forget who God is and forget God’s promise to always be with us. That very presence of God seems to be what scripture promises us we can rely on to help overcome our fear, but fear can easily cause us to lose our trust in it. And the hate that often comes from fear causes us to forget the power of love to transform our fear.
Faith is finally believing in love instead of fear, and believing that fear can be overcome by love—especially by the perfect love that Jesus teaches us.
The wall is just a symbol, a monument, a testimony to the worst of American fear, hate, and white racism.
According to Pew Research, 91 percent of the members of Congress profess to be Christian. The faith-based action served to remind senators of their biblical responsibility to the poor and to raise the nation’s moral conscience to stop the attack on society’s most vulnerable people.
Isaiah 10:1–3 (NIV): Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
Even when Christian culture is compromised by conformity to the values and powers of this world, we can never shed ourselves of Jesus. He has a good record on comebacks.
Jesus said to his followers, “You are the salt of the earth,” to literally preserve the important things that sustain and undergird human societies. This is a quality that conservatives often admire—keeping cohesion and positive communal values intact and formative like the glue that often holds things together, values such as honesty, integrity, compassion, fairness, faithfulness, fidelity, and dedication to raising our children in ways that are good and right and for the sake of service to others.
That is an amazing sentiment considering that President Trump is the antithesis of every one of those qualities.
I have been struck by how much the Beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount have come up on news shows since the 2016 election as such a stark contrast to the language and behavior we see coming from the White House, especially with such seemingly hypocritical silence and support from white evangelical Christians.
Ethics professor Glen Stassen has a good contrast to the more traditional interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount that he describes as “God’s transforming initiatives.” More than any other commentator, Glen expresses my own view of that sermon: The Sermon on the Mount is not about human striving toward high ideals but about God’s transforming initiative to deliver us from the vicious cycles in which we get stuck. It has a realistic view of our world, characterized by murder, anger, divorce, adultery, lust, deceit, enmity, hypocrisy, false prophets, and houses destined for destruction. It
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And activist Lindsey Paris-Lopez comments on the powerful resonance of the Sermon on the Mount in our current political and moral emergency: Jesus’s lessons in the Beatitudes and throughout the Sermon on the Mount seem so far removed from our national ethos. We refuse to acknowledge the deep, systemic racism and violence at the core of our cultural consciousness all the while touting our exceptionalism. . . . The Sermon on the Mount is a call to resistance . . . it uproots and overturns a conventional order built on and maintained by violence.4
And in the United Kingdom she is well known as the real Vicar of Dibley
A wonderful comedy starring Dawn French.
WE INTERRUPT THIS FAMILY FOR BASEBALL SEASON!
We are living through perilous and polarizing times as a nation,
