What if Jesus ran for President?

With 2020 approaching, potential presidential candidates were waiting until after New Year’s Day to announce. One chose the day the whole world was celebrating his birthday to throw his hat, or rather his Kippah, into the ring. It was a Galilean Sage named Jesus of Nazareth. “Hosanna,” they cried as his poll numbers went through the roof. Jesus quickly became odds-on favorite among Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and the Green Party.

Republican poohbahs were slow to warm to a Jesus candidacy fearing the wrath of Trump. Democrats supported him upon learning his followers sold their possessions, distributing them to all as any had need. 

Libertarians, wearied by nominating washed-up, old Republican governors, saw Jesus as a chance for redemption. Green Partiers said, “Our last candidate dined with Putin. Maybe we’re better off nominating someone who dines with prostitutes and tax collectors. What do we have to lose?”

Evangelical Christian support was especially high with 91% jumping on the bandwagon. The other 9% told pollsters they would await the Rapture.

Jesus disappointed them all, announcing he would run as an Independent. He quickly received an important endorsement. As soon as his candidacy was prophesied, the heavens opened, the Spirit of God descended on him, a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus responded, “My name is Jesus and I approve this message.”

Soon thereafter Wikileaks hacked Jesus’s private email server and began funneling opposition research to reporters. The leaks raised serious questions about Jesus’s relationship with God. A whispering campaign started. Some were concerned about the fact that God had once destroyed the whole world. Others wanted to know more about God’s role in several massacres of men, women, and children in ancient Israel.

They asked whether Jesus’s divine backer had entered into a secret pact with Satan to torture Job. Was it true, they demanded to know, that God once attempted to kill Moses? Was Jesus’s primary supporter guilty of slaughtering all the first-born male children of Egypt? Did he order the execution of a man for the seemingly forgivable act of picking up sticks on the Sabbath?

As the fake media continued digging into God’s past, politicians from all four political parties demanded that Jesus denounce God’s endorsement. “God has been with me from the beginning,” Jesus Tweeted in response. “God is my father. If I deny my father, I am denying myself. Why can’t we just talk about the issues?”

“Okay,” one of the scribes shouted, “what would you do about the homeless.” Jesus said, “Find them homes.” Asked what he’d do for the hungry, Jesus said, “Feed them.” Those with ears heard and asked, “With what? Wouldn’t everyone have to pay higher taxes in order to provide food and shelter for all these people.”

What about those foreigners seeking refuge in our country, reporters supplicated. “My platform is clear,” Jesus retorted, “The foreigner shall be welcomed and treated as though born here.” He reminded them that his own life had been saved when his parents took him and was granted refugee status in Egypt to avoid Herod’s sword.

Asked how he would reduce prison overcrowding, Jesus stayed on message. “Look, I’ve been nominated to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, healing for the sick, even those with pre-existing conditions, and to free the oppressed.”

That press conference proved his undoing. An editorial in the “failing” New York Times claimed, “Even his family thinks he’s crazy.” Jesus tried to revive his fledgling campaign by calling on voters to love their neighbors as they love themselves. Conservatives who had LGBTQ neighbors bolted. Liberals feared Jesus’s platform would eliminate the need for government programs and regulations.

His campaign chair promptly resigned, telling anyone who asked, “I do not know that man.” Near the end, his advisers gathered around Jesus. “It is finished,” they said. There was no choice. He needed to withdraw from the race. “If you don’t,” it was agreed, “they will crucify you.”

The post factual world of right wingers

Last week Doug Watford wrote a letter to the editor claiming the left wants what he, Trump, and Fox News refer to as “open borders.” Accustomed as I am to that silly claim, I would not respond but for an adjective Mr. Watford used.

“Soidisant.” He referred to me as a “soidisant columnist.” That is the first time in my 70 years I have come across that term. My computer’s spell check underlines it in red, insisting it never heard of the strange word.

However, Goggle has. It’s a hyphenated French word pronounced swade-zan(t), combining soi, meaning “self,” and disant, which means “saying.” Self-saying.

Translated to English, the word conveys characteristics like supposed, pretend, and pseudo. It’s an odd thesaurusistic find for a writer who often resorts to soi-disant facts to argue his case.

More than not, I’d rather not respond to letters to the editor. My time writing this weekly column would be a complete waste if, at least now and then, folks like Mr. Watford did not feel compelled to respond. I don’t want to do anything to discourage them.

Still I wonder, when conservatives can derive sufficient numbers of fact-based criticisms from my columns, why do some of them make it up?

It happens when we liberals advocate for Bible-based justice for immigrants and refugees. The issue gets jammed up in the right-wing echo chamber’s recycling machine driving the creation of alternative facts. It begins when the President Tweets his proforma lies. Fox News reports his Tweets as though they are true. Rush Limbaugh embellishes. People like Doug Watford repeat them in letters to the editor. Thirty percent of America nods their heads, “Yup.” The cycle is complete.

Trump and Watford attempt to convince people that liberals support “open borders.” They want to convey a faux-image of liberals as thoughtless do-gooders, willing to stand back and allow anyone and everyone to come across our borders to commit crimes and acts of terror while taking your job and living off the God-fearing, patriotic taxpayers of the USA.

In the post factual world created by the vast right-wing conspiracy, that oftentimes works. Doug Watford’s recent letter is Exhibit A. Mr. Watford deserves the benefit of the doubt. He’s a true believer. The problem with true believers is that they often refuse to allow facts to get in the way of opinion.

To support his claim, Mr. Watford cites an August 2018 column in which I discussed the theological underpinnings of the immigration debate. My premise was that God was an open-borders sort of guy (sic). Borders are a human creation.

I wrote, “God’s earth became a Garden, providing everything humans needed. No borders; just the earth…populated by the first humans for whom God had a vision of shared reality. Borders are human constructs designed to thwart God’s will by perpetuating economic, political, and social inequality.”

Human sin, I wrote, created a world where borders are tools of exploitation. “Borders were created,” my column alleged, “to make sure that the very best belonged to the powerful and the less powerful had the leftovers. Borders became the means for dividing God’s creation between the haves and have nots. Border were the means by which humans institutionalize injustice and inequality.”

The column acknowledged human sin won’t permit the kind of open borders God intended. Liberals do not want open borders. They want what God asks in the Bible, i.e. justice for the least of these.

Conservatives like Mr. Watford don’t want to talk about the injustice of ripping children from their families and housing them in prison camps. They don’t want to talk about the race-based efforts of this president to break the law by denying asylum to people whose lives are threatened by gangs and political violence back home.

Their views cannot weather a fact-based debate, which allows the battle to continue without justice for immigrants and refugees. Conservatives are not simply soi-disanters. They are purposely ignoring the facts to create the world they, not God, want.

Sunday's sermon@Highlands

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, part of which was read this morning, Paul exhorts the people to be ready for the day of Christ…as though that day was to be sometime in the future. Well, today is the day of Christ. Jesus is here among us.

During Advent we often talk about waiting for Jesus as though he hasn’t already appeared. Oh, I know it’s tradition but something is amiss when 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, some are still waiting for the fulfillment of the promises and some have waited longer than others.

Unlike the shepherds keeping their flocks in that field, or King Herod who laid awake at night wondering what this child would mean to his kingdom, unlike the innkeeper who had no idea who he denied a room to…we know the rest of the story.

We know who this child is and what his coming is supposed to mean to the world. We’re not so confused as the shepherds, we know to reject Herod and his heirs, we’d never tell Jesus there is no room in the inn.

We heard him announce that he was sent to proclaim the Good News to the poor, to free the prisoners, to restore the health of the sick and to end the oppression being visited upon the most vulnerable.

Unlike those who lived in the shadows without much hope 2000 years ago, we heard God introduce Jesus with these words, “"Here is My servant, whom I have chosen, My beloved, in whom My soul delights. I will put My Spirit on Him, and He will proclaim justice to the nations.”

The Gospel of Luke 3:1-6 tells a story about one person who was unwilling to wait any longer. It was the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod ruler of Galilee during the high priesthood of Caiaphas. Luke isn’t a name dropper. Luke is setting the stage when he lists the names of those who had reason to fear the coming of he who the rest of the world awaited.

Those names matter. Herod had so much at stake if the promises of Jesus’s birth came to pass that he ruthlessly killed every infant in the land hoping that one of them might be Jesus because he so feared the coming of the kingdom of God and what that would mean to his cruel and oppressive reign.

But, Jesus was not among them. Like those refugees walking hundreds of miles to the US border to escape the violence in their homelands, Jesus’s mother and father fled to Egypt where they were afforded the radical hospitality God expects to be given to refugees and the baby was saved from Herod’s sword.

30 years later, Pontius Pilate found his place in history as the Roman who sentenced Jesus to die after the fundamentalists of his day offered Jesus to be executed. Luke drops those names as a way of telling us just what the times were like and why people were awaiting a savior.

Along comes a strange fellow, Jesus’s cousin John. As John begins his strange ministry, the paths are crooked, the rough ways not smooth. Luke has jumped ahead of the Christmas story here. Jesus is now 30 years old. All this time, he’s been working in his father’s carpentry shop wondering what to do with his life. And along comes John.

Maybe you had a cousin like John, someone who made your parents nervous. Joseph and Mary probably didn’t want their son to hang with Cousin John. Can you blame them. Strange fellow stirring up trouble, hanging out down by the river, screaming at people, saying crazy things about God, things you didn’t hear in the Temple. Mary and Joseph attempted to redirect Jesus, taking him to the Temple to learn from the priests. The 12-year-old Jesus ended up teaching them a thing or two.

Cousin John’s voice is crying out in the wilderness. There is something about a voice that cries out in the wilderness that attracts young revolutionaries like Jesus. You know how Cathy stands up here every Sunday morning and says, “Welcome to Highlands. May the peace of Christ be with you”? Well, John welcomed the crowd by calling them a brood of vipers; yet for some reason the crowds grew, some serious about what John had to say as opposed to what they were hearing in the faith community in which they had grown up, some just curious, others wanting to know what might come out of John’s mouth next.

What came out of his mouth next were words quite different than anything they had heard before. When they asked, “What then should we do?” he asked them, “Do you have two coats? Well, share with someone who has none; and do likewise with that food you’ve been hoarding.” Even the dreaded tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?”

“Stop cheating the people, collect only what is due and stop trying to line your own pockets.” The Roman soldiers had their own issues. They asked, “And we, what should we do?” He said, “Quit being bullies. Your job is to protect and defend the people, not to extort them.” All of this led the common folks to ask whether he might be the Messiah.

No, John said, but he is coming. While John waited, his preaching landed him in Herod’s prison. There he awaited the executioner’s axe, pondering the suffering of the oppressed, waiting for the justice Isaiah promised would come with the kingdom of God. John got to wondering about his cousin. He sent messengers to ask Jesus bluntly, “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for or should we keep waiting?”

Those same messengers are at the door of the church this morning. They wait outside not knowing whether they will be welcome inside. “Are you the ones we’ve been waiting for or should we keep waiting?”

They want to know whether the church cares about them and the injustices of their world. They’re waiting like good, little Advent celebrants. For them it’s not about tradition. It’s about their lives and they want to know why they have to wait so long for what others already have.

Candles and hymns, sermons and calls to worship mean nothing to them. If those things mattered, they’d fill these pews. Those walls would have to be rolled back and chairs added. They want to know whether there is anything going on inside this church that is relevant to their lives and the suffering they endure under the reign of Herod’s successors.

Let me be honest. I am saying these things because I need your help on this. We have to figure out what is it that we have say to those who wonder why they are still waiting outside?

2,018 years after Jesus was born, a lot of people are still waiting for justice. Refugees wait at our border, prisons overflow with people waiting for reforms promised by the politicians, the poor wait for a few crumbs to fall from the tables of this wealthy nation to trickle down.

At this Season of Advent, God has placed on my heart the especially long and dangerous wait of our Transgender sisters and brothers. Their government, at the urging of some of our fellow Christians, plans to define them out of existence, churches tell them the God we ask them to believe in made a mistake when they were created. They are told they’re not even worthy to die for their country on foreign battlefields.

They want others to believe that these human beings are somehow an aberration, a flaw, a problem, a disease—rather than a marvel of God’s infinite world. And here we are, a More-Light Presbyterian Church, the only one in Wyoming, claiming to proclaim the Good News that God loves you and that we love you. Our website touts our values statement assuring people that all are welcome here and will be safe and loved among us. But, how would those who still wait know?

By definition, silence cannot be heard. It can’t be heard by either the oppressed or the oppressor. Silence makes the wait longer as the heirs to the Roman Empire visit injustice on Transgender human beings. We don’t want to find ourselves one day looking back on history like the elderly German woman described by a preacher on a progressive Christian website I frequent.

A 60-something woman called me in tears. She remembered boxcars crammed with desperate people passing through her German community and the hollow-eyed horror etched onto the faces. She said, “Those people were Jews headed for the camps, weren’t they? And we said nothing. We did nothing.”

Our government and some of our fellow Christians are cramming new victims into psychological boxcars. Not a one of us is too young to understand what is happening.

Dr. Ilan H. Meyer, a scholar at UCLA, expert on how stigma and prejudice and marginalization impacts the lives of targeted people, says, “People are scared and they’re tired of being scared.” Being scared causes some of God’s children to take their own lives, others to go into hiding. Imagine the pain of being told your government doesn’t want you to exist and that some churches are hoping you’ll burn in hell.

Transgender people have reason to be afraid. Since 2013, at least 128 Transgender and gender-expansive humans, God’s children ALL, have been murdered in the U.S. At the end of 2017, we mourned the loss of 29 more — the highest number ever recorded. As I preach, at least 22 Transgender people have been killed in 2018. Others take their own lives at an alarming rate, particularly among teenagers dealing with the bullying and rejection that comes with realizing who they are.

Last August, the governors of 16 states asked the Supreme Court to declare that Transgender people have no employment protections under the law. Shamefully, our governor, in our name, joined the effort to marginalize and legalize discrimination against these our brothers and sisters.

Advent, the wait for the birth of Jesus, was never supposed to be a time when any of God’s people waited in fear of what was to come. Denying dignity to Transgender individuals, has a devastating effect on their well-being and self-worth as it diminishes God’s hope for the world.

These brothers and sisters look out across the landscape and what they see in the media are Christians teaming up with the government to ridicule them, deny them basic human rights, and question the fundamental right every person has to know that they are loved by God and they are asking the church, “Are you the ones who follow Jesus or should we stay clear of you while we keep waiting?”

We know that Highlands is different, but how would those who need to know know? I included a link in the Clan this month and in this morning’s bulletin, to a Human Rights Campaign booklet. Take time to read it. It contains information to arm you with the facts you need to speak up and out for our Transgender brothers and sisters and it has practical, real ideas about what we could be doing at Highlands.

During our season of waiting, we at Highlands can’t quietly watch as others continue to wait. Let us think and pray about how it is that these people who are subjected to the indignities of a political and religious debate about how God made them…how would they ever know that Highlands exists as a place where they can be safe and loved.

While others await the coming of the Christ child, let’s spend our time figuring out how to let them know that at Highlands, their wait is over. The Jesus they are awaiting is alive and well here, in this church, among these people. Can I get a loud AMEN?