Transcription
Hey everybody. So I was driving to Wisconsin with friends yesterday when my wife called to tell us about the horrific violence at the Enunciation Catholic Church and school. And the Twin Cities have had more than our share of violence, like really demented violence lately. And I'm not even going to try to express all the emotions I feel here other than obviously the grief for the children who were killed and for their families and for all the children and adults who were wounded. The Twin Cities are in a lot of pain right now again, and these things hit close to home. I have friends who attended that school growing up, and everyone here, I think, probably knows somebody who's been part of that school. And the fact that we began the summer with an act of political violence against political representatives. That violence was perpetrated by a guy who claimed to be acting as a Christian. So, we started the summer that way, and now the summer is ending with an unspeakable violence at a church. It's just overwhelming to even know how to think about it and talk about it. And as someone who pastored churches in the Twin Cities for 20 years, and as somebody who talks about so many of the issues that feed into these acts of terror, in the end, it's still just senseless and horrible. So, I'm going to share a few brief thoughts here, and then I'm going to sign off for the day because I'm going to go to the state fair and just be with my wife and be with the beautiful people of Minnesota. So, let me start with this.
Long before I went into ministry, I worked at a clinic for people with seizure disorders. So, we didn't deal with people whose seizures were easily controlled by medication. We dealt with the ones who needed more advanced care. And we even did brain surgeries there. And I was just an administrator, so I didn't learn a lot about the medicine, but I did learn this: that every human being has a seizure threshold, which is basically a body temperature where if they get that high of a fever, they're just going to have a seizure. And some people have a lower seizure threshold than others. And so I'm thinking about that today in relation to our country because I think every society has something like that seizure threshold. Whatever negative words we want to use to describe it, the more of these negative things that society endures, the higher the accumulation of these negative things in the culture, the more likely we are to seize, like a seizure in the brain. If you look at the graphs of it, the brain waves are just firing all over the place. They're out of control. And doctors can determine where the seizure might have started in the brain or what kind of seizure it is. But the brain waves themselves are just firing all over. They don't make sense. And once a seizure is happening, there's just no rationality in those brain waves. And that's what it's like, I think, when we see a horrific act like yesterday's shooting. It's senseless. It literally makes no sense as an individual act. It makes no more sense than the brain waves firing in the middle of a seizure. But the fact that our culture is seeing more and more of these senseless acts, that's a pattern, and we can study that, and we can see what the contributing factors are, what are the conditions that make it possible for these things to happen? And we can say America has reached some kind of threshold where we're having more and more of these seizures because of it.
So what is that threshold? And I've been thinking a lot about this. Like, is it chaos? Have we reached a level of chaos or a level of confusion that's causing this? Would we call it hatred? Would we call it fear? Like, what is it that we're reaching this level where these things are happening? And the best word that I can come up with, and you can suggest another one, but the word that for me captures all of these things, the word that prepares the ground for hatred and fear and bitterness and all that other stuff, the word I want to use is despair. I think our society has reached a level of despair where we're seizing up. And the more desperate we get, the more of this sort of thing we're going to see. And here's what bothers me. An awful lot of Christians will hear this much of what I say, and they'll say, "Yes, America needs Jesus." And that's why they're in despair. It's, you know, I think about this slogan during racial justice movements where people would use the slogan, "No justice, no peace." But then a bunch of white Christians took that slogan away from oppressed people and said, "No, you know, Jesus, no peace." And I'm sure they felt clever doing that. But here's the problem. America has seen the white evangelical Jesus. They've seen Congress people who worship this white evangelical Jesus wearing pins on their lapel with assault rifles on them. They've seen the white evangelical Jesus line up behind the worst man in America and the worst political movement in my lifetime. And they've said when they've seen that, they've said, "It's the white evangelical Jesus who fills me with despair." And that's the worst part of this for me. A lot of Christians are going to look at what happened yesterday in Minneapolis and find one of their cultural hobby horses to blame it on. They might blame gender confusion in this case, or the loss of respect for life in general, but they won't blame the chief architect of America's current despair because they voted for the chief architect of America's despair.
Now, anyone who tries to blame one specific person other than the shooter for this one specific act is out of line, and that's not what I'm here to do. But if we don't blame the current environment in this country, something that I think we all contribute to in one way or another, if we don't blame that current environment in this country for preparing the ground for these sorts of horrors, then we're just not dealing with reality. Whenever these things happen, people ask, "Why? Why is this happening?" And a lot of the answers are correct, but they don't go far enough. The problem is a culture of despair. And the level of despair in the culture is growing. And here's why that's important. Despair is intentional. Despair is a strategy. Despair is an intentional strategy because our despair empowers and enriches the worst people in the world. And again, the worst part of it from my perspective is this: If the gospel of Jesus Christ is true, if Christians are following the way of Jesus, then Christians of all people ought to understand these things. And Christians of all people should be most equipped to be helpful. We even have a language to talk about what's happening. We use this language from Paul in Ephesians of principalities and powers, the systems that underly all of the things that we experience in this present darkness. And a lot of Christians say that these principalities and powers are tied into the demonic realm, while other Christians say it's really the systems and the structures that keep evil entrenched, but they don't go the demonic route with it. But either way, Christians claim to believe in principalities and powers and they claim to believe in opposing them, not empowering them. But when it comes to anything other than, I would say, the abortion issue, a huge percentage of Christians completely abandon their supposed belief in fighting these structures.
So, I'll just use one example. I posted what I think was a fascinating interview yesterday with Dr. Karen Johnson about race in America, and you should really listen to it. You know, we talked about how she gets accused by Christians of going woke when she tries to talk about systemic racism. And that's absurd. Of all people, Christians ought to be the most vocal about systems of oppression because it's central to our understanding of what's wrong with the world and how to fix it. And the thing is, whether you're somebody who believes in a demonic connection to those principalities and powers, or whether you just see them as general forces, like systems that grow up out of evils like racism or greed, and they become entrenched ways of thinking and operating, however you view those systems, these are the principalities and powers. Systemic racism is one of the principalities and powers of this present darkness in America. And it's just ignorant for Christians to write off any talk about it as woke in some bad, dismissive way, you know, or whatever other buzzword someone taught us to say to dismiss it.
So, back to what happened in Minneapolis yesterday, the gun culture in America is another one of those principalities and powers. When Paul talks about these things in Ephesians, he says, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." So to say that it's not a fight against flesh and blood, he's telling us not to get violent. I can't think of anything more flesh and bloodly than to have this gun culture that so many Christians have, especially right-wing Christian nationalists that I listen to on YouTube to keep track of them, who advertise armor plates and things like that in their supposedly Christian programs. You know, what could be more flesh and blood than that? But Paul tells us not to get violent in opposing these systems because we're not going to kill ourselves out of these problems. We're not going to kill ourselves out of these problems. Whether it's political leaders or business leaders or military leaders, as long as the system is in place, as long as, for instance, America worships guns, as long as America worships money, as long as America worships domination of the other, I could list 30 more categories. As long as these systems of thought, these systems of belief are present, there will always be another leader to take the place of any leaders who get removed from power.
Right now, the most powerful of the principalities and powers in America is despair. It's a system of despair. And this system of despair is getting stronger. It's rising. And I could list 30 categories for why that's happening. And not all of them are political, but a lot of them are. A lot of them are intentional choices. Intentional choices in many cases that one man is making, and those choices are being backed by that man's pseudo-Christian movement, and it's an intentional strategy. It's what authoritarians do. They sow confusion. They spread lies and disinformation. They attack the culture on every possible front in order to create a sense of exhaustion so people just give up. For example, Russell Vote, who's now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, was a chief architect of Project 2025. And according to the Guardian, he said this in a taped conversation: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected when they wake up in the morning. We want them to not want to go to work, viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. We want to put them in trauma." Okay. So he's dealing with the civil service, but that mentality is the mentality of the MAGA movement. It's the mentality of authoritarianism coming against the culture, coming against the justice system, coming against every system that would oppose the ruler. So we see this mentality of intentional despair, creating despair in the way, for instance, this administration is attacking museums recently to get them to stop talking about the ways Black people have been oppressed systemically and the ways that Black people have resisted over the years. So they're trying to silence them and put them in despair and make them fearful of talking about these things. We're seeing attacks on businesses. We're even seeing attacks on the courts themselves. Authoritarians tell us not to trust the truth tellers, not to trust science, not to trust the media or universities, and they choose individuals to persecute through the legal system to frighten anyone else from speaking out. And they choose whole classes of people to marginalize in order to create an "us versus them." So the people who consider themselves in "us" will support the authoritarian against the "thems." All of this is meant to create a sense of despair so that the authoritarian is empowered. Crime statistics are weaponized so people grow desperate and welcome the authoritarian's troops into their cities. And the very presence of those troops leads to despair of ever being able to oppose the leader. And in America right now, the people who are supposed to have the best understanding of these systems of oppression, Christians who are told how this works supposedly, they're lining up behind the oppressor, mostly because of another one of those principalities and powers, the one that most of the people who are held in its embrace won't even call by its name. And obviously, I'm talking about Christian nationalism. The people who call themselves Christians, who support Donald Trump still after everything we've seen, are firmly in the embrace of Christian nationalism, whatever name they call it. And it's blinding them to their role in propping up the principalities and powers of this present darkness. And they need to wake up. And I don't care when they wake up, if they call it woke or they call it an awakening, they need to wake up because this is evil, and it's evil at scale, and it's not going away without active resistance.
So what does that resistance look like? I'll just stay in the text from Ephesians. Paul tells us this is what Christian resistance looks like to the principalities and powers: "Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground." And I'll just tell you, we are in a day of evil. Okay? And after you've done everything to stand, stand firm. Them with a belt of truth buckled around your waist, truth, the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people. Now, I could take every line of that if I wanted, and I could show how the MAGA movement and the people who call themselves Christians who support that movement are doing the opposite of these things, and maybe I will someday. But for today, I just want to be helpful in this way. I just want to challenge anybody who's listening to me just to think about that passage for ourselves about truth, about righteousness and justice, and how righteousness and justice work together in the Bible. The things that we're working for, you know, the things that are listed in there. We all do fall short in some way. Again, every one of us is part of this culture, and we can play a role for better or for worse. And so it's got to start with us.
So I'm just going to summarize it again right here. The way that I boiled down my own resistance lately is to these three things: Speak the truth, protect the vulnerable, and work for justice. If we want to be part of lowering the level of despair so that fewer of these insane acts of violence happen, then we can start by telling the truth, by protecting the vulnerable, and by working for justice. So thanks for listening.