#RevThread # 137
Dishonor
1/One of my favorite characters in the Book of Acts is a Pharisee named Gamaliel. There’s a big fight going on about who’s righteous. Some of the clerics are getting hot enough to put wrong thinkers to death...
Dishonor
1/One of my favorite characters in the Book of Acts is a Pharisee named Gamaliel. There’s a big fight going on about who’s righteous. Some of the clerics are getting hot enough to put wrong thinkers to death...
2/When Gamaliel -- “a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people,” got up to talk, he looked at the oh so righteous ones and said, “You might even be found opposing God!”
3/Right now, we have a barely sane monster of greed and lust leading America.
4/Trump was brought to us courtesy of White Evangelicals. He is lewd, crude, and rude. He lies non-stop, has been accused by 43 women of sexual assault, aligns with cruel despots world wide, abuses and shames our own soldiers. He has a Borgia-level streak of depravity.
5/Yet rallies of White Evangelicals swoon over him because he is, according to his devotees, “so authentic”.
6/I say to my fellow White Evangelicals what Gamaliel said to the self-righteous of his day, “You might even be found opposing God!”
7/Except, I think, in this case we can delete the “might”. You will be found opposing God. Yes, you the pious. What in God’s name are you doing supporting this lawless man?
8/I’ve spent every week for the past 45 years studying the Scriptures, writing and speaking about them to thousands of people. I’ve done mission work in Africa, Central America and Asia, tended congregations large and small in the Midwest and Northeast...
9/All my experiences with the actual texts of Holy Scripture tell me -- “Watch out! Do not follow this man! He is a force of destruction, a revelation of what is wrong in this age.”
10/ The problem isn’t Democrats; the problem isn’t Hillary or other ‘uppity women’; the problem isn’t ‘inferior people’ coming in and ruining the population; the problem isn’t the secularism of the age...
11/Doubtless we all have plenty of room for improvement, and always will have. The problem in this moment is the dishonoring of liberty, and the dishonoring of the sacred and imperishable Gospel.
12/That problem, the dishonoring of two sacred inheritances, is being imposed on the world by the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, and the White Evangelical Church.
13/For this spiritual disaster we White Evangelicals have no one to blame but ourselves. The truth is that mobsters like Trump and Guiliani and Putin saw through our masks to the greed lying within, and figured out how easily they could get us to betray what we say we believe.
14/ As Jesus told us, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”
15/ Repentance is in order. We White Evangelicals have, in fact, been found to be opposing God.
