"Once, after I gave an anti-war sermon, a businessman came up to me and said, 'Well, Father, maybe in an ideal world. . . .' I know he meant well, but that’s what we’ve done with most of the teaching of Jesus. We interpret his meaning for some ideal world.

1/5 “Of course, the ideal world is never going to come so we can just ignore 99% of the actual teaching of Jesus, as the institutional church (and I too!) have usually done.

2/5

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) just voted to denounce Christian Nationalism. Here’s a few of the high points:
1/ ga.disciples.org/resolutions/20… “Christian Nationalism is a cultural framework that fuses a radically exclusionary form of Christian supremacist identity with the political and civic participation of a nation’s citizens through the appropriation of Christian language and imagery to amass political power”
2/

Since my account was hacked and I was locked out of it a week, here’s something that happened to me last Sunday night. I went to a prison with @mattslaughter and a few other guys. One of the men who lives at the prison, a strong, stoic, serious man named Fred, asked to speak. 1/ He wanted to share his story. At 18 years old, he was arrested for first degree murder. The prosecutor threatened him with the death penalty and offered him 25 to life if he would plead guilty. 25 years sounded to Fred like a death sentence anyway, so he went to trial. 2/11

Do y’all remember that time Jesus called a poor woman who was desperate for healing for her child a dog? That used to bother me more than it does now, back when people tried to justify it as him “testing her.”

1/7 I think the only way you can read Jesus’ exchange with the woman in question as him testing her is by beginning with the assumption that he had nothing to from anyone.

2/7

A farmer and his teenaged son had a beloved horse who helped their family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”
1/5 A few days later, the horse returned home, bringing with it three other wild horses to the farm as well. “What wonderful news of good fortune!” the neighbors exclaimed. The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”
2/5

A 5-tweet blessing from @henrinouwen. May we have the wisdom to discern and experience more of this in the new year, and the courage to live it.

“If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special.

1/5 “You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter.

2/5

Imagine that you heard about a person who emphatically insisted that the music of Fleetwood Mac is perfect, infallible, inerrant, as Bible people might say. Which songs? Which albums? Studio? Live? All of it. All of the music of Fleetwood Mac is equally important and perfect. 1/7 All of the songs written by Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham are all perfect, whether they are ballads, rock songs, songs celebrating love or damning it, fast songs, slow songs, songs about drug use and sex and loss and the future, all perfect. 2/7

Thomas Merton on Christian nationalism in 1968(!):

“A ‘Christian nationalist’ is one whose Christianity takes second place, and serves to justify a patriotism in whose eyes the nation can do no wrong. 1/7 “In such a case, it becomes ‘Christian faith’ and ‘Christian heroism’ to renounce even one’s Christian protest and to obey the dictates of the (unchristian) Nation without question. 2/7

@RichardRohrOFM rocks

“Many of us grew up thinking God wanted us to be right, to be correct, even to be perfect. . . . [Instead] God wants people who are in right relationship, which means that we are open, and that we can listen to others with understanding and compassion.” 1/4 “[W]e keep condemning ourselves and others for not being perfect, for not being right, for not being correct. This parable, really one of the most beautiful in all the gospels, tells us what God desires - simply that we remain connected, a branch on the vine[.]” 2/4

Thank you and @Beemer251 and others for inviting some addition conversation. Below are a few tweets where I try to get in the ballpark. Feel free to weigh in. 1/4

https://twitter.com/annettebannist4/status/1555609817850462208

2/4

https://twitter.com/preston_shipp/status/1477462500128043016

I think the Bible is a collection of diverse literature, authored and compiled by pre-scientific human beings, writing in different cultures and languages and for different purposes, trying to make sense of life with a God that they, and we, will never comprehend. 1/6 Not everything the Bible says about God is true. While the authors were inspired to write about God, they got some things wrong in their attempts to understanding a God we’ll never grasp. But sometimes the Bible contains truths so beautiful and profound that we memorize them. 2/6

Well let me just do my part to correct this. I have a friend who learned braille while he was serving life without parole for a crime he committed as a kid. The law changed, and he ultimately got out. Now he translates books into braille so blind people have reading material.

https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1553827357345161217

I have another friend who was also serving juvenile life without parole. The law changed, he got out, and became a minister. The area he was living in was a good desert, so he started a food ministry. He currently feeds over 700 needy families a week.

Speaking for myself, when I see people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or William Wolfe beginning to extol the values of Christian nationalism, I take it as an implicit admission that they are in support of a white supremacist fascist state, not unlike Germany in the 1930s. 1/8 When people fashion a bogeyman out of critical race theory or the Black Lives Matter movement, I take it as a tacit admission that they oppose any truthful telling of history that does not reinforce the myth of white supremacy and support the subjugation of minorities. 2/8

Back in 2014, Tim Cook of Apple became the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to come out as gay. We were eating at Jet’s Pizza as the news scrolled across the bottom of the TV. 1/11 My oldest daughter, who was 10 at the time, asked, “What is ‘gay?’” After we explained to her that it means that either two men or two women love each other like her mom and I did, my daughter wanted to know why that was on the news. 2/11