BONUS BLOG: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR A PASTOR SPEAK POLITICALLY

Christi Slizewski Tennyson is a colleague I admire. She has graciously given me expressed permission to share this with you. I know she speaks for many here —

If you don’t want to hear the pastor speak political, then don’t read it. You’ve been warned and I’m not engaging or taking bait today.

These are hard times to minister to God’s people—when the government tear gasses its own citizens so the President can have a photo op—I’m struggling this morning, my friends. It is hard to speak words of hope to others when you can’t even find them for yourself.

So I don’t have words of hope this morning. I am all out. But maybe I have a kernel of wisdom that I can’t believe I even have to say out loud: holding a holy book upside down outside of a church building doesn’t make you a Christian. Full stop. One of my favorite hymns says, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” We are called, as followers of Christ to LOVE OUR NEIGHBORS AS OURSELVES. Love. Your. Neighbor. All of them.

We don’t love our neighbors by throwing canisters of tear gas at them while they’re exercising their first amendment rights. That’s not love. And if you think it is, consider where you may have been standing when Jesus hung on the cross and the crowd was yelling to crucify him. Because I’m sure those Judeans just thought they were good citizens in favor of law and order, too.

There are moments in history in which the Christian faith is diametrically opposed to the empire and so-called law and order. This feels like one of them. Which side of history are you really standing on?