Tag: Donald Trump

Being Human — Chapter Six — A world of (im)pure imagey-nations

This is an adaptation of the sixth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

How does this image make you feel? Is your stomach rumbling?

What about this one? Are you salivating just a little?

And what about this one — can you imagine sitting in this lounge room?

How about this kitchen? How does it make you feel about your house?

It’s interesting — isn’t it — the way images work in our minds to create desires.

I could have shown you images of beautiful people — but I’m trying to keep things PG and these pictures of food came from the #foodporn and #houseporn hashtags on Instagram.

It’s not just Instagram that stokes our desire for food or furniture — you can have your senses tantalised on MasterChef, or My Kitchen Rules — and you can cultivate dissatisfaction with your kitchen appliances on The Block.

The Block had extra drama in 2022, with a couple bailing after one episode; because it wasn’t on-brand for them — it didn’t mesh with their image; Elle Ferguson’s in the image business… she’s a world-famous Instagram influencer. Being an influencer is a desirable new career path; the ABC is even reporting on children becoming professional influencers — and how powerful these influencers are.

It’s a tricky life. Aussie academic, Nina Willment, says influencers live with the constant threat of not being seen; if they don’t keep making content they might be punished by the machine overlords — the algorithm.

“The threat of invisibility is a constant source of insecurity for influencers, who are under constant pressure to feed platforms with content. If they don’t, they may be ‘punished’ by the algorithm – having posts hidden or displayed lower down on search results.”
Nina Willment, The Dark Side of Content Creation

But it’s not just influencers who reduce themselves to images and perform for a machine-like audience; in the age of expressive individualism, Instagram’s on hand inviting you to express yourself with the tools they provide.

Image making is part of being human; it’s what God does, and it’s part of images made in the image of an image maker (Genesis 1:27).

The catch is, when we live as images in a world where we have cut ourselves off from God — where we’re “buffered” — we’re not sure what image it is we’re meant to be like, and so we often end up choosing other people… And often it’s not just our parents, in our visual culture it’s celebrities — or, increasingly, influencers.

Christopher Hedges wrote the book Empire of Illusion, about life in a world dominated by images that are produced to manipulate us and keep us playing along with the image makers; the celebrity-making machines, and he says when we turn to celebrities — or influencers — as idealised forms of ourselves, it ends up impacting us; instead of being fully real, or fully self-actualised, we’re never sure who we are.

“Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully actualised, never fully real in a celebrity culture.”
Christopher Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Maybe we’re not buffered selves, but buffering — always trying to become who we are more fully, but never quite finished and ready to go.

With the sheer volume of evolving images how could we feel whole? We’re perpetually looking for the next image — whether that’s a meal, a house design, a holiday, a relationship, or some visionary version of ourselves.

In an article updating the argument in his book after Donald Trump’s election — Hedges says we’re worshippers of the electronic image — our modern-day idols shape our fantasies; our hearts and our lives. Even our interactions with others are shaped by all sorts of pixelated pictures, whether that’s through interacting on screens; or spending our time seeing people’s bodies in pixelated form.

“Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and fame they impart. We yearn to become idolised celebrities. We measure our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate.”
Hedges, Worshipping the Electronic Image

Hedges reckons Donald Trump’s reality TV instincts made him a perfect politician for the digital image world — he’s mastered the cultivation of political images — we saw this in this image during a series of FBI raids.

Bizarrely Trump seems to be the embodiment of all the vices from Colossians (Colossians 3:5), but his image-making machine controls the Republicans, and about 80% of people who identify as evangelical Christians in the US — and we might feel a world away, but consider how much of the imagery in our culture and on our screens is pumped out from the US…

Trump’s image-making is catching — those following his playbook can look like images in a live action role playing game, or like they’re playing multiple characters at once.

This isn’t new; we’ve always been shaped by images — once it was stained glass windows, and paintings that told the story about an enchanted cosmos, what’s new is the medium; and it’s much cheaper to make a digital photo than a stained glass window; today our icons are the pictures flashing across our screens.

“In the Middle Ages, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And it’s not just foodporn, obviously — porn itself is embedded in our culture and our imaginations — our image making. Both as an image maker and in the way its norms flow into the way human bodies are presented in advertising and entertainment.

Hedges is a lapsed Presbyterian minister who became an award-winning war correspondent — his book has a whole chapter on porn — and it’s like he’s covering a war; it has way too much information to be comfortable reading — he reckons porn both shapes and mirrors the violence, cruelty and degradation in our society the same way war can; and that porn is producing a loss of empathy by reducing human beings — and human bodies — to being commodities.

“The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy… It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

He suggests porn is part of a society that kills both the sacred and the human, replacing empathy and human desire — eros — and compassion with power, control, force and pain — and the idea that we are gods, and others will literally bend to our fantasies…

“It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods… Porn is the glittering façade… of a culture seduced by death.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And we’re seeing the costs of this society in our society — in our schools even — I read this news story about how young boys raised on porn are sexually assaulting their classmates in record numbers.

Melinda Tankard Reist from Collective Shout wrote about the impact of porn not just in assault, but in the expectations placed on teen girls in dating relationships a few years ago where she said the culture, for teens shaped by porn, is that sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy, and authentic human connection — that young people are learning cruelty and humiliation not intimacy and love — this is what happens when we’re just bodies ruled by desire, or see each other just as pixelated images in the flesh, where our desires have been shaped by dehumanising images.

“Sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy and authentic human connection. Young people are not learning about intimacy, friendship and love, but about cruelty and humiliation.”
Melinda Tankard Reist

The culture we live in that commodifies people by turning them into images isn’t just happening in Instagram, or porn, it’s shaping dating — our relationships are increasingly mediated by digital images. One third of all new romantic relationships now begin online, it’s the most common way people get together.

And platforms like OkCupid — who promise dating for every single person — that’s clever — and who can even cater for niches like “people who like kissing while sitting in pie.”

Success on these sites requires cultivating an image that’ll make you attractive to others. And pictures create heaps more interaction than words; they have run studies.

David Brooks — who writes for the New York Times — wrote an article about online dating in 2003, celebrating how it was reintroducing a formal structure and ritual to dating, which he thought had been lost:

“Online dating puts structure back into courtship. For generations Americans had certain courtship rituals.”
David Brooks, Love: Internet Style, New York Times, 2003

He reckoned these platforms were all about love…

“But love is what this is all about. And the heart, even in this commercial age, finds a way.”
Brooks, 2003

In 2015 he wrote another piece — and he had changed his tune — he noticed something about the way these platforms worked — when we go to an online dating site on the same browser they use for their online shopping, we inevitably bring the same mindset — we shop for human beings. He says these platforms commodify people particularly by reducing people to a picture.

“People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t… It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people.”
David Brooks, ‘The Devotion Leap,’ New York Times, 2015

And this process is more or less the opposite of love.

“Online dating is fascinating because it is more or less the opposite of its object: love.”
Brooks, 2015

Things have become more complex since 2015 — dating sites like OkCupid have lost market share to apps focused on instant gratification and immediate availability; where even the rituals of the old web dating have been deconstructed with a swipe of the finger, and where image is everything.

Photography itself is interesting — it has rapidly evolved as part of everyday life since the mechanisation of camera production in the 70s; before then most people didn’t spend time taking photos; even then cameras had built-in limits — like film — but the jump from mechanical to digital means we now have a seemingly unlimited capacity to capture every moment — and then see everything on our screens.

Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay ‘On Photography‘ in the 70s where she was worried then that to capture and shoot images was an act of aggression — think of the words “capture” and “shoot.”

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography

Photographers, she says, are “always imposing standards on their subjects,” and objectifying them.

She saw the need — once families had cameras — to capture every moment as an addictive aesthetic consumerism.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
Sontag, On Photography

She suggests industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies, and this bombardment of imagery becomes an irresistible form of mental pollution.

“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
Sontag, On Photography

This was before the smartphone. Imagine how she would feel about the digital society…

Have you thought about it this way? The idea that images are polluting our brains, and shaping our desires, and reshaping our bodies — but we’re bombarded with images and these images shape our desires and produce reactions in our bodies; and we’re being discipled by our digital society — even by algorithms — to interact with images and present ourselves as images… and normally as images that keep making people more money, by stoking more desires and selling us the answer.

God made us as image bearers to see… to imagine… and to make images.

God made beauty.

He made fruit that was pleasing to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:9); but this visualising — our capacity to imagine — either leads us to or away from God. “Pleasing to the eye” and “good for food” is how Eve sees the fruit she’s been told is not good to eat too (Genesis 3:6). Then this pattern of seeing and desiring and being led to destructive sin repeats — it’s the same story with the Nephilim (Genesis 3:6, 6:2), and with David and Bathsheba (Genesis 3:6, 2 Samuel 11:2-4).

This relationship between sin and desire is also caught up in idolatry — so the Ten Commandments include a command not to make graven images of God (Exodus 20:4-5); and Deuteronomy commands Israel to watch themselves carefully and to avoid making images of living things to worship them (Deuteronomy 4:15-18), because those images will profoundly shape our vision of God and our life in the world.

What do you think Moses would have said about Instagram?

It’s interesting, though, that Israel’s holy spaces — the tabernacle and temple — involve man-made images of trees and fruit (Exodus 25:36); Israel’s eyes and bodies are meant to participate in worship — and making beautiful images of things God made can be part of that — but you won’t find carved images of God; or of animals, or of men or women — images of images of God, because Israel weren’t to worship images; they’re to be images… as soon as we reduce God to an image, or make an image our god, we’re working with a false picture of God; a God who is an image of our making.

This tendency to turn images into gods is pretty ingrained — Ezekiel talks about idols being set up in our hearts; the seat of our desires and loves (Ezekiel 14:4-5)… That’s where images go… Isaiah re-tells an idol making session with someone cooking food over one half of a chunk of wood, then carving an image of a god with the other (Isaiah 44:15), and he says something those of us who live with our phones wedged into our hands with our eyes hunched over giving all our attention… “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?” (Isaiah 44:20).

Are not these images that bombard me, and keep me looking down, and that shape my desires — aren’t they built on the same lies; the same call to misplace our desire, that the serpent used with Eve… Won’t they leave me always dissatisfied? Humans have always been fixated by images.

The New Testament church lived in an image-saturated world — there were statues of the emperors and the Roman gods everywhere; temples on every hill and corner in a city — they also lived in an age of spectacle that upheld the imagery; the degradation of human bodies in blood sports and sexual immorality — and this presented a major challenge for the early church;

They were pretty serious about Jesus’ commands on lust and the heart, and the idea of your eyes causing you to stumble (Matthew 5:28-29), and about his teaching on the eyes and the heart being linked (Matthew 6:21-22). For them, even attending the Roman spectacles; these games, was seen not simply as renouncing your Christian faith, but as announcing you belonged to the ancient empire of illusion. They wanted to cultivate a way of seeing the world that helped them see God, and so live as his images.

Two Aussie theologians — Ben Myers and Scott Stephens — co-wrote a paper about disciplining our eyes in a visual culture; they reckon we also live in a society of spectacle and one of our great moral challenges is deciding what images to look at.

Christians today live in a society of the spectacle. Our lives are dominated to an unprecedented degree by images and by the moral act of looking at them.

Without minimising the damage that sexual imagery does to us; they suggest all imagery is essentially pornography.

“All images today are pornographic: they arouse—but without danger, obligation, or contamination.”
Myers and Stephens, ‘The Discipline of the Eyes: Reflections on Visual Culture, Ancient and Modern,’ in HTML of Cruciform Love: Towards a Theology of The Internet

We’re so conditioned to objectify and worship — that imagery in ads and in social media streams arouse us without the danger of embodied commitment; without creating obligation, or without the complications that come when we actually use our bodies. And the spectacle shapes us.

And I know that some of us are here and we’re struggling with lust; with addiction to porn, and I’m not wanting to minimise that by saying that most of us are struggling with image addiction, in a machine world where the algorithms are geared towards ruining us by making us consumers — I don’t want to minimise it, but maybe I want to reframe the conversations about porn so that you see it as part of a dehumanising world that has objectified and commodified everything and everyone, where we’re taught that a fulfilled life is one where we satisfy our every longing and desire and that we can do this just with imagery — and maybe I think the rest of us should be confronting our own addictions too…

It’s easy for us to look across the ocean and judge the image-driven life of American politics; but ours is the same. It’s easy for us to throw stones at churches built on image, where that goes wrong — like at Hillsong’s New York campus where the image cultivation machine was operating in overdrive. But what about in our church? How do we go about avoiding the worship of images — whether that’s online, or the way we express ourselves?

This is something I’ve been pretty aware of as someone who lives online in an image-soaked world — I’ve resisted selfies, I don’t post or scroll on Instagram, I do scroll Facebook, and find myself comparing and contrasting to all sorts of people — especially other pastors. The sin of comparison will kill you just like any other. One of the ways I compare myself is that I hate when churches post photos from within a church service, especially of preachers — in a way that just creates a sort of #churchporn. Where are you engaged in image-based comparison? What spectacles can’t you turn your eyes from? What online images are shaping your hearts?

We aren’t going to think our way out of idolatrous practices that shape our desires; our loves; our worship — we actually need a new way of life; a new sort of worship and a new image to pursue.

How do we become worshipping images, where images — even the pictures on the screen — help us worship God rather than conforming our imaginations?

This, I take it, is what Paul is teaching the Colossians to do in their own world of idolatrous spectacle; he starts his letter by introducing Jesus as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15-16). Jesus is the one worthy of our worship, because in him and for him all things on heaven and earth were created; and because he has redeemed us and is reconciling us to God…

And then he calls his readers away from idolatry by calling us to lift our eyes; not focusing on the images we’re inclined to worship; but because we’ve been raised with Jesus and because he’s seated at the right hand of God in heaven, and that’s our future and what should be our desire; we should fix our hearts and minds on things above (Colossians 3:1-2); and this’ll mean cultivating a new way of looking at the world.

Because we’re called to take off the old self — with its practices (Colossians 3:9-10), that’s going to include practices of seeing, as we put on a new self with new practices of seeing and worshipping, so that we’re renewed in the image of its creator — which Paul says back in chapter 1 is not just the Father, but Jesus as well.

We’re to put to death what belongs to our earthly nature (Colossians 3:5-6) — a nature shaped by worshipping earthly stuff — seeing, desiring, and taking — by how we approach sex, lust, desire, and greed — which is idolatry — and I reckon Paul’s saying the stuff that belongs to our earthly nature is idolatry — these are paths to death; to God’s wrath. So kill them.

And take up new life — clothing ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience, and forgiveness — seeing others the way God sees them — and ourselves as God sees us — and over all this; love — the virtue that binds them all (Colossians 3:12-14).

When Paul talks about practices in the world — and with others — and these virtues — these practices have to include new ways of looking at the world, and at others — we can’t look at the world, and others, as objects to be consumed — lusted after — desired. That’s deadly idolatry. That’s what porn is; it cultivates death in you — your eyes, your heart, your body are all being aligned to death — but it’s also what any idolatrous image making and image-viewing does for us; instead we should be looking at others and at the things God made in order to learn compassion and kindness and humility — self-denial — gentleness and patience — these are the virtues opposite to pornworld and the age of instant gratification; and when we embrace these new patterns of looking it should transform our community so that we are images who look like Jesus in compelling and truly human ways.

The sort of practices we’re going to need are — like last week — ascetic — cultivating the discipline not to look; to self-deny — and aesthetic — cultivating an ability to look through the goodness and beauty of created things; and to use our desires and our eyes in ways that throw us towards the one in whom all things are made and reconciled.

But we need a third practice; too — one of keeping Jesus — keeping heavenly realities before our eyes, and shaping our hearts — so that as we say no to idolatry and yes to beauty our hearts are being governed by the image we worship; the image of God. This’ll be what stops us being buffered — closed off to God — and buffering — never fully human — we become fully human as we worship God who made us, and are renewed as his image bearers.

In terms of saying no — you might need to do an audit of your image viewing; being confronted with images in an age of spectacle is inevitable, but what can you do to not just turn your eyes, but keep your eyes looking where they should be. What apps do you need to delete? Delete them now. Just say no. What social media platforms or TV shows or games or magazines are cultivating your idolatry? Step back from them until you can step into them as an image bearer captivated by Jesus.

Job has that famous line about making a covenant with his eyes not to look at a woman lustfully (Job 31:1-2) — and there’s an app you might use to fight porn called Covenant Eyes, but if all imagery is pornographic — maybe we all need to make commitments not to look lustfully at sex, or violence, or food, or symbols of wealth, or whatever it is that turns our heart… and the word lustfully here is key; it doesn’t say don’t look at beautiful people or things God made; it’s about our hearts.

Ben Myers and Scott Stephens reckon we need to — in community — cultivate visual disciplines; periods of asceticism — where we put the screens down — as necessary parts of our spiritual life.

“Do Christian communities still believe it is possible to cultivate visual disciplines, and periods of visual asceticism, as necessary parts of the spiritual life? Do we recognize the moral value of providing havens from the dominance of the image, while also nourishing alternative traditions of perception?”
Myers and Stephens

They reckon this sort of discipline is necessary to give our eyes a break.

This is one of the reasons we do so little on social media and the web as a church — there are other reasons, like not wanting to put church forward as an “image” thing to be consumed — but you don’t need your screen. And we need to cultivate other ways of using our eyes; our perception as well.

Myers and Stephens remind us that we can see one another — the faces of living saints — as part of being shaped by images, but also suggest works of art might play a part. In Christian traditions other than ours; like the ones with stained glass storytelling; people’s imaginations were formed — catechised — using pictures; art.

“Do we offer catechesis in the use of holy images, whether these are works of art or the faces of living saints?”
Myers and Stephens

We Protestants tend not to have an aesthetic, or a sense of the place of art and beauty — both making and appreciating it — in our lives as a form of discipline or disciple making; art is a life-giving alternative to the death-taking imagery of porn and advertising…

And here’s where we might cultivate what Alan Noble calls an aesthetic life as a disruptive witness to the world — a life that values and even collects beauty because beautiful things — art, poems, flowers — create an allusionary sense that the world is enchanting, in a world of illusionary images, we need these allusionary images — images that allude to the beauty and character of God as creator.

“What makes a work of art, a poem, or a flower beautiful is the way it suggests more, the way it opens up possibilities, the way it alludes to other things in creation.”
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

He reckons this approach to aesthetics resists commodification — recognising beauty and the creatureliness or createdness of people and things reminds us of the creator; and reminds us we’re not just commodities where nothing matters — the world doesn’t just exist for our grasping; but is shot through with meaning that we’re meant to probe, as humans.

“Aesthetics reveals an irreducible universe — a universe that resists our attempts at totalizing and controlling it, that is always just out of grasp, that always offers us a little more meaning.”
Noble

This might even involve how we decorate our homes, and the food we serve on our tables — not just with images from Instagram; where people are trying to cultivate a sense of self through performance, but images that have a more artistic and allusionary quality that pull us towards the enchanted world; it might also involve practising noticing beauty in creation without taking photos at all, connecting with God’s world — and your body — and receiving beauty with thanksgiving.

Paul’s big solution to guide us as we do this is that we let the message of Christ dwell among us richly as we teach and admonish one another — with wisdom — contemplation of God’s world and how to live in it — through creativity; through poetry — through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit — songs we humans create as temples of the Spirit in response to setting our hearts on things above, and through engaging our voices and hearts as we sing to God — with gratitude in our hearts.

And his goal is that whatever we do — whatever images we make or see — as we live as renewed images — whatever we do we’re to do in the name of the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father through him. If you can’t do that when you encounter or create an image, then there’s a good chance it’s an idol (Colossians 3:15-17).

September 3, 2025 Add Comment

How to make saying “Jesus is still king” actually something comforting, not something jerky and dismissive

Trump has been president-elect for a week now. And Jesus is still on his throne.

The fallout from the election has been pretty interesting, but perhaps the thing I’ve found most frustrating in it all… apart from the damage Trump’s election may or may not do to Gospel proclamation when it turns out the white evangelical American church was seduced by a narcissist who’d promise them anything and everything so he could get into power, and perhaps that he doesn’t really want to share that power with anyone… apart from that the thing I’ve found most frustrating is the rush to the Spiritual high ground in the midst of genuine lament. Which is what the statement “Jesus is still king” actually feels like (even if its well-intentioned and absolutely true).

One of the great failings of our modern western version of Christianity is the death of lament. I know this because this was one of the things I fought hardest against in college before giving up my objections. I didn’t think lament was important, I thought truth and the enlightenment that comes from it was what should give us comfort in the mess of life and suffering. But that’s terrible and inhumane. I’m now convinced from how we see lament play out in the Bible (in the wisdom literature and the prophets but especially in the words of Jesus on the cross) that lament in itself is part of the process of being human, and being comforted.

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). — Matthew 27:46

This is pure lament. In fact. It’s a quote from one of the Psalms of Lament (Psalm 22). It’s a deep irony that in the moment that Jesus is enthroned; he laments. We’ve lost that paradox. I suspect it might have been of little comfort to Jesus if someone had run up to him at that moment and said “but you are now on your throne” and “this is God’s grand and infinitely complex plan for the salvation of the world”… what sort of jerk would you have to be to do that in his moment of great suffering, in his moment of lament.

There is much to lament about when it comes to Trump’s election, especially if you’re already feeling marginalised in a society that favours the strong and dominant, or if you care deeply about such people, especially perhaps if you’d love more people at the margins of our society to know that the Gospel of Jesus is good news when many spokespeople for the Gospel of Jesus have started also proclaiming the counter-gospel of Trump. And by this I’m meaning ‘gospel’ in the political (and original) sense in which it is good news — the proclamation of the arrival of a king and their kingdom; and by counter-gospel I mean compare everything Trump says and stands for with the Cross and the beatitudes and anything Jesus ever said or did… There’s lots to lament, and perhaps some things to celebrate if you like your Supreme Court judges conservative and if that’s why you voted the way you did… but that you are celebrating (which 81% of the white evangelical church may well be, though most of them apparently voted while holding their noses) does not give you space to invalidate the lament of others, or to simply proclaim this fundamental truth — the real Gospel — about Jesus being enthroned as though that should pull them from their grief. There are much better ways to make that truth ring out as a comfort to the grieving. Here are two things I think need to happen before people will hear this proclamation in any way that is helpful; those words are a necessary comfort, this isn’t a ‘preach the Gospel, when necessary use words’ thing, but a recognition that preaching is never just words. Ethos and pathos are part of the package of any proclamation of the ‘logos’. That is who we are, and how we say things, will always shape the way what we say is received and whether it is heard and effective.

Listen to, and join, people in their lament.

Evil sucks. Suffering sucks. Lament is a good response to that because the God we lament to does not stand apart from our suffering. Jesus is king, and that is meant to make a difference in the world, starting with the church. I’m as keen as the next person to scoff at the universities who are giving their students playdough and colouring in books to help them through grief… or to think people taking to the streets and looting probably isn’t really helping… that represents our prevailing culture’s paucity of resources when it comes to genuine lament and processing tragedy. And perhaps we’d have a counter-example to offer if we hadn’t systematically beaten lament out of the life of the church in pursuit of nodding head-smart piety. We need to rediscover how to lament; we need to make space for it, which means we need to listen to those voices who haven’t given up lamenting… those people who are suffering, without simply shouting truth into, or over the top of, it. And this, the election of Trump, is an opportunity.

Just because you aren’t lamenting doesn’t make lamenting invalid; maybe the victims of injustice have a better proximity to that injustice to decide how to respond… maybe, for example, white evangelical men (like me) aren’t actually in the best place to assess what Trump’s election means to women, or people of colour. Maybe we should listen to stories like this one about being an abuse survivor in church and reacting to Trump’s election before jumping in with the platitude that Jesus is king. We could also have listened to abuse survivors talking about the detrimental impact of Christian support of Trump before his election too… it wasn’t like there was no warning that a significant portion of our community would feel like this. Maybe we should be listening to the communities at the margins — the non-white communities, the LGBTQI communities, etc, and hearing their concerns — whether they’re in the church or not, before jumping in with proclamations that seem to make no difference to their day to day experience of marginalisation and fear? There is a way to make a difference, I think, and we’ll get to that, but the first step is to listen before we speak. To understand. And to join in the grief and lament we hear from our friends at what is wrong with the world.

What I learned in college, and continue to learn as I pastor people who are suffering, is that sometimes saying technically correct things can be true but unhelpful. Sometimes it’s best just to sit in and share the pain for a while; and to cry out in protest, anger even, to the God who is sovereign and the king who is enthroned. Sometimes you should shut up for a while and listen. Sometimes you should live out a truth in such a way that it allows you to enter suffering because you know it is temporary not just invalidate the reality of that suffering because you know it will pass. One time where this is true is while people are grieving. And that’s one of the lessons we learn in the book of Job.

Job’s friends are jerks. Some of them say things that are just wrong; they tend to spiritualise a bunch of Ancient Near Eastern wisdom and give Job answers for his suffering that are just totally off base; that he’s being punished for doing wrong. That he’s not the righteous dude he thinks he is. That he’s experiencing retribution from God for sin. But the narrative of the book of Job consistently upholds Job as actually being a righteous man. The first three friends are rebuked for having Job wrong… but there’s this other guy, this other friend, who I think isn’t speaking Ancient Near Eastern truth to Job, but Biblical truth, only I think he’s not speaking this truth in a commendable way, and the narrative helps us get there if we read it carefully. Elihu, says things that are true, but just seems to be not all that much of a comfort or a friend to Job. Elihu is the guy who posts “Jesus is king” the day after Trump is elected. Elihu turns to the lamenting Job (who is lamenting for very good reason) and instead of being a human shoulder to cry on, he claims to speak for God, and he says:

“His eyes are on the ways of mortals;
he sees their every step.
There is no deep shadow, no utter darkness,
where evildoers can hide.
God has no need to examine people further,
that they should come before him for judgment.
Without inquiry he shatters the mighty
and sets up others in their place.
Because he takes note of their deeds,
he overthrows them in the night and they are crushed.
He punishes them for their wickedness
where everyone can see them,
because they turned from following him
and had no regard for any of his ways.
They caused the cry of the poor to come before him,
so that he heard the cry of the needy.
But if he remains silent, who can condemn him?
If he hides his face, who can see him?
Yet he is over individual and nation alike,
to keep the godless from ruling,
from laying snares for the people.” — Job 34

Basically he’s saying: “God rules. You won’t understand what he’s doing but he’s doing something so shut up with your yammering”… the pre-Jesus equivalent of “Jesus is king.”

I read Elihu’s words and think about the scale of tragedy that’s just been inflicted on Job — he’s lost his whole family, his wife, his children… everything. And I think “Elihu, you need to get out more” and many other swear words that I can’t write. When I read the opening of Job I imagine myself in his shoes, and the loss of all those I love… and that’s precisely what his friends should be doing when they approach him. Imagining and empathising. And it’s precisely where they fail… and where we often fail too.

There are plenty of pietistic readings of Job that jump on board with Elihu because he’s a brash, young, truth teller who seems to be doing the Biblically wise thing of starting wisdom with the fear of the Lord and speaking accordingly. But being a brash, young, hothead isn’t typically what a wise person looks like (when wisdom is described in Proverbs), so that Elihu is described as a bit of a hot-head should be a warning sign that all is not well when it comes to his words, even if they’re totally right (for more on this see my friend Arthur’s analysis of how the narrator treats Elihu). Pietism like this often feels like a case of leaving your humanity at the door and being God in a particular situation — seeing the world God’s way — and that’s a problem because we can’t throw our humanity out, and we’re not called to. A significant amount of the Biblical response to God ruling through evil despots is lament at God’s judgment even amidst the knowledge that God’s judgment is just and that God does rule. Habakkuk, for example, opens up his book with lament…

“How long, Lord, must I call for help,
    but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
    so that justice is perverted.” — Habakkuk 1:2-4

He’s totally on board with the idea that what’s going on via powerful foreign kings who don’t stand for God’s kingdom is part of God’s sovereign plan, but he asks this totally legitimate question… And even if this suffering is God’s judgment, that doesn’t mean we just sit on the sidelines while people are suffering because it’s God’s job to judge and our job to be the cheer squad. Our job is to be human, and to love our neighbours. Or, as God condemns those who stand on the sidelines while his judgment is playing out in Obadiah 1… not being moved by the plight of those under judgment earns us judgment…

Because of the violence against your brother Jacob,
    you will be covered with shame;
    you will be destroyed forever.
On the day you stood aloof
    while strangers carried off his wealth
and foreigners entered his gates
    and cast lots for Jerusalem,
    you were like one of them.
You should not gloat over your brother
    in the day of his misfortune,
nor rejoice over the people of Judah
    in the day of their destruction,
nor boast so much
    in the day of their trouble.
You should not march through the gates of my people
    in the day of their disaster,
nor gloat over them in their calamity
    in the day of their disaster,
nor seize their wealth
    in the day of their disaster.
You should not wait at the crossroads
    to cut down their fugitives,
nor hand over their survivors
    in the day of their trouble. — Obadiah 1:10-14

Our job isn’t to jump in to God’s judgment as sword wielding head kickers like a little brother keen to dob on his sister so she gets more anger (and credit to Mark Baddeley from QTC for both pointing this out, and this example), our job is to be brother and sister, to be the friend who comforts our loved one as we see them suffering… whether they deserved the smack or not.

Now back to Job and Elihu… and the question of responding the right way to lament and suffering…

The God of the Bible, the God who speaks to Job, and who Job trusts in, is more than a distant God who sometimes chooses to remain silent. He is a God who lives, and who speaks, and who enters in to our suffering. That’s what Job’s friends should’ve done. Job’s friends — including Elihu — could’ve learned a lot from Jesus who joins us in lament to the point of his crucifixion where he takes those famous words of lament upon his own lips… as he suffers the world with us, and death for us. Jesus both models the human response to suffering, and speaks and lives God’s response to suffering… and it’s not simply platitudes. He gets alongside us in our suffering, and he also joins in the lament… then he does something about it by pointing us to what is good, and true, and beautiful, and eternal.

Cultivate a kingdom-within-the-kingdom where an alternative to Trump is lived out in a compelling and comforting way

When Trump was elected last week there were a bunch of people rushing to be ‘Elihu’; running to the Spiritual high ground to piously speak real truth in the face of genuine lament as though truth alone is enough to pull people from their grief into comfort. The spiritual high ground isn’t actually where Job wants us to end up though… it wants us on the ground looking up at truth about God, next to the grieving, not speaking down at them. The low ground might just be where real spirituality, and real knowledge of God, can be found. Especially if in Jesus we see the face and hands of the God who speaks to Job… and the answer to Job’s confident declaration in the face of his friends’ terrible advice (and terrible friendship).

“I know that my redeemer lives,
    and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me! — Job 19:25-27

Speaking truth is really important; but so is where you speak it from. Truth without the attachment and emotion that come from empathy doesn’t actually comfort (in my experience giving or receiving it). Life doesn’t work like that. We’re more than simply brains on a stick waiting for a good argument to pull us out of our feelings. Feelings pull us out of feelings. Truth is helpful for this — but we feel truth emotionally as much as we know it intellectually; and providing an intellectual answer to someone who is lamenting, whether you think they should be lamenting or not, is a pretty jerky thing to do.

When we say “Jesus is king” and aren’t really living like it we’re actually undermining the truth of this statement and its power. We’re putting all our persuasive eggs in the basket marked ‘head’… When we say ‘Jesus is king’ to an abuse victim grieving that a bloke who turned abuse into a badge of honour, or worse, simply ‘locker room talk’ is now the most powerful man in the universe but aren’t at the same time creating a church community that thoroughly repudiates that sort of behaviour, well, I’ll let this anonymous storyteller’s words do the job…

“So when I hear Donald Trump talking degrading women and talking about using their bodies, that’s not objective for me. He’s the representation of my abuser, writ large on a television screen and given a powerful platform.

However, my abuser wasn’t the only one by whom I felt violated. Christians failed me badly as well. When I revealed what had been going on, my family and I were advised by the pastor to leave the church. In our absence, lies, rumours and accusations circulated the church which were eventually fed back to us. “Everyone knows he’s a bit handsy – why is she being so sensitive?” [Why was the ‘handsy’ guy allowed to be a youth leader if everyone knew?] “Maybe she asked for it.” “It was just once.” [It was 2 years of planned assault, by his own admission.]

So when I hear Donald Trump brag that the women he assaulted enjoyed it, it’s personal, because the same things were said about me. And when I hear others minimise what he did, it’s personal, because my testimony was also despised.”

The way this case was handled is terrible, and we can’t say it’s isolated (nor is it perceived to be isolated). We have a Royal Commission going on in Australia that makes it pretty clear that our house isn’t in order on this stuff. This story is terrible precisely because it represents a failing to live the truth that Jesus is king — the king who came to bring sin to light and destroy it — in such a way that might bring comfort and security to this victim or to others… So when Christians say “Jesus is king” in response to genuine lament, what this person hears is something quite different.

When we say Jesus is king and aren’t living it by pursuing a community that looks like his kingdom (especially if we’re not living it by running to attach ourselves to the centre of worldly kingdoms) the effect is the same on every community marginalised by the community-at-large; and when we respond to tragedy just with these true words, but without pursuing his kingdom with our actions, we’re not actually engaging with where real truth and change and comfort happen. This is a failure of our church to fully imagine the sort of world that this deep truth will ultimately create; that it starts creating through us now.

Imagine a church where abuse victims feel not just heard, but safe. Where their testimonies bring real change because they are taken seriously; where the community is committed to bringing dark things into the light on the big stuff, and that shapes how we approach life together on the small stuff.

Imagine a church that is able to thoroughly, and with real integrity, speak against the abuse happening outside its community because we’re known for taking it so seriously within our community.

Imagine how much more comforting this proclamation would be if our ethos matched our logos; if our community matched our proclamation. If we were a place where the LGBTQI person grappling with their identity and their sense that despite the popular rhetoric they’re oh so very different from their neighbour felt loved and welcomed and safe and able to explore what “Jesus is King” might mean for them?

Imagine if we were a community not just dedicated to treating people as equal regardless of their skin colour, but pursuing justice even at the cost of our own privileged place in the world, and our own comfort.

Imagine if we were trying to tackle racism not just in our affirmation of the image of God in all people at an individual level, but in figuring out what it means for our gatherings and communities to be shaped by different cultures and hearing different voices, not just the dominant white male voice that has tended to make marginalised or minority communities feel like participating in church means becoming white or leaving their own cultural expressions at the door (or not creating the phenomenon of churches that are mono-ethnic and drawn from these minority communities, who create these communities for various reasons that mostly look like our failure to imagine church life together in which the Gospel is plausible for different cultural groups, thus meaning we lose the opportunity to hear their voice).

Imagine the richness of a church community that made space for many voices and many cultures rather than building mono-cultures. Imagine the comfort that’d come from those many voices together proclaiming “Jesus is king.”

Imagine if those words; which are basically the message of the Gospel; were not an empty platitude but a political mantra that described our approach to life in the world; lives dedicated to living out his coming kingdom together.

Imagine if we understood the words “Jesus is king” as where real power lies, and the source of real politics and so didn’t run as fast as we could to attach ourselves to worldly power; be it the democratic process, popularity, or the powerful leader; but instead ran to our suffering neighbours to live with them and comfort them in their suffering, and to the powerful to rebuke them; where in both cases our lives and words model the truth we proclaim.

Imagine how those words “Jesus is king” would be heard then, if they weren’t simply a detached platitude, unmoored from the life we live in the world; or a social media ‘hot take’… the words of young angry hotheads (typically removed from the suffering) who are desperate to tell the world that God really is in control (and he is) in a way that shows how very wise we are.

You may have just imagined what the church should look like. What’s it going to take to get there?

I think it’s going to take less people rushing to be wise like Elihu, and more people responding to suffering and lament, like Jesus. Who joined the chorus while absolutely doing something about it; while securing a lament free future by becoming the enthroned king.

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). — Matthew 27:46

That Jesus is king is a great comfort; but it is made truer and greater still when you sit with the suffering and look up, understanding what’s really at stake, than it is when you stand apart from suffering and look down.

November 17, 2016

Public Christianity and bearing the image of God: some confessions and a response to the response to Q&A’s Christian episode

Confession #1. I have not watched Q&A’s “Christian” special from last night. I’m not yet sure I can stomach it, but I am reading the transcript. There’s some good stuff there, and some bad stuff.

Confession #2. I have followed the discussion about the episode in earnest because when it comes to public ‘texts’ that aim to articulate a vision for the good life in our community — conversations in the public square — the conversation about the text interests me as much, if not more, than the ‘text’ itself.

Confession #3. I have, in the past, said many, many, things about public Christianity that I stand by, but that this post addresses, specifically the idea that the way to get the Gospel into a conversation in the public sphere is to say the name Jesus lots and lots. That’s definitely partly true. But it’s not everything.

Confession #4. I suspect the outcome of what I’m going to suggest below is less Christianity in the public square and more Christianity for the public good, but doing that might get us some invitations back to the adult table (I’m pretty sure Q&A is actually the teenager’s table not the adult’s table).

I do still like the vision for our place in the public square put forward by Scott Stephens from the ABC (summarised here, quoted below). But I don’t think the ‘public square’ as represented by our new media ‘Fourth Estate‘ is actually capable of allowing us to play the role he speaks about. This version of the fourth estate — the role the media was meant to play as a sort of public guardian speaking truth to power by providing a public square — now comes in either in the form of Q&A’s national broadcast of representative debate, or the sort of public square we find on our Social Media platforms where the voices we hear are curated by algorithms and filtered based on popularity. I firmly believe that to achieve Scott Stephen’s utopian vision we may actually need to develop an alternative public square where we can play that role, and that may be less about taking our up role as the ‘First Estate’ with renewed vigour (where the other estates shut us out and don’t see us as part of the ‘estates of the realm‘), and thinking of ourselves as an entirely different realm. Where we might invite more voices to take part in conversations about the common good at our own table, and listen well to them.

“Could it be that the role of the church (and the public broadcaster?) is not so much to be one ideological warrior among many, but the shepherd/keeper of the moral ecology of the public square itself. The defender of whomever is excluded from the public square itself.” — Scott Stephens, at the Emmanuel Centre for the Study of Science, Religion, and Society’s Faith and Public Office Conference

This is a nice sentiment, and a lofty goal, but it’s made harder because our contributions to the public square have, for some time, been at odds with the religion of our day, our secular idols. We are exiles. We don’t belong to the realm, the powers and authorities in our culture anymore, even if we might protest loudly and seek to claim our rightful, historical, place at the table.

We’re marginalised voices not in a sort of woe-is-me I’m being persecuted sense, but in the we’ve-made-a-rod-for-our-own-backs sense. We’ve used the power and influence we’ve had in the public square to silence voices that people are now listening to. Or so they tell us. What’s weird is that we probably actually belong at the margins, if we’re going to take following a crucified king seriously, and whatever power or influence we might have is probably best used on behalf of the poor, the oppressed, and the weak. We’re being pushed to the space we should be speaking from anyway, and now we can listen to these voices that Scott Stephens suggests we should be giving voice to. So there’s that.

It’s possible we’ve allowed too many people to speak in our name, unquestioned, equating conservative morality with God’s kingdom in much the same way that makes this picture so obviously vile and offensive, but without being amplified to cartoonish heights.

trump

So what separates any of our political engagment — our ‘public Christianity’ — from Trump’s? Whether we’re on the right or the left, what is it that protects us from co-opting Jesus for our own agenda and has us living as people tasked with being part of God’s agenda? Because the problem with paying lip service to Jesus in order to get the word cloud looking more “Christian” is that it’s actually not evidence that you’re contributing to the public good as a Christian; that you’re actually doing things for his name. Not yours. The calling of the ‘public Christian’, or the calling to be publicly Christian, is a call to bear the image of Jesus in his world. Paul describes this task succinctly in Colossians 3.

And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. — Colossians 3:17

I’ve, generally speaking and with a few notable exceptions who do things very well, been very vocally critical of public Christianity in Australia. Especially in the media. One of my loudest critiques, often the things I write that have the most ‘virality’ is that our public Christians need to speak about Jesus. We definitely need to get the ‘word’ part right, but ‘word or deed’ isn’t setting up two optional categories, it’s unpacking the ‘whatever you do’… they’re related. Not separate. They’re twin aspects of our image bearing vocation.

I would’ve loved the panelists on the show last night to have spoken more about Jesus, not artificially weaving him in to answers to real questions, but showing how he informs good and real answers to real political questions at every turn. If our answers to any question about life in the world as Christians isn’t built on Jesus, and the virtues that we’re called to exhibit as we live for his name, then they might be ‘wise’ or philosophical, they might even be good and sensible and human, but they’re not meaningfully Christian. There’s plenty of human wisdom that Christians can tap into as citizens as we observe the world, but that always has some connection to the divine nature and character of God, that stuff can inform the public square when it comes to decision making and the shape of our life together, but a good mathematician or health professional can do that sort of thing too (and Christians can, and should, be good mathematicians or health professionals). But when it comes to ‘public Christianity’ we’re talking about our answers to the public’s great needs coming from somewhere beyond simply good science or math. I feel like we’ve lost this central conviction, that Jesus should be at the heart of our politics — literally how we ‘citizen’ — and how we speak into the public square as his ambassadors. His image bearers. I certainly don’t see this conviction articulated in many places whether we’re talking about Christianity’s conservative or progressive arms. The context of that Colossians verse is our new political reality. Our belonging to a new people. Our renewed function as image bearers…

“… you have taken off your old self with its practicesand have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised,barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” — Colossians 3:10-14

Too often our assessment of public Christianity, mine included, is about Logos.

Did they hit the right notes on my Christian shibboleth test?

Did they say “X”?

Where X is our summary of the Gospel, for me, something like: “Jesus is Lord of a new kingdom, he proves it and invites us to take part in it, and be one with him, through his death and resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit”…

And that’s important, but it’s a potentially meaningless criteria if its simply about getting the message right… The Gospel is a message. But it’s a message about an alternative political reality. An alternative emperor; that’s caught up in the first century meaning of the word Gospel. A ‘gospel’ was political good news, delivered by ambassadors, that shaped the lives of citizens. Words matter. The word-made-flesh matters. But in Jesus being word and flesh we see the way to navigate this tension. A human image is embodied. We teach by what we do, by what we consider to be virtuous and how we embody those virtues, and how that embodied life supports and amplifies our speaking. We’ve been Logos heavy, and part of the answer is Ethos, and its relationship to the fruit of our message, to what people do if, or when, they’re persuaded. It’s in lives that match our words, and words that spring to lives from our lives, from the relationships we have in and with our community; from how we love people. It’s not seeing ‘truth’ and ‘love’ as exactly the same thing, as though we love simply by speaking, or as completely disconnected activities. More of the answer comes from properly seeing the Gospel as a challenge to the political orders of the world, not just a detached bit of news that leaves us unchanged. This stuff changes everything, and the change is demonstrated in the examples we live in our world.

Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do. For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.Their mind is set on earthly things.But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. — Philippians 3:17-20

This new “citizenship” is why we might end up excluded from ‘estates of the realm’ when the realm belongs to those opposed to Christianity and to Jesus. This is why thinking of the church as belonging to that realm as a separate estate to the media, as the ‘first estate of the realm,’ not as a realm of its own, will also lead to trouble. We are citizens of something new, but we still have obligations to love our neighbours, and part of that love must surely be in seeking their good by modelling and articulating an alternative Christ-centered vision of life whenever, and wherever, we’re invited to speak.

This typical ‘Logos-centric’ approach, an approach I’ve been guilty of, is an anemic vision of what it means to be publicly Christian. To do “Christian politics.” It puts too much weight on proclamation and not enough on the ethos that goes with it, and I think it makes the criteria a simple check box that some of us, me included, are prepared to tick off if people simply give lip service to Jesus. This is a dangerous check-box if it means we’ll pass people who say things that are totally at odds with the sort of lives of love, and vision for human flourishing, that the Gospel brings and exemplifies in the person of Jesus, or fail people who are living those lives out of Christian convictions but don’t totally land the Gospel in their delivery. There are reasons to pass or fail people at either end of the spectrum… but it’s not enough to tick-a-box for the Gospel, or to quote bits of the Bible that seem to support our position, any monkey, even Trump, can do that.

A certain subset of people reading this, the type who have jumped on the same bandwagon as me with a bit of vigour (and often not much sympathy for the way public Christianity via the media takes place) might switch off here, especially if it sounds like I’m saying “preach the Gospel, when necessary use words” — I’m absolutely not saying that. Words are always necessary, and as Christians, our words about life in the commonwealth as Christians with a view to the common good, should always be fundamentally informed by the Word-made-flesh, and point to him as the model of the good life, and the solution to our bad and damaging ways of life.

Successful public Christianity, whether its on the TV or on your street, is about genuinely grappling with who Jesus is and what he is remaking us to be as we share in his death and resurrection, living out the fruits of this new life, and this grappling, and inviting others to do the same. It’s about adopting a posture of other-loving humility that informs our words and our manner. Trump clearly hasn’t done that, if you listen to what he says about Christianity, but if you listen carefully to many of our Christian voices, voices coming from people I believe are often genuinely Christians, we don’t get much of a sense of this deep-seated conviction that the Gospel creates a political reality. We need Christian images, not simply disembodied Christian voices. Which means the adversarial Q&A format is an interesting challenge… We need to rest in our new citizenship, and develop a new vision for what life together with other kingdoms, following other gods, looks like. Because that’s what Christian politics is about. Citizenship. That’s what shapes our ethos, or image, and feeds into our words. A belief that Jesus is Lord is something that should lead us to proclaim that truth, and build a community around it. A community of Christians though; its loony cultural-colonialism to expect people to live as Christians without the Gospel. The Lordship of Jesus, and his example of love and the ultimate picture of what human life should look like, should help us form coherent opinions on all sorts of social issues so that words on our lips aren’t window dressing, but are substantiated by our lives, and show why we do things differently.

In an age where the public square is contested, and the Christian voice is losing a position of power it held too vigorously and too long to the point that the power corrupted us, we need something more sophisticated than bumper sticker Christianity. Conservative or progressive secular politics with a bit of Jesus chucked in on top. We need to be able to articulate a radically different vision of humanity and ‘kingdom’ that comes from our new citizenship, and our new way of seeing the world, which begins with the death and resurrection of Jesus and seeks to make his name great in the world. We need to recapture the sense that public Christianity is a fundamentally human activity caught up in our created vocation of carrying God’s image throughout his world, as his image bearers, especially as this image — that is broken by our decision to bear the image of false gods — is being restored by God’s Spirit so we are transformed into the image of Jesus. Our persuasive efforts in the public sphere are about being people of this new kingdom, ambassadors from a different sort of kingdom, pointing to the conquering king. His name should be on our lips not as a token ‘get the Gospel in to the Public Square’ box to tick, but because our foundational belief is that a public square founded on anything else is deadly and destructive.

Too much of our ‘public Christianity’ — some of which is on display in the transcript from last night that I’ve read so far — is just us picking a political side that we’ve been indoctrinated into by our culture, our parents, or what appeals to us. The default human institutions — left or right — with a bit of Jesus. Sometimes it’s not so simple. Sometimes we’re informed by some part of our Christianity that is not ‘central’ — like a moral framework that we pull from the Old Testament, without Jesus, so we’re constructing our own man-made religious framework, sometimes our actions are shaped by a particular vision of the new creation, an eschatology, where we’re seeking to construct something good without recognising the gap that exists between us and our neighbours is infinite – that we have the mind of Christ, via the Spirit, and they don’t. Sometimes it seems we expect people to take these positions on board in their life, to change their deeds, without being transformed into the image of the one whose name we now live for, the one who stands at the centre of the cosmos and models the way of love for us, and so rightly stands at the centre of any true picture of how we should do life together as people. Too much of it assumes we have a right to have a voice at the table in an estate that is not ours. Too much assumes that we’re to hold on to, or wield, power (in the form of lobbying) for the sake of ‘Christians’, not use whatever power or influence we have for the sake of others (in the form of advocacy). Too much of us leaves Jesus acting as the ambassador of whatever worldly cause has co-opted us, even if it’s morally good and naturally worthwhile, so that we, and he, are ambassadors for morality and nature, and not for the one who is truly moral and created all things.

If you’re going to be a public Christian, which we should all be every time we cross the threshold of our homes and walk into public space, and any time we invite the public into our space, we’d do well to meditate on Colossians 3 and 2 Corinthians 3-5, perhaps especially this bit…

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. — 2 Corinthians 5:14-20

This should ultimately be what separates us from Trump, and keeps us both wanting to speak about Jesus and doing it coherently. It’s who we now are, not just a box we tick to appease the Christians talking about our performance on social media or in 3,000 word rants on their blogs.

April 26, 2016

The nu-Statesman: Obama’s move from comedy to gravitas in two days

So, I go away for a weekend and suddenly Barack Obama is in the box seat to take the presidency again next year. It’s been a good week for Obama (and for West Wing fans). First he put Trump, the Republican’s current darling (for some reasoning as bizarre as the man’s hair) in centre stage on the birther issue by finally presenting the full-form of his birth certificate, killing a conspiracy that could only really thrive in America and in the age of the Internet, then he made him the butt of a couple of cracker one liners at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week.

The Press Dinner speech was probably proof enough that Obama is a man to be reckoned with when in campaign mode. Feel free to skip through the minute or so of Hulk Hogan’s “Real American” theme song…

There’s a transcript here.

“And I know just the guy to do it -– Donald Trump is here tonight! (Laughter and applause.) Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. (Laughter.) And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter –- like, did we fake the moon landing? (Laughter.) What really happened in Roswell? (Laughter.) And where are Biggie and Tupac? (Laughter and applause.)

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. (Laughter.) For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice — (laughter) — at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. (Laughter.) You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. (Laughter and applause.) Well handled, sir. (Laughter.) Well handled.”

This is why journalists love him, and it’s why the opportunity to give compelling speech after compelling speech is going to leave the Republicans scratching their heads if they go with the likes of Trump or Palin – or a Trump/Palin dream ticket. From a speaking/speechwriting perspective – the shortness of his sentences is something to behold. They do all they have to. Nothing more. Nothing less.

This punchiness carries over, though the mood changes, when he turns to serious subject matter – like today’s announcement that Osama is finished. Bin Laden’s exit will no doubt rekindle Obama’s place in the polls. Which for me was the most fascinating part of this speech. His branding of the event as a result of his leadership.

There’s a transcript here.

The imagery here seems a little cliched “cloudless September sky”… “black smoke billowing up” but it carries so much of his retelling of the narrative that it’s poignant rather than cliched.

It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory — hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.

And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.

Obama’s speech today was a corker – and must have been the result of some pretty quick work by his speechwriting team (and he doubtless still works them over pretty thoroughly himself) – it was laden with imagery. Pathos. Gravitas. And a presidential authority that Trump will never muster. It was a triumph of poise over bluster. And one wonders if Trump would feel more at home waving placards with the scare-mongering revellers on the street than pointedly praising the work of Pakistan and describing Osama as an enemy of Islam.

The contrast Obama deliberately seems to create between himself and Osama was both powerful and purposeful – not just to shut up those right-winged idiots who think he’s a muslim with terrorist sympathies. Here’s the three paragraphs where he makes it clear this was “his” achievement.

“And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Then, he subtly shifts the narrative to a contrast between his own symbolic leadership and Bin Laden’s…

“For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda…

…As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.

Bin Laden is an enemy of peace and human dignity, Obama a friend of peace and human dignity.
Bin Laden plots against America, Obama seeks to unite it.
Bin Laden was a fan of wholesale destruction, Obama pinpoints rather than generalises.

And how do you move from a defining moment of one’s personal leadership to an election campaign without sounding like you’re a cynical news-coverage grabbing power junkie? You talk about unity (with a few mentions of your Republican predecessor). You talk about how good your country is. And you take them back to where it all began – the constitution.

“And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.

The cause of securing our country is not complete. But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.

Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

And thus, a campaign is born.

May 2, 2011