“Reuniting a Once Great People” Nov. 22, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Probably everyone in America has heard some echo of a tweet posted by an exhausted and exasperated emergency room nurse in South Dakota. Jodi Doering spoke of the painful irony of caring for patients who denied the existence of Covid-19, even with their last breaths on an intensive care respirator.
You could ask how that could be so? Why would they stick to such an obvious ludicrous belief against all evidence, even as they prepared to take their place in Memorial Gardens? Well, South Dakota’s very cute, 40-something governor, Kristi Noem, might be a part of that answer. She has declared this week that even if a President Biden mandates mask wearing coast to coast, that she will not enforce the mandate in South Dakota. How did the pandemic become partisan in the United States and a few other hot spots around the world? Why did, for example, most Asian nations immediately start wearing masks and maintaining distance, cutting their death tolls to a tiny fraction of ours, while Americans defiantly go to grocery stores, bowling allies, theaters, and even hospitals, bare faced and insisting that the virus was all just a hoax?
It may not be fair to lay it all at his feet, but you know the old saying, “the fish rots from the head.” Donald Trump rose to power in the United States through the use of grade school playground bully rhetoric. He reached down into the brain stem of his base to provoke their fear, but he did by talking tough, and with chest thumping bravado, he divided and divided and divided our nation.
The incoming Biden administration is well aware that they have a Herculean task ahead of them, trying to reverse the damage Betsy DeVoss has done to education, what Bill Barr has done to our Justice department, and what a series of coal and oil executives have done to the EPA. But task number one for the new occupant of the White House will be trying to reunite a country that is now so accustomed to always choosing sides and resolutely fighting that you could not currently get a bipartisan declaration out of the Senate saying that grass is green, and the sky is blue.
I am willing to contend that it is a habit. The way prejudice or even handwriting is a habit. You don’t consciously think about how to make a R or a T when you are writing, you have done it so many times that it would take effort to do it differently. Prejudice is like that. It is a kind of shorthand that allows you to get on with living without having to think about everything. If you had to look at everything on the store shelves in a grocery store, read every label, it would take you days to buy groceries. Your prejudices, your preferences, your pre-determined judgements, allow you to coast through the isles…. You know what cuts of meat you prefer, which brand of peanut butter, what kind of bread . . . prejudices are not all bad. It would be hard to get through life without them.
But, of course, they are also not all good. An ideological prejudice can be lethal. We saw that at its extreme more than 40 years ago when Jim Jones had so much power over the followers who had move to Guyana with him that more than 900 people committed mass suicide. Somehow the phrase, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has crept into common speech to reference venial things but I remember the suicides at Jonestown, and you will never hear me referencing any mindless event as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” It will never be lighthearted and certainly not funny.
There are worse examples, if you think back to the holocaust, or the many ethnic cleansing events that have occurred in history, but Jonestown stands out in my own mind as the end of the ideological line for people allowing their minds to form a prejudice around a leader who, fundamentally, cannot be trusted.
Politicians and preachers all dabble in this to some degree. We hope to gain credibility with an audience, a constituency, a base, and hopefully, most of us earn that credibility and use it for the good of those with whom we share a connection; but what we have seen in this pandemic are political leaders who are using the virus to further divide people and in so doing, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are being unnecessarily infected and, shamefully, many will die, and some will die holding onto their belief that Covid-19 is all a hoax.
We have talked a lot in the last few years about having arrived at a “post truth” era in which people make unsubstantiated assertions and, if your mind is properly prepared to accept the source, you will believe that there are mind control drugs in the chemtrails left in the sky by jets, that George W. Bush planned the 9-11 attacks, that vaccines cause autism, that 5G cell phones cause Covid-19, or that Bill Gates is using the vaccines to inject us all with tiny GPS tracking devices because, I suppose, he is desperate to know when I go to the grocery store or a fast food drive through . . . with all that money, doesn’t it seem like Bill Gates could get a life?
Since we have stopped having public services, and I have packed up all of our belongings and history to be stored until we can resume church services, I have realized how far we traveled theologically in just 12 years. When we started in 2008, at least I and I know several of you, brought with us the muscle memory of having been a progressive but pretty specifically Christian Church. We had an Ash Wednesday service with imposing of ashes and afterwards several of us just said, “You know, that doesn’t really make any sense anymore.” For a few years we did Palm Sunday, Christmas Eve services, and even Lent. I look back on some of that with a mild sense of shock that we were so Biblically based, so unconsciously theistic.
You can change your familiar prejudices, but it doesn’t usually happen very fast and it is almost always uncomfortable. It is accompanied with a sense of loss. I am convinced that in a couple of years, the red MAGA hats that Trump supporters have proudly worn will be as embarrassing as finding a Richard Nixon campaign sign in your attic. It is hard for those of us who saw through Trump’s lies and manipulations from the beginning to be patient with those who voted for him a second time and who now repeat the false claims of massive voter fraud. Right now, having lost the election, there are very many people who are sad, depressed, angry, and even fearful. I counsel patience. We don’t want to keep writing people off. We want to help them to engage in critical thinking so that they can examine their prejudices and correct the ones that need to be corrected.
Covid-19 is not a hoax. It was not caused by the development of 5G cell phone towers, it was not a product of a Chinese military lab, and the vaccines will not let Bill Gates know when you go somewhere you shouldn’t be.
I suppose that we were all a bit outraged at the recent firing of Chris Krebs who, until this week, was in charge of our nation’s cybersecurity and who did an absolutely laudable job of insuring that our recent election was free of foreign influence and that social media was scrubbed of a great deal of false information. Unfortunately, an awful lot of the false information he was identifying came directly from our current Commander in Chief. In fact, the website he put up to flag false election claims started to look almost exclusively like a Trump filter since almost everything Trump said was a lie. His firing certainly did not come as a surprise to him and I feel like it will end up being a gold star on his resume. But you have to remember, the little boy in the parable who first shouted out, “The emperor has no clothes,” was not immediately regarded as being a hero.
Almost every elected Republican and most of the White House staff have played along with the circus that Trump has created. A few wrote “tell all” books after they left the administration, but few have been as clear eyed as Chris Krebs who, like the little boy in the parable, just wasn’t going to turn off either his brain or his character to play along with the crowd.
You have heard me say before that only dead fish always swim with the current. We are coming to the close of a chapter of American history in which nearly half of our peers have been swimming with the current. No one likes to be made to appear to be stupid. No one wants to cop to having been tricked, manipulated, or conned. So, let’s be patient and try to hold out an olive branch and hold open to the door to those who are willing to try to restore some unity to our divided land.
Not many of us were born into progressive homes. Not many of us started our spiritual journey in an open minded, inclusive, post-theistic context. Someone gave us encouragement and support along the way.
We may not be conscious of the steps we took over the past decades to get to where we are, but think back, you were not who are you now and aren’t you glad that people gave you the time and space you needed to evolve?
Prior to the Trump era and the pandemic, I was inclined to believe that only about 2 or 3% of the population were sociopaths. But when you start to hear people insisting that we not have universal healthcare because they like the insurance they have, literally insisting that we leave millions of people without any access to healthcare because they are afraid they might lose some personal benefit, then you start to look at society differently. When you see politicians railing against a pandemic stimulus package when millions are unemployed, being evicted, and probably hungry, then it starts to look like there might be 10 or 20x as many sociopaths as I had originally thought. And I want to caution you against lumping political conservatives, Trump supporters, or even covid-deniers into a single basket of deplorables. Even if they are saying deplorable things today, we must hope that all of us can change.
When we were starting our church, I had a meeting with an older pastor who had experience with a new church start. The one piece of advice he had that turned out to be the most useful thing that I could hear was this: He told me, the people who help you to start the church will not be the same people with whom you celebrate your second anniversary. Don’t take it personally, it is not your fault. This is just the nature of the beast.
His words turned out to be prophetic. There was a lot of coming and going in the first years. I hated it.
People would join us, be very active, they were a part of every social gathering and event, and then either disappeared quietly and slowly, or they burned out in a more explosive ego driven fireworks display. Again, the people who came in, got really active and involved, and then left were not a basket of deplorables. They were not bad people. Some came and got what they needed and left. Some came and found that they needed something else. And, of course, some died, some moved away, and others had big life changes: they got married, changed jobs, something that made the congregation that once was vital to them, no longer a good fit. It is painful. It feels like losing a friend and a lot of times it is exactly that, but it rarely calls for our judgement . . . just our loving acceptance.
But, of course, sociopaths do exist and there are those who do harm because it gives them a sense of personal importance or satisfaction to lash out at others.
If any aspiring pastor ever asks me for advice about starting a new church, I will share this proverb with them: Be careful who you let on your ship, because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can’t be the captain. You will never meet anyone who will introduce themselves to you by saying, “Be careful, I am a sociopath, and I will eventually tear your heart out and eat it in front of you.” There has never been a sociopath who knew that they were a sociopath. What they feel is lonely. They feel that they are being ignored by the world, overlooked, under appreciated. And so, they seek out voluntary associations . . . whether it is a church, the Kidney Foundation, or some other charity . . . and at first they are generous with their time and resources and they are friendly to the point of being absurdly flattering, and then they consciously or unconsciously, try to take control.
And not even necessarily because they want to be the captain of the ship but because, for reasons they do not even understand, they just like to see ships sink. It gives them a sense of personal importance and power. Some people are not looking for fame or wealth, they just like to watch the world burn.
Most of us are wounded by life. All of us have issues. We are aware of some of them and we are unaware of most of them. Many times, the worst things we do in life were unintentional and we have no idea why we acted the way we did. The purpose of creating a community is to both find healing and to heal others. Building community within family, within a church, within any free association of people in a charity or a political movement, helps us to learn how to bring healing to the divisions in our nation. Without forbearance and forgiveness, we have no hope of ever healing our nation.
But, the truth is that there are sociopaths in the world who do not want to be healed. They just want to watch the world burn. And if I have any advice to give on that front, I would implore you to err on the side of generosity. You cannot always tell who is trying to find healing and who is trying to just get your trust to deliver a dagger to your back.
I hate it when a familiar face disappears, and people come to me for an explanation. “Whatever happened to so and so?” I am left to try to make sense of something that is often so embarrassing that it would embarrass Charles Darwin if you said it out loud. You cannot always win over the haters and you sure can’t give a logical account of illogical conduct. Give yourself a break. You are not, after all, the jackass whisperer.
The most important and the most difficult task ahead of us is to reunite a deeply divided nation. Not everyone wants to be reunited. Not everyone will be able to set aside their loss and hurt to accept your olive branch. All I can say is that it is not up to us to control the outcomes, it is simply up to us to sincerely try to be forgiving, understanding, and reconciling.
Secondly, and this is the real crux of the matter. Don’t you be that person that sinks the ship. Don’t set fires just to watch the world burn. Human beings should not be treated as if they were expendable. Don’t sever a friendship unnecessarily. Don’t abandon someone in their time of distress. That doesn’t mean you have to act like conspiracy theories aren’t stupid. It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to act like you believe lies and propaganda. But it does mean that you can be nice about it. It means that you can give those who have not yet felt their connection to the unemployed, the uninsured, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, or the lonely, the space where they feel safe enough to change.
No one ever changes when they feel unsafe. It is nearly impossible to draw someone into the light by insulting them, deriding them, or by being condescended. Someone loved us when we were jackasses. Now it is our turn to be that someone. Consider it a gift that you are giving to them. You don’t have to remind them that they made a 15 on the ACT or that the never finished college. They remember. Their condescending tone is because of their insecurities. You don’t have to put them down and you don’t have to believe their Fox generated conspiracy theories. But you can give them the gift of patience, of kindness, of listening, asking questions rather than retorts, and see if they can find their way out of prejudice and darkness.
Unlike Motel 6, for the last few years, a lot of us have forgotten to leave a light on. Now, perhaps, it is time to welcome some old friends back.
