Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Church Potluck serves up thoughtful, friendly, informal conversation at the intersection of Christianity and contemporary culture. Just like a church potluck, we offer variety: a variety of topics, a variety of academic disciplines, and a variety of Christian traditions. Guests are friends and colleagues who are also experts in the fields of sociology, political science, theology, philosophy, divinity, and more.
Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Pastors as Priests and Prophets: Bishop Budde's Challenge to Trump
Navigating the roles of pastor as both priest and prophet presents a unique dynamic within church ministry. Our panel, all pulpit preachers, explores the complexities of speaking truth to power, particularly in light of recent events surrounding Bishop Budde's remarks at the National Prayer Service. Through this discussion, we examine the balance of comfort and challenge within the pulpit, the role of civic religion, and the importance of building relationships within the congregation.
• Discussion on the dual role of pastors as both priest and prophet
• Examination of Bishop Mary Ann Budde's sermon and its implications
• Reactions to addressing public officials in worship settings
• The importance of relationship-building for effective ministry
• Encouraging empathy in the congregation amidst divisive socio-political issues
• Reflections on unity, mercy, and the pastor's calling
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
Okay, we are recording. Welcome everyone to Church Potluck, where we are serving up a smorgasbord of Christian curiosity. I'm your host, dale McConkie, sociology professor and United Methodist pastor, and we got some Methodists around the table. We Methodists, we like a good church potluck. Yes, yes, yes, we do. Well, there are two keys to a really good church potluck. Well, how about? I shouldn't exclude our Anglican brothers?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's okay. That's okay. Are y'all church potluck folks as?
Speaker 1:well, are you potluck folks we?
Speaker 2:eat together. So I don't know. Definitely All right, I like the luck and potluck myself, because what are you going to get?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, for our purposes, there are two keys to a good church potluck We've got plenty of variety and engaging conversation, and that's exactly what we are trying to do here on Church Potluck sitting down with friends and sharing our ideas on a variety of topics from a variety of academic disciplines and a variety of Christian traditions. And today we've got something that has been fascinating to me my whole life, even before I was a pastor, but especially being a pastor now the concept of pastors as priests and prophets. It's a tension inherent in ministry. Are pastors called to nurture and care for their congregations, offering reassurance and stability, like priests, or are they called to challenge, disrupt and speak hard truths, like prophets? Can they be both?
Speaker 1:This dynamic was recently highlighted when Bishop Mary Ann Buddy, during the National Prayer Service, directly urged President Trump to show mercy towards marginalized communities, a move that sparked significant controversy. So let's explore the calling of the pulpit, where pastors must speak both words of comfort and words of conviction. And I'm excited today We've got a very interesting panel, because I think this is the first time we've ever had a panel completely full of pulpit pastors. So yeah, we'll give an applause for that right off the bat here.
Speaker 3:So yeah, Just like we hear every Sunday. That's just the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I actually one time very early on at my ministry at Mount Tabor came down after the choir head sang and they always applaud the choir. And I say, you always applaud the choir, but I never get an applause after my sermon and so I was just doing it to be funny and then I got applause. After that that one sermon I got applause.
Speaker 4:That's why I always sing in the choir too.
Speaker 1:Oh, so I get the affirmation that way, very nicely. Well, let's introduce our guests, and we'll do it in order of seniority, so we'll start off with the Reverend, dr John Parker. Yay, thank you for being here, john, and tell us about yourself.
Speaker 2:I am a professor here at Berry College of Bible and Theology. I've been here since 2013. I am also an Anglican priest in the ACNA.
Speaker 1:What's the ACNA?
Speaker 4:for those ACNA.
Speaker 2:Anglican Church of North America. Sorry, and I have been the last, just almost three years. Have been a church planter here as well. I've been on church staffs before other churches, but currently that's my pastoral care and preaching responsibilities.
Speaker 1:Great, and it's been a while since you've been on the podcast, so thank you for coming back. Very happy to be here. Thank you Excellent, excellent, excellent. We give you another applause, thanks. And our next guest she has done a podcast, but I have been very derelict in my duties and have not published that one yet. This one was going to come out before that one, and so it'll be a new voice to all of you listening, reverend Dr Valerie Lohner.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me back. I am the pastor of Rome First United Methodist Church. I'm a Bay Area grad. I'm glad to be back.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you've been there for a little over a year, correct?
Speaker 3:About 18 months.
Speaker 1:yes, Okay, great, wonderful to have you. Just keep the applause coming. Have a great day. And on her maiden voyage here on Church Potluck, we have the Reverend Karen Kageyama. How close did I get? Perfect, all right, karen. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:I'm well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I've listened to this podcast, so it's fun to be on it. Yay, I don't have to listen to it. I am Karen Kageyama.
Speaker 1:Some of our guests don't want to listen to it.
Speaker 4:Well, yes, and I'm the Director of Pastoral Care for Wesley Woods Senior Living, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church here in North Georgia, and I've spent about 30-something years in ministry, as a church pastor, a campus minister and now this work in pastoral care, so I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Excellent, Well, wonderful to have all of you. Like I said, I'm very excited about our panel today, but since, John, it's been a while since you've been we've got some new folks. I thought we would start off right off the bat with our game show.
Speaker 2:Are there prizes? That's really what I want to know.
Speaker 1:The affirmation of doing a good job. Oh, good, well, that's what I always work for anyway, isn't it? I can give you a grade. I can give you a star. Professors, we're always the good students. That's right. I can give you a grade. I can give you a star If you need something.
Speaker 2:Professors, we're always the good students.
Speaker 1:That's right. Well, today we are going to play. Never have I Ever. All right, so this is in your pulpit. You didn't tell us this we don't have anything to drink after each one of these.
Speaker 3:This was not in my contract, that's right.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to say something about pulpit ministry and you're going to have to say if you've done it before, so ever or never have I ever done that before? And we'll just go around the table for each one of these when I'm preaching. Never have I ever worn jeans.
Speaker 2:Oh ever, I preach in jeans often, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm going to say never. I don't think so.
Speaker 1:You don't think you have.
Speaker 4:I don't think so All right, I was a campus minister. I wore jeans all the time. That's right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I was too. Yeah, I was trying to think whether I have or not, and that's exactly what I said I must have when I was here and especially it was an evening service.
Speaker 4:as pastor at Berry College, I think I have a few times in the church when we've had some more informal experiences.
Speaker 1:Just very quickly go around. Never have I ever worn shorts.
Speaker 2:I think on campus, yes, I've worn shorts, but not in like a church pulpit, no.
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm going to go with never if I didn't wear the jeans.
Speaker 4:So I've had the opportunity to be a camp pastor with kids and, yes, I wore shorts for that.
Speaker 1:All right, good job Very quickly. How often are we wearing robes? This is not ever, ever, ever. Are we robe people still.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've. Actually I've been experimenting with that in our new church plant. In my old church we always wore robes and now I'm just like occasionally wear robes, like keep them guessing, which is another reason to wear the jeans. You just throw the robe over it. It doesn't matter what you have.
Speaker 3:There you go Both. Actually, I have a contemporary service where it's just a whatever and then bring out the robe for the traditional service.
Speaker 1:So are you like Superman and put the robe on, or are you taking it off? I put it on, you put it on. So it's the second service. The second service is the robe service. So all right, next one. Never have I ever preached for more than 40 minutes.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I've definitely preached for 40 minutes before, but again that was probably Just full disclosure.
Speaker 1:I knew how John Parker was going to answer this one.
Speaker 2:I always say, it takes me 10 minutes to say my name. So 40 minutes yeah, but I don't normally know?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're in the same ballpark as me, as being both a preacher and a pastor. You're just going to use more words than you need.
Speaker 3:Probably. That's right. Oh, that's a never.
Speaker 1:Never.
Speaker 4:Never. I can't imagine that.
Speaker 1:No, when I was the pastor here at Berry College as part of my chaplain responsibilities, we had mostly students, but we had one retired member who came regularly. Her name was Rita Dickey. Many of you probably know who I'm talking about a very sweet woman. But I remember after the service one time we were talking about length of sermons and everything I said. I typically preach between 15 and 20 minutes and Weta says yes, dale, you normally preach 17 to 19 minutes long, very precise.
Speaker 4:Yes, that was.
Speaker 3:Weta Dickey. She was a lovely lady but, always right on it.
Speaker 2:I'm a third-generation pastor. My grandfather and father are both pastors. My grandfather used to talk about the dean at his seminary, starting his sermon saying I will be finished in 19 and a half minutes.
Speaker 1:And he would always be on time.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine doing that, but he was always on time.
Speaker 1:Very good, well done. This is your reward there, john.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, yeah, there you go All right.
Speaker 1:Never have I ever preached from Obadiah.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's really interesting. I've definitely mentioned Obadiah in a sermon. I don't know if I've done exegetical, but I'm an Old Testament prof, so Obadiah is somewhere in my wheelhouse, somewhere in my wheelhouse.
Speaker 4:I'm going to go with never yeah, is Obadiah in the lectionary I looked it up.
Speaker 1:I have to give you a question?
Speaker 4:It is not, then I probably haven't preached to Obadiah.
Speaker 1:So you're very much a lectionary preacher.
Speaker 4:Most of the time I've read Obadiah, at least once I might have to go read it again 24 verses or something that's not an accomplishment, really, Karen.
Speaker 1:I can pronounce Obadiah there you go, all right. So all right. Well, very good job, let's do one more here. Oh, I like this one. We'll do two more here.
Speaker 2:Never have I ever cursed during a sermon, oh yeah, don't tell my bishop, but yeah, yeah, I've dropped a word.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, all right, depends on what you mean by curse. I think there's a range of them A cuss word, a swear word.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, probably at some point Okay.
Speaker 3:I'm going to say never Are we going to do something I've actually done.
Speaker 4:What kind of preacher are you?
Speaker 1:I was going to say, I've never pictured you as the overly cautious type here.
Speaker 3:Well, I've referred to it. I've cussed many times out of the pulpit, is that?
Speaker 1:a count? No, that's a little idea from the pulpit pulpit.
Speaker 4:Is that a joke? No, that's a little idea from the pulpit. Well, let's see, I'm not naughty about Sweber but occasionally with campus ministry.
Speaker 1:yes, so you get all the checkboxes of campus ministry.
Speaker 4:It was an appropriate illustration. Let's just say that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah, that's what I was thinking about.
Speaker 1:Excellent, all right, this will be the last one. Never have I ever used a relative for a negative example from the pulpit.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I would love to say never. I hope it's true. I don't know. I definitely try not to. Yeah, I don't know. I always pick on myself for the negative examples as much as possible.
Speaker 3:I'll say never. I don't think I have Okay we're going to come back to you.
Speaker 1:You're going to tell us something. You have them from the pulpit when we're done.
Speaker 3:Most of them don't listen to my sermons, so that's pretty good.
Speaker 4:I love my family? No, absolutely not, huh.
Speaker 1:You're talking about how your congregation doesn't listen to your sermons. I have a retired pastor in my congregation, Wayne Hopper. He's a very funny guy and he's gotten to an age where he sleeps a decent amount, and so he very often sleeps during the sermon and we tease him about it. And he looked at me and says you have two choices.
Speaker 1:I can either sleep during your sermon or I can talk to you about your sermon afterward. You make the choice, so I haven't pushed it. All right. Well, thank you all for playing. Never have I Ever.
Speaker 1:All right, all right, well, now that we get to know you a little bit, let's go ahead and talk about what happened at the National Prayer Service last week, where Reverend Marianne Buddy gave a homily, a sermon about the importance of unity and, as far as I can tell, just right up the Christian wheelhouse and everything that she said. But then she took the final few moments of her message to directly engage the president, and I spoke to him directly and said please care for marginalized people, especially those who are immigrants and those who are LGBTQ people, especially those who are immigrants and those who are LGBTQ, because they're fearful right now. And that was her message, and I'm just going to step back here and let you exchange. What did you think about this? Just what? Was this a good, appropriate thing, or did you have qualms about it? And I'll just open the floor for you all to dig in.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll jump in. I think it was extremely appropriate. She's a pastor first and foremost and she's teaching. The main teachings of Jesus are about love, grace and mercy, and she didn't rant and rave. It was a very humble request for mercy for people who are afraid, and that is in the wheelhouse of Jesus, and I think that was very appropriate. Worship is first and foremost about God and she was encouraging the president to follow the ways of Jesus.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll go with no, I think. When I saw it I thought, well, at least the church is getting a headline for once, and so we can talk about that dynamic and maybe what it takes to get a headline in our culture. But I immediately felt uncomfortable with singling out a single individual in a sermon, even a public official, and I strained for trying to think of any example where a sermon should be addressed to a single individual. So that was the part that I didn't mind. The exhortation for mercy, but I think a tone of an example or a parable we can come back to this like the rhetorical technique or we all together because the whole thing was mercy, unity, and then to just single out a particular individual.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes we think we ought to do single out a particular individual. I think sometimes we think you could, we could, we ought to do that with a government official, and I can understand where we might get, we can talk about where we get that idea. But I strained to think of an example where that was appropriate. I feel like it actually ended and I think ultimately fruit of it, I think it ended up doing the exact opposite of what she tried to do, which was to forge unity. I think my feed immediately blew up on both sides. I had people like this was great and people this was not great, and so it divided immediately as a viral moment. I thought.
Speaker 1:Well, you're checking off all the talking points I wanted to address later on.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, yeah, first impressions, things to talk about, just for the record for all of you out there.
Speaker 1:I had those ideas too. Just wanted to talk about them later on.
Speaker 4:But anyway, thank you. Good job, john and Karen. It's terrible to go third because I hear it and I'm like oh wait, I thought I knew what I thought. Now I will say as a pastor in a pulpit, I have never singled out an individual in that way, other than often you might lift somebody up in prayer or somebody's going through something that everybody in the congregation is aware of. We mention it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, fair.
Speaker 4:And sometimes a story if you've got permission. But that kind of direct address about a particular issue, I think obviously in a church we would not do that.
Speaker 4:I talked about this with a few friends and some of them said it wasn't really a church service and I said, well, they said it was a political event and I thought, yeah, I guess I hadn't thought about it that way. But it's in that realm of what we think of as civic religion, where this is a traditional prayer service that is held the day after the inauguration to somehow bless the incoming president and their administration, and I don't think it's ever been necessarily a partisan thing. It's held for Democrats and Republicans alike. I don't know how far back it goes, and Washington National Cathedral is the civic space of religion in Washington DC, so it does have a different kind of space and tenor. So I don't know. I don't know that I was not uncomfortable with the content of anything she said. I felt like she was speaking gospel and I don't know that I would have done it the way she did it either, but she did and she had courage in being able to speak up like that. I don't think she did it without thinking it through for sure.
Speaker 2:Oh, you could see her like. I mean, she read it all right now Before she said it, like she knew this was going to be a thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and my sense is there comes a time when prophets take that risk of crossing a line where the word that they have to offer and the opportunity to do it just coincide and you do break your own rules perhaps.
Speaker 1:Okay, valerie, you seem to be the most comfortable with it, so would you want to push back a little bit on what we just heard?
Speaker 3:I'll push back and say I too would not call somebody out in a regular church service. But I think we have to think about this was not your normal every Sunday kind of service. This was a particular service for a new administration and there is a difference, I think, in the Old Testament between the prophet addressing the king or the leader and a regular citizen, and so we do have to speak truth to power, and in this case this person has extreme power. The president always does no matter who was in office and imploring them to have mercy. I just think it's a lot different than if I had, from a pulpit, on a regular Sunday, called out just someone out in the congregation, which I would never do in that way.
Speaker 4:And it was in response to specific actions that had already and words that had been said and actions that had already been taken at that point, because those executive orders targeting those groups, I think or at least they had indicated they were going to sign them. If they hadn't, but I think they'd already started signing them. So it wasn't just based on hearsay or what we think you might do. It was actually in response to particular actions. So I think in that way, there's an integrity around her words, addressing something that President Trump had already done, I think that sorry.
Speaker 4:No go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, I think that the point about the civic religion is actually really important. When I woke up this morning thinking about what we're going to talk about, I thought this is such a weird service, and I don't want to presume to be bishop buddy, I don't want to presume to be a bishop period. I don't know what it's like.
Speaker 3:No, none of us want that, yeah right.
Speaker 2:So I really don't want to be judgy about this. I think it's right for us to consider. And she took a risk and she felt like she was following the Lord in that and I can see what she was going for. So I don't mean to be overly critical, but it is a weird service. I was thinking what kind of a service is this? Is it a congregation where you've built up affection for one another? Is it a chance to preach publicly? You're also on TV. There's all sorts of these different dynamics, public and private, and I do wonder about how we construct these events and what we're doing with them. I thought what would Stanley Hauerwas think, one of my favorite United Methodist guys, like they probably have something to say against even the presumption of civic religion moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I do want to come back to the. We can talk about it an hour later. But about the prophet king thing in the Old Testament, that dynamic, because I do think that one comes to mind. But actually I think there's more nuance there that we might could learn from in this moment.
Speaker 1:Well, before we get to the prophet king, let's just take a moment to step back and maybe some people in the audience would not be terribly familiar with this priest-prophet distinction. And just curious in your own ministries, what, in terms of do you think of yourself more as a priest who's keeping the order and affirming the congregation and holding things together and keeping structure, or do you find yourself being the prophet, where you are speaking out against the current situation and saying God is requiring us to change? And I think both of those are there right. The comforting, pastoral role and the prophetic, challenging role are both part of the pastor's responsibility. So what are some things that you do to balance that out, or how do you see the balance in your ministries?
Speaker 4:Well, I think was it Karl Barth that said to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And that can be a strange place to stand these days, because now we have Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat.
Speaker 3:What is a newspaper? Tiktok, yeah, exactly, who knows?
Speaker 4:what a newspaper is. I write for one, but yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't know who reads it. But no, there's a tension in some ways. But I think that when you are the pastor of a congregation of people who have voluntarily joined in community together and have given you a kind of respect and responsibility to be their pastor, the tension eases because part of what they're saying is we trust your spiritual authority that comes through leading us in worship and through preaching and teaching and all those things. We don't always have to agree with it, but we trust your intention to lead us in that way. And I think anybody who's a serious Christian wants to grow in their faith, wants to not just be mollycoddled but wants to be challenged, wants to hear this piece of scripture Seems like it's saying this, but what if it's saying this to us? And wants to be engaged in the community as a Christian and so wants to think about some of these issues that come up for us.
Speaker 4:And I think good pastoring holds all of that and weaves through it. And I often think of what is prophetic pastoral care. So that part of my work of care is also prophetic. It can't just be to comfort people and say, oh, you're okay, because none of us are okay. We're all struggling, we're all dealing with stuff. How do we help suss that out and help people think as well as do what they're supposed to do as Christians?
Speaker 1:That is a great answer, but all I could think of while you're saying that is I wanted to reward you for saying mollycoddle.
Speaker 2:There you go. I think what you said is awesome. I think there is an implied social. That's probably what we're talking about in this weird situation because there's applied. I don't know if Mike Bailey here can tell me I'm using social contract inappropriately. But there's, a social contract here of like the relationship, like what we're here to do, and it is in this, in this national event. It's about yeah, they expect words about unity, about coming together across difference against across the rancor of politics.
Speaker 1:We're on Inauguration Day, let's put our differences aside and come, and indeed the first three quarters was all about that. It's all about that.
Speaker 2:And I think that is one thing If we're going to have a take a viral moment, and yeah, people should go listen to the whole thing. I was. I was one of the Mark Clavier in England. He was an old colleague of mine and he was saying everybody should watch the whole thing before you start judging, which always is a good word, I mean. But anyway, the contract is together in unity and how do we do that? I think there's a question about whether she actually accomplished her goal by, particularly by naming the president by name rather than presidents should encourage mercy, for those who are marginalized.
Speaker 2:Just that kind of a line is different Now. I mean, I got the attention that, president Trump, I address you, this is what you should do, but it looked like she was dressing him down from the pulpit and that can seem she's trying to humiliate him and that's going to get a rise out of people one way or the other. Sorry, I may be drifting from the subject.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say let's get Valerie's points, but then I want to come back to that because that's come up a couple times already.
Speaker 3:Well, balancing that role between priest and prophet can be very difficult, but I think week to week in the pulpit, many of us really have to lean toward that pastoral role. You have to have relationship with people when you are leading a congregation. This service is very different. It's not your typical congregation but week to week I don't know anybody who wants to come in every Sunday and hear the words of Amos thrown at them.
Speaker 3:So I think you really have to get some pastoral credit in the bank, if you will, so that you can be the prophet if you're talking about a local congregation.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point.
Speaker 3:And from time to time I do speak more prophetically, but I don't think you can do that week to week. I think your folks need to be encouraged as well. But that's looking at the long view, and that's one thing about this service it doesn't offer that long view. The long view for her became what? 15 minutes, if even that long, and so that's where maybe part of this struggle is.
Speaker 1:So you all have done a great job. What was this service? What is the goal of this service? Right, Because if it is only priestly, if it's only affirming, then it's there to affirm the powers. That be right and that should not at least my view, that should not be the role of the church, but probably that prayer service has that. It's right after inauguration. It's praying for the president, but there's an affirmation there, and I think that's probably how they have typically rolled out with a goal toward our higher aspirations of who we are as a country.
Speaker 2:I think there's a little bit of a false dichotomy in here. I think part of what we're talking about in terms of the long view is having the encouragement, but also the people want to be reminded of the values and goals, and I think the first thing that came to my mind is my grandfather used to always say lift them up when you're in the pulpit. Lift them up. They're beaten down all week long. Make sure you lift them up, and so that always is in my first mind. And to end with something that's lifting them up.
Speaker 2:But prophets again, not to be too Old Testament-y, but they are not always just warning and judgment is coming. The judgment is coming because it's warning, because I love you, because it's a warning because I love you, like that's, it's the. I actually think there's an issue on these Jeremy ads that we go on in politics where we grab prophetic language both on the left and the right. We'll have the judgment, warning language out there, but not to say because it's about us, it's about us being together in solidarity. The warning and the because I love you, not that we have to say I love you, but that's God's reference, right? Comfort you, my people, isaiah 40, right that there's this I'm warning you because I care about you. That comes together and I think a lot of us probably in the pulpit are that warning and comfort come together at the same time. So I think we have to be careful not to just have the warning or to say that's prophetic, because actually prophetic is actually both both warning and comfort all the way through.
Speaker 1:Good point.
Speaker 4:Very good point, Well, and in the Old Testament. Not that I'm an Old Testament scholar, but the prophets… Well, you've never preached from Obadiah, so… I have preached from Zephaniah though.
Speaker 4:Oh, I have preached from Zephaniah though. Oh. Sometimes the prophet is speaking to powerful people, and then sometimes the prophet is just speaking to the people of Israel and addressing them for the wrongs they have done, and again it couched in that language of love because you are my children, because I created you, because I led you out of the wilderness, you must, and so it's this calling back to who you're supposed to be and who you were created to be, which, again, is pastoral as well as prophetic, and that's why I think it's a tension, but it doesn't really. They're not opposites, they go together beautifully, and I think if we hold that tension and hold the kind of interweaving, it works.
Speaker 1:That's a good point that I need to hold in mind. So thank you. That kind of leads into, John, what you were trying to say a little bit earlier about the relationship between the pastor and the king. So did you want to say something about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll just say I struggled to come up with a reference in scripture where a prophet prophesied to a king and a public prophecy. So we have encounters between prophets and kings that are individual, that where they. You have Jeremiah with Zechariah, you have Samuel and Saul, you have Nathan and David, as a classic. These are all within the court, they're not at the temple, they're not out in public. Even just mentioning a king by name in a prophecy is actually extremely rare. So I actually wonder if the genre of preaching, speaking truth to power in public or addressing a particular individual in public is actually a misnomer. An interesting example of this misnomer that I found was actually the first church example I thought of was John Chrysostom is famous for preaching to Empress Eudoxia for and calling her out. Sorry, this is like a nerd alert there you go.
Speaker 2:Something like that was coming. My students would like that in class. But that was the first person I thought of, like, oh, and didn't he preach to her? Didn't he preach to her specifically and tell her that she was wrong? And I'm there, was this actually? I have a picture, a photo of an old 19th century painting that's very dramatic. It's a great picture of this priest, chrysostom, like pointing up at empress eudoxia and telling her off. And then I dug on it and found out that actually never happened, like he actually all he said was like an illusion and a reference to what he said. Something like to this day, herodias calls for the head on a platter, which was an illusion, to like her calling for him to be. But it was just an illusion.
Speaker 2:So I wonder if we're actually using the techniques of rhetoric with power that are actually effective. With power, the ones that are effective is when you, like Nathan with David, that actually try to get them to see. Jesus spoke in parables, often right, he often talked in ways that made them, that caught them off guard, caught them sideways. I think if you go straight at someone in power, are you really going to get them to give up their power. I wonder if we actually need to be more creative. Again, I don't want to. It's easy to say second-guessing bishop buddy but it made me think about these examples and challenged me to think okay, maybe I need to be more creative. And gosh, it's so hard as a pulpit preacher to be creative. It takes so much energy to think of those things. I'm not as genius as Jesus in doing it, so I'm not trying to high and mighty, but I think it was something I learned from preparing for this podcast and I wanted to get that out there.
Speaker 3:When I think about the Old Testament prophets, particularly with Nathan and David. They've got a longstanding relationship right. There are multiple we assume there are multiple occasions when they and he has a formal responsibility as court prophet. Yeah, yeah, so they were talking about people who have at least seen each other or been together in the same room multiple times, and so I think about Bishop Buddy.
Speaker 3:When was her other opportunity? This is not the same kind of relationship. So I also think about it as the prophet taking the opportunity that she had to preach a word of mercy, and I saw her speaking very humbly. I know other people have not interpreted it in the same way.
Speaker 1:It's hard to imagine how she could have said it more humbly other than if she's going to address the president directly. Yes, it was about as humble a statement as you could have made. I guess you could argue that Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we can have some other about that it was definitely intended to be gentle.
Speaker 3:I think was the intention, whether it succeeded.
Speaker 2:I think is another question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and this service was a prayer service for a new administration. It was for his administration. So to me it's a very rare and, like you said, it's a weird service in terms of everything that's happening and what it's about, but the relationship is just not the same, as we're talking about Nathan and David and I just think she took the opportunity she had.
Speaker 1:Well, what would you say to the person who would argue that because she didn't have that relationship with the president, she wasn't really in the position to make that kind of proclamation toward him?
Speaker 3:That's where I go with the preaching truth to power, because there are many pastors who are very much supportive of the policies of mass deportations and some other policies that President Trump has. She looks at things very differently and if someone has to speak truth to power on occasion and to be asking for mercy was not a radical request she really didn't advocate for anything, any specific policy, except for mercy toward a couple of groups of people. Karen, you want to?
Speaker 4:Well, I wonder, and you can't know somebody's motivation, but part of the work of a prophet is to speak on behalf of those whose voices are not heard. Yes, to speak on behalf of those who don't have power, because you're the intermediary between the powerful and the powerless. Sometimes, and perhaps, and maybe some of the folks who are part of those groups that she named and others that just feel powerless had a bit of a voice that day. I think I agree with John. I don't know that it accomplished. I don't know what she wanted to accomplish with it. I don't know that we can know. Did it accomplish unity? Probably not, but I don't know that anything would accomplish unity in a day in a worship service anything at this point.
Speaker 4:I'm not sure Jesus coming back would accomplish unity for all of us, but I do. If I look at it from that perspective, from the ground up, from underneath, then there is this voice that is saying something on behalf of those whose voices are being silenced and whose people are being thought of as less than silenced and who, as people, are being thought of as less than, and if she speaks on their behalf, then that's a pretty prophetic stance to take.
Speaker 2:I guess I wonder if there's not we haven't moved into. She talked about earlier in the sermon outrage industrial complex, which I thought was that wasn't her original phrase but it's a good one to remember that we are in this outrage age.
Speaker 1:By the way, she cited a sociologist for that term. There you go. So yeah, that cited a sociologist for that term. There you go. Citation.
Speaker 2:Sociologist We've been seen.
Speaker 1:Someone sees me. I suspect that's probably the first time the word sociologist has ever been used at a prayer service.
Speaker 4:So we should take what we can get. I've used it in a sermon.
Speaker 2:But I guess when we're in an outrage culture, I think one of the things I've noticed is that people feel like we've started to really value not only value, but have a moral mandate on speaking up. We've put really a lot of intention on words and if you don't speak up about every single thing that's wrong out there in the world, then you aren't, you're allowing the power of people to get away with it, you're complicit in it, and I don't think Jesus lived that way.
Speaker 2:He did not run around always outraged at everything. And there is a maybe I'm thinking about my students who just feel like they need to be outraged all the time in order to be in the moral right and I wondered if that actually trickled into what she was doing and whether we as pastors and preachers actually have to figure out different ways to diffuse that a little bit. I think again, I think she tried, but you could just ask a question Are we effectively coming together in unity if we are making people afraid for their sexual identity, if we are making people afraid who are working really hard in the world? Are we accomplishing our goal of unity as an administration? I think any administration should be thinking about the effect that it has on the least, the lost and the lonely. That kind of rhetoric is a lot less pointed. It may not get a viral moment, but at least if it poses, it puts us all in the same category of how should we do this as a country rather than oh, I've had to speak up and make my point.
Speaker 1:Trevor Burrus Ballard. Do you think it would have been as powerful had she made that? A call for all of us to be thinking about the fear that immigrants, that we all need to be showing mercy in this moment we all need to be, rather than directing it at one particular person? I'll buy it the most powerful person and the one who's, from her perspective, fomenting the fear.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know that it would have been as effective, because it would have been, I think, about the last time I pressure washed my driveway and you have the choice of using the big spray, which is light but doesn't do a whole lot, and then you can use that really pointed stream and it may not go far but it will get the dirt out, if you know what I'm saying. And again, I think she did it very humbly, but I think it needed to be addressed to, in this case, the king, if you will. And you're right about, we seem to be angry all the time and we can't live that way, and I don't. To me she didn't come across as angry, but I also remember, you're right, jesus didn't run around speaking that way all the time, but he did at one point flip some tables and I wonder if that was her way of humbly approaching that and trying to flip tables. I don't know, I'm not.
Speaker 3:I wasn't in that moment, I don't know what had gone through her mind, but there's always a balance. It comes back to that role between the priest and the prophet. I grew up in a tradition where I heard a lot of pastors banging on the pulpit every Sunday and basically trying to scare the hell out of me every Sunday, and so that's what attracted me when I came back to my faith of finding grace. There is a balance between those things of encouraging people but also lifting them up, but also encouraging them to live out some of the harder sayings of Jesus and certainly being merciful, if we get right down to it, can be quite controversial in some ways.
Speaker 2:I think it's an important question about what's rhetorically powerful, and I was wondering about what would Jesus say in that moment. I think that's a good question for a pastor to ask Lord, was there something that you would say in this moment? And the example that came to my mind was Luke 13, where they say hey, didn't you hear about how Pilate mixed the blood of some Galileans with their sacrifice? Outrage, aren't you going to be outraged? And Jesus says do you think you're going to get away with anything less? So the pressure, what was the pressure hose moment?
Speaker 2:The shock value of that statement was actually directed back at our own hearts to say we are the guilty, all of us are the, or maybe all of them. Not himself, but, like I think Christianity is extremely forceful about our own guilt. It's incredibly powerful about our own guilt and our own need for forgiveness, and it's about forgiving one another for our guilt, but it's powerful about guilt. So I wonder if there's a sharpness that could be said but pushes in the direction of our guilt, rather than I'm better than you or you're not doing what it should be. And again, she said that, but I think it came across.
Speaker 1:Let me turn the tables a little bit and say would we have felt the same way had it been a conservative, prophetic voice on an issue? So, for example, it's not a perfect apples to apples comparison, but 20 years ago Mother Teresa was invited to a national prayer breakfast, not the inauguration prayer service, but a year later President Clinton had only been president for a year and Mother Teresa was the invited keynote preacher for that message. And here's one of the things that she said during her message I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? Not gentle, Can we tell other people not to kill one another? Not gentle, not directed at the president, but the president and first lady and the vice president all sitting very close, by very harsh words. Would we have been comfortable with that message being preached at the National Prayer Service?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think that's exactly the right way to do it. Again, I'm coming from a perspective of. I remember I was in London studying with an old, eminent churchman named John Stott, and John Stott looked at us and he said I just want you young people to know that. And he said a great British accent which I won't read to you. He said I never quote someone from a sermon, even like talking about ideas. I don't use their name unless I've met them personally. And then this goes back to your other point. Otherwise, I talk about their ideas and so it's important for us to debate ideas, and so I think it's great to debate ideas and to put ideas out there, and I think that's an appropriate question and pose.
Speaker 1:So I think she did fine because she didn't use a name, so she put focuses on issue and asks so yeah, so, as long as she was, the words were much more harsh and in the way she did it, but because it wasn't specifically directed to the president, you thought that's inbounds and I think she's gained.
Speaker 2:She's working on moral reasoning, asking about how we moralize it. Maybe I'm a little, I don't know. I'd love to hear another way to think about it. But, karen and Valerie, what do you think about that?
Speaker 4:Well, I think that if we're going to allow one messenger to have the privilege of saying something directly, then it has to go both ways. I think the question is in both cases is the real intent to make somebody uncomfortable? Because you see a problem and you see the person or persons who have the power to do something about it and you want to put that pressure hose on them and poke them a little bit, not in a mean way, but in a way that it's like. This is my one opportunity to bring this up and again. I see Mother Teresa very faithfully speaking on behalf of what she perceives are innocent, powerless, voiceless babies, that she's trying to be the voice, the prophetic voice for them when she feels that other people weren't. But she's also Mother Teresa. Everybody knew who she was. Everybody respected her. If you didn't agree with her, it's an interesting-.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting. That's a really interesting point. Who'd ever heard?
Speaker 4:of Bishop Buddy outside the Episcopal Church, perhaps in Washington DC.
Speaker 1:That's an insightful point, because she didn't have like a personal relationship with people, but there was some kind of contextual relationship that people had with Mother.
Speaker 4:Teresa. She had a certain amount of authority she did and she had a certain amount of power. Out of that, she was a very powerful moral figure in the world already.
Speaker 1:That's a very interesting point Bishop Buddy is.
Speaker 4:She's not a nobody. She won't be news three weeks from now. She's a faithful servant of God with deep power in who she has been as that. But in the world scheme, in the national scheme, she doesn't hold that kind of moral authority, which is probably why we're having this conversation Exactly.
Speaker 3:I agree with Karen that if you're going to allow one side of an issue to speak, this isn't about promoting one way of thinking about the world. When you invite someone to speak and you're aware in Mother Teresa's case, they would have known, kind of, what her stances are. But I also think there is a distinction between a prayer breakfast and a prayer service, and that's just something to explore as well.
Speaker 3:A prayer breakfast is a lot different than a service where you've had some other element of worship, and worship is always about God, it's not about the individual and promoting the ways of God. So to me there's also some difference in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. I like that this might be getting a little on the political side rather than the theological side, but do you want to hear the different responses that President Trump had to Buddy's remarks and how President Clinton responded to Mother Teresa's run? And again, this might have to do with the power imbalance between Mother Teresa and Bishop Buddy, but so President Clinton said this was through the press agent, not Clinton himself. But President Clinton said President Clinton has the greatest respect for Mother Teresa's work and for her absolute integrity in stating her positions, even if he does not share all of those positions.
Speaker 4:So just very it was a good presidential statement.
Speaker 1:There you go. Thank you for putting the words in my mouth. It was also respectful Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is. I think this is President Trump's own words. Yes, I'm pretty sure she brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way. He wrote on Truth Social. She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal immigrants that came into our country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that's taken and it goes on just to talk about all the so not quite as gracious as President Clinton's remarks. How are we Long pause?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's a very different political moment. There's so many different voices.
Speaker 1:It's not a Well, just the fact that it was Trump posting on true social, the social media it shows how different the world is compared to a press secretary. It's an outrage response.
Speaker 4:You talked about the kind of politics of outrage or outrage of politics. But the thing that I'm in, one of the things I'm interested in it was something you said, john, about did she accomplish what she set out to do? And she talked about unity very beautifully. I didn't listen to it. I read the script of her sermon and very beautifully, very poignantly, and I thought graciously and throughout the sermon I think even her last words were gracious. I did not find them ungracious. But then did she undercut the first part of the sermon by directly speaking to the president? I'm not sure it wouldn't have undercut it, even if she hadn't spoken directly to him, if she had said it in general, because she listed the groups that had been affected by the executive orders most recently. So even if she hadn't directed it directly at him, I'm not sure that he would have still heard it as directed at him and taken the same tack.
Speaker 4:But the question I think becomes for me sometimes if you're trying to accomplish a goal by how you preach, be careful that you don't let your moral righteousness get in the way of the persuasive power of the pulpit. So you have to meet people where they are, and if they're on this other side of the divide just preaching Adam doesn't really ever get them to open their ears. Jesus went around saying you have ears to listen up, and the prophets did too, and I think there's a subtlety and a way of asking questions that Jesus was so good at and telling the parables that gets people to like stop and pause and think, oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. And when you can get that opening in somebody's mind and in their heart, then you can begin to ask more questions and that, to me, is a really that's another work of prophetic preaching and pastoral care and all those things. That might be a smarter strategy.
Speaker 2:I think that's really well said and I think it really requires empathy. That's a good one Like to think about. I wished again. I really sitting on a podcast, like telling a bishop what she should do.
Speaker 4:And we're not doing that, please.
Speaker 2:But when I think about the words that valerie and I are okay I think about how I'll say I think trump calling her nasty as an odd ad hominem attack that is is not presidential, it's not worthy of the office. So there's a lot of ways in which his rhetoric is is divisive and and maybe it's good for political gain, but I'm not trying to defend that in any way.
Speaker 4:He also reserves it mostly for women.
Speaker 2:There's definitely something to that for sure. So I don't want to like, but I guess when I, she starts to assume that she tries to call him on hypocrisy. Right, you say that God has saved you as a gracious God has saved your life, okay, so then by all means have mercy, was what she said, right? But she presumes that he's not thinking any merciful thoughts at all. Persuade people, you might say. You may disagree about how. Whether we agree or disagree about trans-identifying children, we all can agree that they should not be scared for their lives. So let's think about how our policies impact. That's too wordy, but something like that where you're trying to think about that's a professor who has 50 minutes to explain the point.
Speaker 2:She's in the cathedral. She's gotta like come up with a way to but there's a way there are. She's dealing with very sensitive issues that are. She talked earlier about presuppositions and the way we think about the world and having different ideas about the world. She needs to display that is my point like she needs to display that we can. You can conceive of what's of LGBT community one way, and I can conceive a different way, but we can come together for the protection of people, something like that. Or you can think that you're worried about your workers who are losing their jobs. What was the substance of what he was trying to get? Or about crime? Those are things that we can all be concerned about. But are what about these folks who are, who are doing the work in our society?
Speaker 2:Trying to bring the actual partisan debate into the statement is what I'm trying to say, and in the pulpit I often try to do this. I try to think, okay, who's going to disagree with me? What are they going to think? How do I articulate their position as a steel man position in a way that maybe is even better than they've been able to say it themselves? Again, but how do I put the steel man position and then show another side and then call for the morality out of it. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at and that requires a lot of empathy, and I think she maybe missed the mark on that in terms of how to really think about maybe not Trump, but like, maybe, the people in my feed who, like I, don't like Trump, but they're. They're particular issues that I'm really concerned about that she seemed to be ignorant of and that's where it created this kind of division. She wasn't ignorant of them, but she didn't seem to acknowledge that there was a genuine debate about some of these.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was listening to something on the radio and it was talking about how do we find empathy for people who voted differently from us and who see things very differently, and yet we have there are things we really still have in common and how do we find our way to that place in order to open up the other spaces. And this is where I think storytelling is so powerful, because if you tell the story of a transgender person, people will at least acknowledge humanity in somebody they might, and you can create the hooks that are common to all of us when you tell the story about somebody that is different from just driving in. I was listening and they were talking about a couple who are part of the DACA community and have been here this is the only country they've ever known and he's a computer software engineer and she's a teacher and they've just had a little baby and their lives are being upended. And yet they're just as American. They had no accent, they spoke perfect English and even if they didn't, it wouldn't matter to me.
Speaker 4:But it was like, okay, this is just tugs at your heartstring, but it's a real, they're real people behind the issues. And how do we like on all the different sides. Remember, we're not just talking about ideas and issues. We're talking about people who are our neighbors, people who might one day be president of the United States, you never know. So it's just, I think, trying to dial up, especially as pastors, we can't tell a good story to open somebody's ears. We're not very good preachers.
Speaker 1:Well, that seems like a very nice affirming, encouraging and challenging place for us to finish up. Is there anything that didn't get said that needs to be said? Valerie, we haven't heard from you in a little bit. You want to have the last word.
Speaker 3:Oh goodness, I think empathy is one of the most underrated virtues. It has become difficult to see. I see what you mean by that.
Speaker 2:I feel very affirmed.
Speaker 3:I also hear the sincerity dripping from your voice, but I think it's very challenging because we've become so mired in our way and our side, or whatever we have spoken so much about. Well, here's what I think, here's how it ought to be that we're often not listening to others and that's one of the great debates of our time is what is right, what is wrong, but we're not taking time to listen to other people. And sometimes in the sermonic moment, that might be a time someone might listen for just a moment, but as preachers, we also have to take that time, both before the sermon and after, to listen and to continue to evaluate ourselves in the moment.
Speaker 2:Very nice.
Speaker 1:But now all I can think about, as nicely as that was said is that I can only think of sermonic. Sounds too close to demonic Dale you have a weird brain.
Speaker 2:That's what came, anyway, sorry, I say that with all empathy.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you all very much. I really enjoyed that. I'm pressing the wrong buttons here. We'll see if that gets edited out or not, but I do want to thank you all very much. I really enjoyed this conversation and I didn't get into my own journey but with my calling to ministry, with my sociology having a prophetic kind of topics that we cover, but my calling being very much a chaplain, which is, I think, much more on the priestly side of things typically, that this is something that I have thought about many times, as I'm sure we all have. But just where does one use and how does one use the prophetic voice? So this has been a helpful conversation to me.
Speaker 1:So thank you all very much and I want to thank our audience for sitting around the table with us today and I hope that we have provided you with some food for thought and we've given you something to chew on. But we aren't done yet. After we finish up the music here, we're going to have some leftovers for you to enjoy, some additional thoughts that we share with one another after we wrap up. So feel free to continue listening and, if you have a chance, we're getting started backing up doing the podcast regularly. Give us a shout, a comment or a rating, on whatever platform you get the podcast from. We really appreciate hearing from you, and until we gather around the table next time this has been Church Potluck, and thank you for listening We'll play the music again here. All right, thank you all very much. That was really good. You've only done it once before and you all just seemed as natural as could be. That was good, and, and, john, you too always, but I just think you're more seasoned at it, so yeah sorry, I talk a lot.
Speaker 1:It was all good it's all good, it's all good, so, but you definitely previous podcast too. I just love to see your passion. Whatever we're talking talking about, you dive feet first into it to whatever the topic is.
Speaker 4:My kids say I'm too intense. Is there a Bible? And then there's an iPad.
Speaker 2:What did I not bring as one of my deans used to say the bigger the stack you walk into the classroom with, the less confident you are about what you're about to say. So this just shows my insecurity. That's all that's going on there.
Speaker 1:That's a small stack compared to some other times that he came, when we talked about the coronation of the king and the religious emblems of John.
Speaker 2:I brought my grandmother's coronation books. That was so fun. It was my one chance to get them off the shelf. Man.
Speaker 1:What you said about confidence based on the number of books. My dad had to do his engineering test and I was too young to really appreciate this. But my mom got so freaked out because he went in with like his little briefcase and people were bringing like dollies of books in to the exam for references. You could bring whatever you wanted for references and she was like freaking out that. But he had his confidence, he had his.
Speaker 4:My older daughter went to Georgia Tech and they had these tests where they could bring a 3x5 card and they could write anything on it. They wanted double-sided. She learned to write so small. Micro-writing I just need to get all these equations on there so I don't have to remember them.
Speaker 1:I've noticed that students will take this on the iPad and they'll take my slides. I don't have a lot of content on my slides. I've got basically talking points and then they expand the slide so it's massively big and they can write all these detailed notes in very great detail. So that's very smart, not quite a three by five card, so they could get infinite space almost.
Speaker 2:So what are we doing with leftovers? What are we doing?
Speaker 1:Just talking about anything. Usually we debrief and talk about, like, for example, Valerie, you said that you actually did bring this up during your sermon. You mentioned it directly.
Speaker 3:I did and just it's funny, I planned a series a couple of months ago called the Challenge of the Gospel and the tagline is there's something to offend everyone and really, when you get into the teachings of Jesus, they're hard. Talk about forgiving your enemies. Well, they're enemies for a reason, so loving your enemies and all that, but I used electionary text.
Speaker 1:Which is very right on point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it just happened to be Jesus quoting from Isaiah I've come to bring good news to the poor and going on from there and it really did fit in nicely. And I did talk about the need for mercy and the need also to make sure that we're worshiping God, and I got into the thing of the division we have experienced. We're looking at everything first through a political lens these days versus looking through it through a gospel lens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really true.
Speaker 3:And I've pretty bluntly said, when we do that, I said, we're practicing idolatry. We are worshiping our political parties and our political figures, and that's not just true on one side, it's true across the board and that is idolatry. And so he was encouraging my congregation. We have to see everything through the lens of the gospel first, not politics first, and then oh yeah, here's Jesus.
Speaker 4:Do you ever get accused? I would get accused sometimes of being political and I said, well, no, I'm just saying what Jesus said. It's not. I'm really not coming at it from a political standpoint I don't belong to a political party, anyways but this is what I'm reading in the text and, yes, I'm addressing what's going on in our lives and in the world, but I'm really coming at it from a God. And there's this real kind of distrust sometimes because I think other people are seeing it through a political lens first and can't identify that you might actually see it differently.
Speaker 3:And that's why I had to approach it that way. We're talking about the teachings of Jesus, but people do see everything politically rather than looking at it through the lens of the gospel, and that's a hard switch to get people to make. I think the message was very well received at my congregation. I did actually get applause At the end of the contemporary service. I did, I did actually get applause.
Speaker 1:Did you really At the end of the?
Speaker 3:contemporary service I did. I was very surprised and taken aback by that.
Speaker 1:Now, did you mention Buddy's sermon? Did you reference that directly? What I ended up doing is I had a little point in my sermon that would I got in the pulpit as I was finishing up the preparation for it. I decided that people are going to hear that as political and they're going to hear that in a way that might jar them from everything else that I've said Almost what you were saying about Buddy's sermon itself, john, so I opted not to. So I think it was Buddy adjacent, but I didn't answer it directly.
Speaker 3:I went head on with it.
Speaker 1:I think everyone was pretty aware of what I would have been talking about, and I think in your congregation, as opposed to my more rural, more moderate congregation, I think it would have been. It makes sense, is what I'm trying to say In your context too. I've done that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it fit the context. Well, yeah, to have done that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it fit the context well, yeah, I think the point about trying to get people to think theologically, gospel-oriented, biblically, rather than spiritually, not just politically, is really good. I do feel like we're in an over-political age, although I think maybe the language that I've and I think Bishop Buddy did this. She talked about not being partisan, because I think Jesus is political right and that in the sense of the polis and how we're not to get too academic.
Speaker 1:But we're in a. We don't want to do this during the I know.
Speaker 2:We're in a. We are people who are trying to figure out how to live together. We actually need help with being political. We don't need to be more partisan, and I guess that's part of what I was trying to get at. In the main thing was just saying how do we name some of the things that were overly partisan about things we all care about? How do we draw people to the same common values that we actually care about? I think you were making that same point.
Speaker 4:Well, I think people assume we don't have anything in common anymore. And I'm like okay, if you say are you against this particular like? Let's just take, for example, the ACA People would say, oh yeah, I'm against that.
Speaker 2:Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the Affordable Care Act. But if you had but they would pull out just aspects of it without naming it and people would say, oh yeah, I want my children to be able to stay on my insurance. Oh yeah, I don't believe in preexisting conditions, I don't. So it's like okay, so we actually agree on this content. It's just the politics of how it came about have gotten in the way of your being willing to moment going viral is that it finally put a moral voice over the partisan and the political.
Speaker 2:I think we as Americans have a hard time not letting the political and the partisan being the ultimate authority where everybody, that's all we talk about and there's nothing over that. There's no critique of that from outside. Partisans they're just, and in England, where I did my doctoral work, and you have the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury always has a voice, he can always get on the front page, he can make an issue, he can make a speech in the House of Lords and there's this sort of whether it works or not, it has this kind of you can make a moral argument, which I think is what Mother Teresa was trying to do make a moral argument in the context of the political. It's not all political. There's this moral frame and I do think the National Cathedral prayer service is a moment where we still have some remnant of that. I actually worry, now that this has happened, that that will disappear, that the Episcopal Church will be viewed as too political, too one-sided. It won't be respected as a place where that can happen.
Speaker 2:We didn't talk about that in the main, but I worry about that because I just think, as an American society, how do we have any moral voice? And again, we struggle more with the question of multi-faith. England has its own version of that multi-faith environment that they've navigated, I think, effectively, even if it's grounded in Christian tradition. But they have a way of doing that. We're always fumbling around, for are we Christian, not Christian and all the multiple faiths? But just to be able to have a moral voice over the political, I think is so worthwhile for us as a country to just talk that way, talk morally and not just talk politically.
Speaker 1:And that goes back to what you said, valerie. I'm going to be chewing on that. Just if our congregation is putting everything through a political filter, no matter what we say, we run the risk of them hearing it in political ways. I think that's an important point.
Speaker 3:It becomes, I think, offensive to the pastor for someone to try to say that's a political word and I want to say no, that's the word of God and I really shouldn't say offensive to the pastor. It's offensive to God Because that's where we come from. That moral voice is the church's lane. There are things that are certainly addressed through political means, but it's very much within what the church is called to do, what the pastor specifically is called to do.
Speaker 2:And there's no ambiguity on welcoming the stranger and caring for them. We can have debates about the legality and how to manage that, but to welcome the stranger and to have a due process of care and concern for all people and their dignity in the middle of that, like there's no cross currents about that or protecting people's lives, these are things that are core. There's no crosswind. I do sometimes like I'm an Old Testament guy, right. So when I get into Exodus or Deuteronomy, it's always about protecting the sojourner and it's students.
Speaker 2:All go into the Exodus and talk about living as immigrants in the land and Egypt. There's just that, that, such a strong theme and someone that's touched us. We're worried about economics and the dollar, but are we worried about people and hosting people and how we care for people? Even if we do Obama deported a lot of people even if we end up deporting people, how do we do that with dignity and respect and say we've got to go through the proper channels? There's a way to do that. That right. There's a way to just have this moral commitment to people's and to hospitality.
Speaker 3:It's a stranger absolutely and I think we also have. We've set up just two polar opposites. Well, if you don't agree with this, then you must think this, and it'll be the extreme at the other end yeah, shrill voices yeah, and you're right, not everyone can live here.
Speaker 3:There are people who are bad actors, who should not be allowed to come, but the vast majority of people who have come are not falling into that category, and so that's where we've got to have somewhere in the middle, where we have an effective method to screen out the folks who intend harm, but also a path for those who can really contribute great things to our country. That's really the middle ground that we've got to find, and we do want to treat people with dignity and respect and love our neighbor. I think I read that somewhere.
Speaker 2:Humor is an effective tool. That was good yeah, we didn't talk about that in preaching.
Speaker 3:We have a whole podcast Humor and sarcasm Exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll wrap up, but I have one more question for John. Oh dear, Are you an Old Testament guy?
Speaker 3:How many times did I say that.
Speaker 4:How much of your preaching comes from the Old Testament?
Speaker 2:Not shockingly little actually, yeah.
Speaker 1:So great Well, thank you all.