You’ve had days like this. I know you have. Days when everything hurts. Days when you open your eyes and can’t see, or wish you couldn’t see. Days when, if you have hearing aids, you put them away. Days when your head hurts, though you have no headache. Days when what you cherish is belittled, twisted, misrepresented, and assaulted.

The dedication of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem was a day like that. NPR ran the story that gave voice to why it hurts so badly in 2018. The American Administration’s selection of Robert Jeffress and John Hagee, both evangelical religious exclusivists with views that are marginal to the American mainstream, rubbed against the grain of traditional American values of respect, propriety, and decency. At no time in my memory has the United States handed the people’s microphone to representatives know for insulting the host nation’s religion and way of life. But NPR can’t voice the part that hurts this writer.

I look and listen as a retired Christian pastor who claims the same tradition President Trump calls his own. We were both confirmed in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Some of us remember what the president seems to have forgotten in confirmation classes. The Presbyterian-Reformed tradition of the Christian faith does not claim exceptional status among the world’s many religions. It calls for respect. The Presbyterian Church’s Confession of 1967 expresses it this way.

Christians find parallels between other religions and their own and must approach all religions with openness and respect. Repeatedly God has used the insight of non-Christians to challenge the church to renewal. But the reconciling word of the gospel is God’s judgment upon all forms of religion, including the Christian. [Confession of 1967, 9.24]

God is bigger than any belief, creed, or religion. Claims to divine favoritism that confine the Divine within the borders of national or religious geography blaspheme God’s ubiquitous presence and freedom. As the late Kosuke Koyama put it, the God of Jesus is a spacious God! Not a house god or national god.

We also believe that the reconciling gospel of Christ calls the church and its people search actively  for cooperation and peace, “even at risk to national security“.

The president’s overtures to North Korea and Russia have given reason to wonder whether perhaps he is following that spirit of The Confession of 1967. But, then, I hear the name calling, the insults, the braggadocio, and remember the dedication of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, and the headache threatens to become a migraine. But I have learned over the years since confirmation class that, though the loudest voices often hold the microphone, there is an inverse relation between loudness and truth, volume and good sense, loud clashing cymbals and the still small Voice that cannot be silenced.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, August 20, 2018,