I've always liked quiet. And, like most people, I've experienced the world's madness. "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jan. 2017) distills 47 years of experiencing stillness and madness as a campus minister and Presbyterian pastor (IL, WI, NY, OH, and MN), poverty criminal law firm executive director, and social commentator. Our cat Lady Barclay reminds me to calm down and be much more still than I would be without her.
Out of the devastation of hurricanes Helene and Milton, two roads diverge in a sodden wood. One road sees only what is urgent, the immediate needs for rescue and recovery. The other road, less traveled by, also looks farther for what is important. The road we choose in the Nov. 5 election will make all the difference. Listen to weatherman John Morales speak of his decision to do more than report the weather. Have a look.
Nothing is more important than a healthy planet. Nothing. When a candidate for high office calls climate change a hoax, move on. Do the same with “down-ballot” candidates and political parties that tap dance around the question. This election is about reality.
Presidents, senators, justices, and generals have spoken lines they attribute to Alexis de Tocqueville during his visit to America in 1831. “America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Facing the sin of slavery, James Russell Lowell wrote the poem that became the lyric of a hymn on which I was a raised. “Once to every man and nation, in the strife of truth with falsehood, comes the moment to decide….” This is a moment like that.
Looking for a Foothold
In time, God help us, the divisions among the American electorate will be healed. Yet, before there is healing, is a common weariness that crosses all lines of difference. Nobel Laureate Albert Camus described our situation when he wrote under the dark cloud that swept over the world in the 1930 and ’40s. Camus’s insight into the experience provides insight into how the absence of any foothold produced suffering in a period similar to ours
“The modern mind is in complete disarray,” wrote Camus. “Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find a foothold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.”
The Sum of Your Choices
“Life is the sum of your choices.”
Albert Camus
The sum of our choices in this election will be who we are, and will determine what America will become. Votes for candidates and parties that substitute greatness for goodness, while avoiding or denying climate change, are votes against the future.
Vote like life your life, your children’s and grandchildren’s depend on it, because it does.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, October 10, 2024.
While 67 million Americans watched the presidential candidates debate in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, something else was happening in Springfield, Ohio. Nathan Clark, a grieving father, whose 11-year-old son, Aiden, died when a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant veered into his school bus, was speaking at a city commission meeting.
What has to stop?
Those of us watching the debate might suppose Mr. Clark was speaking of the Haitians pouring into Springfield, but this “this” was not that. Aiden’s father spoke clearly.
This has to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members, however, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apology.
No apology in Philadelphia
In Philadelphia, there was no apology. “In Springfield,” said GOP candidate Donald Trump, “they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of people who live there.”
Fact check
ABC moderator David Muir set the record straight with a fact check: The city’s elected officials say there is no evidence that dogs and cats had been killed and eaten in Springfield. Mr. Trump replied that he thought he had seen it on television.
In that moment, film-goers as old as I might have thought of Chauncey Gardiner in “Being There” — the estate gardener who confuses television with reality, whom the power-brokers and politicians mistake for a genius.
But Chauncey was not the only one that deserved a fact check. The “they” of whom Mr. Clark spoke was much larger. “They” are the party that eats lies for breakfast and claims they’re eating Wheaties.
Venus Flytrap or Bird-of-Paradise
Who are “they”? A Venus Flytrap and a Bird-in-Paradise “They” are a Venus flytrap, capturing the fearful, the gullible, the anxious, the confused, and the floundering, who mistake the leaf of a flytrap for a solid foothold, or who mistake a Venus flytrap as a Bird-of-Paradise.
In the spin room after the debate, a reporter interviews Trump advisor Stephen Miller. The journalist is asking Mr. Miller for evidence to support the claim that criminals, rapists, murderers, gangs, and people released from prisons and insane asylums are invading our country. Here’s the spin room exchange where Chilean journalist Jose María del Pino asks for specific numbers and the source.
In the aftermath of the debate, a citizen of Springfield has identified herself as the source of the story about pets being eaten in Springfield and has apologized for making up the story and for the hateful disturbance it has caused.
“If I have to create stories…”
Republican candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance continue to repeat the story they know is not true. Last Sunday’s “State of the Nation,” JD Vance replied to Dana Bash: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do….”
Since the presidential debate put the spotlight on Springfield, 38 bomb threats have resulted in the evacuation and closures of City Hall, public schools, medical centers, and the office of the Department of Motor Vehicles, among others
Stochastic terrorism is turning the city of Springfield into a minefield. Although there is no direct relation between the former president’s finger-pointing at Haitian immigrants, random individuals hear it as a call to action.
As happened on January 6, 2021, the former occupant of the Oval Office, stays silent. The leader of the MAGA movement stays glued to his television set, tees, and fairways without distancing himself from threats of violence in Springfield. He has yet to say, “This has to stop now!”
When a nation mistakes a Venus flytrap for a Bird-of-Paradise, only an election can get it out.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), September 17, 2024.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN. Sept. 16, 202
God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the gods.
The house we took for granted is infested with carpenter ants. The gods of power, greed, privilege, fear and favor undermine the framework of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the aspirational foundations without which the house crumbles.
I watch in horror as a deranged man of White privilege claps back at the adoring crowd and wonder why real farmers in tractor hats leave their fields to applaud a city-slicker Godfather wearing a $4k Oxxford suit, red Armani silk tie, and a red tractor hat, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood wearing sheep skin to have Grandma for lunch. If there is a God surrounded by the gods, why the trail of unjust judgments?
Then I remember Jesus’ parable of a last judgment in Matthew 25, where the Sovereign of the Universe separates the sheep and the goats, and hear the cry of the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, hanging on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And I wonder.
Where is the thunder that will split the veil of religion and empire? Every day I awaken to the knowledge of my helplessness to help. I am a kindergartner in a bully’s world, asking for the gift of daily bread— enough to make it through another day of MAGA madness, another day with hearts turning to stone, another hour watching a sociopath twist law into pretzels. I have seen the crimes. I have gasped at the lies and heard his voice echoing in a swelling chorus of voices cheering on the gods who are not God, silencing the still small voice.
Where is the God who convenes the council of the gods? Where is the God who judges the gods we confuse with God?
How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?
The “wicked”? Seriously? The wicked? I don’t believe in an impenetrable wall between the wicked and the righteous, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats. I have met the wickedness that lurks in me.
Confession
“The prestige of the wicked” and the wickedness of prestige lead me to confess my exaltation of prestige. I have confused the ladder of success with Jacob’s ladder until the wind blew me off the ladder into shame. The climb to the top has been wicked. I have learned how easily the search for excellence inflates the ego and overtakes the gift of authenticity in flesh and blood mortality. Life has a way of knocking the pretense of prestige off the ladder, and, if we’re lucky, we realize that we had it wrong.
Jacob’s ladder is not a ladder for us to climb up; it’s a stairway on which the angels (divine messengers) descend to be with us.
I know the ladder of success. I have climbed it and fallen off. I have also met the divine messengers who pick me up when I’ve fallen.
Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
This is not a suggestion. It’s an order! — the Sovereign’s order to the assembly of gods. In the Hebrew Bible and in our own experience, the nations are gods. This word from the Most High God addresses the gods of greed, privilege and nationalism.
Saint Patrick’s Day at the Irish Pub: A Festive Celebration
It’s the day for green beer, corned beef and cabbage, and the wearing of the green. The television monitors in the pub are broadcasting a rally in Dayton, OH. “I don’t know if you call them [i.e., migrants crossing the southern border] people,” says the man in the MAGA hat. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
“I don’t know if you can call them . . . people. In some cases, they’re not people.”
The poor and oppressed fleeing tyrannical regimes, drug cartels, and gangs in El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras are not people? The people now seeking refuge on American soil are not the Jews, gypsies, and “homosexuals” Hitler loaded into cattle cars for a one-way trip t to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald for “poisoning the blood of our country,” but they are the same: the less than human ones, the non-Aryans, animals. “Now, if I don’t get elected, . . . there’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” There will be no rescue for the weak and needy under his watch. Rescuing the weak and the needy is the work of the woke and the weak. We have to be strong.
Jesus’ rebuke: “Woe to you!”
I hear Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I am haunted by the curse of the Strong Man that has fallen over the world. I am not digging a mass grave in Ukraine. I am not homeless. I am not searching for food for my starving child in Gaza, Mariupol, or Calcutta. When will the rebuke — “Woe to you” — thunder across the world?
The gods are neither ignorant nor uncomprehending
Ignorant and uncomprehending, they wander in darkness, while the foundations of the world are tottering. I had thought, “Are you gods, are all of you sons of the Most High?”
Are the gods that troll us ignorant? Are they uncomprehending? No. They are crafty. They are willful. They are calculating. Andrei Navalny did not die of natural causes. He was murdered. The regime that poisoned him knew what it was doing. The gods of power, greed, violence, and war are neither ignorant nor uncomprehending. Aries and Mars are alive and well. They live in our heads. They tell us what to do, leaving Ukrainian and Palestinians to search through the rubble and step over the dead. Here at home a megalomaniac cut from the same cloth as Vladimir Putin threatens a bloodbath if he is not elected. The crowd chants and cheers.
Hearing Voices Inside and outside the hospital for the criminally insane
I am at the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane in Saint Peter, MN. I’ve come to see Mary, who turned to the Legal Rights Center for legal counsel. Her lawyer has asked me to visit as a pastor.
Was Mary ignorant or uncomprehending the day she stabbed her nine-year old son nearly 100 times in broad daylight on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis? Did she mean to kill her son? Or were the voices in her head responsible?
Mary had gone off her meds the day the voices told her that her son was the Devil and that she should kill him. “Not guilty by reason of insanity” sent her to the hospital for the criminally insane. The day I am with her, she is groping in the darkness. The foundations of her world are tottering. Suicide is an option. Which is why I am here.
Driving home to Minneapolis, I hear voices like the ones Mary heard. Aries and Mars are speaking on talk radio. To one degree or another, everyone out here is insane, just a short step from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The gods are driving us to collective madness.
I had thought, “Are you gods, are all of you sons of the Most High?” No! You will die as human beings do, as one man, princes, you will fall.
The Mortality of the gods
Are you gods children of the Most High? Or are you as mortal as we? Are you destined to fall, like princes and tyrants? Will you be thrown from the thrones that rule our hearts? Will the shouting and clapping fall silent? Without the language of the heart, only the impostor gods, the carpenter ants, remain to eat away the foundations of compassion and sanity. The impostor god of national supremacy may look different in “Mother Russia” than it does in the USA, but it is the same.
The World and the god of Nationalism
Arise, God, judge the world, for all nations belong to you.
Among the gods gathered for judgment, nationalism has no peer. “If I don’t win this election, we won’t have a country anymore.” He places his right hand over his heart. The crowd does the same. The sound system broadcasts the January 6 chorus of imprisoned “hostages” he promises to pardon singing the national anthem. I hear a still small voice in Alexander Hamilton’s prescient letter to President George Washington in 1792.
The truth unquestionably is that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security. …
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.
Like the psalmist, I cry out, “Arise, O God!” Deliver us from the gods of criminal insanity.”
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, July 22, 2024.
News that the Ten Commandments will be posted in all schools and public places in Louisiana and Oklahoma took me back to Mark Twain’s encounter with a sanctimonious businessman notorious for his unscrupulous business practices.
“Before I die,” said the shyster, “I want to take a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I’ll climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud from the top.”
“’I have a better idea,’” said Twain. “’You could stay home in Boston and keep them.'”
What difference do the 10 Commandments make if one shouts them from the top of Mount Sinai . . . or insists they be posted in every school and public space . . . but ignores them and does not practice them?
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
Not taking the Lord’s Name in vain is hard. It would be easy to keep If the commandment tells us, as children often are taught, not to say “G-d damn.” But, if it prohibits the wrongful use of the Divine Name, any person, official, or group (church, synagogue, political party) that uses the 10 Commandments for selfish ends and purposes makes a wrongful use of the Name of God.
You shall not commit adultery.
Anyone who sweeps aside a jury’s conviction on 34 counts for cooking the books to hide from his third wife and from the press his tryst with a porn star from his third wife and out of the news on the cusp of an election violates the commandment
You shall not steal.
You shall not steal an election which every court decides is legitimate. You shall not make a wrongful use of your constitutional oath of office by refusing to concede the victory of your opponent preventing the peaceful transfer, invite your followers to the Capitol to stop the steal of power, telling them to go to the Capitol to prevent Congress from its Constitutionally required certification of election results on January 6, and continue to promote the lie that the election you are seek to steal has been stolen. You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness
Tell the truth! Do not make up stories that will hurt someone else. Do not call them names that have no foundation in reality. Do not malign judges, Jurys, court personnel, and potential witnesses, a jury of your peers. Do not insult your adversaries. Do not shift the blame to those who testify against you. You shall not make a wrongful use of your First Amendment right of free speech, promoting what you know is false, and claiming that your country’s judicial system has been rigged by the person who wrongfully occupies the Oval Office.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s
Earth and the fulness thereof belong to the Lord, not to you! Be careful that your prayers do not become a form of preying. Stem the tide that confuses wants with needs. America has devolved from any sense of responsibility and moral character into the quicksand of late consumer capitalism. Citizens of Aboriginal communities likely experienced covetousness. A member of the tribe may have wanted to be the chief or fantasized about another’s attractive spouse, or being jealous of larger huts or more hides to warm themselves in the cold. Covetousness is human, and, as such, it needs to stay within the guard rails that limit its search for dominion.
Gordon C. Stewart, Brooklyn Park, MN, June 30, 2024.
A personal reflection on God’s word to Sennacherib
I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against Me
Isaiah 37:28
19th-century wood engraving by Gustave Doré depicting the destroying of Sennacherib’s army outside Jerusalem.
You cannot hide. You plot and scheme as though unseen, not noticed, secure in the dark places of public life. You rise. You sit. You go out among the shadows, declaring innocence and impunity. You mislead. You cheat. You lie. You bear false witness and concoct stories to assail your neighbors. You connive, conspire, and assassinate. You poison your opponents and flood the public with fear and hate. You threaten your critics, and pay, or refuse to pay, legal fees for sycophants who have placed their trust in you. You rant and rage and rouse the people with a voice that feigns righteous indignation.
Because you have raged against Me and your insolence has come to My ears, I will put My hook in your nose and My bit in your mouth; I will turn you back on the way by which you came.
Isaiah 37:29
Uncivil, insolent, resistant, unhinged, kicking up dust on everyone around you, you mock whatever would restrict you, restrain you, expose you to the light of day, but darkness is not dark to Me. I hear you snorting, braying and bellowing. I see you bucking against all attempts to rein in your whims and schemes, your defamations and slander, your arrogance and threats, your schemes of terror, your treasonous justifications of insurrection, invasion, and assassination.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still!: Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), 49 brief (two to four page) reflections on faith and public life; Brooklyn Park. MN, Feb. 22, 2024.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world that can be thy place .
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXLI
They’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just standing in the way.
There’s been a mistake
There’s been a mistake. I don’t know you; you don’t know me. No one is coming after me. I’m not that important. Neither are you. No one with their wits about them could believe you are the only one who keeps “them” from getting to me. But the pitch has a familiar ring.
The old, old story?
It sounds like “the old, old story of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love,” but this story is a far cry from the one in the New Testament. The Biblical story includes a warning, attributed to Jesus: “Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and they will lead many astray.”
It’s a biblical way of saying, “Don’t mistake a wolf disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s Grandma for the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.
Life with Buddy
Even a parrot can quote scripture. But there’s a difference: the parrot has no idea what it’s saying. Human beings do. Take Buddy, for example. Shortly after arriving for a visit with old friends, the phone rang. Harry stayed put. Knowing that any call to Harry could be an emergency, we encouraged Harry or Anna to feel free to take the call.
Harry raised his finger to his lips. Anna smiled and whispered, “Shhhh!
The phone continued to ring. When it stopped, a voice from an adjacent room yelled, “Harry! It’s for you! Harry. . . it’s for you!”
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, an African Grey Parrot doesn’t know it. After Buddy had fooled us with his imitation of the phone ringing, with precise intervals between the rings, and calling Harry to the phone, Buddy went on to recite the 23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…” before imitating the sounds of Anna he’d heard every morning: brushing her teeth, gargling, and other sounds not fit to print.
Shakespeare: “O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” wrote Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. “An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge: To See More Clearly, and author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf & Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN.
Thanks to Carl Krieg for permission to republish “The Rule of Law, No More” from Progressive Christianity. Information about Carl follows the commentary.
The Rule of Law, No More
As the American public reels in the face of the many trials of Donald Trump, delayed again and again by rules only a lawyer could ever know, we are consoled again and again by the analysts who assure us that this only proves that we are a nation wherein the rule of law is supreme and applied equally to all. Baffled though we may be, we Americans want to believe that in drafting the Constitution, the “Founding Fathers” exhibited unparalleled wisdom in creating the bedrock of our society, our law and our democracy. The problem they could not anticipate, and therefore could not adequately prevent, was the possibility that a definitive proportion of that society would ever reject the freedom they were offered and instead choose a dictator. The bedrock of our society, however, is not the Constitution itself, but the public consensus that grants validity to it. Without the mutual agreement that we all accept the rule of law with the Constitution as the foundation, – without that consensus, democracy becomes untenable. And we have lost that consensus.
The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution as it chooses, searching for ways to make the Constitution say what the Court wants it to say. The Republican Party refuses to guarantee that it will accept and support results of future elections. And the Leader of this Party mocks courts every chance he gets, encouraging his disciples to chaos, disruption, and violence. Meanwhile, dictators around the world, fearful that successful democracy elsewhere might loosen their own grip on power, also work to destroy our consensus, covertly undermining the helpful discussion and dissent that characterizes democracy and replacing it with diatribe and demonization. Achieving consensus in a nation of immigrants, such as the US, was never an easy proposition. But maintaining consensus when one of the two major parties refuses to abide by majority decision, is impossible.
That is the situation we now face. Trump and the Republicans will of course accept the results of an election “if it is fair”. But if they lose, by definition the election was not fair. And they will not accept it. As we gather steam toward November, Republicans, please think long and hard about your party’s refusal to abide by election results. We went that route once before and wound up shooting each other as the nation was thrown into civil war. And to all you evangelical Christians, without whom the Republican party could not exist, is this really what you believe God wants of you?
Thanks for coming by, Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge; author of Be Still! Departures from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, May 20, 2024.
In the eyes of QAnon and Christian fundamentalism, I’m a heretic. I don’t believe in Satan. Not that Satan, the devilish opponent of God. But trying to make some sense of life these days has led me to take another look at Satan.
The biblical Satan is the personification of trickery and the reptilian impulses that lie in wait in every mortal psyche. Satan is a con artist. “You will not die,” whispers the serpent to the mortals in the Genesis story of humanity’s fall from paradisaical innocence. Likewise, in the wilderness temptations of Matthew and Luke, it is Satan who lures “the man for others” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description of Christ) to being a man who cares only for himself. Satin is the personification of the lies that flips reality on its head. Satan is a Con Artist.
Con artistry is never far away. Sometimes we come face-to-face with it. I see it inside the courtroom in New York City where a jury wrestles to disentangling truth from falsehood, evidence from sham, honesty from fraudulence, in full view national figures, members of the U.S. House of Representatives take their seats in room as visiting dignitaries who are surely recognizable to at least one member of the jury. Their physical presence is intimidating; it strikes me as its own kind of witness and jury tampering, a violation of the defendant’s gag order.
Outside the courtroom, I see these same Members of the United States House of Representatives, each of whom has sworn the Constitutional oath of office, line up take their turns behind the microphone and media cameras to denounce the judicial system, malign court personnel, the judge, prosecutors and their families, and read aloud. Up is down and down is up; right is wrong and wrong is right; truth-telling is out; conning is in. I hear Pinocchio’s surrogates betray their oaths of office in hopes of becoming Pinocchio’s right hand. Jiminy Cricket is a distant memory. Conscience is nowhere to be found.
Yesterday confirmed what I know of the biblical Satan who never was but always is wherever there’s an Achilles’ Heel – the vulnerability of mortals to the Con that I and we can do no wrong.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, May15, 2024.
I didn’t feel like shouting Hosannas and waving palm branches this Palm Sunday. So I did something else. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory,” written in 1930, a time as uncertain as this, cried out for attention. “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour.” The title of this sermon was ready before the sermon had been written. Fosdick’s lyrics led me to Psalm 82 addressing “the great assembly of the gods . . . by which all the foundations of the earth are shaken.” Here’s the sermon at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN, the loving congregation that welcomed me for nine years (2005-2014) on the way to retirement.
Thanks to Shepherd of the Hill Elder Chuck Lieber for taping this long-winded sermon on Palm Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN.
PSALM 82 NIV
God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the “gods”:
“How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?
Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
“The ‘gods’ know nothing, they understand nothing. They walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
“I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”
Arise, God, judge the world, for all nations belong to you.
Psalm 82 niv
Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian and social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock Publishers), 49 brief (2-4 pages) on faith and life; Brooklyn Park, MN, April 7, 2024.
The greeting struck me as peculiar. “Happy Holy Week” is more than a little strange. Something didn’t smell right.
Rev. Al Sharpton response to the “God Bless the USA Bible”
Preying on Praying
Only a person ignorant or defiant of the heart-wrenching events of Jesus’ last days — Peter’s deceitful denials (“I do not know the man”) in the High Priest’s courtyard; the self-serving betrayals and abandonment of Jesus’ closest ‘friends’ and students; Jesus braiding a whip and driving out the money-changers in a fit of rage, turning over the money-changers’ tables for making his Father’s house into a den of robbers; Judas Iscariot, the apostle entrusted with the group’s purse, exchanging intelligence identifying Jesus’ whereabouts; an apostle drawing a dagger at his arrest, cutting off the High Priest servant’s ear, followed by Jesus’ rebuke of the way of violence; the release of one Jesus (Jesus Barabbas), the nationalist insurrectionist prisoner awaiting execution in place of the other (Jesus of Nazareth) in whom Pilate finds no guilt); Jesus’ final meal in an upper room of an unidentified dwelling; the invitation to “Take, eat. This is my body, broken for you” — would wish Christians a happy Holy Week.
Mark Twain Advice
I feel a bit like Mark Twain the day he responded to a sanctimonious businessman notoriously for his unscrupulous business practices.
“Before I die,” said the shyster, “I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud from the top.”
“I have a better idea,” said Twain. “You could stay home in Boston and keep them.”
The Way to Easter
You can get to the Easter Bunny without walking through the events of Holy Week, but you can’t get to Easter without walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It’s all there in Christian Scripture. It makes no difference how many Bibles you have —”I have many;” “it’s my favorite book,” or how much you love it — if you’ve never opened one.
Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge, author of "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (2017 Wipf and Stock Publishers), 49 two to four-page meditations on faith and public life, Brooklyn Park, MN, April 4, 2024.
Views from the Edge 