This is a quote from my dear sister Rabbi Nancy Kasten in a recent Dallas Morning News interview when asked to reflect back on our work and ministry with CLEAR DFW over this past year.

Today, we commemorated a year of clergy vigils at the Dallas ICE Field Office. And this quote from Nancy was speaking to my Spirit.

“not demoralizing....re-moralizing.”

I cannot think of a better way to incapsulate the role we believe our big, beautiful group of interfaith DFW clergy is playing in our city.

In a time of deep demoralization of our people...we find this work RE-moralizing to ourselves...and we believe it is doing the same for the beautiful people of Dallas, Texas.

Not in some condescending/preachy way. But in a somber, yet hopeful, way...reminding us of the best our faith traditions have to offer us as individuals and a nation.

Our nation needs to find its moral conscience.
To become re-moralized.

We all become demoralized from time to time (including me, during many of these past eight weeks...) and WE need to be re-moralized.

Re-moralizing means...

The Golden Rule, lived out...not the Ten Commandments plastered on a wall.
The Great Commandment, lived out...not recited as lip service.
Taking seriously the hard call of faith traditions to love the stranger.

50 years of Jerry Falwell and other evangelical Christians fairly well ruined the word “moral” in our culture.

It got dumbed down to rote rules about personal behavior. And, sure, personal behavior matters.

But how we...all of us a a whole behave...how our government behaves on our behalf...this matters more.

Respect for due process matters and when we call for it, we are re-moralizing America.

Loving the migrant and stranger like our own citizens matters...because it’s what our scriptures teach...so when we remind our nation of this...we are re-moralizing America.

Naming the harm of narcissist leaders who trash talk anyone who disagrees with them re-moralizes America.

Calling out the harm of ICE....the harm to migrants and frankly the cultural harm to ALL Americans that they are causing right now, re-moralizes America.

Reminding us all that how we treat “the least of these” matters more than how we treat the wealthy and powerful (Jesus said that, actually...)...this re-moralizes America.

Saying to all Americans who are waking up to the horrors of this administration: “No...you are not crazy or imagining it...this IS happening...and it IS different.” That is re-moralizing.

There is a calm centeredness that comes from knowing you are living from deep core values. This is what CLEAR DFW does, in all that we do.

And so: What a holy moment today.....as we grieved, lamented, yet also celebrated victories along the way (like Hutchins....)

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO CAME OUT TODAY.

I am so blessed by all the wise leaders in CLEAR. We are effective BECAUSE we trust each other and respect each other...the way American leaders should.

Copious pictures below...almost none of them taken by me.

God bless you all.

Here’s a screenshot of the front-page:

Their story about our CLEAR DFW clergy vigils tells the story of our one-year commemoration of “holding vigil” at the Dallas ICE Field Office…every Monday…rain, or shine.

But, please also see the second story, as a companion: An interview with an ICE insider, expressing his own concern about the Trump 2.0 policy of mass detention.
(Those without a DMN subscription can find these via AppleNews and other news aggregators…)

Friends:
The story about the vigil is about what we are doing.
The insider story is about why we are doing it.

If you are a person of faith, or a person of good will, know you are welcome to join us Monday for our one year commemoration.
8-10 am at the Field Office on the freeway side…here are the details.

But the interview with Todd Johnson, an ICE insider, provides a rare glimpse into the kinds of concerns we clergy know must be present in the minds of long-term ICE agents.

Johnson says: “Everything else came secondary” to simply arresting as many migrants as possible.”

Yes. We know that.
Yes. We see that.

Yes, we believe this is an irresponsible policy that cannot keep Americans safe, and can only cause harm to our community.

For some time, we have been convinced that longterm ICE agents must be wrestling with the dissonance of their own actions. We clergy are confident they are causing themselves moral injuring, alongside the physical, emotional, and psychological harm they’re causing to migrant families.

I think guys like Johnson know this too. They may not use the language of moral injury.

But Johnson says this:

“I don’t think that HSI’s resources should have been used to the extent they were for purely civil immigration enforcement…That was not an efficient use of valuable investigative resources that impact many different areas of public safety and national security.”

What he won’t, or maybe can’t, admit is the level of harm this causes to migrants themselves.

What he won’t, or maybe can’t admit is: how these policies of rounding up just about everyone eventually drive wedges of fear and mistrust into the heart of every diverse neighborhood.
Including the ones we most love in Dallas.

These indiscriminate policies aren’t just a bad use of resources, they’re a HARMFUL use of resources. To migrants themselves, to all of us, and finally the agents themselves in terms of the moral harm they will now carry from this era.

This is a section of the story we should all pay attention to:

“If there are expectations that a certain number of arrests need to be made in a day, a week, a month, then, at times, you’re going to go after easy targets so that you can accommodate the expectations,” Johnson said.

Many of those arrested or deported had no prior convictions, which Johnson found frustrating.”

I have no doubt that it is more than frustrating to many agents. I have no doubt that many ICE agents will eventually feel like many soldiers coming back from America’s unjustified foreign wars.

Those soldiers come back with the moral injury of questioning why they were asked to do what they did.

And I have no doubt many ICE agents will carry similar wounds as the true extent of the harm and violence of this current era becomes known.

And as a pastor, I would urge other longterm ICE agents to start speaking up against what they are seeing.
Speak up and speak out, for the sake of your own souls.

As for us, we will continue to keep watch and keep vigil. We will continue to name the harm done to migrant neighbors, who are children of God first and foremost.

Our Biblical mandate tells us to love the stranger and the foreigner, because we were all once migrants and strangers.

We will keep up the prayer, and keep up the action, with God’s help.

What you will see is video that shockingly reveals the open secret in American today:

Racial profiling is now completely “legal.”

You will see Black and Brown American citizens stopped and detained, and hear them interviewed.
You will see White citizens let go with just a warning.

Watch/Read a gift version HERE, or click the picture.

Americans have fought this unequal treatment under the law for decades now.

In previous eras of our history, mass mobilizations of citizens —protests, lawsuits, social movements— have pushed back against these things.

But now, under the Trump Administration, and with the shockingly acquiescent assistance of the Supreme Court, ICE and some local law enforcement now stop American Citizens with impunity.

What Is NOT New Today

Please hear how I am not denying that racial profiling existed in previous times. Quite the opposite. I am confident it did, and have been telling these stories for decades now to anyone who will listen.

For now thirty years, I have written on these issues. I have written about the personal experience of watching the unequal treatment I receive (as a White man) compared to the treatment of my wife (a Latina).

I will admit that, as a much younger man, I wanted to explain those differences away. But over time, and for many decades now, they became unavoidable to ignore.

Early on, she told me how —as Dallas-born US citizen of a Dallas-born US citizen— she was confronted by Border Patrol and asked where she was born, and asked for identification. She was a ten-year-old child She had no ID. (No ten-year-old American citizens does…or ever has…)

Decades later, during one period of our marriage, we counted the dozens of times she was pulled over by a specific local police force, while during that same period was let go with only “a warning.” This includes at least on instance when I shamelessly broke a traffic law in plain sight of the officer who pulled me over.

Finally, as we pass through airport security checks, for many years, she would be pulled out of line and searched, while I would be allowed through, unquestioned.

For twenty-plus years now, she’s been an elected member of the Texas State judiciary. And, even then, during this season of life, can speak of her concern about how she will be treated by local law enforcement. The most recent troubling encounter happened just months ago, while she was on the way to church.

Our lives have allowed us to know many People of Color who are in law enforcement as officers or judges. My own calling as a pastor has allowed me the privilege to hear their stories too….to hear how elected and appointed public officials…those who are, themselves, a part of the American system of government…still are racially profiled with impunity and regularity.

This is what these videos show too.
As the New York Times rightly says here: “This is what racial profiling looks like.”

While Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy is a true threat to our nation, my own sense as a Christian pastor is that the desire to tribally divide and profile “The Other” is a human trait, not an American one. Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy are but its horrific manifestations for America.
My most recent essay on this very old dynamic is here:

These are examples of the things that are “not new.”

What IS New Today

What is new, as the NYT notes, is the law now allows this. Recentl Supreme Court rulings now allow racial profiling by police and ICE, in ways that in every previous generation, there were successful efforts to push back against.

In the time of George Floyd, and I can’t breathe…
In the time of “stop and frisk”…
In the time of the original SB4 bill in Texas…

There were mobilization efforts that pushed back on a mass scale. Legislators, left and right, voted these things down. Yes, some “show your papers” laws were passed. Yes, unaccountable groups such as Border Patrol have often lawlessly acted with impunity. Yes, the harm was massive.

But in every previous era, citizens rose up in mass movements. The history of America’s long Civil Rights struggle, through Jim Crow to the 1960s, illustrates the blood and treasure it took to create change.

The paradox of what the court has recently ruled is that John Roberts himself has previous decried the very kind of profiling their new rulings now allow. (The Times video notes this…)

But now, the scale of this new iteration of morally licensed profiling —this most recent Trumpian change to the fundamentals of American society— is massive.

That’s why this video is so important for our society, right now. I truly, deeply, urge all White Americans to sit with what this video tells us about who we are, and where we are headed as a nation if we don’t fight back.

What I have about it during this past decade of harmful creeping authoritarianism is this:

These policies drive wedges into the hearts of American neighborhoods.

To Love American Is To Love ALL Its People.
And, on a good day, that’s hard.

And these are not good days.

I live in, and love deeply, a major American city. Like most of the rest of us here, we live here because of its beautiful diversity, not in spite of it. But as the stories of previous generations show us, such a life is always challenging on the very best days. We human beings misunderstand each other across racial and cultural lines. As Malcom Gladwell’s brilliant book showed us a few years back, it’s hard to talk to, or understand “strangers.”

Loving the Stranger is a Primary Message of Christianity.
What We Christians Can (Should) Bring to the Table.

I won’t go unto all the details here, because this a whole other essay. (or series of them…) But my own sense of Jesus’ mission (set out in Luke Chapter 4) was that he was sent by God to love all humans, not just those of his own tribe. In point of fact, the Gospels tell stories of how those who are angry with Jesus —those who seek to kill him from the moment of his very first sermon— do so because he demanded a love and inclusion of all people, not just his own “tribe.”

This Gospel message can help us push us beyond our tribe and culture, and to a love of all humans. Despite what Evangelicalism is doing to Christianity —offering theological “cover” and blessing to Christian Nationalism— the message of Jesus pushes us to a completely different place.

In this different kind of Christian faith, we don’t dissolve the differences between us; we instead celebrate and revel in them.
We learn from each other, and we approach it all with a God-led humility.

Trust Is What We Lose.
And When We Do, We Lose Society Itself.

When I, as a pastor, repeatedly say that these kinds of policies drive wedges in American neighborhoods, the thing I worry about most is: loss of trust. Trust is the glue that holds it all together. Trust in my neighbor. Trust in the shop owner. Trust in the guy I pass at the 711. Trust in the person I pass on the street.

Trust is the first thing to go, and the last thing to be restored. People of Color already did not have trust in our government or institutions, and they came by that lack of trust honestly…through experience and the lessons of history. We don’t need to recount all of that here, and my sense is the majority of White folks still don’t get this.

What I am saying here today is: if you are a White American, this eroding trust always should have always concerned you. And it should concern you even more, now.

Authoritarians and Fascists rely on various racial and cultural tribes no longer trusting each other, believing that the system is always rigged and…eventually…they rely on those tribal identities turning on each other in small acts of violence they can use as pretense for even further harm and repression.

Minneapolis Should Inspire Everyone.

I recently had the privilege to meet Rev. Susie Hayward, a Minneapolis pastor. We were together at a “training of the trainers” for how pastors and faith leaders can help us push back against authoritarianism. It was incredibly inspiring training, and I am confident that CLEAR DFW will be offering it soon in our area, as we seek to love and serve our community.

I quoted Rev. Hayward in a recent sermon because her description of Minneapolis and its people reminded me so deeply about of the core of Dallas.

Part of that quote comes back to me now:

”In the end, the source of our bravery is just Love. We love each other. Like, we literally go around telling each other we love each other, that we keep us safe, and that we will defend each other – everyone, whatever their race or religion or citizenship status, no matter how much the government throws at us, knowing they may kill more of us. Because we love our neighbors.

And seeing the power of that love — manifested in how fiercely we care for each other — seeing how much stronger it’s making us individually and collectively, stronger even than the forces of hate and violence unleashed on us: I don’t believe that love is almighty because the Scriptures testify to it. I believe it because I see it every day in my neighborhood. And that truth manifested is what makes us brave. That kind of love is unbreakable and defiant.

We will prevail.”

(The whole essay I wrote is HERE)

I was reminded this week, in the presence of new Minneapolis friends, that we don’t yet seem to have that level of resilient community in Dallas. But we do have beautifully diverse city core, and my sense is that the majority of folks who choose to live here are choosing because of its diversity, not in spite of it.

Which, to push this once again, is what makes these new policies so deeply harmful.

Because this racial profiling erodes trust…among citizens.
Because this emboldens already racist law enforcement to harm and divide citizens.
Because it gives permission to further Authoritarianism and Fascism.

So, although I know you are tired, and I know the harm is deep and wide…I hope you continue to pray and continue to act. I hope you pay attention to this NYT video. It doesn’t show me anything fundamentally new. But it does illustrate the depth of the current harm. This stuff is really happening, right now in America, and we should all pay attention.

May we build out communities of love, trust, and mutuality….the hard work of the every day…so that we can resist and restore trust, and rebuild the America that never was, but still could be.

This seems a good week to dust off this story, and share some of NASA’s remarkable new pictures, while I tell this story.

Please check out all these original NASA pics here.

I first read the story I’m thinking of in Matthew Fox’s powerful book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.

Fox tells the story this way:

“During the Apollo mission in 1969, astronaut Rusty Schweikert was let out of the capsule on an umbilical cord… Just as he emerged from the capsule, something went wrong within the capsule… and this left Rusty all alone floating around Mother Earth in complete cosmic silence. During this time he had two profound conversion experiences [or awakenings].

He looked back on Mother Earth, ‘a shining gem against a totally black backdrop,’ and realized everything he cherished was on that gem – his family and land, music, and human history with its folly and its grandeur; he was so overcome that he wanted to “hug and kiss that gem like a mother does her firstborn child.” Trained as a jet fighter pilot, he was a typical “macho man,” but a breakthrough of his own powers of maternity came washing over him at that moment in space…

Schweikert’s second awakening in space was a political one. He was a red, white, and blue American who believed what he had always been taught – that the world is divided between the ‘communist world and the free world.’ Yet, while floating around Mother Earth he saw that the rivers flowed indiscriminately between Russia and Europe; that ocean currents served communist, socialist, and capitalist nations alike; that clouds did not stop at borders to test for political ideology; and that there are no nations. Nations exist in the mind of the human race alone… Interdependence is what really exists.”

There are many lessons to be gleaned from this story for our time, and many messages inside these pictures. One lesson is “interdependence;” the interconnectedness of all things.

But, in the week Orion flies farther from our little blue marble than any humans, ever; we too are farther way from the concept of “interdependence” than we have been in decades.

Yesterday, the entire planet was wracked with fear of a civilizational destruction, wrought by the fascist dreams of our sitting president. He is destroying alliances and deeply damaging the trust of the world in America.

But a picture such as reminds us all: We are all tiny fools to believe we control this planet. None more a fool than that man in the White House. In the wake of yesterday’s threats to “end a civilization,” we all need the picture below even more…to realize our place in the cosmos.

There’s a message in the juxtaposition of the anxieties we feel when we look down at our predicament, and the awe we feel when we see this picture.

When seen from the vastness of space, we are tiny dot of starlight, barely visible to the whole cosmos. Therefore, our fantasy of control of the planet is the greatest of human hubris that we recreate in every age; and we are currently being led by legions of hubristic humans all around this globe.

Perhaps it’s the inability to deal with this smallness of humanity that drives much of this? America’s “Manifest Destiny” was driven by a desire to control and conquer. And by the time we got to the Pacific Ocean…when what?

As the Eagles sang forty years ago: “There is no more new frontier, we have to make it here.”

But we seem to be forgetting this…or maybe not enough of us ever really understood this? The older I get, the more I believe that, if there is an “original sin” of humanity, it’s HUBRIS.

Hubris seems like it lurks in the shadows behind all our hyper-controlling theologies and political movements.

We are still seeking to build a tower “up” to become “god,” just like the time of Babel. And we can look at this tiny blue marble below, and either decide to double-down on control.

Or…perhaps we can simply stand in awe.
Perhaps we can be reminded of how small we are.

Faith, at its best, isn’t supposed to help us in our animalistic desire dominate. It’s supposed to help us develop our spiritual capacities for the greater spiritual gifts. The doctrine of discovery, once blessed by the Church, can now be seen to be the ultimate in our spiritual hubris.

Even the most powerful of us are invisible specs on that tiny marble in this picture below. We are fools to believe in our power.

And so, awe stands ready to push us away from our hubris. Historians of religion suggest that fostering awe was one of the primary reasons that drove humans to create their religious rituals in the first place.

Another lesson of Schweikart’s story is a reminder about my favorite Biblical word: Compassion.

But, not just compassion for individuals, but also for our entire planet and all of us tiny creatures who live here. Again, we somehow have to develop of compassion for the WHOLE of humanity, and overcome our deep tribalism. And, again, for some of us, faith helps us do this.

But I think a third powerful understanding in this story is about love, and its connections to the first two lessons. It’s about having a love for the entire beautiful whole of our broken and fractured world.

One of the most quoted verses in all of the scriptures is:

“For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son…”

God gave Jesus, not out of hate, or anger, of vengeance, or even to fulfill some kind of mechanistic “plan” of ritual atonement.

God gave Jesus to the world out of LOVE…for the world. Not for the world’s destruction. Not for the world’s conversion to specific religious doctrine. Not even to be killed through some predetermined plan.But God gave Jesus for the world’s own sake. And out of love.

Observers have come to describe the kinds of experiences that Rusty Schweikert had as “The Overview Effect.” In short, the effect is an experience of awe, transcendence, love, compassion and unity that comes from stepping back out of our own individual experiences and seeing the “whole.”

Dozens of astronauts have now reported this very similar experience. For many of them it has changed their lives, and they come back from their space flights committed to serve the world through various humanitarian causes.

It seems to me that this famous Gospel verse is God’s own version of “The Overview Effect.”

God takes a look at the whole world…
…all of our artificial borders and divisions…
…all of our tribal natures and petty grievances…
…all of our wars and selfish greed and destruction of the world itself…

And instead of condemning us to harsh judgement…God LOVES the world, and sought to send Jesus as a way for us to overcome all of these things.

Jesus calls us to the same kind of “Overview Effect.” Jesus pushes us to step back from our provincialism and see the world as God sees it. To be awed by the world and overcome with a desire to make it a better place…to improve the lives of all God’s children.

In Christian Nationalism, violent politics and policies find justification, permission that is properly called “Moral Licensing”1 through the theology and imagery of Christian faith. The one reinforces the other.

Arguably, Christianity has been in conflict with “Empire” and the desire for Nationalistic Religion, ever since Constantine decreed it to be the state religion. As I’ve said before, the collusion between Constantine’s Imperial power and the church’s ecclesial power is one of the “greatest tricks” ever played on humanity.

Think about that moment, for a moment…

Somehow, this collusion of church and state, a failure of Christians to understand their own story, a fourth century Church-structure blessed the very Empire that killed its Lord and Savior 400 years prior.

I call this “Constantine’s Greatest Trick.” Again, there’s never been a greater theological/political slight of hand than this. And our world has been the worst for it, ever since.

The Wizard of Oz might say, “Pay no attention to that crucifixion at the end of the story…”

But if we read the Gospels, read they illustrate the dangers of Christian Nationalism, and how an authentic Christian faith is something different, altogether. It was there at the very beginning.

And there is no better example than “Palm Sunday.”

And that parade has never been described better than in the book, “The Last Week” by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.

Even if you never read the whole book, the chapter on “Palm Sunday” alone will revolutionize your sense of who Jesus was, and what his procession that day really means.

As they say, “The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’ crucifixion.”

I think it’s even more than that…

The Two Parades

The key that unlocks it all is to understand that there is not just one, but two, processions that day. The one you know from our Bible is Jesus’ humble procession on the back of a donkey.

Lesser known, but just as real, is a Roman procession led by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of the area. Pilate did not live in Jerusalem, but instead lived in a “new and splendid city on the coast.”

But, it was common practice for him to come into Jerusalem during high holy days like the Passover.

Borg and Crossan explain it here:

“Though unfamiliar to most people today, the imperial procession was well known in the Jewish homeland in the first century. Mark and the community for which he wrote would have known about it, for it was the standard practice of the Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals. They did so not out of empathetic reverence for the religious devotion of their Jewish subjects, but to be in the city in case there was trouble. There often was, especially at Passover, a festival that celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from an earlier empire.”

Remember how Donald Trump wanted a military parade for his birthday? Pilate’s procession was like that. The goal —like the violent spectacle of crucified bodies lining the road into every Roman city— was to instill fear and obedience into conquered people.

“Imagine the imperial procession’s arrival in the city. A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.”

But! This was not only a display of political might and power. This was also a message about theology….

“Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power, but also Roman imperial theology. According to this theology, the emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome, but the Son of God. It began with the greatest of the emperors, Augustus, who ruled Rome from 3I BCE to 14 CE. His father was the god Apollo, who conceived him in his mother, Atia. Inscriptions refer to him as “son of God,” “lord” and “savior,” one who had brought peace on earth.” After his death, he was seen ascending into heaven to take his permanent place among the gods. His successors continued to bear divine titles, including Tiberius, emperor from 14 to 37 CE and thus emperor during the time of Jesus’s public activity. For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.”

Read that last line again, because here you see the implicit message of nationalistic theology at work: “For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.”

And then, there’s the parade you know. Jesus, humbly riding on the back of a common animal…no soldiers…no chariot.

Lauded by folks waving branches or putting down coats (and, sure, that’s a tad confusing between the different Gospel versions…) the point is clear in all versions: They are proclaiming Jesus “Messiah,” and they are shouting “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.”

But this is a very different kind of power and authority. Here’s how Borg and Crossan describe it:

“Jesus’s procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world.

Jesus’s procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast—between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar—is central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.

The confrontation between these two kingdoms continues through the last week of Jesus’s life. As we all know, the week ends with Jesus’s execution by the powers who ruled his world.”

Frankly, Borg and Crossan are underselling this here: The “confrontation between the two kingdoms” has continued for the past two thousand years.

One leader, flexing the power of Empire.

Another leader, humbling riding among the common people in the name of God, standing against imperial power.

The implicit question is:

Which kingdom/realm will you serve?
Which parade are you part of?

And that, friends, as I’m suggesting, is always the question of every age.

Hegseth, ICE, and Pilate’s Parade

Recently, our Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, suggested the war in Iran is a holy war, protected by God.

Pope Leo shot that down with a quick social media rebuttal: Don’t justify your violent war with god….

But, also during this past year, the Homeland Security social media accounts have posted images of ICE agents, in full military-style gear, alongside quotes from holy scripture. I have written about this dangerous mixing of theology and politics before here.
In fact, this essay (the link) really is a good summary of many theological values I speak on often: The Dangers of Enemy-Making, Moral Licensing, Christian Nationalism. (It’s long, but worth your time…)

This is not the Spirit of Jesus.
This is not the message of the Gospel.
This is a nationalistic mix of politics and religion.

Power and empire seeking to be baptized by the language of faith, with no desire to really follow the teachings of Jesus.

Yes, the Church has tragically acceded to political might in almost every era. From the horrific “Doctrine of Discovery,” down through America’s “Manifest Destiny,” political power has always looked to bless itself with the outward trappings of faith. Christianity, far too often, has been happy to oblige. Both the Civil War and “Jim Crow” eras of the White Protestant Church theologically blessed White Supremacy in ways most of us still have not accounted for. Dr. King lambasted White Moderates in the Birmingham Jail letter decades ago. These are some examples of the toxic mixing of Christianity and American power and how it has been called out.

But always and alongside this, like its own parallel parade, has been social justice-centered Christianity that opposes empire and pushes back against the blending of political power and Christian imagery. For this other strand of Christianity, Christians still use the language of faith to describe their political views, and they still appeal the moral teachings of Jesus to guide their moral actions; especially as it pertains to a broad and deep love of all God’s children.

But they do not seek power for themselves, for power’s sake. They express a wariness to create a direct marriage between politics and religion.

I first came to understand these differences when I noticed the Christianity of the 1980s.

On one side, there was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, explicitly seeking to tie Republican power with Evangelical power.

On the other side, there was Jesse Jackson and also the preacher at my own Austin UM Church during that time…preaching on social justice, calling for moral accountability. But, again, from very different moral places.

This second strand of Christianity is like a second parade, always wary of acquiescing to raw political power out of fear of Christian Nationalism.

One brief example…

On July 4th Weekend, every year the large Baptist church in downtown Dallas has a patriotic worship service where the entire sanctuary is filled with American flags. The people are waving them. They’re on the screens. If you just saw an image of that gathering, you’d assume it was a Republican Party convention.

Meanwhile, across town at the liberal Mainline Protestant Church I served, we were remodeling and discovered a dust-covered, orphaned, “flag stand” in the nether reaches of an old closet. No doubt was at one time used to display an American flag in the sanctuary. But decades before —while evangelicals started draping themselves with the flag, more and more— that congregation read Bible stories of how people of faith eschewed such an outward political symbol of the state in their worship space. And they took theirs out.

This is not because anybody hates America. It’s because we love and serve Jesus too. We love and serve the humble servant on the back of that donkey….the one who was lauded by the common folks of his day…as we modern-day Christians should love and serve all God’s children in our age.

Jesus Stood With Common Folks. So Should We.

But, speaking of common folks, in Jesus’ time and ours, they are the ones who most suffer under the toxicity of Christian Nationalism.
Let’s talk briefly about “elites” and “common folks” in both ages…

Borg and Crossan also have an extended section on the “collaboration” of Jerusalem elites. The ruling class, represented by King Herod, were no doubt walking a tightrope between trying to save their own culture and religion, and show deference to the power of the Roman state.

When I think of that, I think of how the Star Wars show “Andor” illustrates the challenges to people such as Mon Mothma, and her circle of friends. She is both trying desperately to “get along” but also eventually choosing for the “resistance” to the oppression of “empire.” I imagine the Jewish ruling class was a bit like this.

Understand, then, in our own time how the poor the marginalized feel overwhelmingly marginalized by “the elites,” by politicians, by billionaires and the powerful. By Epstein, his friends, and by corporations. By both political parties. By the collusion between Church and State, or government and corporations.

As in Jesus’ day, common folks today look around and see the collaboration and oppression at work, everywhere. Maybe they hear some of them telling Jesus to be quiet. They feel lied to by the very leaders who are supposed to speak truth to power.

The true message of Jesus, then, is something that stands against this. It marches alongside, in solidarity with, the marginalized. This is, it seems to me, the power of the “No Kings” protests. We like to believe this is what we clergy in CLEAR DFW are doing when we stand alongside migrants and the deep harm our nationalist government is doing to them.

Brief Aside: Kingdom Language.

To stand against Empire, then, is to stand for God’s very different “Kingdom”

But, a word about that phrase. Many modern theologians recoil against the phrase “kingdom of God,” and instead prefer something like “the realm of God.” I have certainly been known to use “realm” more often. Sometimes, I use them interchangeably. I’m simply noting how, while problematic, Borg and Crossan make a credible case that it is the juxtaposition of “kingdom language” that is a primary point of Palm Sunday.

What’s important is to understand the illustration of the binary nature of the original story:
Kingdom of Rome.
Kingdom of God.

They say it this way:

“Kingdom of God” is a political as well as religious metaphor.

Religiously, it is the kingdom of God; politically, it is the kingdom of God. In the first century, “kingdom” was a political term.

Jesus’s hearers (and Mark’s community) knew of and lived under kingdoms: the kingdoms of Herod and his sons, the kingdom of Rome. Jesus could have spoken of the family of God, the community of God, or the people of God, but, according to Mark, he spoke of the kingdom of God. To his hearers, it would have suggested a kingdom very different from the kingdoms they knew, very different from the domination systems that ruled their lives.”

Again, “kingdom” as a religious metaphor is, credibly flawed. It’s too easy for the rich and powerful to shift it away from a theological meaning, and into a literal expression of political power. So, no, I’m not wedded to it, at all. But if we are to understand what’s a play in the original Gospel, we must come to terms with the binary metaphor at the heart of it.

State Power Killed Jesus.

As I remind my readers every year this at this time, Jesus was crucified. And, the only people who ever crucified anyone were the Romans. “The Jews” are not to blame for Jesus’ death, Roman power is. Imperial power is. State power is. And State power will always attempt to co-opt religious language for its own use.

Hitler loved Christian iconographic imagery, but also borrowed the Swastika from Hindus. Once upon a time, Donald Trump cleared the plaza outside the White House to hold up a Bible. It’s doubtful the man who once called one of its letters “Two Corinthians,” has ever read much of the Bible. But that wasn’t the point. The point of Trump and military leaders holding up a Bible was a toxic mix of imagery that satisfies and satiates the masses….and blesses blunt political violence.2

Where We See Jesus-Like Christians Today

First, my sense? We need a new set of theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer. Both, in their own ways, engaged with politics yet understood the dangers of nationalist religion.3

It seems to me we need self-aware Christianity, willing to stand up against American Empire, fascism and authoritarianism…all while humbly understanding its own ability to be marginalized and coopted.

The Black Church has always been a major part of this witness. There is absolutely no denying this, and they teach all of us White folks humbling and inspiring lessons.

That said, my own belief is that my own much maligned mainline Protestant faith has done this better at this than the culture often admits. We’ve failed many times, and we continue to do so. But we try.

And, as Twain said, “reports of our death are grateful exaggerated.”

This is the faith of James Talarico, of course. The best way to describe him is as a “liberal Mainline Protestant.” Whatever you think of his politics, he’s being embraced as some new expression of public Christian faith. I am sure that many folks are just attracted to the generally fresh expression of a non-Nationalist faith.4

And while, I could not be more excited by this, I’ll also gently say: It’s not “new.”

It might be new to a new generation raised in the Evangelical-stew of modern America; but we Mainline Protestants have always been here, in the public sphere. Rep. Talarico’s pastor, for example, is a 30-year social justice friend of mine.

Our liberal mainline churches never have, and never will, be huge.5 But we have always been here, alongside the power of the Black Church, to stand in solidarity with others both outside in and inside our faith traditions.

Expressed as a number, White Mainline Protestants were 10% of those who identified as left-leaning voters in 2023. By comparison, the Black Protestant Church is something like 16-18% of that voting block.

There are also something like 10% of both Hispanic and White Catholic voters who “lean left.”

And this leads to a gentle reminder to us all: Even as this moment, the slim majority of left-leaning voters identify as “some kind of Christian.”

Again, this is where our binaries fail us.

Evangelical Christianity, mostly, has become completely coopted by the MAGA Nationalist movement, ascendent today.

But quietly, and faithfully, always alongside that parade have been a hodgepodge of various forms of American Christianity. No, they’re not the majority of American Christians. But in a way that observers of all kinds still forget, they’re still a bare majority of Democratic voters.6

But perhaps in our current age, they can be part of the leaven.

Social Justice Christianity, liberal White Mainline Protestant Christianity, is just one part of this coalition of various Christians who seek to be active in politics, but also typically stand wary of nationalist faith too. As I write and preach often: If you are a Christian fleeing from Evangelicalism, check us out.

This is how, for thirty years, I have tried to engage in the public sphere. (That story about our church and the American flag, for example).

I am most definitely, and unapologetically, interested in how my faith connects with my politics. In fact, I think my faith demands action in the world. And, I am sure I could do it better; be better ally and coalition member. And I am constantly asking God for the wisdom to make sure I too don’t just become an empty “collaborator.”

The Humility As the Skeleton Key

I wonder if “humility” is the skeleton key” that helps us understand this whole essay and those two parades? Perhaps it helps us break open Jesus’ is intentionally humble parade, and how we navigate these different forms of Christianity today?

Jesus’ parade is almost poking fun at the pomp and circumstance of the imperial parade. And! Jesus is willing to follow God’s call through Jerusalem…to the seat of power.

And therefore, it’s not a choice without risk.
Even the risk of death.

All this is how I see the true meaning of that Palm Sunday parade.

Tomorrow, likely millions of Americans will take to the streets to proclaim “No Kings.” (See you at City Hall!)

“No Kings,” is American story, usually told about not following a British King…or now, an American tyrant.

But some strands of God’s Christian Church have proclaimed “No Kings” ever since that Palm Sunday parade. We understand the call to live as part of our world, in solidarity with it, and yet with an ethic of love and justice that applies to all God’s children.

There are Caesars in every age, including the American age.
And so, along with following the humble Messiah instead of the Power of Empire, many of us Christians always have, and will always, proclaim:

“Jesus is Lord. And Caesar is not.”

The “Golden Rule” functions as both a “commandment” and a “law of nature.”

In its positive form --one we attribute to both Jesus and many other spiritual teachers-- it’s a commandment.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The answer is not immediately obvious. It requires you to think, pray, and meditate. It’s a spiritual challenge that requires imagination, insight, and spiritual depth:

Question: “How do I wish to be seen or treated by others?”
Answer: “Do that thing…act that way.”

The assumption, of course, is the way we would act is with compassion, love, justice, fairness, equity. Things like this.

Modern brain science now shows us the wisdom of this most basic of all spiritual teachings. When we “mirror” positive attributes…spreading love, compassionate justice, fairness…these spiritual attributes INCREASE in others.

As Dr. King liked to say, only love can drive out hate. Because only LOVE can create more love.

The problem is, the Golden Rule is ALSO always true as a “law of nature.”

This is perhaps best seen in Rabbi Hillel’s version, which comes to the world’s attention at around the same time of Jesus:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to another.”

Why?

Because if hate is what is spread…as opposed to love…then hate is what will INCREASE in the world.

As spiritual teaching then, The Golden Rule is morally neutral as to its outcome. Whatever we put into it…that is what will come out of it.

Hate creates more hate.
Love creates more love.

Take your pick.

Cynics and critics of religion will deride the fact that both Hillel and Jesus become known for the same religious teaching, at around the same time. They’ll suggest it means religion is all “made up” and untrue. Manufactured, in some way.

I’ve always found that to be a strange critique.

Wouldn’t the opposite reaction be more reasonable? I mean precisely because The Golden Rule is found in so many of the world’s great religions, should not we pay even more attention to it?

Pete Hegseth, the Iran War, and the Negative Golden Rule

I’ve been thinking about this almost constantly since I read quotes from Secretary Pete Hegseth about his “moral vision” for the War in Iran. From a recent New York Times piece:

“The goal, he said recently, is to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Instead of seeking justice, U.S. forces are pursuing vengeance against an implacable foe.

“Their war on Americans has become our retribution,” he vowed.”

Death.
Destruction.
Retribution.

Before you recoil from these words (and, you should…) understand their meaning in terms of the millenia-long history of The Golden Rule:

Because The Golden Rule is like an algebraic or physics equation, we can put any INPUT into it.

“What is retribution to you, do not do to another.”
“What is destruction to you, do not do to another.”
“What is death to you, do not do to another.”

This allows us to quite easily see not just the moral emptiness of Hegseth’s statements, but also the danger. Moral teachings that encourage retribution and vengeance will…unsurprisingly…create more retribution and vengeance.

But Hegseth’s bizarre and heretical theology didn’t stop there.

(He’s also spreading a lie that this war is a part of Jesus’ “second coming.” I wrote about that last week.)

Hegseth has said the war is somehow protected by God.

Nobody knows more about this than a sitting Catholic Pope. Popes, tragically throughout human history, have launched all manners of wars, crusades, and foolish adventures under the theologically blessed “Doctrine of Discovery.”

But in recent years, modern Popes seem to have come back to their senses on these issues, and I appreciate Pope Leo’s quick response to Hegseth:

“Do not involve the name of God in choices of death. God cannot be enlisted in darkness.”

It’s probably dangerous for me to edit Pope Leo. But actually, I’m not sure he’s right without a quick addition:

“The true God cannot be enlisted in darkness.”

You can easily create an “image of God” that is based on hate, vengeance, retribution. Hegseth’s ascendant form of Christian Nationalism is ample proof of this.

This is what religious nationalism and it’s American version, “Christian Nationalism,” is. It’s a twisting of God’s true teachings in the service of a nationalist government. It seeks to bless clearly anti-Christian goals for legislative and governmental ends.

But again, this also proves The Golden Rule as an algebraic equation….

If we learn —if we are taught, if we mentally conceptualize— a god as these darker moral choices, that is what we will manifest into the world. That view of that god will become real in the real world.

This is why we say, over and over: “Theology matters.”

So, why are so many of us disturbed by Hegseth and his morally dangerous theological views?

BECAUSE WE UNDERSTAND HOW THE GOLDEN RULE IS A LAW OF NATURE.

We understand the vengeance, anger, hate, violence…being inflicted on Iran will come back on America. It will come back on our own people.

Yes, of course, in God’s name the violence itself is a horrific moral stain. The killing of hundreds of Iranian school children is almost unmentionably horrific.

But how far are we from the Vietnam era…when we came to see massacres like My Lai as moral stains. When our nation recoiled in horror at our excesses.

Our constant news cycles means we register the horror of those children dying, and then callously move along.

Perhaps it’s just too much to remember?
Perhaps there is just too much trauma, anger, hatred, vengeance loose in the world.

Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal and the Golden Rule

This week, an Afghani man died after being held at the Dallas Ice Field Office. This is the location where, in a normal week, I spend time with clergy in prayer vigil, and assist in direction compassion for terrified migrants coming for their appointments.

Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal had six kids, and lived in Richardson. Very near where I grew up. For all I know, his kids go to the same schools I used to.

Mohammad was here in America because he had helped the US Government prosecute our war in Afghanistan. He helped with our elite special forces. For this, he was gifted entry to our country. He has been hailed by our government, previously, as a hero.

Our local ICE Field Director has, many times, insisted that ONLY “bad guys” are being rounded up.

We clear in CLEAR DFW clergy who minister there have known all along this was a lie. We can read the analysis by journalists, proving this is a lie.

But, also with our own eyes, we see this too. We see the good and decent migrants who show up, faithfully, for their appointments and then are detained. We see their shocked and crying families. We cry with them because we have known, for many months now, that “the cruelty is the point.”

The law is not “the point” for this American administration.
The cruelty is.

As evidence, look at how his war hero —who is currently being lauded around the nation by veterans and military personnel— was described in the headline of ICE’s own press release:

“Criminal illegal alien from Afghanistan with previous arrests for fraud and theft passes away at Texas hospital”

His alleged crime?
The theft of SNAP benefits to feed his family of six kids.

This is how your government is describing this American war hero.

From the conversations I’ve been part of this past week, this death is affecting many people in a deeply personal way.

I’m just going to end with one more point, though…

Generational American Violence and the Golden Rule

Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal was a victim of American violence in both his home country and here. Yes, he heroically assisted American Troops.

But, also yes, those troops were prosecuting a morally questionable war (especially in later years) which involved the kidnapping and rendition of thousands of human beings.

We, our government during that war, kidnapped and tortured our alleged enemies, some of whom have now been shown to have been innocent of any crimes.

As I’ve noted in many other essays, the violence of those military tactics has now been brought back to our shores. Now, it’s ICE, Border Patrol, DHS…dressed up like American military…marauding through American streets…..and renditioning migrants off the streets to secret sites. This is, by all acounts, what they were trying to do to Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal.

It didn’t even take some foreign nation to do this to us…WE…our government…brought home those tactics to our streets. The violence of American foreign war has become the violence of American domestic policy.

Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal lost a homeland because of our use of violent, vengeful, and harmful tactics. And now he has lost his life because of it too.

Expressed in the horror of The Golden Rule:

WE DID TO HIM WHAT WE TAUGHT HIM TO DO TO OTHERS.

I cannot think of a more horrific manifestation of negative Golden Rule than this.

I pray for the family of Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal.
I pray for the moral harm ICE are causing themselves.
I pray for our military families who have died in Iran.
I pray for the victims of the indiscriminate violence our nation is inflicting there.

All of this leaves me, as I am sure it does all of you with a heart, with a deep sadness.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“What is hateful to you, do not do to another.”

God has given us these commandments for centuries, and through almost every single one of the great spiritual teachers, including my own Jesus.

Ignoring them means nothing less than the destruction of even the possibility and human civilization. Civilization is build on trust, not distrust. It’s built on love, not hate.

In God’s name, humanity must rise up and stop this madness.

But time and again, as I move through this oral exam we call “life,” I look up from my own desk, and across the room see these types of Christians answering the same existential/theological questions I wrestle with with bizarre and twisted reasoning.

It usually doesn’t bother me much, because it’s hard enough to live out your own life values, much less keep up with details of the value systems of others.

I usually shrug, and go on with my life, shaking my head with bemused bafflement.

“I don’t care if they think the world is about to end…they can believe whatever they want…no skin off my nose…”

That said, even though we mainline Protestants rarely —if ever— are obsessed with endtime issues, now and then folks ask me about it.

Long ago, folks would ask my thoughts on Hal Lindsey’s “The Late, Great, Planet Earth” (1970s).

When I was an intern pastor in Mason a sweet little old octogenarian came into my office with hands trembling, holding a book she’d gotten in the mail, called “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be In 1988.” I mean, literally she was trembling in fear that all of us here on earth had mere months left.

After a few moments of conversation, she calmed down, lived what I hope was a peaceful rest of her earthly days, and we all watched as those September dates came and went.

To be clear, there has never been one day of my life of faith I took the stuff seriously. As time went on, these theories got crazier and crazier.
At this point, I’d call them bat-shit crazy.

So, yeah, it comes up now and then. But as a Mainline Protestant, this kind of toxic literalism and theology just isn’t who we are, so I typically explain it away quickly, internally manifesting that same bemusement.

It did lead me to be captivated by the sheer number of times evangelicals shriek that the world is about to end because of some real-world event. One of my favorite books as a young theologian was “The Doomsday Catalogue.”

It’s a large volume that details the hundreds of times, over 2,000 years, that Christians have shrieked about the imminent end of the world…and how many times they’ve been wrong.

Which has always led me to think that this is all sweet, old, batshit stuff from our past. Like the overt racism of our grandfather’s generation, I have naively spent most of my life pretending this is a relic of the past.

To wit, my dear friend and neighbor, Jason Cohen, used to have that first picture in this essay, up at his East Dallas shop, “Curiosities.” It’s a MASSIVE wall hanging of dispensationalist theology…I mean for scale that thing is like 4 feet tall…and probably twice longer than I could fit in this picture.

I was so captivated by it that I snapped this pic back in 2019. (I need to ask him if it’s still there…I haven’t been in for a while…)

Jason describes “Curiosities,” as:

”…an emporium of objects dedicated to the past. Side show banners, medical devices, porcelain advertising signs, tramp art, vintage cowboy apparel – Curiosities, located in East Dallas near the Dallas Arboretum, isn’t your typical antique store. Jam-packed with antiques and oddities.”

And this is perhaps the BEST description of how I have always viewed this theology: Some weird, side-show oddity of the past. In the same old shopping bin along with carnival barkers and their elixir tonics.

The problem is: Those evangelicals who believe in it keep reinventing NEW world events that herald the “end times.” For them, it’s not a relic or oddity. It’s their lived theology, still in our day.

Our current war of aggression in Iran1 is the latest example of Christians doing this.

And this time, I’m not just “shrugging” or rolling my eyes, because of one key difference I’ll note in a moment.

First, let’s note how deeply nihilistic this theology is about God’s world.
Rather than see it as something that can, and should, be nurtured and saved, this theology believes things are so bad, that this world is beyond all redemption. Somehow, they ignore their own favorite scripture about how “God so loved the world,” and believe that the world is hopelessly broken that destruction is the only future.

It’s the same theology as a Marvel comic or a DC movie. And it’s a deeply American fantasy: Only the lone hero can save us, and only if things are so crappy they are beyond all hope for the world. For 2,000 years, this theology always begins with a world-event that is happening, in the present day, that is the start of the end of the world.2

All this leads directly to a deep nihilism about the idea of ever doing anything good in our world.

If the world IS about to end…why try to save it?

Why bother with disarmament?
We’re gonna need those weapons to help Jesus.

Why bother with environmentalism?
The world isn’t here much longer, so it doesn’t matter.

Why give the poor food assistance?
Nobody — at least not the “saved”— will need food soon.

Multiply this nihilism out, across the “conservative” vision of destroying the Federal Government, and you start to see this nihilism everywhere....

Feeding the hungry…funding education…treating migrants like human beings…none of it matters because Jesus is about to return.

One of the most nihilistic parts of this theology always been the “steadfast support for Israel.”

As I told my dearest Rabbi friends years ago: Evangelicals really do not care about the “Modern State of Israel.” What I mean is: they don’t really care about its actual humans who actually live there. Their “strong defense of Israel” isn’t about actual human Israelis.

It’s about preserving some semblance of Israel like it was “Main Street USA” at Disneyland.

They don’t have to care about the actual humans. But Israel just has to be right there, in that place.

Modern Israelis, all modern Jews, are a macabre puzzle piece of a bizarre Biblically literal world-ending chessboard, where the outcome is fixed.

For my actual Jewish friends in our day, whose family’s endured the actual Holocaust 80 years ago, when they first realize what I am saying here, it is often head spinning and horrific.

We all, Jews and non-Jews alike, miscode the “Evangelical support of Israel” for actual support of current-day human and living Jews.
It’s not now. It’s never been.
It’s just some bizarre literalist drama.

Again, I am very clear that all of this literalist end-times theology is heresy. I am very clear that all of this is very dangerous. I’m also very clear —as a mainline Protestant Christian— that they think I am the foolish heretic. And I’ve never been that bothered with being called heretic, since Jesus was accused of something similar.

But here is my problem, right now….here is what’s different, right now.

In every other instance of this, when evangelical Christians crowed about some event heralding the end of God’s world…THEY DIDN’T HAVE THEIR HANDS ON THE LEVERS OF POWER.

OK. Maybe a few did, here and there. But there were always guardrails. There were always others in the room, pushing back.

Now, our “Secretary of Defense,”3 believes in this kind of theology.

And, according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, just this week more than 200 complaints have now been filed, detailing how commissioned officers are telling troops how this war is all a part of God’s plan so that Jesus can come back.

The Guardian sites one complaint as saying this:

“this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ….He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

So, again, this theology is totally wackdoodle. I can’t even take it seriously for a moment. Except that: beliefs are stubborn and “theology matters” because theology really does manifest itself in what we do in the actual world. So, in ways I’ve never been before, I am deeply troubled by all of this. It may not be MY theology. And it’s probably not yours. But our joint dismissal of it as fringe, is probably part of what has allowed it grow.

David Baumgardner, who hails from this tradition, has written a great essay this week titled:

”Dispensationalism Is Going To Get Us All Killed.”

We’re lucky to have my friend Mark Wingfield and Baptist News Global explain these things for us.

If you are an exvanegelical or anybody else, perhaps this Baptist news essay will help you deal with what’s happening in the culture right now. And maybe you’re close enough to Christians who believe this stuff to speak to them?

As for me, as a United Methodist, we never bother with speaking to point-by-point specifics of this theology, because my therapist taught me years ago, “you can’t argue with crazy.”

That said, let me offer a much simplified United Methodist on how we can bat down this bat-shit stuff.

My own walk with Jesus tells me to reject this theology for two specific reasons:

Reason #1. Jesus says it’s heresy.

OK, maybe he doesn’t literally use the word heresy. But in Matthew 24, Jesus says this:

“But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows.”

This allows us a very simple test that we can replicate, every time we encounter this crazy theology.

Question: “Is somebody crowing that the world is about to end because of specific world-events?”
Answer: “You can be assured that is heresy, and that God is NOT about to end the world.”

Because unless we are surprised, it’s not the end.

There’s no foreknowledge for the “elect” or the super-wise. Jesus literally says “nobody can know when this will happen,” apparently not even him.

So, if somebody says, “God is using us/this event to bring about the end of the world,” you can be assured they are mistaken. You can be assured this is heresy. It might be a horrible war. It really might end of our world. But God is not ordaining or using it. Human beings are instead, once again justifying their own murderous desire through Christian Nationalism.

Reason #2: This theology disempowers God.

If God is God, then God can save the world any damn way God wants to. It’s an insult to God —like us building the Tower of Babel— to pretend God is powerless without us. God needs our co-creation of the goodness of this world, yes, that is clear.

But, no, nowhere in the Bible does it say that we must start wars in order for God to come back…that we must make the world a hellhole in order for God to save it.

The world IS a hellhole…often….but it’s almost always through our human choices. God awaits our trust of God’s Spirit to co-create with God goodness, love, compassion, and mercy. THAT is what God needs us for.

So thanks to Mark and David Baumgardner. But as a good mainline United Methodist, I’ll tell you: all you really need is Reason #1. That is the full-stop, mic drop verse, that destroys all this goofy stuff.

I trust in Jesus. I trust in the Bible as non-literal wisdom for my life. And so, I trust Jesus when Jesus says “nobody knows when this will happen.”

So, when these guys, right now, crow about how they’re helping God bring about the end of the world, you can know: They might be right that they’re helping end the world, but it’s not God who is leading their choices.

It’s some far darker choice and more dangerous power.

And I can’t talk you down if you fear it might still kill us all.

If I was to write the long story of my spiritual, social, and political transformation in two sentences, that would be it. This essay is the story of that journey, and I’m inspired to update it because of the news today that Jesse Jackson has died. In my own telling of my own life, it’s hard to underestimate the profound effect Rev. Jackson had on me.

I wasn’t always “Progressive.” Anything you think you’ve known about me in these past few decades, as a social justice-preaching United Methodist pastor, that’s not where I started.

I grew up in very conservative Far North Dallas. Everybody I knew was a Republican. Everybody I knew was a “Conservative.” Evangelicalism was ascendent. It was the age of the “Moral Majority,” and that —for all I could tell— was the model we young White folks were supposed to embrace for how it meant to be political and “Christian.”

But during my college and seminary years, God changed my heart spiritually.
And Jesse Jackson changed my heart, politically and spiritually.

And I’d like to tell that story. Because it feels like we’re in something of a similar time today, and yet everything could not be more different. Young White men, like I was then, track staunchly Republican as a group. Far too many of them are radicalized online in this way. Young Christian men appear to be falling for a dangerous (imho) conservative Calvinism that I do not recognize.

It is not the same historical time, I get that. But looking back through the decades, I see a “rhyme” in it.

Being a Christian means believing that people’s hearts and minds really can change. That’s a foolish thing to say in our current day. We’ve never been more Balkanized in modern time. We’ve never been a in period where folks are LESS likely to change their minds about anything.

And yet, I am living proof it can happen. Further, I am confident that my own personal transformation —the way Jesus changed my heart— can help show us the way, today. Jesse Jackson played a key role in that story.

Lastly, and I know this won’t be a shock, but the socio-political left is hopelessly balkanized within itself today. Not only are we “tribal” in Team Red and Team Blue…but we are further tribal within the always fragile coalitions comprising the American political left.

Once again, it strikes me, Jesse Jackson has a lesson for us today.

And so, if you’re a White man of any age, and your allegiance to the MAGA/Republican/Evangelical world is fraying…
Or, if you are a member of the broad political left who laments the divided/balkanized nature of those movements…I’m here to suggest to you…

Jesse Jackson had it right.

He had a message for all of us. And if we still have any chance at all at creating a truly multi-cultural democracy in our nation —one that respects all our racial, religious, gendered, queer, economic identities— if we have any chance of changing anyone’s mind…perhaps we ought to remember again the political wisdom of Jesse Jackson; a wisdom undergirded by a particular kind of Christian faith.

And so, friends, buckle up. I’m going to tell you the long story of my own personal transformation.
How I changed my heart.
How I changed my mind.

Maybe you will find some place, whoever you are, in this story. And maybe you’ll find some hope, too.

I Voted For Ronald Reagan Twice.

I was eighteen on election day 1980, and so I voted for Ronald Reagan in my first election. It would never have occurred to me to vote for anyone else. I did not know any Democrats. I did not know any People of Color, although we had a few at Richardson High School where I was a student.

I was very active in my Methodist church young group. But we were most definitely not “liberal” by any means. We also most definitely not evangelical or fundamentalist, either. Although the “Moral Majority” was ascendent, we were “mainline protestant.” That said, it was impossible to avoid the cultural messaging that the Evangelical Christianity of the Moral Majority was the “true” Christianity we White people should all espouse.

Most of the childhood Conservatives I knew considered themselves “moderate Republicans.” They were socially moderate, economically conservative…or at least that’s how they saw themselves.
My point here is that this was an all-pervasive culture. Perhaps for anybody under forty it’s really hard to conceive of just how conservative Dallas was then.

This all followed me to college. During my time in school, I had this poster of a Nicaraguan “contra” up on my wall of my dorm room. I thought it was funny, cheeky, brash like I dreamed of being.

It seems to me that in every generation young men are drawn to military fantasies. I was too young for Vietnam. But Reagan was pushing support for the Contras (in all sorts of ways, we would learn…)
And it read as “cool,” to me. Macho. Strong.

Again, the older me is ashamed to for you to see this poster. Many of my decades-old progressive friends —especially my older mentors— were at the very same moment involved in the struggle for justice in Central America. Some folks may be horrified to see this poster, and imagine on my dorm room wall, perhaps during the same years they risked their lives to help Central Americans.

This is, as I’ve said, is a part of my confession.
This is to help you see my journey.

Transparently, I did not think deeply about the issues in Central America. My Father had been an anti-communist, therefore I was too.

I suppose, looking back, I thought the picture of this “contra” was cool…in a kind of “Apocalypse Now” way. Yes, that movie was supposed to be a meditation on the horrors of war. But like the “Wall Street” later on, and what it was meant to teach us about “greed,” cinematic cautionary tales sometimes get read as models of what it means to be a strong, confident, White man. This “freedom fighter” was like Martin Sheen, in my mind.

But, it was all “image” and posturing. This is only possible due to White privilege, of course.

That said, it also does make me wonder about the young men in our day who seem to obsessed with images of war and violence. They don’t really know violence, but they are fascinated by it.

It was all image. I never sent money to support “Charley.” I never attended College Republican meetings. But I was College Republican adjacent.

I didn’t know much about what Reagan was doing, or the illegality of supporting it through a poster like this. This was just the kind of thing young conservative men, in my conservative tribe, were doing back.

But Jesus Started to Work on My Heart

I want to talk now about the next period of my life, which I would describe as “Jesus’ Holy Dissonance.”

During that time, I started attending church at First United Methodist in Austin. I would become very active there, serving as college class president for two years. Sunday after Sunday, I sat in the balcony of that church and heard Rev. Jack Heacock preach on “Liberation Theology.” Jack would preach about the struggle in Central America. He would talk about the poor people of El Salvador and Nicaragua.

My friend Frank Rahm and I would sit in the balcony and make fun of him. We would made fun of the awkward White-man way he’d pronounce “El Salvador,” and “Guatemala.”

But another part of me was also listening. It was a theology that centered “the poor,” the disenfranchised, the outcast. And the more I read the actual teaching of Jesus, the more it started to challenge me as perhaps even being a true way to look at God.

It was theological and social “dissonance.”

Two campus ministers were incredibly important to me… Revs. Susan Sprague and Claudia Highbaugh.

They talked about their experiences as clergywomen…and Claudia about her experience as an African-American. Claudia, especially, listened to me. She loved and supported me…even as it was clear she thought I was young and naive. She didn’t judge me, but became my first real ministry-mentor.

Claudia Highbaugh, an African-American clergywoman of another denomination, is the single most important reason I ended up in seminary and as a minister today.

Even quietly made fun of Jack Heacock’s tortured pronunciations, I was also listening. It was seeping in. The theology of liberation was challenging me….angering me…pushing back on my little conservative, White male bubble. I took the Contra poster down, and started to question my values, even as I was afraid to admit it publicly.

And this is the key point, and one I have tried to restate for decades now:

It was my Christian faith that led me to question those “Conservative” social views.

It was reading, studying, and really learning about what Jesus said about ministering with the poor, the marginalized, the outcast. It was really reading the Bible…the Gospels…and not just relying on Evangelical talking-points.

On the West Mall –UT’s famous “free speech” area– I walked by tables full of information from people who believed very differently from me. I used to joke that there was “one of every kind of person” at UT. I now say “there was a club.”

In rows and rows of information tables, I learned about Christian evangelicals and fundamentalist, and also every mainline denomination too.
I learned about Israel and Palestine.
I learned about Libertarians and Socialists, Republicans and Democrats.

The beautiful diversity of God’s humanity started to speak to me. Yes, the West Mall probably where I got that “Charley” poster. But encountering and meeting people from all over the world, of different races and religions; their very existence was challenging in the best, and most fascinating, way.

Jesus’ holy dissonance…

At one table, one “club” had brochures that made made a claim Jesus wasn’t White. That was revolutionary too. I’d obviously known he was Jewish. But weren’t the Jews I knew pretty “White?” (This was my thought…)

But as the group on the West Mall pushed, given the proximity to Africa, there was a much greater chance Jesus was African than Germanic. (That was the point of the group…)

Whatever Jesus looked like in real life, he didn’t look anything like me. Jesus, the historical Jesus, wasn’t White.

Jesus’ holy dissonance…

This was the period I also became fascinated with Jesse Jackson. Jackson was not only a politician, he was also an actual Christian preacher. Jackson spoke, theologically and politically. He used language of liberation that I now realize was very similar to the Jack Heacock sermons.

And it was clear to me, for the first time, that there were different ways to be Christian. Yes, Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” was ascendent on the social right and in popular White culture…and yes, I’d just always “assumed” this was what it mean to be “Christian.

But here was Rev. Jackson. Also clearly Christian. Deftly weaving theological language into social/political speech.

This was the first time it dawned on my little brain:

There are different ways of being a Christian, and not all Christians act/believe the same way.

Jackson preached a “Rainbow Coalition.” His candidacy was the first time anyone seriously spoke to our multi-racial and multi-faith future. His imagined coalition was African-Americans, yes…but also White, Brown, Women….the gay community…working people….

That was the Rainbow. That was the Coalition.

I was fascinated because not only was it so much more diverse than anything I’d ever experienced in my White-conservative life, but this is the point I will come back to later:

Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition included a place for me.

It was a “club” of everyone. It was, what I now often call, “The Tribe of Everyone Else.” Everyone else being: Every part of a rainbow coalition and, yes, even we White folks who have had the scales of their own naive or toxic Whiteness fall from their eyes.

As a preacher, Jesse Jackson was issuing an altar call, really. An altar call to America. To come together, as diverse coalitions.
By contrast, it was very clear to me that Moral Majority Christianity was almost exclusively White, very Male, and very evangelical.

Jesus’ holy dissonance…

Jesse Jackson came to UT Austin quite a lot during primary season.
I remember shaking his hand on a rope line at the “East Mall.”

And, I remember hearing him speak at the Student Union, in a night that I now believe changed my life.

It was November 22, 1983. My friend Ed (another White guy) and I had decided to go and see Jesse speak. I remember this night so fondly that I’ve obtained a blown up copy of the Daily Texan write up of the day, to insure that I was not exaggerating what had happened. It’s on the wall of my study, to remind me every day of that touchpoint in my own life’s conversion.

I’m happy to say that The Daily Texan write up confirms my hazy memory…

We had seats halfway back on the left side of the auditorium. It was PACKED to overflowing. The Daily Texan says there were 1,200 in the auditorium, and many more outside the closed doors.

For fear of a riot, organizers/police had closed the doors. As Jackson took the stage, 500 more students pounded on the doors, rattling them and making a commotion over which Jackson could not heard. The doors were glass, and you could see the huge crowd…and how they were POUNDING on those doors and yelling.

I had never been in a situation like that. It felt like it might turn violent at any moment.

Rev. Jackson stopped his speech, walked down the long aisle (much to the chagrin of his own security and Secret Service detail, I am sure) and opened the back doors. I could not hear what he said, but he was clearly addressing the crowd outside in the halls.
It became clear he was trying to get them to calm down enough so that the doors could be left open for all to hear.
The crowd agreed. The doors were opened so that all could hear and be included.
Jackson came back to the front of the room and re-started his speech.

I thought to myself, “Who IS this guy?!!” Who has the power to confidently wade into that kind of tense situation, to diffuse it, and to all the while, keep his cool?!!
I’d never seen anything like it.

Jackson led the crowd in the “I am somebody” chant. Jackson connected what he was doing with the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960s. It all made sense.

The Daily Texan cites several quotes from his speech that day…

“In the 1960s we could not use the Woolworth, we could not use hotels and motels and students risked their lives to make America, America for everybody. That generation was great….This generation must never give up its right to dream.”

I was mesmerized.

Here was a man who was inspiring people in a way I had never seen from any politician or preacher. He was talking about a multi-racial, Rainbow coalition…and one that might even have a place for ME.

White men would clearly not lead this coalition (Clearly a Black man was the leader….) but that the invitation he extended was to everyone…genuinely everyone.

That was revolutionary.
Jesus’ holy dissonance…

And the image of Jesse Jackson….walking to the back of that room…opening those doors…calming that crowd….that moment has stayed for me for three decades, now.

“Opening the doors for everyone…”

The vision of this last sentence —theologically, spiritually, socially— has been the primary calling of my life every day since.

I Still Voted for Reagan

And here, dear friends, is a humbling truth we might want to remember today.

Did I vote for a Democrat in the next election?
Did I suddenly identify as a “liberal?”

No I did not. Even with everything Jackson was doing to cause dissonance in my heart, I could not leave my White Conservative Male tribe.

I did not vote for Walter Mondale. I vote for Reagan a second time.

Walter Mondale was boring. I could not imagine voting for somebody so boring. Those same college Republicans who probably offered my that “Charley” poster also likely created this gem which also hung on my wall in the months prior to the 1984 election. Again, I’m a bit ashamed of this poster now, but the image helps you see where I was.

The main line that I resonated with was “he’s more boring than ever…”

I am not proud of fact that I allowed something so shallow to affect my political vote. I was attracted to what Jesse Jackson said. But Jackson hadn’t won the nomination, and I could not vote for such a boring guy.

This is the level of thought I put into my vote that year.

But, friends, Jesus’ cognitive dissonance was stirring in me, big time.

I was stirred up…by Rev. Claudia Highbaugh…by Rev. Jack Heacock…by Jesse Jackson…Something was changing.

I Left the Republican Tribe, Election Night 1984

That night, my friend Ed and me —the same friend who’d gone with me to see Jackson— decided to go to the college Republican celebration at the Texas Union. We never went to College Republican meetings, but we were politically and socially curious kids.

Walter Mondale had been crushed by Reagan, winning only his home state of Minnesota.

We walked up to the bar that was in the ground floor of the Student Union (the drinking age was nineteen). And there —watching the returns on a first-generation big screen TV— were a bunch of blue blazered, khaki and top-sider wearing, college Republicans. If you remember the “Steve Dallas” character from Bloom County, they looked just like him.
(In fact, as we all know, he really was them…and they him…)

They were mostly young White men, they were drinking a lot of beer, and they were yelling lustily at the results.

I cannot describe for you now just how disturbing this suddenly felt to me in that moment. The dissonance broke in me, and what welled up inside of me was a feeling of regret.
The polls had only been closed a few hours, and already I was regretting my vote. Mostly because I looked at this mostly White crowd, and was ashamed of how they were acting. A feeling of intense revulsion and confusion washed over me.

Reagan had won in a landslide. Everybody knew he was going to win in a landslide. (Remember: “Mondale was boring.”)

But these guys were shouting like they had somehow been the underdogs.
Like they had almost lost, and this was some miraculous comback win.

There was a lustiness, among them. Like soldiers, putting a head on a pike outside the castle. Like they’d won some brilliant victory, when they were all just rich, spoiled White kids.

“It was a LANDSLIDE, for Christsake,” I thought to myself….
“What the hell?”

There was something about that moment that broke me. Again, the reaction just felt so off, so privileged and riduculously boastful for so obvious a win.

When Ann Richards later described White conservatives who “were born on third base and thought they hit a triple,” this is what I was feeling in that moment.

But here was my immediate problem…

This should have been my tribe. I should have been right there in the midst of their testosterone-fueled celebration. But I watched them from the hallway, it hit me

“This is no longer my tribe”

I was suddenly no longer cool acting like a landslide was some brilliant victory, or laughing at Walter Mondale, or making fun of Jesse Jackson and Black people. I was suddenly embarrassed by my Contra poster….that Mondale poster…all of it.

“This is not my tribe…”

It was not a verbal thought. It was a visceral feeling I can recall, all these decades later.
I knew I had changed.
I knew I would never go back to that group and that room.

But…Who is Now My Tribe?

If they are not my tribe, then who was?

Jackson had lost, and it didn’t seem like the Democrats were in a mood to support him.
So, who were my people?
Where was my place?

I didn’t have one and felt adrift and confused.

I don’t want to race past this moment, either. Because this seems relevant to our time too. We are all tribal. All of us. And especially among White men, we seem to wish that they would “switch teams.” I get that desire.

That said, it’s important to note that if there does not seem a viable option for some different “tribe,” some new way of being that seems viable, our tribal natures tend to revert to our own tribes.

The very next Fall I would be at Perkins School of Theology. Now, I wasn’t just hearing Jack Heacock preach on libertion theology, I was studying it.
I was writing papers on Jon Sobrino and the Central American theology I had previously mocked.
Now, it made sense to me.

My first year study group gave me a cadre of diverse friends. We intentionally designed a group with women, a gay man, and an African-American man. And in that group, we didn’t just “study.” We wrestled with our theology, our identity, our power, gender, race. That group prayed together. Argued. Got in each other’s face. Pushed each other. Sought to understand each other.

I was listening…I was growing.

I became a Hall Director in the Residence Halls. I remember specific two events that transformed my social views even more.

One was an “in service” where Rev. Michael Piazza, then of Cathedral of Hope, spoke to our residence hall staff. It opened my eyes to the plight of the gay and lesbian community in the 1980s, and how the Reagan administration had done slow-moving and harmful damage.

Another seminal moment was a two-day racism training with Dr. Charles King. Dr. King was a nationally known trainer in race-relations. His method (I later learned) was to push, cajole and even berate White participants in his seminar. To the point at which he intentionally made them angry. He then was able to show those White participants that our emotional reaction was exactly like the reaction of POC to White Supremacy. (In those days, nobody used either of those last two terms…)

A write-up I recently found online has Dr. King explaining his process this way:
“I have manipulated you. I have cut you off, I oppressed you, not let you speak. I made everything go according to my system. It dehumanizes a person. You felt guilt, shame and anger you didn’t show.You slowly lose your dignity . . .

Again, we didn’t use the words “White Supremacy.” But that’s exactly what he was modeling for us. For a few short minutes, he put us White people in the position of seeing how White Supremacy feels.

Again, scales fell off my eyes. My world was rocked. My knees buckled.

“Oh, crap,” I thought.

And in the midst of this, I first met Dr. Bill McElvaney.

If you know me at all, you’ve heard me speak of just how important Rev. Bill McElvaney has been to my life. Next to my Father, he is the most important man I’ve ever known. Bill was the man who –more than anyone else– showed me the way to a new “tribe.” He modeled, and lived, what it means to be a different kind of White man; at exactly the moment in my life when I needed such a mentor.

Bill had his own story —a very similar story of transformation to mine— that captivated me and gave me hope. Bill had moved from being the scion of a wealthy Highland Park family, a young man who defended his fraternity’s segregationist policy in the 1950s; to eventually becoming the lone White minister marching in MLK’s Poor People’s March from Grand Prairie to Dallas in 1968. Bill was also compassionated and committed to real justice for Central Americans, and the LGBTQ community.

He became the person about whom I would say, “I want to be like that guy…”

Transparently, there were times when I wondered “is there even hope for us White Men?” (Some are asking similar questions today…which I shall get to…)

I desperately needed the hopefulness of Bill McElvaney’s confessional journey, so that I could take my own confessional journey, to give me hope…to give me a roadmap.

And so it was that my theology, my politics, my entire cultural vision shifted.
I had a new vision of what it meant to be a White man, and perhaps as importantly, how I fit in relation to everyone else around me.
I had new White male role models, and genuinely deep friendship with POC, the LGBTQ community, and the poor.
I’d had experiences of my own privilege and power that had humbled me.
(Some of which, I have not shared here for brevity…)

And so, when it was time to vote in the 1988 primary, I proudly voted for Jesse Jackson.

Let me pause here.
Having told the story, let me note again, just how revolutionary this was.

Again, everyone I’d ever known from my “home” (which was, of course, just miles away from Perkins…) was still a Republican. All my high school friends. All my family. Many were conservative or evangelical Christians.

Some of them, no doubt, would still have been like those testoreone fueled guys on election night ’84. They would have made fun of Jackson…and me, no doubt.

This moment –voting for Jesse Jackson– was more than pulling a lever. It was a “break” with every White man I had known growing up. But, it was clearly my new calling.

Tribes, the “Rainbow Coalition” and Today.

But now, we must talk clearly about tribes…and how disorienting a loss of tribe is for anyone.

Because, in that moment, I felt alone, too. Not the confused alone-ness of 1984. But I still felt pretty weird, as what we now call a straight, CIS-gendered White man.

Now, decades later, I feel powerfully surrounded and blessed by progressive friends and family today, and that “tribe”now inspires me.

But in that moment? Pulling that level… (“Democrat.” and “Jesse Jackson”) also felt like betrayal of everything my Father and my “tribe” had ever taught me.

We are all tribal, to one extent or another. Even White men. The trouble, of course, is that White Men so often believe their tribe isn’t a tribe at all.

Too many White Men believe their “tribe” is just “reality.”
White men who fail to internalize this in a healthy way are incredibly lethal to everyone else.

Here’s what “The Tribe of Everybody Else” has taught me over the years: Whenever we leave the tribe of our birth, it can be disorienting.

Some folks leave their childhood religious traditions and join a new one; and even if the newer beliefs are closer to their core personhood, they still sometimes feel guilty for leaving the old faith.

Talking with friends of Color, my undersatnding is that sometimes when they move into the White world, there is a disorienting sense that comes, and a feeling they have betrayed their culture to live in the larger world. (Sometimes, their parents and families tell them this…)

Tribe, culture, religion, race…for all of us, these things go deep.
The specific cultural phenomenon of waking up from the dream of Whiteness can be disorienting.

Whiteness is an illusion. A creation of White Supremacy itself. White men must take this journey.

But, I think it’s important for those of us who wish current White Men would shift more than they do, and faster than they do, to understand just how how, it felt then like a betrayal of the White tribe then.

I’m encouraging you to look at how much time, how much experience, how much life…it look for me to leave that tribe. This is honest and sincere realism.

Another key learning of my life is this (and I am still working on a long essay on it):

Change is Hard.
We Believe It’s Easy.
That’s Our Problem.

Both in politics and the church, politicians and preachers try to sell us quick fixes. They promise “they alone know how to fix things.” They promise “conversion” through Jesus that changes our lives, permanently.

But any good habits —from health diets, to exercise— actual change takes time, and repetition…far more of both than our impatient internet fueled culture is willing to give any of us.

Again, I’m not asking for sympathy for White men, or excusing them, or even asking for social change to slow to their pace. I am suggesting that this dynamic I am describe here –this lonely, disoriented feeling– explains part of what I believe it appears to be so much more difficult for many of White men to take the leap.

We are trained to be White.
We are trained to be Male.
It’s in the water of our experience, how our families treat us, how women treat us, how POCs treat us, how we treat each other. It’s ASSUMED.

And we are trained…we are bred…to LEAD…and to expect that everyone else will follow us. (Yes, I’ve started suggesting that White Men are “bred” to lead, perhaps like trainers breed racehorses.)

Yes, it’s all White supremacy. Of course it is.
But it’s also a deep cultural training that starts early in life that is assumed to be what your family, your church, your entire society, expects you to be.

And unlearning and unwinding it is often confusing.
Learning and unwinding it is a lifelong journey, filled with stops, starts, and plenty of cognitive dissonance.

Here’s what I know. Jesse Jackson was an inspiration to me –and to other White people my age– and not just to a generation of African-Americans.
Jesse Jackson was a life-raft off the wreck of Whiteness for me.
He helped row me toward a new place, socially, theologically, politically.
Existentially.

At that 1988 Democratic Convention, as he gave that incredible speech to rapturouse applause, he thundered “Keep Hope Alive…”

This specific section is as relevant today as it was in 1988:

I wept.
For his courage and conviction…
For all the times I had (up to then) fought against that dream…
For how elusive his coalition and his dream clearly was…given how the election went that year.

It’s still far away, decades later, of course.
And that’s a point not to miss here either.

The Democrats of 1988 were not totally kind to Jesse Jackson.
Some privately mocked him, even as he brought huge numbers of African-American voters permantely into the Democratic Party. I am quite convinced that our nation, and specifically the Democratic Party, has not properly thanked Jesse Jackson for all he did to change the party’s trajectory

The coaltional nature of Democratic politics has not lessened in the ensueing years either. Democratic victories are now driven by fragile coaltions of African-Americans, the LGBTQ community, Latinos, Unions, Environmentalists, Young People…and others I’ll probably hear from because I didn’t mention them.

But that dream of Jesse Jackson?

Jesse’s Rainbow Coalition dream captured me then.
And it still does now.
It changed my life, was a key moment in my social conversion, and gave me hope.

And that’s the story, right there.
That’s the long journey of the first two sentences in this essay.

What This Story Might Still Teach Us

And now…some ending thoughts on our historical time.

I believe that when the Bible talks about “repentance” it is talking the kind of story I have told here. “Repentance” really means, “turning in a new way.” Whether the issue is homophobia, racism, sexism, White Supremacy…when the Bible speaks of “repentance,” that is the “turning in a new way.”

It is, at the core, a spiritual process.
It takes constant work.

It’s not just feeling apologetic or teary. It can be. Or, it cannot be. The turn, the New Life, the new direction, is more important than the weepiness.

Repentance is what we do to live in a new way.

And, I want to be clear about this last part: As a non-evangelical, I do NOT believe it’s neither a “one and done” process, or a “in one blinding moment” process either.

In Wesleyan language, repentance is “going on to perfection,” and knowing that you might never get there completely. We are never done, especially in a society so completely dominated by White supremacy. The journey has not been of one, lightning bolt moment, that forever changed my life. Instead, it’s God working on me, through faith, to live as a different kind of White man…and as a White man who had no models….in the stories I am telling you here.
It’s this last point I want to end with.

We need a path through which we can see ourselves in a new way…and through which we can behave in a new way. In a society that still affords us great privilege, it’s very hard to do. It’s easy to suggest “Well, all White men should just get off the stage.”
(I’ve actually had folks tell me this…)

For almost all of us, it’s still hard to see all the ways our privilege puts on “third base” and helps us believe we “hit a triple.”

Look, many of you know me as very different from the young man depicted in this essay. Some of you, I might surmise, may even be disturbed by some of what I’ve said here.

You perhaps know me as a progressive preacher who…
Was arrested in DC, in support of immigrants…
Performed Same Sex weddings in alleged violation of my church’s teaching…
Served on Planned Parenthood’s religions advisory committee…
Marches in a crap-ton of marches…and speaks out against White Supremacy…
Writes copiously on all these topics and more from a progressive spiritual point of view.

The point is that now and then my wife, looking at all this, asks: “How did you get this way?”

Well, it’s complicated.
It wasn’t just one moment.
It takes practice and re-learning…and re-unlearning.

But here is a final gratitude and final plea: Let’s find a space for more men to take this journey.

I thank God those around me have allowed me the space to grow, change, and move to a new place. I thank God that they have seen my “repentance” as genuine…and they have judged me by my actions, and not by my past.

Our society certainly does not reward this kind of journey. In my own case, I rejected a “ladder” of increasingly larger church appointments, becasue I felt called to a different kind of ministry.

Perhaps this is why relatively few men feel either the desire, or the willingness, to take this journey?
Because, existentially, it can feel like giving up “everything” (it’s not) for an uncertain future (well, that’s true…).

As for me, I thank God for all the mentors and moments along the way…
For Revs. Susan Sprague, Claudia Highbaugh, and Jack Heacock…
For Jesse Jackson…
For Dr. Charles King and Rev. Michael Piazza…
For Rev. Bill McElvaney…and Dr. Zan Holmes…
For Dennise and all my social justice friends from the present day.
For small groups of men I know on similar journeys, with whom I can share stories and experiences.

All these and more allowed me “in” to a new “tribe” where I don’t have to act like the boss, or be in charge, but where I can —in the language of liberation theology— “accompany” everyone as we move forward together.

I like to call this new tribe: “The Tribe Of Everybody Else.”
I have an idea it’s what Jackson meant by The Rainbow Coalition.

I see my calling as being that of using the platform God has given me to do just this kind of ministry and sojourning.

I do wonder, and I leave you with this important question: What might have happened if I had been condemned along the way? Cancelled? Shunned?

What might have happened to me if I hadn’t had all these mentors and s/heroes?
What might have happened to me, if compassionate people of color, Women, gay people, had not only pushed me out my comfort zone, and forgiven me when I badly stumbled?

I might be in a very different place.
I might be a Trump guy.
I can’t rule it out.

Marc Maron said something that’s stayed with me for months in his podcast with Brene Brown. It was a throw-away line that I’ve been pulled back to, time and time again.

He said that in modern America it seems that conservatives “never apologize” and that progressives “never forgive.”

There is something deeply true here.

On the Left, the only tribe I have any influence with at all now, there can be a terribly unforgiving streak. White men deserve to be scorned for much of our history, and our current behavior.

But it’s the “never” part of Maron’s line that gets me.

I’m no longer a Conservative. (and I haven’t been for decades now…) So I can’t speak to the “never apologize” part (although it rings true…).

But the “never forgive” part also rings true on the Left. The modern political Left appears to be an increasingly balkanized group of tribal identities, rightly impatient for change…but also consistently failing to keep its eyes on its real adversaries and tearing apart each other, instead.

If Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition is ever to be fully realized —which is to say, if we truly hope for a multi-cultural democracy that never was— there will still be a place for White men at the table. Not as leaders, but as a transformed part of the “Tribe of Everyone Else.” A truly inclusive politics, a truly inclusive theology, will make this clear too.

Along with theologies of liberation in their present form, I also increasingly drawn to the theology of Rienhold Niebuhr, and his “Christian Realism.” Niebuhr stood against Nazism, but he also spoke against the weaknesses in our system too. Neibuhr understood human hubris in a way that I fear we are forgetting. That’s the “realism” part.

Today, we need a realism that gives space for truly everyone at the table. I believe that perhaps it’s an inclusive Christian faith that can also help us name how all constituent groups are made up of human beings who can “Otherize” even members of their own team. None of us are perfect, and all of us have faults. This is, actually, one of the moral and spiritual insights that progressive Christianity can offer to progressive coalitions. This is exactly what Jesse Jackson was also doing.

Yes, I support and yearn for coalitions led by Woman, POC, the LGBTQ community, and the poor. But none of us are just our '‘identities,” either.

A very honest church member told me once, “I don’t need a theology to tell my I’m good because I’m gay…I’m not bad or good because I’m gay…I’m just gay.”

Humans are humans. We need a theology and a politics that overcome the binaries of our time. And one of our most harmful binaries is believing nobody can change, even in this time when it seems like nobody ever will.

And if we have learned nothing else the past decade, surely we are learning this. We are constantly learning and re-learning —at a societal and personal level— the lessons of how to live into a truly multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-faith…diverse future.

As for me, I thank God that I am not judged (by those who know me today) by my actions in the past.

Maybe you will think this entire essay is just White Man “virtue signaling?” It’s really not. It’s suggesting that…

Jesse Jackson had it right.

He really did. He had the metaphor right. We’ve never had a better one. That Rainbow Coalition idea. Nobody —Left, Right, or Center— has ever been more invitational than he was. He was invitational because he was Christian. The invitation, the intuitive understanding of the need or that Rainbow Coalition, I am 100% confident that came from his faith.

Rev. Jackson gets much credit for solidifying the Black vote as a major part of the Democratic Coalition. But this is far too simplistic a legacy to give him.

Jackson’s true, societal-wise legacy is the METAPHOR.

The two words together.
Rainbow: All our identities….those we knew back then, and all the diverse beautiful ones we affirm today.
Coalition: Everyone, anyone of good faith willing to walk hand in hand.

That was, if I may, his true genius.

All those years ago, Jesse Jackson was speaking to a kind of multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-faith coalition that America is still yet hoping to make real.

It has never yet been.

But that hopeful vision, which I first saw in the primaries of 1988, which changed my life, is deeply threatening to some White men. It’s certainly threatening to White supremacy. And that is at the heart of much of the churn in our society, especially in today’s “Trumpism.”

I don’t have all the answers. (Maybe any…) I do know the self-obvious truth that White supremacy will be a continuing challenge.

But White men will still be in our society for the forseable future, and it now is readily apparent that at their most desperate they can be a deep danger to themselves and to everyone else. They must have permission to explore, as I was granted years ago, the “Tribe of Everyone Else,” or they will never feel the courage to leave the tribe of White Men.

All I can tell you is that, decades ago now, Jesse Jackson spoke to me.
As I watched him open the doors of the UT Student Union ballroom, it was a glimpse of a powerful inclusion for everyone.

A place where the powerless are lifted up from hopelessness, and the powerful brought down from their “breeding” to lead and dominate.
That is the hopeful, and still unrealized, future of our nation.

Jesse Jackson had it right.

If you are a White man, I invite you to join me on this continuing journey of repentance and living in a new way.

If you are everyone else inside “The Tribe of Everyone Else,” when you can, I hope you might offer some of us your forgiveness as you see us White men living in a new way.

Or if the language of forgiveness makes no sense to you, just know that I will commit to continuing with walk with you, to “accompanying” you, anyway.
Not in front, or behind, but beside you.

A Final Coda: Last Night and This Morning

And so it was that last night I was in Hutchins, Texas…celebrating a victory for justice, compassion, and mercy. In our present-day, I’m sure readers know my commitment to standing against the harm of ICE and the Trump Administration.

I wrote this last night.

On the way home, I think God led me to think about Jesse Jackson. I am not kidding. And I remembered this old song from Tish Hinojosa. It was released in 1989, and I was drawn to it because it’s a song written by a wise Latina, that opens with the iconic words of Rev. Jackson from his convention speech. And, somehow, that perfectly fit my mood and yesterday’s wonderful news.

For decades, I have come back to this song. And for reasons beyond my understand, I was drawn to listen to LAST NIGHT…for the first time in many years:

And now this morning, I awoke to see Ed Gray’s post…where I first learned that Jesse Jackson had died.

My friends, this is deep spiritual stuff that I must pay attention to. Some primal, spiritual connection of past and present that reminds us movements beyond our control. Some “Cloud of Witnesses” speaking to us.

We’ll probably never call it the “Rainbow Coalition” again.

Jesus would call it “The Kingdom of God,” where the last are first, and the first shall last. Where “Greeks and Jews,” and “Male and Female” are welcome, where Roman soldiers lay down their weapons, like White Men can lay down their privilege.

But as Tish sings, as Jesse preached, however dark things might seem: love is on the side of anyone seeking to be in “The Tribe of Everyone Else.”

It’s a spiritual, social, and theological vision, that still animates my life and calling today.

Thank you for reading this long essay.

God bless the memory of Jesse Jackson.
God bless anyone in our time who works to make real that “Rainbow Coalition.”

That is the primary word I spoke to a crowd gathered in Hutchins tonight, following today’s stunning reversal that Majestic Reality will not sell or lease its Hutchins’ warehouse to ICE.

This was supposed to be a rally to push the city to pass a resolution in opposition to the sale. But since the morning’s news, plans switched, and the rally became a momentary victory celebration in this long struggle we are now in.

“Remember this day, for there will be many more bad days to come.”

Since this story first broke on Christmas Eve —thats ICE’s largest planned “human warehouse” was to be in our own backyard— we CLEAR clergy have worked relentlessly to makes sure the public’s voice could and would be heard by the Powers that Be.1

Remarkably tonight, as apparently is happening in other parts of our country too, it was this very public pressure applied by perhaps thousands of ordinary North Texans that has made a difference.

“Remember this day, for there will be many more bad days to come.”

Here’s our truth. Every community organizer, Hutchins resident, clergy member, elected official I spoke with today were all DELIGHTEDLY disbelieving.

To say it again, we can only surmise that it was the voice of the people that made this happen.

YOU, dear friends and beautiful strangers, it was your expression of righteous outrage at housing human beings like packages.

YOU saw it for the moral horror that it is. And you spoke up. And, at least on this day, that made a difference.

“Remember this day, for there will be many more bad days to come.”

Even today, those of us in this fight wanted to start thinking of the next thing.

Don’t.

Stop.
Savor this.
You need to do that.

You need to be reminded that there really is still a world of hope beyond the world of traumatic and triggering stress responses we are becoming far too acclimated to.

Put this day away in a dusty drawer filled with you most cherished memories.

In my office desk, I have a drawer filled with every positive letter anyone has ever written me. On my lowest days, I open up that drawer, take one at random, and read it. It lifts me out of myself, and reminds me that I really have had good days in the past, and that I will one day again.

Treat this day like that kind of hopeful letter.

Put it in a drawer to yourself. Let it be a future encouragement on some dark future day, still to come. Because, dear friends, the days are still likely to get darker.

“Remember this day,” because it is all but certain ICE is already planning their next move, almost certainly for some other warehouse in North Texas.

“Remember this day,” because tomorrow Hutchins will still need that grocery store.

“Remember this day,” because ICE continues to detain thousands more innocent migrants, guilty of no crime, whatsoever.

“Remember this day,” because somewhere our nation, some of those innocent migrants will soon be stored like packages inside some warehouse that did not get stopped.

“Remember this day,” because as early as tomorrow morning, I assure you, there will another crying family member at the respite center at the Dallas ICE Field Office. Their confused tears will fall because they WERE “following the rules,” and their loved one will be detained, anyway.

“Remember this day,” because tomorrow somebody will be tackled in the hallways of immigration court, and dragged behind some door, never to be seen again.

“Remember this day,” because no one can promise you there will not be another Rene Good or Alex Pretti.

“Remember this day,” because tomorrow our nation’s highest leaders will again drive cultural wedges into the hearts of American neighborhoods, and between all of us who seek to live together in peace.

“Remember this day,” because you will personally have some dark day when it feels all is lost…and you will need to remember this day.

EF

The clergy of CLEAR DFW are proud the role we had in drawing the public’s attention to this plan.
But we are even MORE proud of how the public showed up!

YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

But perhaps some have not known there are credible theories the song written by a lesbian as well?

I wrote about this more than a decade now. And the writing of the song —that story— is one of the reasons this is my favorite “patriotic song” by a mile.

That, and some of the verses we never sing.

Here’s that essay, with a few updates for our time:

“In the summer of 1893, Katharine Lee Bates, a teacher at Wellesley College, set out on an adventure across America. She and other teacher friends were invited to spend the summer teaching at Colorado College in Colorado Springs…the city I’m writing you from tonight.

But before coming here, they stopped in Chicago to see the World’s Fair, and took in the best of human ingenuity of the time. Then, they headed south through Kansas’ amber waves of grain.

Among other friends, she was accompanied by another woman named Katharine, who many believe may have been her longtime lover.

Bates herself describes one of the events of that summer in Colorado Springs:

“One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”

One story goes that Bates lingered longer on the mountain than her companions and –even there, at that high elevation– began to write down verses. By the time she left the town later that summer, she had all of the verses of a hymn you have heard countless times.

O beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

As you might imagine, I am thinking of all of this today, because earlier we took our own sojourn to the top of Pike’s Peak.

Dennise says she remembers visiting here at a kid, but she clearly didn’t remember the road; which, turns out, is as daunting, or more so, than the Trail Ridge Road.

Frankly, I was a bit surprised by the road too. I’d always been told what an easy drive up it is. And, I guess in some sense that’s true. But, much of the top third of the drive is gravel (nobody mentioned that to me!) and there are few directional or speed limit signs.

Which, of course, means the speed limit is slow.

It was amazing.

I totally get that folks have varied relationships with this song. It is a hymn, that is sure. It was first published in a Congregationalist newspaper. And the nationalistic tone can sometimes be troubling.

But I sure like it more than “God Bless America.”

To me, “America the Beautiful” was redeemed by two events. One was when Ray Charles recorded it, which gave us, by a factor of ten, the best recording of it, ever.

The second event was after September 11th, when along with millions I saw Dan Rather on David Letterman, and both of them teared up a little. But none more than when Rather cited the fourth verse of the hymn:

“O beautiful, for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!”

There was something about the memory of the twin towers, the connection of urban America with rural America, that really spoke to me. For about a year I learned my own little acoustic version of the song and played it at every show.

I still like it far more than “God Bless America.” There is something about the driving, bombastic nature of that song that simply doesn’t do anything for me.

But “America the Beautiful?”

There’s such richness to the imagery…

Amber waves of grain…
Fruited plains…
Purple mountains majesty…
Alabaster cities…

The poetry is lush. And, the truth is, the theology is better too. Check out the chorus of verse two, in case you’ve never heard it:

“America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law!”

There’s something about this song that, while it is asking for God’s favor on the nation, is not assuming we deserve it.

It’s a song that asserts whether that God’s continuing favor depends upon our actions.

It’s a song that’s not so much saying that America is “great,” but that America is “beautiful.” I like to meditate on how being “beautiful” might even be more important than being “great.”

I remember how philosopher Charles Hartshorne posited that beauty is a key to the heart of what is good in the world. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s also a universally understood “good.”

I recently suggested that before we “Make America Great Again,” we focus on what makes us good.

Last night, with Carlile, Bad Bunny, et al…there was plenty to remind us of what makes America Good.

And perhaps the beauty of America comes from the country’s incredible nature landscape.

Perhaps the beauty also comes through, dare I say, humility, kindness, compassion, art?”

Yes, let’s ask God to mend our many flaws.

In every generation, we have that chance to become beautiful again.

It’s not an understatement to say: It’s very hard to feel “Joy” right now. But let me tell a brief story of a place I saw joy recently.

A month ago this Monday, was a hard day. Two days prior, Rene Good had been murdered in the streets. The world was shocked by what was happening in Minneapolis. And, locally, we were already chasing down yet another horror on the horizon.

That was the afternoon Rev. Mara Bim, Kim Verriere and myself drove to Hutchins to check out the site we now know is intended as ICE’s largest detention center in the nation.

Mara, working on tips from other activists and her own logical conclusions, had figured out the likely site, based on public comments. So we drove down just to see it and take some pictures.

It’s a million square feet. Massive. It took our breath away, in terms of its sheer size. Physically, it’s a mile around the entire complex. As Robert Wilonsky wrote in yesterday’s Dallas News, “Photos don’t do it justice. The thing swallows the horizon.” (Worth your read here).

Here’s the post I wrote about it a day later, which includes links to Mara’s initial reporting.

So much has happened in the ensuing weeks. Since when, we CLEAR DFW members have been speaking with local media, public officials, Hutchins’ residents, and each other. The City of Hutchins is responding in beautiful ways

Reporters still say it’s on a list from ICE, and other factors point to that site being where they intend to go. But no deeds are yet filed here in Dallas. So….it’s hard to figure out just what is happening. Beth Erickson explains why here

But that Monday, for weeks ago now, was a rough afternoon. The horror of Minneapolis and Rene Good. The idea that this massive warehouse, meant for packages, might soon store human beings.

Let me name this, too. The public needs to understand the weight on everyone in this time. Over the past eight weeks, I have never spoken to so many reporters who, themselves, are as concerned as they are right now. The same for public officials, and other preachers. Everyone is feeling their own sense of helplessness.

Everyone is feeling the oppressive weight of this moment, something I felt deeply that Tuesday after we first saw that massive warehouse. I spent most of that next day in a kind of funky daze. And, it seems to me, that’s an expression I’ve read on the faces of so many others, these past weeks.

Late that Tuesday afternoon, to clear my head, I decided to walk over to “The Hillcrest House,” where KPUMC members serve a meal, every second Tuesday of the month. Hillcrest House is just down from us on Colorado. It’s a remarkable place that provides housing for those living with long term HIV/AIDS.

The walk among the trees was quiet and soothing. But, even more soothing was the scene when I arrived, at Hillcrest House.

For there, was our large crew of beautiful KPUMC members, setting up to serve. Soon, we saw a crowd of the Hillcrest House regulars. The folks who live there who we’ve become close to. We all exchange hugs now. We recognize them. They recognize us.

We trade “How you been, lately?” as they filed in for dinner.

The warmth of these exchanges, their simple genuineness, was a balm for my soul.

Yet still, I was distracted. I was in the corner of the room, on my phone, talking with some reporter. Brett Shipp, one of our members who is a reporter, walked over and pulled me back.

“Come on man,” he said, coaxing me back being present in that moment. I don’t think he realized what a simple gift that was. Paying attention to the joyful service going on RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, helped me cope with the weight is was feeling, otherwise.

So, I appreciate what Brett did. I needed that reminder.

And maybe you do too?

“Hey come on man…put down the doomscroll…serve somebody else…soak up THIS moment…”

Which is what I’m here to remind you of today:

Sometimes it is in serving others that we ourselves find community and healing. Often when we truly serve others, we find something beyond being “drained.” We find we are renewed, instead. We can find a deeper joy that wells from deep within.

Our scripture this week hints at what it means to serve with joy:

“Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.”

God’s own grace reminds us to serve others. We can find a joy in connecting with others. It’s not prideful, or boastful. We’re not serving to call attention to ourselves, but because sharing the grace God has given us helps heal not just others…but also our own souls too.

So, yes, it’s still a very hard time. Even harder in this month that has passed since the day of that story.

But this coming Tuesday, we’ll be back at Hillcrest House again, and even in the midst of this hard time, I’m betting good money they’ll be a sense of the peace of God that wells up, when we choose to serve others with joy.

You read that right…a city council meeting had me driving home more hopeful in the promise of America than I’ve been in months…maybe since the beginning of Donald Trump.

It was a meeting in Hutchins, Texas of their City Council. You may recall that name because we CLEAR DFW clergy have been urging opposition to a proposed “human warehouse” right there in Hutchins. The biggest human warehouse on Donald Trump’s current list, biggest in the entire nation --more humans than currently live in their town-- is slated for little Hutchins, Texas in the southeast part of Dallas County.

I’m about to tell you what happened there, but on the way home our church member, Brett Shipp (great local journalist) called.

”Are you watching Rachel Maddow? She’s covering all the towns across the nation opposing the detention centers?”

I told him, “I’m not watching it on TV…I’m living it in real time…right here.”

Monday night, Hutchins held a council meeting that opened with time for comments the people of Hutchins. I got to the meeting early, and immediately bumped into two very old friends of Dennise who I also remember through the years…old Hutchins friends I forgot that we had. Rev. Julie Harding was also there representing CLEAR. Our goal, as outside clergy, was to simply provide presence…to be moral support for everyone else who came to speak against the horror.

The room was packed. They were mostly local folks who’d turned out, over concern for the proposed human warehouse. In fact, driving in I saw this homemade sign, urging folks to turn out last night.

I think maybe that homemade sign tells the whole story of how it felt last night…

A homemade sign.
A homemade council.
A homemade democracy.
A homemade gathering of neighbors.

The kind you rarely see much any more in America. There’s so much yelling and screaming, everywhere. So much blame (much of it fair, of course…) But, also, so much dopamine dinging as we scream through our online siloes.

I’ll lend my own thoughts to the night below, but I’m grateful to our KPUMC member, Brett Shipp, for this video summary today:

Rev. Carl Sherman —who also spoke at our CLEAR DFW press conference last week— opened the meeting in prayer. (see video below at end…)

And even in this, I was moved. Because Rev. Sherman prayed for EACH Councilmember…BY NAME.

He did not appear to be looking at notes. He just prayed their names…. because he KNOWS their names, And because, no doubt, THEY KNOW HIS name too.

The intimacy of praying for each of them…I knew right then, this was going to be a different night.

That was followed by a powerful opening statement from the Mayor. I won’t quote it here. But it was, again, very heartfelt and genuine. He wasn’t just speaking to “citizens”…he was speaking to neighbors. He made that very clear. He talked about raising kids here. About how others on the council had too.

All of them, in all they did, were speaking neighbor-to-neighbor. It was comforting. It was, dare I say, pastoral? It was “neighborly.” The way neighbors are supposed to behave. The way our neighbors in East Dallas do….the way our church neighbors in Oak Cliff do. It’s a common thing, on many city blocks, all across America.

But it’s also a missing grace and dignity in far too much of our public square. But there it was, in Hutchins. Just basic, neighbor-to-neighbor, decency.

The Mayor’s statement was basically: We don’t know any more than any of you know. When we know more, we will tell you. He said nobody on this council wants this or is happy about this.

The Mayor pointed to a picture of a new billboard Hutchins is using to promote itself, which is all about community and family. Somebody else talked about a new library they want to build. Another person talked with pride about the new subdivision where he lives.

The point is, they talked of their pride in their small town and the hard work it’s taken to turn things around, to build community up this point…and so, in Gods names, why this monstrous horror, and why now?

The Mayor’s powerful statement got a long ovation. This was followed by four neighbor, all making heartfelt three-minute public comments. All of them were equally heartfelt and sincere as well.

It was a melt-my-heart kind of civic goodness we have all forgotten about. From my chair, it appeared the comments were moving to the council members too, who listened intently. Spectators were also “feeling the feelings.”

One of the speakers, a brand new Hutchins neighbor, introduced himself that way; so somebody from the audience yelled, “Welcome! We’re glad you’re here!”

You can’t write that in script…nobody would believe it because we’re all so jaded. But it was a moment in that meeting last night.

My favorite line of the night: “Are we gonna get a detention center before we get a grocery store?”

MIC…..DROP.

And such a basic, “kitchen table” question. One people in Oak Cliff ask. Maybe a question neighbors in your world ask too.

The kind of question an ordinary American city should be asking itself: “What can we do to get a new grocery store?”

Not: “How do we stop our own government from storing people like packages, in our backyard?”

Each speech (all of them were staunchly against the center) got full applause.

And each speech was just so sincere and genuine.

But let’s be honest. We all knew why we were there, too. That room was packed —with mostly citizens and we few scattered visitors — because of a searing heartbreak, loose in our nation. The horror of mass detention was a pall in the room. The horror of Minneapolis was a visible sadness in every eye. There was a heavy weight in the air.

But the weight of the sadness held part of the answers. The questions of these neighbors ARE the answers:

“Why can’t we just grow our small town?”
“Why does this have to happen here?”
“We just want to be neighbors…”

As the mayor said again at the end (to more applause) “Nobody wants this…”

These are fair questions, all. Hutchins deserves answers to them.

I’ve prayed for our Dallas City Council, and County Commissioners Court. It’s a wonderful thing to get asked to do. But, let’s be honest. Here in our big city, the FEEL is just different. It’s way more professional, with perhaps 5 times the onlookers. You don’t know everyone in the room. It’s far more professionalized, in all the good and bad ways I can insinuate that.

It’s only eleven miles up the road, but it’s a factor of a hundred larger than Hutchins.

Unlike the bitter and rancor we sometimes get, there was a sweetness and sincerity here that was clearly real and that you simply cannot manufacture.

You cannot “pretend” to that level of real.

You can’t fake your way to it, because it’s not fake.

You can’t create that kind of neighborly love and affection I saw before and after the meeting among these folks just giving each other hugs.

As we know about our East Dallas home of many decades, you get that kind of sincerity from knowing folks OVER TIME. From showing up, again and again. From raising families together. Owning homes together. Being in PTA together. Going to church together. Going to the funerals of your family members together. Bring food to each other, when somebody’s sick. From welcoming younger neighbors, all of them, whoever they are, too.

That’s what my neighborhood does for our family, and that’s what Oak Cliff does for each other too. I’m blessed to see it in action, twice, in my daily life.

I’ve said for several years now: We’ve all forgotten to live with each other in the real world. We all need to practice at it again…to relearn it…to remind ourselves that we need like, like we do at Kessler Park United Methodist Church.

Let me be real, though.

This monstrous evil may still come to Hutchins. We can’t know that yet. But everyone knows that truth.

These wedges the MAGA Trump movement are trying to drive into American neighborhoods, we’re not done with that evil either. We’ve hardly begun to fight it, actually.

And the pandemic kind of broke something in all of us, as I’ve also said before. We’ve forgotten the basic decency of neighbor-to-neighbor living.

As I like to say: living as neighbors is a challenging thing on the very best day, among people of different ethnicities, genders, nationalities, orientations, and classes. It becomes near impossible when somebody is driving wedges into us all, on purpose.

But last night reminded me: It’s all still here. This miracle we call American democracy. This beauty we call small towns. This marvel we call neighborhoods.

It’s all still here. And we can all still save it, together.

If we just find the will to stand up, fight, and show up, for each other.

There will no doubt be terrible cost to fight back against this intrusive authoritarian state. I’m not sugarcoating anything about how hard it’s still going to be. And you might not feel one sliver of optimism yourself much of time these days.

But just as I feel a call to stand up for our migrant neighbors, my own family, our own church members and neighbors. Just as I feel called to stand against the tyranny of what’s been pushed on Minneapolis, so too I now really want Hutchins to just be able to be…Hutchins. They deserve that, and I told folks last night: However they need their Dallas friends to show up and help…we’re here for that.

Thank you, Hutchins, for showing up for yourself last night, and for allowing us all to watch.

Whatever happens from here, you’ve restored some of my faith in America…by just being you.

And we’ll help you, any way we can.

For context, here is our CLEAR DFW press conference, that urged local media to report out on this human warehouse. Dallas Clergy were a major part in pushing the media and local community to take this story seriously.

What does it mean to “Love Boldly?”

You are free to disagree with me. (that’s part of our Methodist tradition too, I am not a Pope or Bishop…) But we on the Kessler Park United Methodist Church staff are inspired this week by the witness of Alex Pretti.

And before you think, “well that’s too political,” let me offer how I see his witness…

Eleven days before his death, Alex Pretti got into an altercation with ICE defending a neighbor. He came away from that altercation with a broken rib. He told at least one person he thought he might die that day because of how badly he had been beaten.

And then, on the morning he was murdered, Alex Pretti still went out AGAIN. It turned out to be his last moments, and he spent them defending yet another neighbor.

And if you want to say, yeah, but that’s still too political, perhaps these verse from 1 John 4 will help:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

Loving God means directly interacting with, sacrificing for, others. No, not everyone is required to give their life. But sometimes in Christ’s service this is what is required. And the point is this: It’s our faith that gets us ready for that moment…whenever that moment comes to us, or whether or not it comes.

This is what it means when Jesus tells parables about being ready, like wedding guests and their lamps. We are spiritual ready for…whatever might come…not hoping or wishing for the worst.

Our Wesleyan “Covenant Prayer” that we prayed recently after the New Year gets us to a similar kind of spiritual readiness. Methodists have been praying this prayer for 250 years as the year turns…

“Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing."

Again, if you think I am foolishly saying: “Run out and sacrifice your life tomorrow, like Alex Pretti” I am not at all saying that. I am saying that the life in Christ, the life in God’s love, means we are ready for whatever comes. And that readiness, I believe, is based on a fundamental love of God…whether the person names it or acknowledges it at all.

We United Methodists call this “Prevenient Grace,” the love and grace of God that moves through all humans, whether or not they ever realize or name it as a theological thing.

It’s an embodied love that drives a man with a broken rib to go out, one last time —he didn’t know it was one last time, of course— put his arm around a woman, and say his last words, “Are you OK?”

We are not “OK” in this country, right now.

But God is calling we who believe in Jesus to remember his hardest teachings, not just his easiest…

"Love your neighbor" (all of them)
"Pray for your enemies" (all of them)
Be ready to “take up your cross” (It will be uniquely yours, as it says in that Wesleyan prayer)

I am grateful to my own dear friend/neighbor, Terri, who sent these powerful words along yesterday. They’re from Dr. Stacy Patton, and they perfectly describe the kind of love I'm talking about....

"What makes that video so unbearable to watch isn’t only that an ICE agent killed Alex Pretti. It’s that in the middle of being shoved, struck, and repeatedly blasted in the face with chemical spray, his body kept doing one thing: reaching.
Reaching for a woman who had just been knocked down. Reaching for clarity through the burning in his eyes. Reaching to put himself between her and whatever was coming next. You can see that he is disoriented, choking, and staggering but still his instinct is PROTECTION.
He isn’t posturing or trying to be a hero for a camera. He’s trying to focus so he can shield somebody else. His nervous system is under assault, his vision is blurred, his lungs are on fire, and yet his moral center doesn’t collapse inward. It expands outward toward another human being in danger.
Maybe he knew her. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But that’s almost beside the point. What the footage shows is a man whose first reflex under state violence was not self-preservation at all costs, but solidarity. Care. The ancient, almost forgotten impulse to say, “you are not going to face this alone.”
That is what makes his killing so devastating. The state didn’t just shoot a protester. It shot someone in the act of trying to protect a woman. It shot a man whose last visible choice was compassion. Whose final posture was not aggression, but guardianship.
And that is the deepest obscenity of the footage. It’s watching a system built on force extinguish a body that was, even in terror, still reaching for love. Damn."
— Dr. Stacy Patton

As a pastor I read Dr. Patton's words and think of how Jesus says: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

I don’t know much about Alex Pretti. Just snippets, like that clip that caused Dr. Patton to write such eloquent words. It’s been reported that as a boy he was a proud Eagle Scout and Catholic, and even earned the ““Light of Christ” medal as a Cub Scout in his youth, a recognition of his early devotion to living the Gospel.”

I know that a Catholic Priest/Chaplain who worked with him at the VA Hospital for ten years commended his love and care for sick and dying Veterans.

“He was known for his kindness and gentleness to patients,” said Father Harry Tasto, in a worship service this week.

For all I know, Pretti may have been a faithful Christian, or walked away from the Church, shaking his fists to the sky

My point is, it doesn’t matter. Whatever his current relationship to the church of his birth, Pretti LIVED those values that we who call ourselves “Christian” all too casually throw out. Values that come from God, not an institution or preacher.

Living those values, not just “professing” them, is the point of having values like that any way.

Sacrifice.
Service.
Love.

Living those values came back to me this morning, as I read an essay that dear friend, Rabbi Kasten forwarded this morning. She, along with Revs. Mason and Bim, spent their week in Washington at “Together for Democracy. There, they heard a remarkable testimony from Rev. Susie Hayward, a UCC pastor on the ground in Minneapolis. The last paragraphs of her essay immediately help remind us that Pretti and Good are but two of thousands of Minnesotans, rising up to love their neighbor.
Many thanks to Baptist News Global for publishing it for us all read.

This first paragraph hits me hard, because it reminds me of the beauty of Oak Cliff and, really, the core of all of the City of Dallas. But read this whole quote, please…it’s the most hopeful thing I’ve read in weeks. What drives Minnesotans to do all the heroic things they are doing?

Love. That’s it. Nothing more or less than that. We are so in love with each other and our diverse gorgeous community right now in Minneapolis — in all our multi-religious, multi-racial gorgeousness. This home to refugees and immigrants and Indigenous people.

Sure, the training sessions some 30,000 of us attended so we know our legal rights to document ICE agents’ actions helps. And yes, knowing we have access to lawyers and medics ready to help also strengthens our spine. We know if we get detained the community will quickly mobilize to get us out. That helps.

But really, those aren’t what in the end are our true source of courage. Because even those things aren’t guarantees right now. Rule of law is elusive. ICE is blocking medics from getting to those they’ve harmed at the scene. Knowing our rights doesn’t mean they’ll be respected. Our rights are violated hourly.

In the end, the source of our bravery is just Love. We love each other. Like, we literally go around telling each other we love each other, that we keep us safe, and that we will defend each other – everyone, whatever their race or religion or citizenship status, no matter how much the government throws at us, knowing they may kill more of us. Because we love our neighbors.

And seeing the power of that love — manifested in how fiercely we care for each other — seeing how much stronger it’s making us individually and collectively, stronger even than the forces of hate and violence unleashed on us: I don’t believe that love is almighty because the Scriptures testify to it. I believe it because I see it every day in my neighborhood. And that truth manifested is what makes us brave. That kind of love is unbreakable and defiant.

We will prevail.

— Rev. Susie Hayward, Creekside UCC Minneapolis

It’s not enough to just “profess” that you love God. It’s not enough to quote scripture, or theological “belief statements.” Our love must be, Jesus says, based in actions. Or else our claim to love God is a lie. As Rev. Hayward eloquently says, she doesn’t believe in that love because she reads it in scripture….she believes it because she sees it in people.

We United Methodists follow our founder, John Wesley, into lives of engaging and loving in the world (Or, we’re supposed to). We worship on Sunday. We serve the rest of the week. That’s the pattern… Steel and renew your soul on Sunday, to standing against injustice, to love as Christ loved, through our prayer and worship.

But! manifest that love, through standing for justice, for the marginalized and left out, throughout everything what we DO with the rest of our time.

Gratefully, Dallas has not been subject to the kind of “surge force” of ICE Agents Minneapolis has.1 Frankly, no other American city has been confronted so many agents swarming their city, like bands of military SWAT teams. Please read Rev. Hayward’s whole essay to hear about the beauty of how they fighting back through collective action and love.

Despite not having that kind of need for resistance (yet) CLEAR DFW has been…
— Showing up for weekly vigil at the Dallas ICE Field Office.
— Showing up to accompany migrants as they enter the building for their appointments, working alongside community organizers.
— Showing up at immigration court, to witness and assist migrants who are snatched out of the halls of justice.
— And now, calling on our region to sound the alarm about the deeply harmful “human warehouse” coming to Hutchins, Texas.

Additionally, we clergy show up at marches, do investigations behind the scenes. And we stand ready to partner with everyone in exactly the same kind of “love response” Susie Hayward describes here.

Join us.

There are dozens of local groups in Dallas, already doing this work of organizing our community, reaching out to migrants directly, getting folks information so that we too can love boldly, should (when) our time of crisis comes here.

Once upon a time, our United Methodist founder, John Wesley, was having correspondence with a Methodist who appears to have been a wealthy woman. Sparing you the details, she had repeatedly written him, making excuses for why she just couldn’t visit the poor. She had nothing in common with them, she said. They were of a different social class, she reasoned.

After reading her letter, Wesley wrote back and bluntly told her: “OK…now that you’ve made those excuses, I’m here to INSIST you MUST work with the poor…because your own soul needs this…YOU need to be changed/transformed by your engagement with the world.”

That’s a modern paraphrase, but that’s the gist of what he wrote to her.

Then, John Wesley observed the following in his reply correspondence to that woman, and it’s a truth that’s come to me many times over my own thirty year ministry:

“I have found some of the uneducated poor who have exquisite taste and sentiment; and many, very many, of the rich who have scarcely any at all...I want you to converse more, abundantly more, with the poorest of the people...they have (many of them) faith and the love of God in a larger measure than any persons I know."

Amen to that.

Alex Pretti seemed to understand this. Whether working as a VA nurse, defending migrant neighbors, or holding up his hands in protection of a woman on the street, this kind of engaged loved seems manifest in his life.

Yes, it’s a scary.
Yes, let’s be sober, it doesn’t mean run out and try to get yourself killed.
But it does mean the Powers that Be might try to kill you, or even succeed.
Those are the risks.

It’s not an “easy love,” but as Jesus reminded us often, a “hard one.” And the hard-loves, not the easy ones, are why we need our faith in the first place.

If all this is troubling, I’ll end with words from a pastoral letter sent by our local bishop, Bishop Ruben Saenz of the Horizon Texas Conference. Bishop Saenz’s pastoral letter this week, it seems to me, is a good way to close our thoughts here:

“A word to those who are afraid. Fear is not the final word. Love is. Jesus called us to follow him, to take up a cross, to love our neighbors as ourselves; including the immigrant, the detained, the vulnerable.
When we stand with the vulnerable, we stand with Christ. We trust that God's justice will ultimately prevail. We trust that resurrection is more powerful than death.
We are not powerless. We are not alone. We are the Church.”
— Bishop Ruben Saenz.

Hope to see all our members and friends, Sunday.

Eric Folkerth

In the name of God, here is the moral juxtaposition I call you to sit with today. This is the moral choice before us today.

This is the moral fight before us.
Yes, there are other fights to mount, through law.
Yes, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, there is physical resistance to mount in the streets.

But in the same of God, it is time for every American to seriously ask themselves a simple MORAL question beneath all our systems and processes.

As you will see from these two pictures, the answer to this question one we clergy find self-obvious.

That quote from me is from our CLEAR DFW press conference last week here in Dallas. The quote from Todd Lyons is from a story in today’s morning news. Both quotes appears in that same story…which is why I am writing you now.

Americans need to be clear that all Americans do not oppose housing humans in warehouses meant for packages. People with their hands on the levers of power at the highest levels of our government clearly believe we should.

So, there is a moral question for each of you: Are you truly ready, on a mass scale, to treat human beings like packages?

Through all of our separate and distinct religious traditions, we clergy answer: NO.

The best parts of all the world’s great religions condemn treating human beings in subhuman ways. Our religions are not perfect, because human beings are not perfect. But through the moral theology of our separate faiths, through our own individual prayers, we say

“No, God does not want us to treat human beings like packages.”

We say: That is self-obvious, or should be.
We say: That is morally horrifying.
We say: That reminds us, and should remind us all, of the worst epocs of human history, not nations with functioning democracies.

Our own Rev. Mara Bim of Royal Lane Baptist initially surmised the location of this site, and other members of our group helped confirm through confidential conversations or their own sluething. This was a part of our press conference a week ago, today. (see video below…)

Dallas County’s new human warehouse sits directly South of the Hutchins State Jail, and is sandwiched between a highway to the West, and a FedEx “megacenter” to its East.

A jail in one direction.
FedEx package site in another.

Somehow, this confluence also is a reminder of how we got here. We clergy have long lamented the militarization of local police under both political parties, the expansion of unchecked military power abroad being used as home, and we have previously stood against police brutality. We have decried the prison industrial complex.

Therefore, we understand that this moment today is not new in terms of the inhumanity, but is an horrific end-point to the long, active dehumanization of “prisoners” over decades. That is all true.

But my own view is also that although this is end of that horrific process, this will be new in terms of the scale of both the operation and the shameless disregard for basic human rights and a rule of law.

As Rev. Bim previously reported, this Dallas County site is larger than any single existing prison in the United States. And it’s just one of almost TEN national sites.

No…in the name of God… we find it to be morally clear as day: WE SHOULD NOT HOUSE HUMAN BEINGS IN WAREHOUSES MEANT FOR PACKAGES.

So, imagine my surprise when, in this same DMN story, I see Ted Lyons quoted as saying: “Yes, actually we want to be just like Amazon.”

A chill gripped me the moment when I read those words last night.

He does want this. I get that.
It’s still chilling to me, to read it so plainly.
But…do YOU?

Some segment of America’s population reads that quote and thinks they want it too.
But…do YOU?

Now that the physical locations of these planned buildings are public, the question is not what is the government saying about this. We know they want this to happen.

The question is: how will you answer this moral question for yourself?

And, if you join us in answer “NO,” will you, publicly, loudly, and for as long as it takes, decry and condemn, and work like hell to dismantled or delay these mega human warehouses?”

TEXAS: Get ready. Of the two confirmed Texas sites, the single largest is here in Dallas County and just on its heels, another massive center is scheduled for El Paso.

As I’ve said, the juxtaposed quotes of this essay come from that single story up at today’s Dallas Morning News. I think I can speak for all of us pastors with CLEAR DFW when I say we are grateful they’ve finally dropped their story.

This now makes a handful of news sources now who have confirmed the location of the Dallas County site. You can find a nice list of them posted by Rev. George Mason and Rabbi Nancy Kasten at Faith Commons.

Here’s the press conference, in case you’d like to watch it.
As you can see, we are broad coalition of faith leaders, standing up to say NO to this.

If your moral answer is “NO,” then I have some very specific “asks” of you….

If you happen to live in Hutchins, push your elected officials, but also support them. The Mayor in on record in opposition, and anyone there who is will need the support of the public.

Ask Dallas County government what it can do to slow things down.
Ask Dallas City government: How do they plan to provide Hutchins enough water for this? Sanitation? How is that supposed to work?

Speak out, get involved.
State your own moral value, as clearly as you can: “No, I do not believe we should store human beings in warehouses meant for packages.”

Morally, it’s pretty clear.
Right?

We need to understand two things:

1. This is what he wants to do. And this is his strategy to hold on the power, in a nation that clearly no longer wants his style of leadership.
2. The escalation of the protests themselves are a direct result OF HIS ACTIONS.

The "surge" itself...3,000 agents on the streets of that city...that usually has just 600 police....that surge sets the stage for the more violent responses in recent days.

I'm not defending the violence of encounters between federal agents and Minnesotans on the part of protestors.

I'm saying: it's tragically PREDICTABLE.

When football players started wearing heavier and "safer" protective gear, guess what happened?
They started hitting harder.
That's predictable human nature.

When federal agents show up in American cities, dressed like the military, with the gear of the military...but behaving like thugs...we should predict that the response back will be harder.

Again, I condemn 100% any violence.

But don't pretend it's not predictable.
And don't pretend the president doesn't understand it's predictable either.

Since we're on the edge of Martin Luther King weekend, I'm drawn to a specific speech Dr. King gave to American Social Scientists, at the height of riots in the summer of 1967. While I wouldn’t want to speak for Dr. King, of course, these words feel especially salient for this very moment.

I often like to remind folks that Dr. King was primarily a preacher. And so part of his calling was to analyze an entire social situation. Not just “what is happening,” but also “why is this happening? Who is responsible?”

Dr. King, in a sense, schooled social scientists with some basic common sense about the violence happening in his era. Like I am trying to do here, he didn’t excuse the violence of riots and looting. But he did push the nation to look for the actual causes of that violence.

As we must do today, King correctly placed the blame for riots on those in power themselves.

"Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest....There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity."

I want to quickly say: I do not see what’s happening in Minneapolis as an “urban riot.” But I DO see it as predictable…the way King saw the rioting of the 1960s as equally predictable.

King then quoted Victor Hugo, from a century before who once said this:

"'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."

Trump is the sitting president. Trump has caused the situation in Minneapolis with the introduction of thousands of federal agents, while dismissing their thuggish actions. HE is where the buck stops.

Trump could lessen the tension by removing the Federal troops.
Trump could lesson the tensions by announcing a stop to "house to house" searches.

But he doesn't want that.
He wants the escalation.
He wants to invoke a 215 year old law.

And this is all about keeping power.
This is all about the midterms and a dying MAGA movement that will, no doubt, do anything to hold on to power.

Yesterday, many of you read my colleague Mara Richards Bim piece about the proposed human warehouse in Hutchins, Texas.

Here is her piece about the known plans.

Today, I’m just reposting the link to the CLEARDFW statement about all this.

CLEAR is a loose coalition of interfaith clergy who have been deeply involved at the Dallas ICE Field Office since last May.

The CLEAR link includes the link to Mara’s reporting, which I’m sure you read yesterday. But I’ll also include links to other stories that reference the DFW site.

In transparency, no one is yet certain of the exact location of this proposed facility. But based on public comments, there are only a few site of that size potentially for rent at this moment.

The primary reasons for making these posts is:
1. You need to be aware this is happening.
2. You need to call your elected officials and express your own displeasure about this.
In this case, if you have connections to Hutchins, contact the Hutchins City Council.
If you are in Dallas County, contact the five members of commissioners court.
3. You also need to call/write your Senators and Congresspersons as well.

There might be time to stop this. But it will take a mass movement to do so. And we hope folks are jumping in to determine the exact location too. Feel free: our goal was to shine light on this.

This story initially broke on Christmas Eve, via Wapo. That timing, clearly, caused it to be unseen by many until this week.

We ourselves were (many of us) out of town or on vacations during Christmas break...but upon our return we’ve been able to confirm independently that this is really under discussion and really intended for Hutchins.

Finally, a question about terminology. All throughout our long work at the Dallas ICE Field Office, our intention has been to see migrants as “human.” We believe, from our various religious traditions, that all humans are God’s children.

Therefore, for now, we are referring to this facility as a “human warehouse,” in an attempt to center a truth we feel necessary to continue to state.

These persons are human beings.
We demand that they be seen as such.
But our government seeks to house them in a freight warehouse.

I will make one more comment, which is something that came to me personally as a pastor here in Dallas County for thirty years.

That quadrant of Dallas....Southeast Dallas County...has been desperately ignored for decades. The warehouses there today...the “transportation hub” that was created there...all of this was originally planned and created in an attempt to bring good paying jobs to South Dallas...to an area primarily populated by people of color.

The fact that warehouses intended to provide JOBS for people of color might now HOUSE people of color is a multi-generational horror I must personally name here.

ALL OF THIS IS HORRIBLE.

I know our local officials well enough to know they are equally horrified by this historical truth, and these current plans.

But speak up and speak out.

Our local officials will want/need your moral support to help stop this, if possible.

But the Good News is: there is “good” in every neighborhood in America; which is why so many of us recoil from this event, whatever our personal politics.

There is “good” among every migrant, just as God’s good spirit works in every human heart.

No migrant is perfect.
No citizen is, either.

My faith teaches how “all have sinned and fallen short,” but also that everyone has some “good, Imago Dei” in them.

That’s what Christmas celebrates. We literally just finished a holy season where our calling is to see the image of God within all people, and humbly recount how Jesus’ spent time as a migrant and refugee.

A primary part of why so many Americans are rising up to oppose the roaming bands of authoritarian agents —non-local police descending on our cities— is that we understand how our neighborhoods are a complicated and beautiful mix of people of all kinds…every race, sexual orientation, economic situation, and legal status. And in our American cities, the work of being good neighbors is always challenging.

Therefore, when authoritarian thugs descend into neighborhoods, spreading terror: that drives needless wedges of fear, distrust, and division into our neighborhoods, instead of keeping them safe.

People see this. People know this. People rightly rise up. That’s the heart of our work at the Dallas Field Office, with our fierce Latina-led organizers, and our CLEAR clergy group. That’s the heart of why neighbors get whistles, and organize “Ice out” groups all over the country.

We do our work…Minneapolis organized a whistle-blowing brigade…to keep their neighborhoods safe.

This is not hard to comprehend, nor should it be surprising to anyone.

American cities are not war zones, deserving of indiscriminate military style raids. Migrants are not criminals. These raids are “performative violence” with real-world consequence. This is not a video game or an action/adventure film, although it seems the shooter this week was play-acting as if it was.

There are reverberations far beyond the violence-porn that authoritarians want us to be obsessed with creating and distributing.

This is real life, and we live in real neighborhoods with real people.

Therefore, where ever you live: Seek the “good” in your town or city.

It is “good” to build community.
It is “good” to defend our neighbors.
It is “good” to resist authoritarianism.

Every American neighborhood has “good people.”
Authoritarianism will always tell you otherwise.
Don’t believe them.

Despite the cost, love and protect your neighbors.
All of them.

Renee Good appeared to be trying to help her neighbors in the moment she was killed. Her death reminds me of the death of a migrant named Miguel at the Dallas Field Office. I wrote about this, back in October:

When that parking lot —the same place we clergy and organizers gather every day now to witness to faith, pray, and offer assistance to migrants— came under assault from a terrorist, it was paradoxically and horrifically two migrant men who died.

Miguel was one of them. As he was already injured and bleeding out, he urged an eighteen-year-old sitting next to him to use his wounded body as a shield from further bullets.

It was a stunning act of heroism from a man who would soon die, and therefore never see his soon-to-be born son.

Miguel…like Renee Good…like you and me…was not perfect. But he found the good in his own life or death moment.

I can’t speak to what “makes America great.” But I can tell you: Jesus got angry with his disciples for endlessly arguing “Who is the Greatest?”

That’s because Jesus didn’t care about human concepts like “the greatest.” Jesus cares about the divine goodness that God has placed within all people. His ministry was, in large part, to urge us to see that goodness, and to expand that goodness, among all people.

Renee Good made America good.

May she rest in peace and power.
May her memory inspire us to more of God’s goodness.

1. The militarization of American policing. We don’t have to recount that history again. But it’s been happening for a generation now.

2. Unaccountable bands of ICE and Border Patrol agents, roaming the streets of America as an escalation of this unjust militarization of American law enforcement.

3. Overworked ICE and Border Patrol agents, working side-by-side with some in their ranks who are known White Supremacists, to carry out dangerous Trump Administration orders.

As a pastor/volunteer at the Dallas ICE Field Office (where we hold weekly vigil and assist migrants coming for appointments) we have noted the staff there becoming increasingly more harsh, and less engaging with us.

Further we volunteers who stand for justice at the Dallas ICE Field Office, have witnessed an increasing number of what seems to be less well trained agents coming on the scene here in here. We believe we are observing ICE violate its own policies for training new agents, and perhaps even for hiring them.

The point is that today happens….from years prior….from last year prior…from the last several months prior….and none of it should surprise you.

Therefore, America, I will repeat what I’ve said to you all during 2025:

None of this is keeping American’s safe.
None of this does anything but sow fear, hatred, and division into the hearts of Americans.
None of this, the data shows, is fulfills the alleged goals of Donald Trump.

All of this —yes, the shooting today, but also the raids, the detentions and the deportations, the ankle monitors, the raids on apartment buildings— drives wedges into the heart of American neighborhoods.

I’m not posting a picture from today. I’m reposting an image I shared back in July (sent to me by a church member) when armed agents were wandering down a street less than a half mile from our church.

My point is this: What happened today could happen in our church’s neighborhood, or any American street.

It is the presence of these agents that is the problem. Roaming bands of overworked, undertrained, highly-stressed, and in some cases White Supremacist agents (some, not all)….carrying guns and shooting civilians at point blank range…this is a VERY BAD IDEA.

But, today feels totally predictable.

The blood of this shooting is squarely on the hands of Trump Administration.
Full stop.

I will tell you this. I personally know local Dallas law enforcement who deeply disapprove of what ICE agents are doing….the raids, the arrests off the streets, the detentions of the Dallas Field Office.

Additionally, we have personally experienced ICE staff say, “We are just following our orders.”

Yes.
Yes you are.

And this is what your orders get our country.
The gunning down of civilians.

Your “orders” get us blood in American streets, directly tied to those orders.

All while ICE itself still has failed to acknowledge or reprimand known White Supremacists among the ICE Staff.1

We know this: Those who work for ICE, DHS, and the Administrative state, are not all of “one mind” about the orders they are following.
We know…they are not all overt White Supremacists.

But again, my point today is this THOSE ORDERS YOU ARE FOLLOWING…from the Trump Administration, they get us to THIS POINT today.

I condemned the violence of the shooting at ICE Headquarters, and therefore I will today also condemn the violence of this ICE agent, gunning down a citizen in cold blood.

As a pastor, I would also remind us that this victim is a human with grieving family and friends….just the migrants who died at the Dallas Field Office at the hands of a terrorist were. Please hold a space for the grief of their family and friends.

Domestic law enforcement —local, state, and Federal— must recommit to deescalation tactics. That is their job.

That is the accountability we must demand of them.

Violence, I say say over and over as a pastor, is still THE problem.

But THIS specific violence…this was perpetuated by an unaccountable American police force.

And this violence is PREDICTABLE, based on the poor leadership and “orders” of the Trump Administration.

The buck stops at the White House desk.
America: it’s time for you to rise up and condemn all of this.

The film was based on the short story by Stephen King, called “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”1

Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins), was an expert at how to “Resolve to Not Resolve.”

Before I get into that, it’s now time for my almost annual plea to you:

If you want to do great things next year, whatever you do, do not make public New Year’s Resolutions.
Don’t make a big, outward show of the inward changes you want to make in your life.
Instead, as NIKE says, “Just do it.”

I first learned this from entrepreneur, Derek Sivers, and his TED Talk. The moment I heard it the concept, I knew I was hearing something deeply wise that I needed to pay attention to.

Sivers cites this data:

“Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.“

Interesting, huh?

The psychology follows this pattern:
— You resolve to be a runner.
— You tell everybody.
— You do out and buy running shoes.
— You admire your new shoes, and your brain says “HEY! I’m a runner.”
— You never, or rarely, ever do actual running.

Since I first wrote that last series of sentences, I’ve learned much more about brain chemistry and function. I’ve learned that when brain scientists hook us up to machines they find that thinking about a thing is exactly the same as doing a thing….at least inside the brain. Right down to a slight release of feel-good dopamine.

We think about being a runner?
We trick ourselves into believing we have already run…that we are already a runner.

When, in fact, all we’ve done is buy the shoes.

BTW, the department stores? They know you’re gonna do this. Pay attention. They put the running shoes, the exercise equipment, the spandex pants…right up in the front window during these weeks of late December/January.

They don’t *care* whether or not you will ever be a runner.
They just care about selling you the shoes.

So, how do we make progress toward our goals this year?

First, don’t make public resolutions.
Or, if you do, understand that the public resolution by itself is never enough. It’s not enough to just declare it.
You’ve got to “Just DO it.”

The problem for many of us is that resolutions function as this very kind of short-circuit I’ve been describing here. We fail at resolutions, not because we are inherently weak, but because resolutions are never enough on their own.

Now, some folks do seem to understand and embrace this difference between being and doing. They make a resolution, and then they do it. And then they report back on how they have done it.

I both admire and hate those guys.

Because it never works that way for me. I make the resolution, and I end up stopping there.

For me what’s become far more important is “holding an inward intention.” Almost like Mary in the Christmas story, as she “ponders these things in her heart.”

Inwardly. Meaning: without telling anyone. Tell yourself, sure.
But, instead of posting it all over Instagram, do small, achievable things toward the goal every day.

Change IS possible. But every change —physical, spiritual, mental— takes “practice.” It takes making daily space in your life for new things, and giving yourself grace when you fail. Then, it takes getting up again and doing it again. The goal is change over time, not change all at once.

Being a runner means resolving inwardly to do it. It’s not about the gear. It’s not about one Saturday you actually get out a run. It’s about every day.
Being a songwriter isn’t about wearing a black leather jacket, and striking a pose. It’s about writing songs and learning the craft.
Being a cyclist isn’t about wearing a yellow jersey or tight shorts. It’s about working at being a cyclist every day. It’s about riding when you don’t want to, and when the weather is bad.

Whatever your goal…being a runner…or a cyclist….or a novelist….or a songwriter….an entrepreneur…or deepening your spiritual life…or anything else….it’s about being these things every day. We do these things by repetition and practice, not by verbal declaration.

And the most challenging “moves” are always the inward intention, not just the outward declaration.

And this is where Andy Dufresne steps in as our Patron Saint of “Just Do It.”

Be Andy Dufresne. Be the one who is in prison, and yet never loses hope. Be the one who works a little, every day, for years toward a goal.

Be that one who chips away at overwhelming stone with a small rock hammer.

He never quits. He never stops. And! He never tells a soul what he’s doing.

For all the world knows (even his closest friends), he just looks up at that movie poster on his wall. (In the book, it’s Rita Hayworth. In the movie, it’s Raquel Welch.

Day after day, everyone else in the external world thinks Andy is leering at Raquel.

What he’s really doing is looking at his path to freedom….the hole he is slowly digging behind what the poster covers.

At one point Andy Dufresne says this:

“That there are things in this world not carved out of gray stone. That there’s a small place inside of us they can never lock away, and that place is called hope.”

Hope, in the spiritual sense, is always beyond the event-horizon of this world. But, to keep hope, we need small victories along the way. And, if our hope is to do great things, we must allow those small victories to light the path of our future hope, and not depress us that we have not travelled farther.

It’s tricky. Too much contentment and self-satisfaction can lead us to believe we are “done,” when we are very much still “digging.” Too much desire to change now can lead us to believe the stone is too thick, and the hammer too small, and the task impossible.

I originally wrote this essay years ago, now. And I revise and repost it almost every New Year’s. Since I originally wrote , I also released a song to illustrate the concepts as well. “Rock Hammer To the Stone,” became the title track to my album of last year.

The lyrics might also be a help to you today:

“Every day, just wake up
Put rock hammer to your stone
Though it rarely breaks up
Each chip leads you home…”

And when it gets hard, when you feel overwhelmed….when it feels like you’re making little progress and want to give up… consider this chorus as a mantra to keep going:

“Keep on breathing…
Keep on seekin…
Keep believin…
We’ll leave this grieving…”

Watch it here, and listen where ever you get music.

In the end, whatever goals you may have for this coming year, I’m here to tell you that you can do them.

But it’s far more important to be Andy Dufresne every single day, than to just publish a resolution on New Year’s Day.

It’s far more important to hold an interior intention that you work toward with singularity and focus, than to surround yourself with external trappings and markers.

Resolve to not resolve. Resolve to just do it.
Lift up your rock hammer, and start chipping away at the stone.

And, next year on this same day?
You’ll be amazed how far you’ve come.