Co-missioners,
Our editor sends an initial response to a question that came our way in recent days.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Thoughts on the Mess We Are In (Set One of ???)
Initiated by Jerome Burce
- The Mess We Are In: Need I Say?
Four Thursdays ago, the sitting president of the United States, aiming for a second term, debates his opponent. As he does so he demonstrates significant frailty and convinces his own supporters of his unfitness to continue as a candidate.
As it happens the opponent, a former president of the United States, has recently been convicted of multiple felonies in the State of New York. Millions of voters who support him do not regard this as a disqualification for presidential office. Millions of voters who oppose him are dumbfounded by this, not to say enraged by its flagrant hypocrisy.
Two weeks and two days after the debate, the former president is almost shot dead at a political rally. This past Sunday the sitting president withdraws from the race. He recommends that his vice-president succeed him as a candidate. I have no information to back this up, but I will guess that this vice-president is used to receiving death threats. Such is the spirit of our times—or one of them, at least. “We are Legion,” said the spirit who talked back to Jesus.
Speaking of the unclean spirits Jesus deals with along the way: St. Mark tells of one that keeps a boy from hearing and speaking (Mk. 9:25). Is it altogether fanciful to suggest that this one has been rampant in America for many years? It has its claws in all of us by now. Take me, for example. I have my little list, developed especially during the past decade, of people I don’t talk to any longer and refuse to listen to. They started babbling nonsense a while back. Some of it was mad and twisted, especially the bits that had them thanking God for certain persons and outcomes that I was begging God to deliver us from. They’re still babbling, incorrigibly. What I know to be evil they call good, and what I known to be good they call evil. There being no common ground between us nor any chance of finding some without more effort than either of us can stomach, I eventually say “to hell with them” (more or less) and they in turn say this to me. Somewhere Satan smirks.
2. “Let’s Talk!”
I offer the last paragraph as a first tiny half-step into a Crossings-style diagnosis of this Mess We Are In. We’ve gotten a few requests in recent months for something along these lines. The last one came a day or two after the attempt to kill Mr. Trump. “We don’t behave this way,” wrote the person we heard from. “Let’s get together as a community and discuss what’s going on.”
Time was in the Crossings Community when such a discussion would have been preempted by the energy and talents of Co-Founder Ed Schroeder. When the country was shaken, as on September 11, 2001, Ed would dash off a screed or two that gave a theological accounting of what had just happened, and with it he’d recommend a national response. Talk about chutzpah! That no one paid him the slightest attention seemed not to bother him in the least. His one-word piece of advice after 9/11 was “Repent!” But as Ed well knew, since when would America do that—since when would his fellow American Christians even think of doing that—when we all saw ourselves as the injured party. God was on our side; God had to be. How could it be otherwise if God is righteous? Leave it to Ed to point out that this is the very thought Mohammed Atta and his comrades were finding comfort in as they steered their hijacked jets into the towers on that terrible September morning.
He who sits in the heavens continues to laugh derisively when he catches people dreaming that they have him in their back pocket. (See Psalm 2.) Ed in his prime would have underscored this at great and hurried length the day after Trump was almost killed. He’d have done it all over again the day after Biden said “Uncle.” What else he might have packed into those screeds—and screeds they would had been—I won’t presume to guess. Still less will I venture a screed of my own. I did this once, on the morning I woke up to find that Mr. Trump was now President Trump. The chief outcome of that exercise eight years ago was a fresh appreciation, prompted by responses I got, of how seriously deep was the Mess We Were Already In. It has only gotten worse since then. A lot worse.
3. An Approach to Addressing the Mess; an Invitation to Pitch In
Does the Mess We Are In today call for some focused attention within our Crossings community? Without question. So much the better if we approach it as a group exercise, a thing we work at together. Rich are the gifts of mind and heart that God has blessed us with. Abundant are the perspectives from which we view what’s going on within us and around us.
Between now and the November election I would like to run a series of Thursday Theology posts that will help us think about the Mess and pray about it too. I imagine each of them comprising four brief reflections of three to four hundred words on something that weighs with particular gravity or urgency on the person who wrote it. It’s a fear, perhaps. A rage. A flash of insight. A piece of unexpected comfort. It’s a thing the writer wants to share with others who, like the writer, appreciate the distinction between Law and Gospel. With this in mind they keep looking for ways to put the benefits of Christ to use; and here they begin with the freedom to be honest—as honest about themselves as about the enemy who drives them nuts. They embrace the word “Repent.” They take it for granted that Christ was crucified—that he lives and reigns this very day—as much for them as for anyone else who is thrashing around in this Mess We Are In. They grasp what Paul is driving at: “Let those who boast, boast in the Lord.”
Comes the question: what’s on your mind, your heart? Will you dare to share it? Will you help the rest of us describe and diagnose the Mess? Can you help us with the prognosis, a glimpse of how Christ might be with us and for us amid all this and not merely theoretically, but in practice and in genuine outcome?
Anything along these lines, please, write it up in one or two paragraphs—400 words or so—and send it to me. The address is jerry.burce@crossings.org. I’ve already collected one such item and the permission to share it. If I can get one or two more contributions, I’ll share it next week. If there’s a little spate of submissions—wouldn’t that be nice—I’ll ask our editorial team to help me sort through them for a third or a fourth post. Everything else will be gathered in a collection that will wind up in our online library, or so I imagine.
So much for the moment. Thanks be to God for each and every one of you. Let us pray this week for God’s mercy on our messy, troubled land.
JB
