A few rambling thoughts about my school bus and Dimwit Donnie

This week I began year number ten of driving a school bus.  What began as a side gig a few years ago to make a few bucks has become something I genuinely love to do, and something I will try to continue doing long after I retire from church work.  My middle school kids are usually hilarious, sometimes horrifying...but I am grateful for each one.  My bus may be one of the most culturally and racially diverse groups of people you'll ever find.  About half of my kids are white, while the other half is equally divided into kids of Hispanic, Black, and Asian descent.  There are times whether I wonder whether all of them are 'legal', and I think about the coming day in which some masked ICE thug decides he wants to drag one of them off my bus for the crime of being brought to America, land of the free and home of the brave.  I've come to the realization that I will offer myself up for arrest in their place, not as some moral hero but simply because I'd want somebody else to do for the same for one of my children.  

Tonight I was mowing the yard and I was thinking a lot about how well our Dear Leader might do driving a school bus.  Can you imagine that whiny and thin-skinned dope and how he'd deal with 60 unruly middle schoolers?  They would tear him apart.  10 minutes on a bus with those kids and Trump would be screaming about how he is going to sue them or deport them.  I doubt he could finish a route without them making such fun of him that he runs off the bus crying and saying how unfair everything is.  

Kids can be cruel and mean sometimes...that's what they are, just as that's what we were at that age.  We found the tiniest little thing to get under an authority figure's skin and we just picked and burrowed and poked and prodded until some of them broke.  Many of them, who were not so concerned with letting a 12-year-old determine their self worth, let us run ourselves out, loving us the whole time while slowly teaching us the important lessons of life.  Those who couldn't do these things didn't stay as teachers or youth ministers or anybody who dealt with kids for very long, usually running away screaming after a year or two.  The rest stuck around, grew a pair, and realized that God had put them in this thankless job and so they might as well try to find the humor in it all.

Occasionally I might meet somebody new and when they ask me what I do I tell them that I'm a minister for a small church and a bus driver.  They almost never want to acknowledge the first, but the second thing will usually provoke a response of 'Oh, I could never do that!'.  Yeah, they're right.  They couldn't.  But I would love to see the world's worst egotistical blowhard try.  In his mind he'd be better at it than everybody.  But his failure would be worth almost any price to watch.  

I Am Your Retribution

Recently in my daily Bible reading I read from Psalm 109 I came across these words: 

6 Appoint a wicked man against him; let an accuser stand at his right hand. When he is tried, let him come forth guilty; let his prayer be counted as sin! May his days be few; may another take his office! May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow!  May his children wander about and beg, seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!  May the creditor seize all that he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil!  Let there be none to extend kindness to him, nor any to pity his fatherless children!  May his posterity be cut off; may his name be blotted out in the second generation!  May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD, and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out!  Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth!  For he did not remember to show kindness, but pursued the poor and needy and the brokenhearted, to put them to death.  He loved to curse; let curses come upon him! He did not delight in blessing; may it be far from him!  He clothed himself with cursing as his coat; may it soak into his body like water, like oil into his bones!

This hit home for me, because in my mind in recent weeks I have often thought about something like this for our current president and his adminitration.  The evil of Trump and his basket of deplorables has rarely been matched in the near 250 years of our nation.  It's not simply any one thing...but the cruelty to immigrants, the financial grift, the harm he has done to anything good our nation was doing, the appointment of like-minded depraved individuals...after awhile I cry out, as many do, 'How long, O Lord?  Why do you allow this to happen?'  Shouldn't we as people be taking up arms and removing these people, by force if we have to?  

Yet there's something about the Trump administration that gives me pause...could it be that God has sent him here to bring punishment upon our nation?  Throughout Scripture we find that when God decides to punish people, he often does one of two things.  The first is what we often think about: direct punishment.  Think Sodom and Gomorrah.  Think Herod being struck down and his body eaten by worms.  Think Israel being overrun by their enemies.  Each of these goes back to God directly bringing wrath upon individuals or nations.  

But a second way in which God comes after people is by allowing them to destroy themselves.  I think particularly of the words from Romans 1:18 and following:  For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. 

Three times in this passage, following various forms of sin within humanity, God says in effect, 'OK, that's what you want?  I'll give you up to those things.'  In effect, God is allowing people to suffer the consequences of their choices, and such things might well destroy them.  This is not God's desire, of course, but the hope is always that people will repent, call out to God, and turn away from sin.  Only then will God relent from his wrath.  

So...could it be that with the chaos of the past six months we are bearing the fallout of our unrepentant sin?  Think about some things that have defined the United States in recent years: gross materialism, sexual immorality, and self-absorption, to name just three things.  How have we been given over to these things to our destruction?  

We are, by almost any measure, the most powerful economy in human history, all designed to meet any and every human desire.  We dispose of things so quickly because we have so many more (newer! shinier!) things to take their place.  We crave stuff rather than the God who has blessed us in so many ways; this is sometimes called idolatry.  So how might God let us be punished?  Who is the epitome in our nation of wealth?  Could it be a man who loves a gold-plated toilet seat and has gilded the Oval Office?  Could it be a man whose family is grafting milllions of dollars from foreign investors (golf courses, casinos, hotels) by making his own interests more important than the nation's?  Could it be a man whose recent attachment to crypto has caused those trying to get his ears to fill the coffers of his family?  Has not God given us over to the ideal of what we crave by showing us the depravity of its worst excesses?  

We are a nation that has become obsessed with sexuality.  Sure, there are some who gnash their teeth about LGBTQ or various forms of sexual immorality, but look a bit closer and they are no different than anybody else, only seeking to take away the rights that they themselves have.  People define themselves in our modern era by their sexuality, and believe that nobody (not even God) has any right to tell them to temper their desires to any more than what God has authorized.  So how might God let us be punished?  Perhaps by electing a man (with 82 % support of 'evangelical' Christians) who has more divorces in his life than all other presidents combined?  Perhaps by putting into power somebody who has routinely bragged through history of his sexual conquests?  Perhaps by making into the emperor one who is an adjudicated rapist and likely child molester?  Has not Donald Trump become the person that embodies our sexual depravity?  

We are a people who are fully and completely self-absorbed.  While there may be some benefits of the  therapeutic process, the adoption of the navel-gazing mindset in our nation is complete.  Life is about how much I am to be happy.  Get in my way, and I'll destroy you.  I am the center of my own universe.  Rather than think about how we are called to serve our neighbors and love those who aren't quite like us, even many Christians today live with a mindset that is as anti-other and unChristian as those who know nothing about the love of God.  So how might God let us be punished?  Maybe it's by putting in charge of this country the most self-absorbed person of the 21st century, a man-child whose every waking thought is 'how can I gratify every desire I have today?'  Perceived enemies are to be destroyed.  Aliens and strangers are cast out without due process.  The 'other' means nothing to us.  They're 'not like us'.  

Maybe you think I'm going way off the deep end here...maybe we really do need to rise up and destroy these wicked people who do wicked things.  But I think back to just over a year ago when Trump was campaigning, and one thing that he said over and over again to his supporters:  "I am your justice.  I am your retribution."  Could it be that he didn't really know what he was saying, that God was warning us through these words about might well happen if we don't turn from our evil ways?  Could Trump be the retribution upon our nation, the instrument of his divine wrath?  

However you choose to see Trump, his ascension to power for me is a call for our nation to repent...and that's not something I am seeing happening.  His supporters are glorifying him and his wickedness, while his opponents are just infuriated and want to see his downfall.  Few people seem to be seeing this time in history from a spiritual perspective.  Our de-Christianization may well be finding its nadir in the reign of Donald Trump.  

Weddings, funerals, and a changing religious landscape

I guess my wife and I were something of trailblazers.  When we decided to get married over 20 years ago, we had two ideas: I wanted a small wedding, and she wanted to get married on the beach.  So we decided to go to Myrtle Beach and invited only her parents and mine; my brother, who lives a few hours from there, decided to invite himself as well.  We had a nice simple wedding on the beach done by an old guy we found online, went out as a family for dinner, and started our honeymoon.  

When I first began in ministry over 30 years ago, most people still got married at a church.  Part of my job was occasionally meeting people that had no connection to the churches at which I ministered and finding time to do a brief bit of premarital counseling before walking them through the sanctuary and fellowship hall and letting them plan their big to-do.  Often times I would never hear from them again after the wedding, but I wished them well and hoped that in at least some tiny way the need for Christ and the church would have rubbed off on them.  

I got to thinking about this recently, as the daughter of a cousin of mine got married last weekend at a venue not far from here.  Even as these were people who were raised in church, I don't get the impression that getting married at a church building crossed their mind.  Instead, they chose one of the many venues that are found in the city and countryside these days...often a barn with a pretty view, a banquet hall with plenty of room for a dance floor, perhaps even an old church building that has been repurposed for weddings.  When was the last time I went to an actual church wedding?  It's gotta be over a decade, I think.  

In some ways I don't feel too bad about this...administration and wedding plans have always been the two things I have enjoyed the least about ministry.  Starting about 10 years ago, I made the conscious decision to try and avoid doing weddings for anybody I didn't know...but now it's been years since I've even been asked.  Many of the times I officiated at weddings I always felt I had the same value in the eyes of the couple as a color scheme or the right kind of flowers in the reception hall.  

Yet watching the change over these years has also brought me some sorrow, this idea that people in our country have bypassed churches, even God, in their weddings.  While I am glad that people are still deciding to get married (as long as I don't have to do it!) rather than simply live together, this diminishing of religion in one of the most sacred moments of a person's life speaks volumes about the real place of Christianity in America.  There's a line in the wedding vows in which a person makes a commitment to their spouse 'before God and before these witnesses' that now is no longer necessary, at least in part.  

As much as I have never cared to do weddings, I have always felt more at home in funerals.  Funerals actually allowed me to do my job of ministry, serving and blessing families in some of the most painful moments of their existence.  It's a terrible time, but I actually feel useful, and over the years I think that I've been able to bring some real healing for people.  While I never say that I 'want' to do a funeral, I always feel honored to do so.  

But the cultural landscape on this, too, is changing.  While I still get called to do funerals occasionally, more and more I have noticed that for many people, even Christians, these are being replaced by a 'celebration of life'.  My experience in these things is that, while at times they are still being held in funeral homes or even churches, God and his eternal promises are rarely in view.  Rather, we sit and random people (almost never ministers) talk about what a good person ____ happened to be.  Maybe they went to a church, probably not, but that's not what defined the deceased.  Instead of the goal of life being a desire to be with the Lord forever in eternity, it's enough that such people live on in the hearts of others.  

This year I have pondered a lot about the change in my country...it's easy to point out the apostasy with which many Christians have paraded about in their Christian nationalism or worship of their orange god.  But it may be that when the history (and decline) of Christianity in the United States in the 21 century is written, the change we have made in funerals and weddings may have been the canary in the coal mine.  If religious faith, even a shallow kind of religiosity, is removed from two of the most important elements of a culture's ritual identity, what does that say about how important it is in our daily lives?  A lot, I think.

Respect and the Trump Tattoo

Imagine your best friend: a regular guy with a wife, a few kids, and a steady job.  You've known him for years; you love him as a brother; you thank God everyday that he's in your life.  

But let's say he comes to you one day and says he's going to get a tattoo.  Not just any tattoo, but a large one on his face cheeks.  Yogi Bear dunking a basketball over Shaquille O'Neal.  He's wanted to do this for a long time, and he thinks it's a great idea.  

Of course, as a friend you try and talk him out of this crazy idea.  How can this look good?  Is this really how you want to present yourself?  Are you mentally ill?  But your friend is adamant.  He's gonna get this tattoo, and if it costs him your friendship, that's your problem.  He knows who he is, a Yogi-Bear-lovin' hoops fan.  Nobody can stop him.  

He gets the tattoo...and for awhile you still love your friend.  You have gone though enough stuff together that you won't give him up that easily.  But everytime you look at him you see this tattoo...and it really is the very worst thing you've seen, something you can't unsee.  It's not just the idea of a tattoo, but that he chose the worst tattoo artist in the county to get it.  The characters are all wrong, the placement is off-center, and there's not a soul out there who would think that this was done while somebody was sober.  He continually defends the tattoo, of course...if people don't like it, well they are just stupid.  They have been brainwashed by the anti-tattoo lobby.  Only he knows the real value of this art.  

Slowly but surely, over time, you stop hanging out with your friend.  You will always love him, but your respect for him has suffered immensely.  You longingly wait for the day where he comes to you and recognizes that the tattoo was a stupid idea, can you help him find a plastic surgeon to remove it?  But that day never comes.  And you continue to drift apart.  It's hard to respect somebody that delusional.  

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Over the past decade I have had a lot of people in my life who have their own tattoo: the imprinting of Donald Trump on their hearts.  No matter how terrible an idea it is, no matter how badly executed it has been done, they defend their devotion to him with their very being.  Even as you bring up his incompetence, his venality, his corruption, and even his immoral depravity, all things that are so obvious that anybody should be able to see them, it's never Trump's fault.  It's Obama's fault.  It's Democrats.  It's the mainstream media.  It's Hunter Biden's laptop.  It's Hilary's emails.  

Rather than admit the ridiculous nature of the Trump tattoo, they flaunt it and celebrate himwith their red hats, theirs cheap (and quickly dissolved) flags, their Facebook memes, their devotion to a MAGA echo chamber that always points fingers in another direction.  And so they learn to hate windmills, hard-working immigrants, random members of Congress that their lord and savior has decided are the enemy.  There's nothing real about most (if not all) of his grudges, but this doesn't matter...the Trump Tattoo tells them what to think.  

I will continue to love these people as I slowly and depressingly wait for them to wake up from whatever zombie virus they are under.  But I can't really keep respecting them.  When they speak, even as it's not about Trump, I look at them and all I can see is that terrible tattoo on their face.  

A hundred years of New England freedom

This past week our family took a vacation through the New England states; I especially enjoyed the forests and tranquility of Vermont as well as a boat trip on Portland's harbor.  With vacations it's always nice to get away and see things you don't get to see everyday, but after a week it was also nice to get home and sleep in my own bed last night and poop in my own toilet.  

When we approached Boston, consciously or not a lot of our trip involved looking at stuff related to the Revolutionary War.  We stopped first in Concord and Lexington, just west of Boston, where it could be said that the civil war started in April 1775.  There we saw the places where 'the shot heard round the world' kicked off a series of events by which a bunch of diverse colonies united to claim independence and ultimately win it as well.  We also saw some of the historic sights in Boston, as well as a few touristy ones like the Tea Party museum.  It's a reminder that people suffered and sacrificed for the idea of a new nation, for liberty, for the ability to begin something very new.  No matter how imperfect it was (I was expecting monitors from the Trump administration to be sniffing around to see how America-glorifying it was, which it wasn't always), these are things that should give Americans of all stripes a sense of pride.  

A few days later we left Boston and drove to Newport, Rhode Island.  Rhode Island is where Roger Williams fled in the 1630s when the freedom-seeking pilgrims of Massachusetts denied that freedom to others  Rhode Island was found as a colony seeking a greater sense of religious liberty.  Two and a half centuries later, however, Newport became known as the place where religiosity was easily swept aside in the name of rich people wanting a summer showplace built a series of mansions overlooking the ocean.  It was the time of the 'gilded age' of the 1880s, a time where people (many of whom genuinely had worked hard; some had inherited wealth going back generations) had the wealth to lavishly show off their position in society.  Many of the old mansions still today, though a lot of them are museums; a few now belong to a college I had never heard of before, Salve Regina University.

It struck me as we strolled along the cliff walk that bordered these homes and the ocean how this week had explained a lot of America.  Our country was founded on a sense of freedom, however imperfect (ask the slaves, women, and indentured whites), but a century later was more about wealth and status in a way that might have embarrassed our English forbearers.  It may well be that this is the eternal struggle of the United States, that the energy and passion that inspires true greatness inevitably leads to a form of greatness that is gilded and self-absorbed.  Could it be that our human nature and our tendency to desire a legacy in the form of monuments leads us into a place where importance is only something that is bought?