Seven Things for Saturday

Oh Look! There's Still A Blog! Traveling, Cats, Jerusha Duford, Evangelicals for Harris, Micah 6:8, Harris and RevKara, Go to Church

[So sorry I can’t read this today—the chaos of people coming and going is very great.] The animals in this picture are not the Baddies:

One

We are all eight of us home and basically in one piece. My oldest and youngest children, who got home by flying, endured that exasperating experience of going to the airport, getting on the plane, sitting for a while, getting off the plane, listening to regular pronouncements about how the plane would be fine in just a minute and then would for sure takeoff, and then going home at the end of the day and trying again the following morning. “It will be fun!” I said as I kissed them goodbye to drive north, “Enjoy yourself!”

So, that is why we didn’t manage a do-over of our failed podcast attempt from the day before because we were on the phone with the girls all day trying to help them figure out what to do (hopefully will still do that shortly). And then when we got home we had to launch into the herculean task of eradicating the smell of our wicked pets from our house….

Two

…this happens to me all the time. We end up with a geriatric and incontinent cat with emotional problems. This time, we’ve been the inheritors of Lucy whose favorite person went to heaven to be with the Lord something like a year and a half ago. Nobody knows how old Lucy is, except that she is small and bony and can’t see very well and if you pet her one half second longer than she desires she will sink her little sharp teeth into your hand. She paces up and down up and down, restlessly, like Mephistopheles, searching for something that never arrives. She is big on punishments—as in, if you make her mad, she will pee on your neatly folded clean laundry just as you are about to put it all in the drawers.

She is very mad at us, I presume, for having gone away and come back again, and has determined that the only Loo for her is not her box, placed conveniently in such a place where she can reach it with no trouble of any kind, but rather our one foot off the floor on a wooden platform Japanese style mat/bed. Twice now she has come in and peed right in front of us, without trying to disguise the hideous reality at all.

I am beside myself, as you can imagine, with grief and rage. I can’t live like this. What am I to do? I am not the sort of person willing to send a basically healthy furbaby beast over the Rainbow Bridge, but also, I have to be able to lie in my bed through long night hours with my ordinary swirl of anxieties keeping me awake and not the immanent threat of an angry and deranged cat peeing on me.

Three

As if to make everything worse, I found myself watching this clip of Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerusha Duford, explaining why she suddenly became “political” eight or so years ago when the horrifying incubus of Mr. Trump came into American Government. He is to be blamed, she says, for so many people who were “curious” about the teachings of Jesus going away and not bothering. But then she had to go and break the camel’s back—or the demented cat peeing one too many times outside the box—by literally hauling out the only verse “Evangelicals” seem to know anymore. You guessed it: Micah 6:8.

I didn’t want to transcribe the whole thing, because that seemed tedious to me, but here are some snippets from her two-minute Zoom Address:

If you told me ten years ago that I would be taking an active role in politics, I'd have laughed. But then I had to stop and realize, this is so much more than politics.

My role began in 2016 when a man bragged about assaulting women. Various leaders of my faith then propped up this man as a poster boy for goldy manhood and leadership. This broke my heart as I have watched people who were curious about Jesus and his teachings do a 180 and walked in the other direction from my faith.

She mentions some tree in Isaiah and then gets to the good part:

One of my grandfather's favorite verses was Micah 6:8. What an incredible reminder of what the Lord requires of us, to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly.

This verse, it turns out, is the deeply spiritual reason for Ms. Duford to vote for the most progressive political candidate ever:

Voting Kamala for me is so much greater than policies. It's a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread. And that is why I get involved in politics.

Also, she explains

I'm a therapist.

And therefore provides three “committed action steps:” Pray, Take the Evangelicals for Harris Pledge, and do some acts of Service.

Four

I’m willing, of course, to pray, but also, being a curious person myself, I went over to Evangelicals for Harris to see what they had to say. Under the “Take the Pledge” tab we find this:

As Evangelical Christians, we pray for a president who will unite our nation through courage, compassion, and  and self-control. We believe Vice President Kamala Harris most closely aligns with these values, and, as such, we support her election in 2024. 

Those typos belong to that website, not, for once, to me. Anyway, it also says this:

As Christians, we are the hands and feet of Christ. Join us in giving back to our communities through acts of service.

And when you click on the “Upholding Christian Values” tab you get a series of side-by-side lists. What Trump “Talks” about the economy, jobs, manufacturing, healthcare, infrastructure, pandemic management, and creation care are in one column, and what Biden-Harris have “delivered” are in the other. I read through them all because I am a sucker for pain, and I guess what Evangelicals for Harris would like us to conclude is that these are all “gospel issues.” How much a pharmaceutical company can negotiate for Medicare is one of those “acts of service” accomplished by all the “hands and feet of Jesus.”

Notably absent from any of these lists is what Ms. Harris thinks about abortion. For those stats, you have to dig around and probably not bring them up on a Zoom call with a lot of “Evangelicals.” Oh, and also the lgbtq acronym—that’s not in there either.

Five

I am more curious, though, about what faithful believers in the God of heaven and earth think about the Bible, particularly Micah 6:8. I finally got fed up enough to go look at the whole chapter. It starts out this way.

Hear what the Lord says:
Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
    and let the hills hear your voice.
Hear, you mountains, the indictment of the Lord,
    and you enduring foundations of the earth,
for the Lord has an indictment against his people,
    and he will contend with Israel.

“O my people, what have I done to you?
    How have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt
    and redeemed you from the house of slavery,
and I sent before you Moses,
    Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised,
    and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
    that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.”

What’s alarming about this is how frustrated God is. Though the people who trot themselves to the temple with interminable predictability, though they mouth all the proper religious jargon and make interminable sacrifices, God perfectly well understands that they are “wearied” by him. As if answering him back, the prophet mouths the annoyance of the people, like they couldn’t possibly understand what he required, let alone desired:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
    and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O man, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?

Hauntingly, speaking of abortion, is that horrible line that only finds its resolution as darkness falls over the death of the Son on the Cross, “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” How have I never noticed that before? Probably because no one does in the rush to blather on about justice, kindness, and humility, as if those three things were doable by human people who are wearied not by their sin, but by God.

The chapter ends in hopelessness:

The voice of the Lord cries to the city—
    and it is sound wisdom to fear your name:
“Hear of the rod and of him who appointed it!
Can I forget any longer the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked,
    and the scant measure that is accursed?
Shall I acquit the man with wicked scales
    and with a bag of deceitful weights?
Your rich men are full of violence;
    your inhabitants speak lies,
    and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.
Therefore I strike you with a grievous blow,
    making you desolate because of your sins.
You shall eat, but not be satisfied,
    and there shall be hunger within you;
you shall put away, but not preserve,
    and what you preserve I will give to the sword.
You shall sow, but not reap;
    you shall tread olives, but not anoint yourselves with oil;
    you shall tread grapes, but not drink wine.
For you have kept the statutes of Omri,
    and all the works of the house of Ahab;
    and you have walked in their counsels,
that I may make you a desolation, and your inhabitants a hissing;
    so you shall bear the scorn of my people.”

Six

And this is what is so terrible about all of the people who try to imagine that politics, of whatever kind, will actually accomplish the good world they so desire, especially in the context of mouthing spiritual platitudes without the hard road of trust to give them richness and meaning. For no man has the power to “destroy the message Jesus came to spread.” Jesus didn’t come to “spread a message.” He is the Message, though not the Eugene Peterson version, thank heaven. He came because our creation care was going very poorly, because we thought that by sacrificing our children to false gods we could get rain, prosperity, flourishing, and happiness. He came because we were wearying ourselves groping for the door to sin and ruin. He came because we were a desolation, our habitations a hissing.

Of course the Lord requires justice, mercy, and humility. That is who he is. But guess what, Evangelical for Harris, you are not him. You are not his feet nor his hands. You are the usual, ubiquitous sinners who will one day face a perfectly just God who opened the door of salvation to you through the blood of the cross. Blaming the Bad Orange Man for all your troubles will not get you out of that trial on that awful—in the true sense of the word—day.

Seven

Anyway, now I am going to change over the laundry and try to figure out what books I need to buy for the kids to start school and think about what to wear in France and how many books I can reasonably be expected to read while eating cheese. Here’s a fun Tiktok to drive you to church out of complete desperation.

@revkarlaKamala Harris is a Libra sibling! #revkarla

Tiktok failed to load.

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Have a nice day!