Holy Mischief

Matthew 25:44-46 – “Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This reminds me of something that Jesus said according to Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” That doesn’t seem to mesh well with what Jesus is saying here. In both cases, the people he is talking about did not know what they were doing. In the case of the goats, they didn’t know, as evidenced by their question, when? In the case of the Jewish authorities and the Romans, they didn’t know Jesus was the Son of God. (I wrote Song of God – it still works.) Yet, in one case they are forgiven, and in the other they are not.

Possibly the goats are so far gone, as Branca d’Oria from my last post, that there is no hope for them. Or is it that the goats have died while the people crucifying Jesus are still living. There is still time for them to repent?

The idea of repentance led me to think this morning of the Old Testament patriarchs and heroes. One of the things I love and appreciate about our scriptures is that the people in them are so very human. Abram and Sarai laughing at God’s promise of a child of their own. Jacob’s and Laban’s trickster behavior with each other. King David, probably the most revered person in the Old Testament, had a trusted fellow soldier murdered to cover up the fact that he had sex with the soldier’s wife. They all repented and were forgiven. But these stories are in here to remind us that leaders are not perfect. They remind us that these behaviors are not condoned, that they must be rejected in everyone. Idolization of our leaders is a cancer that the Old Testament preaches against again and again.

We are seeing such leader idolatry happening with Donald and his enablers. They are different from the goats and those who crucified Jesus, because they know what Jesus asks of his followers, and they’re not doing it. Yet, they are as human as those Jesus forgave on the cross. I’m not saying they deserve forgiveness. I’m not saying they don’t deserve forgiveness. But they do deserve a chance to redeem themselves if and when they recognize the harm, the suffering, and the death they have caused by their greed and their racism. It is so hard to recognize their humanity right now. Yet, if I don’t want to emulate them, I must.

And I don’t want to emulate them. There are many lessons we can learn from this presidency. One of them is how to recognize a bad example of leadership when we see one; to not follow such leadership. There are many examples in the Bible of leaders making bad decisions. In addition to the examples above, there is Herod, who killed every child in Jerusalem under two years old. As far as I know, he did not repent. It is much easier to recognize bad leadership when our survival or our way of life depends on recognizing it. But the opposite is also true. It is much harder to recognize bad leadership when our survival or our way of life depends on not recognizing it. What the Republican leaders and Donald’s acting secretaries are doing is very human. It is behavior that civilization has been fighting against for a long time.

The question arises; how do we recognize bad leadership? What are the signs and symptoms? One simple answer is whether the policies of the leaders lead to death, destruction, and devastation. That’s bad leadership. By contrast, good leaders endorse and enact policies that give life, build up people, and maintain what has already been built; both physical and social structures.

I have been reading about the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which operated in England during WWII. Their mission was to send agents trained in sabotage and mayhem into German-controlled territories to “set Europe ablaze,” as Winston Churchill put it. I think I’m going to be incorporating more sabotaging and mayhem in my thinking about resisting the president’s policies. I’m not sure what that will look like, but any non-violent action we can take to slow down or stop this evil is a loving act.

How will we create holy mischief? Sanctified sabotage? Sacred spying? Reverent resistance? Consecrated chaos? Devout disruption? Prophetic subversion? Loving defiance?

B