it broke my heart seeing the hybrid flag
chimera
half stars and stripes half southern cross
unholy marriage
of the promise of human liberty and the obscenity of human bondage
as if the union Lincoln fought to preserve is no union at all but only a monstrous
amalgam of oxymoronic ideals
or is my heart is breaking because that is
who we are?
I recommend an article released this morning written by Emma Green for The Atlantic magazine, entitled A Christian Insurrection. Ms. Green addresses similar concerns to those I raised yesterday in my blog post, Disturbing Images, namely the confusion and distortion and degradation of the Christian witness brought about by an unholy alliance with a ungodly demagogue. Her article begins,
The name of God was everywhere during Wednesday’s insurrection against the American government. The mob carried signs and flag[s] declaring JESUS SAVES! and GOD, GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA, LET’S KEEP ALL THREE. Some were participants in the Jericho March, a gathering of Christians to “pray, march, fast, and rally for election integrity.” After calling on God to “save the republic” during rallies at state capitols and in D.C. over the past two months, the marchers returned to Washington with flourish. On the National Mall, one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to SAY YES TO JESUS. “Shout if you love Jesus!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd cheered louder.
Shout if you love Jesus. Shout if you love Trump. As if the two belong on the same dais, merit the same praise, deserve the same allegiance. And notice which of the two received the greater acclaim. This is a dangerous confusion, a toxic conflation of loyalty to Jesus with loyalty to a political leader, a confusion which Mr. Trump has only encouraged. Recall what he said at a campaign rally in October …
A friend of mine said, you know, you’re the most famous man in the world. I said, no, I’m not. No, I’m not. No. He said, no, who’s more famous than you? You are the most famous man in the world. What are you talking about? Who’s more famous? I said, Jesus Christ.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
And I don’t want to take any chances, so I looked up and I said, and it’s not even close.
Mr. Trump defers to Jesus, but he is the one who dares raise the issue and speak his name and the name of Jesus as if they belong in the same conversation. Mr. Trump has said of himself, “I am the chosen one,” and also drew attention to the remarks of a radio commentator who claimed, “The Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.” Jesus himself warned his followers not to be fooled by such pretenders …
Watch out, and do not let anyone fool you. Many men, claiming to speak for me, will come and say, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will fool many people.
Ms Green’s article continues,
The group’s name is drawn from the biblical story of Jericho, “a city of false gods and corruption,” the march’s website says. Just as God instructed Joshua to march around Jericho seven times with priests blowing trumpets, Christians gathered in D.C., blowing shofars, the ram’s horn typically used in Jewish worship, to banish the “darkness of election fraud” and ensure that “the walls of corruption crumble.”
The Jericho March is evidence that Trump has bent elements of American Christianity to his will, and that many Christians have obligingly remade their faith in his image. Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’s banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House.
Christians have remade their faith in his image. Shame! This is nothing more than idolatry. The peoples of this world are watching and it grieves me that when they see the name of Jesus lifted up, this is what they see.
The images I saw yesterday afternoon were jarring, unsettling, disturbing …
An American flag with the name TRUMP superimposed, equating allegiance to the nation to allegiance to one man.
A hybrid flag, half stars and stripes, half southern cross, equating the ideology of these United States with the ideology of the Confederacy, namely the fundamental right of citizens to own human beings of African origin as personal property.
A full Confederate flag paraded through the capitol building, emblematic of a longing for the ascendancy of white supremacy.
Even more upsetting for me were the signs: one sign mounted on the windshield of an automobile reading “Pelosi is Satan,” and a large yellow sign held aloft reading simply “JESUS SAVES.” But this “protest” was billed as a “March for Trump” and a “March to Save America,” meaning that these signs conflate believing in Jesus with believing in Trump, that Trump’s mission is to be America’s “savior,” that the debate, the struggle, is not between Republican and Democrat, between left or right, even between fundamentally different visions of governance, but between darkness and light, between devotees of the devil and the servants of God and their savior, namely Donald J. Trump.
I can believe that Proud Boys and white supremacists and Q-Anon disciples would want to gather at the capitol at the president’s bidding to disrupt the business of our democracy, to promulgate the lie of a stolen election, to foment rebellion, but I had friends there. Forty-year friends, dedicated followers of Jesus, had traveled half a country to be there Wednesday, to be there because …?
This was not a Right to Life March. This was not a march for peace. This was not a march for religious liberty. This was not a march for any cause, but for a man, a “March for Trump,” a show of solidarity to bolster his claim that he actually won the election.
Why be there? Why be there as a Christian? Why be there for no other reason than that one man, one man alone, testifies that the election result is a lie. There are no “two sides to the argument,” absolutely no evidence at all of a level of fraud that overturned the election, only the word of one man whose ego cannot bear losing. Why be there for him, at his bidding, trusting only his word?
We are called to be there for Jesus, to do his bidding, to trust his word, not to give this kind of unquestioning allegiance to a man. Jesus saves. Jesus saves and no man may claim that mantle for himself. May Jesus save us from this time of confusion and cooption and carelessness, when our Christian witness, our witness to the empowering and freeing and healing love of Christ, has been compromised by our readiness to believe the lies of and pledge our allegiance to a self-serving charlatan.
A Wednesday evening tweet from President Trump …
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.
Mr. Trump’s words are not merely justification of a shameful and violent attack on our American democracy, and not merely a shameless lie, but quite simply blasphemy.
It is blasphemous to attribute holiness to something that is entirely profane. Whether or not God may use political leaders to advance God’s purposes (and we do pray that our leaders will advance God’s purposes of justice and righteousness and peace), and whether or not God has a preference in any particular election (and I believe that God cares little about whom we choose to elect, but much about how whomever we do elect chooses to act), no politician may claim holiness because of their office and no elective “victory” is worthy of being named “holy.”
When this president claims that his (untrue) “election victory” is “sacred,” he is claiming for himself status and honor and glory that belong to God alone. And that is blasphemy.
The last of the poems I will publish in memory of David Walters’ life and in tribute to the power of his poetic voice, a most timely word for us in a time when we wait “for a promised dawn …”
Why doesn’t God like us?
Have you ever noticed how God deserts you
When you most need Him?
He hangs around for awhile until he’s through,
Then his bright light grows awfully dim.God reminds me, sadly, of the sun,
Here now, made known, then gone!
Shines his spotlight, it seems, for fun,
Then makes us wait for a promised dawn.But a patient scientist pointed out to me my error:
The sun, he said, is almost in the same place today
That it was happily playing in yesterday.
It was only the earth and we who moved! So there!But I, from living, and the logic of each day’s sharp realities,
Remembered when living wells of faith dried up,
And sincere efforts to live and love or to be kind weren’t enough,
Haunting me with their weak and uncompleted activities.Still, like a desperate soldier, we choose the forlorn hope,
To rush high stone walls that were laid to injure and damn!
It seemed only right then that we become the sacrificial goat.
Only, I decided instead to stand with the one who had already
died for us as our Passover lamb.A dear friend helped me see what we too often miss:
God, he reminded me, is always present – right now!!
– everywhere and in each moment with all of life.
Even when ignorance blinds us so that we will not heed,
or we are afraid even to risk!
This is the time of constancy as He walks beside us in our dark
and loneliness, and simply, loves us.david walters
February 2015
A poem written by David after the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville. His language is raw and vivid and impassioned, but hopeful, too, always hopeful. And there is even room for pity for the demonstrators themselves: “Were they ever shown loving kindness?”
Charlottesville
Animated ideas rise as gray ghosts in the summer night,
Feral cats prowling littered alleys looking for a fight,
Drawn hungrily to rotting smells of offal’s slippery bed,
Cold bodies dragged up that many had thought dead.Barefaced lies unearthed approved by Nazi hate,
An archaic power wakens to separate the righteous race
From Jews, blacks, gays, and brown faces,
Eliminate race pollution, keep order, divide to make safe.Our enraged brothers and sisters wildly brawl pell mell,
Burning lava bursting into bigotry, racism and hot hell!
What terrible wounds torment such desperate souls!
Were they ever shown loving kindness instead of woes?Will death hunt us all down till there’s no more light?
Or will we bestir ourselves to face white supremacy’s alt right?
Moments come when the living stand up against the cruel,
An ancient remnant remembers that it’s time to speak true.Declare with untethered strength who God created us to be,
Love’s children strong and creative, tall trees growing free,
It’s not too late! though hounds of Hades loudly bay,
In each age and place we have to begin, today.david walters
August 2017
A wonderful poem about humility, about neither overstating or understating our own place among all God’s creatures …
watching sparrows
I don’t think that I like house sparrows.
Brassy, aggressive and flying in feathered gangs,
Scaring smaller chickadees, nuthatches and juncos
who are eating and singing their carols.
Sparrows can use their thick beaks like sharp fangs.They crush and eat our cracked corn or sunflower seeds,
Pushing and shoving away even their own kindred.
They don’t wear prayer shawls, read a bible or use rosary beads,
Each one is too busy fighting for victory and to get ahead.Then one day I watched a sparrow stop, and ponder,
Or so it seemed, as he reminded me of me.
Did he pause to see how hard he strove and did he wonder
Why he scrabbled all out to fill his belly in each deed?Because I have often judged sparrows they may not like me.
But I see now they are only being who God created them to be.
And since in truth, “God’s eye is on the sparrow!”
He seems happy with them just as they are,
so maybe there is hope for you and me.david walters
February 2015
Two a half years ago, just before my retirement, David sent me this poem. He wrote in his email:
“I very much enjoyed reading your book on Ecclesiates!! Made me look not only more deeply into what he was saying but also into how I understand and how I live my life with insight and faith as one.
The following is a poem that draws from some of the book and my own faith. I am submitting it to a poetry contest in Northfield with the theme, “Poetic Living Wills,” as we are asked to write about how we look at death and living.”
It is now, some two years later, an extraordinary testament to David’s readiness for death, because of how grateful he was for his life. It reflects the wisdom and clarity of a man who has learned what it is that matters, who understands the wondrous privilege of loving and being loved.
I don’t know that I have reached the point of his unquestioned contentment, but I am working on it!
I am content
“…chasing the wind…”I am content!
Time will come when no one remembers me,
Family, friends gone, leaving not a hint!
Nothing I have done, or built, is left to see,
Hard work, success, achievements, illusions!
I am free,
Relieves me of confusion,
I am content.Today, I love and hold you close,
Dearest wife! you my brothers, sisters,
Strangers became friends giving me hope!
Still, does not death come ever closer?
Joyfully we make plans for tomorrow!
Confront our terror, trust in something greater,
Accept the final loss that brings sorrow!
I am content.Crossing through dark waters of death,
I will forget things I left behind,
Except for when I loved without regret!
Not when I was right! but whenever I was kind,
Working for justice with humor our human majesty.
Moments I forgot myself the best times!
The wise man of Ecclesiastes speaks of mortal frailty,
Be thankful, he says, “All else is vanity!”I am content.