As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that fewer things bother me, but the ones that do bother me more than ever.\u00a0 Maybe that’s your experience too.\u00a0 The thing that bothers me most these days is the widespread acceptance of slander, bullying, disrespect, and denigration of the weakest and most vulnerable of us.\u00a0 The immigrant, the single mother, the poor elderly, children from the wrong neighborhoods — it has become acceptable in American society, and most appallingly in the church, to blame such people not only for their own fate but for all the ills in the world.\u00a0 So-called conservatives blame the foreigners, and so-called liberals dismiss the Tea Partiers as unlearned and unwashed.\u00a0 So it’s an equal-opportunity climate of insult and rancor.\u00a0 It is not limited to one ideology or party or group or class.\u00a0 And the deafening silence of those of us who know better seems to add to the problem, not solve it.\u00a0 These things bother me.\u00a0 And lately they’ve challenged me to do what I can, even if it’s writing blog posts for those who read them.<\/p>\n
But mere righteous indignation cannot solve such problems, and being bothered is not a good end point, only a place to start.\u00a0 The larger question is, how do we Christians stay focused on our deepest calling, which is to love God with our whole being and our neighbors (all of them) as ourselves?<\/p>\n
Psalm 11 is a good place to start, and not just because it’s the next one in our series.\u00a0 The Psalmist expresses dismay at the behavior of others who “love injustice,” but he or she turns quickly to the source of healing.\u00a0 This source is the realization that God not only has the wide perspective that allows accurate judgment of all human behavior (“The Lord is in his holy temple\/palace…. searches out all all humankind”), but that God has a strong bias toward righteousness.\u00a0 God is not a neutral observer in the world.\u00a0 Rather, God calls us humans to be righteous people, in short to be “godly.”<\/p>\n
What does it mean to be a righteous person?\u00a0 Somehow that question has gotten lost in our churches, with all our emphasis on experiencing worship and being a group of friends.\u00a0 Good things, to be sure, but not the same as the call to be righteous.\u00a0 How can I live my life as a just person whose work is a blessing to others?\u00a0 That’s the question, and it’s one that in our time of Qur’an burning and other blatant expressions of contempt and hatred (hence, of injustice), we must ask.\u00a0 For only so can we be saved.\u00a0 The God who is no respecter of persons does not let us off the hook because we say we’re Christians.\u00a0 For Heaven keeps the book of life with all the names in it, not we.\u00a0\u00a0 And in that realization lies our hope and the potential to re-imagine our world after the rancor has died away.<\/p>\n
Maybe we can brainstorm together.\u00a0 What do you think it\u00a0 means to grow as a righteous person?\u00a0 Who are your models?\u00a0 What works, and what doesn’t?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that fewer things bother me, but the ones that do bother me more than ever.\u00a0 Maybe that’s your experience too.\u00a0 The thing that bothers me most these days is the widespread acceptance of slander, bullying, disrespect, and denigration of the weakest and most vulnerable of us.\u00a0 The immigrant, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n