President Trump spoke to the UN this week and he took on the North Koreans, the Iranians and the Venezuelans. So the Iranian guy who heard Trumps speech said it belonged in medieval times. Venezuelan guy says it was racist and probably sexist too. Hillary said it was “dark and dangerous”. Criticism from a theocrat who foments a religion that forces everyone that believes it to go back to the 4th century and from a worn out Marxist regime that cannot handle billions of dollars in oil wealth but goes bankrupt instead, and a worn out politician whose husband gave the North Koreans billions to start the nuclear race to begin with, tells us what a world we live in. That criticism tells me the speech was about right. The topper might have been the North Koreans who called the President a “dotard”. This is quite hilarious in so many ways. To think that the strange little man with the bad haircut views the President as a dotard, tottering around in his dotage is rich. Even funnier was the fact that the press, who I believe are mostly ignorant, (the idea that they are deliberately obtuse has crossed my mind as well), had to scramble on google and actually read a dictionary to find out what he meant.
The humor in so much of this has to be sought or one might go a bit insane. This world is indeed coming unglued and the politicization of all things is evidence of the insanity. We need to get out of the past we are told while we dig up old antebellum antagonisms. We need to rethink society and our values while chanting the same political slogans that started when I was wearing bellbottoms and old army fatigues. We need to revamp the Church’s Creeds while trying to make everything gender neutral.
The crazy world we live in is a world to which we send missionaries. So deeply entrenched in our politics is the racist, sexist, homophobia designations that it bleeds into our mission work and our pulpits. The very concept of a missionary is considered by some to be colonialist and racist. Our missionaries go to places where other churches are trying to preach the Gospel of sexual expression rather than the Gospel of Jesus. The global South and the indigenous churches we deal with there are much more conservative than our more “enlightened” denominations in the States are, and it make for uncomfortable times.
One of the larger churches in Africa recently called for one of the larger Lutheran Churches in the US to “repent” over their stand on sexual issues. It has become a political football when it should be a theological one but that is the nature of the beast. The church whose work it is to call people to repentance has forgotten how to do so. When was the last time you heard any church in this country call upon anyone to repent over anything except perhaps driving SUV’s or owning a confederate flag?
