The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.
Lord, Save us from Your Followers
Dan Merchant, author of Lord, Save Us from Your Followers, has sought to collapse ideological division in the U.S. by wearing a jumpsuit covered with aphoristic bumper stickers and traveling the country to capture public response. He intentionally selected conflicting bumper stickers in order to stimulate discussion about these important issues—issues of love, truth, justice, compassion, right and wrong—a great idea! Merchant claims that the followers of Jesus have departed from Jesus’ essential message—“love one another.” This is true. Too often Christians are known for their fundamentalist beliefs, not their love-filled actions.
However, to affirm the truth of the disparity between Jesus’ message and Jesus’ followers is to also assume that truth exists, that it is possible to evaluate history, belief, and behavior based on rightness and wrongness. Therefore, we do well to be truthful about Jesus’ message, which also included “Love God with all you heart, soul, mind, and strength.” On both accounts, loving God and loving neighbor, everyone falls short. Who consistently loves others and God? This highlights the need for Jesus’ solution to our failures in love—his substitutionary death for our failure to love and cherish the infinitely lovable.
Merchant notes that the issues can not be reduced to a bumper sticker. He agrees that people and ideas are more complex than aphorisms and that sensitive, irenic discussion over dividing issues is necessary. He is right. In fact, winsome dialogue is an expression of love, especially when we do not minimize the role of truth in discerning the best way forward in addressing global poverty, HIV/AIDS, government corruption, and so on. In the end, what we need it the Lord to save us from ourselves and to fill us with unnatural love for him and for one another.
This article on Horton Hears A Who has received a lot of attention; I hope it’s helpful.
Missonal Video from Coram Deo
Some friends in Omaha called Coram Deo share their church vision and values in this video..