“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
I have a problem.
My problem can be simply stated. It goes like this:
How do I… figure out… how to be a good Christian Minister… in America… during the 47th president’s term in office?
That’s my problem.
I will tell you an old joke to get us into the mood of this dilemma. A quick content warning – during the course of this joke I use a word, usually not heard in the pulpit, that rhymes with “spit.” I would use a different euphemism, but I’m afraid, as you will see, the joke demands that word…
Here we go…
A man dies and finds himself at the front desk in hell. The administrative demon – I suppose Hell’s equivalent of St. Peter scans a list, determines the man’s fate and the man finds himself being led through a long corridor where, here and there, he looks into rooms where other unfortunates are receiving their eternal comeuppance. The man has a sinking feeling. Finally they arrive at a door to a room – we will call it room 47.
Upon entering room 47, the man discovers a crowd of people standing around chatting and smoking cigarettes. As he joins them he realizes that they are all standing knee deep in shit.
“Well, this is pretty bad,” the man thinks as he smokes his cigarette… “but frankly, I thought it was going to be a lot worse than this!”
Just then a demon enters the room: “Alright everyone,” he yells “break time’s over, back on your heads.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but these days it feels like we are all in Room 47.
We all have our own room 47 problems. Mine, as I have stated it above, is
How do I… figure out… how to be a good Christian Minister in America during 47th president’s term in office?
I have tried some different strategies – but none have worked very well.
But… I think I’ve made a breakthrough.
Or rather, we have – we Americans have made a breakthrough.
**
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
I feel the need to define some terms.
What, for example, do I mean by a “good” Christian minister?
Well, as you can well imagine, I’ve given this some thought. As I see it, the good Christian minister must succeed at two important tasks. The foremost is that a minister must lead the community in worshipping God. This follows from what Jesus identified as the first and most important commandment:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ (Matthew 22:37)
So, task 1 – worship God.
Close on the heels of task one, comes the minister’s second important task, which is to interpret the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Since Jesus was not some hypothetical universal force, but was an actual wise and compassionate man who lived right here among us, the job of interpreting his teaching follows nicely from the next commandment that he, Christ, emphasized:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments, Christ said hang all the law and the prophets.
I don’t think any person of the cloth would disagree with me when I likewise say that On these two commandments hang all the important tasks of a good Christian minister.
But, wait. There is another important point that must be considered.
It is theoretically possible to achieve the two important tasks: Worshipping God, and interpreting the gospel, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the actual lives of the people in the pews.
We could just worship God, and ignore what is going on in the world beyond the walls of the sanctuary. As odd as that sounds to us, this is a real thing. Great pains were taken in Monasteries and Convents throughout the ages, to shut the outside world out entirely, in order to focus solely on chanting the psalms, meditation and prayer.
We could do that.
Indeed there are those who think of this as the ideal way to worship God.
This is not my view.
From where I sit, this way of being a church suffers from some problems – namely, the Ostrich problem and the hothouse flower problem.
Otrisches are famous for hiding their heads in the sand. If I ignore the Lion, so says the Ostrich, it will surely go away and not eat me.
If I can’t see it, it can’t see me.
The Ostrich Christian might be good at chanting psalms or meditating, but otherwise, he’d be pretty useless. Perhaps that is why there was no Ostrich present at Christ’s Nativity.
In order to survive, the hothouse flower requires the temperature to be stable and the relative humidity to be precisely measured. A hothouse is built around this flower to carefully curate the proper conditions. If anything disturbs this delicate balance, the hothouse flower will wilt and die.
Is that who we are?
No thank you!
We are not as delicate and refined as all that are we? If we were, could we call ourselves followers of one who wore a thorny crown?
I don’t think so.
Both Ostrich and Hot house flower are guilty of the verdict that my mother sometimes cautioned me against when she said:
“Don’t be so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good.”
If we are to really be the church, we must be the church of NOW. I hope you agree with me. Interpretation of the gospels must be done, not for the sake of maintaining the purity of an old doctrine, but as an honest effort to inform the lived experience of the current generation.
Ideally, these two ministerial tasks – worshipping God, on the one hand, and interpreting the gospels for our generation, on the other…. ideally, these two tasks, should be achieved in concert with one another.
If they conflict with each other, there is a problem.
It sounds like a tall order, but it can be done.
It must be done.
Because to worship God, is to understand Jesus.
And to understand Jesus, for our needs, is to worship God.
**
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
On January 26th of last year – the Sunday after we were all dragged, kicking and screaming, into room 47, I made my first attempt at addressing my problem. Yes, I wanted to worship God, and yes, I sought to interpret the gospel in a manner that was relevant to your needs, but on that day, I was also confronted with an overwhelming moral concern. What was 47 going to bring?
My approach, on that occasion, could be called the “head-on approach.”
Donald J. Trump’s presidency, I said, threatens to cause the moral collapse of our nation.
I suppose I was in no mood to mince words that day. I went on to say:
Ultimately, the hope, the value, the very sacredness of the American experiment, envisioned by the founding fathers and perfected through the crucible of our history, depends, more than anything else, upon the basic moral integrity of its people.
Without this, we are lost.
On that day, I proclaimed that
As a citizen, I will not remain silent.
As a Christian – as a minister even – I believe it is my sacred duty to speak out – I believe that my fidelity to Christ calls me to do my small part to protect the fraying thread of moral integrity that may be our final hope.
I stand by the sentiments that moved me on that day.
But I fear I did not live up to my lofty intentions.
This is because, before these high-minded proclamations were out of my mouth, the barrage began.
Break time was over.
Not a day went by when there was not a fresh affront. There was no time to breathe before another horrifying violation of our rights, another dismantling of our cherished institutions, another backwards environmental policy, put us back on our heads. Each instance was more clear evidence of a political agenda driven by cynicism and hatred.
Overwhelmed by this tsunami of bad news, I did what most well-meaning-EV-driving-New England-liberals did. I retreated into a kind of bewildered numbness. Ignoring the news became an accepted practice that we universally agreed was not so much a choice as a matter of necessity if we wanted to keep from going insane. I believe we identified this as a particular form of crazy that is, for some reason, named after the feces of Nocturnal flying mammals.
Why would I bring such madness into the sanctuary? I couldn’t bear it, and neither could you. Making reference to the moral outrages that hove into sight each day, would, it seemed, do nothing but defile the sanctity of our precious time together.
I, like all of you, wanted Sunday morning to be a gift – a time of quiet reverence when we could simply be with God… and literally find sanctuary from the horror of our weekdays.
So, not so much intentionally, as simply because I was dead tired, I fell into a new way of dealing with my room 47 problem.
I let the poop win.
And this, of course, was not a way of dealing with the problem. It was a way of avoiding the problem.
**
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
There is one more thing I did to try to solve my room 47 problem.
As I preached about the gospel, I would drop some fresh outrage into the mix and then, instead of commenting on it, I would just leave it there to fester. This I did in order to create a stark contrast with the wisdom and compassion of our mutual friend Jesus – and I think that I did not have to work very hard to succeed in this project…
The trick made for some richly ironical sermonizing, but there was a distinct downside to this rhetorical flourish.
When I did it, I felt awful. And so did all of you. It felt a bit like that gratuitous violence that you see in cheap horror movies – whatever effect it had, was not worth it.
We all know 47 is a bad man motivated by bad intentions.
If we talk about room 47, we shouldn’t just wallow in aimless feelings of disgust. If we talk about room 47, we better make it count.
Which leads me, finally, to the breakthrough.
I noticed it first in the news that was coming out of Minneapolis last week.
Every American with blood pumping through their hearts had been mourning the senseless death of Alex Pretti. But even as we we watched that video and decried the horrifying violence – 10 shots into a man lying prone on the pavement – we were also aware of something else.
Minneapolis was giving us “a masterclass in peacefully defending a democracy against authoritarians.” This quote comes from UCC pastor David Ostendorf whose op-ed, entitled Minnesota Shows Us That Resisting ICE Works appeared in the Time Magazine website last week. Pastor Ostendorf went on to describe the spontaneous acts of goodwill that permeated the frozen streets of Minneapolis:
The community solidarity shown in Minneapolis has been nothing short of astounding—and ICE has struggled to circumvent it. Neighbors are patrolling Minneapolis’ streets, watching for unmarked vehicles. At the sound of a whistle, people pour outside—filming, documenting, refusing to let agents operate in silence. Legal observers stand for hours in the bitter cold outside schools, childcare centers, and businesses. Troves of people are collecting food to deliver to families too afraid to leave their homes.
Neighbors have planned economic shutdowns, mass protests, and sustained actions that clearly demonstrate we will not cooperate with the destruction of our communities. High school students have walked out of class, and elders have turned up to protests in the frigid cold. Thousands have demonstrated in below-zero temperatures—conditions that make it difficult to breathe, let alone protest.
Meanwhile, interfaith networks—which have been built over decades—have come into full force. Pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams are in the streets, courthouses, and places of worship defending immigrant communities.
This resistance is not random. It is disciplined. It is effective.
And it is deeply rooted in diverse community relationships—between neighbors, faith leaders, unions, mutual aid networks, organizers, and more. Across race, culture, language, age, and religion, there is a deepening sense of shared community, resilient hope, and democratic renewal that will long endure. And that will have far more impact than the scourge of the federal government and its agents in our streets and neighborhoods.
ICE agents may have hoped that their violence would weaken these community bonds and dissuade us from showing up. We won’t let that happen. History has shown us that when people mount a powerful, peaceful resistance, change is possible.
This witness is SO moving!
It fills me with pride.
PRIDE!
I did not know how much I missed that feeling until it returned.
Ostendorf shows us that…
we are still Americans…
The people of Minneapolis have shown us who we really are.
We are good people.
We look out for each other.
And most importantly, there is hope
There is hope!
Why?
Because we American’s not lost. We are capable of moral outrage!
So the breakthrough?
It’s simple really.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.
When you hear the Beatitudes – the first thing you notice is the repetition of a single word –
“Blessed”
Jesus did not repeatedly tell us of what is bad. He did some of that, but he balanced it with blessing.
He repeated, over and over, that we were blessed.
So I will continue to speak of the moral outrages of room 47…
But Jesus and the brave people of Minneapolis have taught me not to stop there.
I will also seek out, and present to you, examples of the shining moral integrity displayed by everyday Americans.
When we say their names:
Renee Good.
Alex Pretti.
we proclaim that, though they are dead, that have given life to Christ’s teaching, make it more true today as they have ever before, that…
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Amen