This past Sunday morning's Facebook post read as follows: "If you are going to church today, and your pastor expresses anti-Jewish or anti-Palestinian statements to stir up bigotry, hatred, and fear, please confront them. Get your butt up out of the pew and do so in real time, if the Spirit leads. Any pastor engages in this way has no business behind a pulpit. I said what I said."
I had woken up that morning to a report that 3 young Palestinian men in Vermont--2 wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyehs-- had been shot. There are 4-5 large churches in the region where I live which have "leadership" who have consistently leaned to the polical far right (at the cost of abandoning all scriptures clearly stating opposition to many far right positions). They have mocked people for wearing masks during a global pandemic, embraced unsubstatiated accusations of election fraud and used their pulpits and platforms to sow baseless seeds of insurrection-esque unrest, dismissed concerns regarding systemic racial injustice, trivialized the plight of parts of the world suffering the most from climate change-related environmental disasters, and demonized the LGBTQ+ community. Thinking of these churches and the shooting victims, my first thought was, "not in my back yard!" And, yeah, I have no dilusions that my little post made any difference, but maybe it encourage people who DO choose to operate in soundness of mind, to continue to do so--that they are not alone. I mean, are we not encouraged in the very text church folk are supposed to be reading from to behave thusly.
(see Galatians 5:22-23 "22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.") I have yet to have anyone show me where it instructs us to behave like feckless murderous nutjobs after all. (sorry for this horrible font. It's late. Hopefully next post will not be such a hot mess.)
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