Goobers!
As anyone who reads Ramblings knows, we live in deep southern Illinois, the red state part of blue state Illinois. And, we also are a person of faith. We believe that a church is a place where one goes to see and be seen by God. We are embarrassed to tell you that thought is apparently not shared by some of our fellow parishioners in our local mainline church that we attend in southern Illinois which will remain nameless in this piece for obvious reasons.
At the end of January, our previous pastor announced that he was being reassigned to a church in north central Illinois. We had never much cared for this man because he really, from our perspective, was not much of a pastor. Among the things that he believed was that if poor people came to the local food pantry for aid and had been somewhere else, that they should be denied for “double dipping.” This was a manifestation of a larger belief that the poor are lazy, shiftless people who could work if they were not so lazy. And that was a manifestation of an even larger belief system that follows to a tee what personalities like Rush Limbaugh are passing out on a daily basis.
Apparently much of his church believes just as he did. Otherwise he could not have stayed there fourteen years.
On the first Sunday after the beginning of July, the new pastor showed up to begin his term as the churches leader. This man has a thirty five year history of being a leader in his denomination and has broken some interesting ground. He was the first white pastor of his denomination to lead a mostly black church in the state of Illinois. He is also, contrary to the prior pastor, well educated in both religious and secular matters and has an ability to combine religious teachings and history together to reach some interesting conclusions. He spoke to us about something beyond the Golden Rule which teacher to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This pastor introduced “the Platinum Rule” which plays off of one of Jesus’ commandments to “love one another as I have loved you.” He feels that to love is more important than to do, and, this writer feels that he is right in this approach. Not so some of the congregation.
There has been a great gnashing of teeth and wailing around among the congregation over the message that this new minister has brought to them. And some have even already departed the church for safer havens where their beliefs are more in tune with what they want to hear from their pastor. Among the tings that the new pastor believes he has practiced. When he married, he and his new bride took a part of both of their names and created a new last name that both of them took on for the rest of their lives. One family who lives in isolation and has home educated a number of children that way left the church before he even arrived because they feel that the new pastor disrespected his father by not forcing his new bride to take on his name. In the last church service that we attended, the new pastor mentioned his father and how he had been among the troops to liberate the concentration camps at the end of world war two. He said that his father got a far away look in his eyes when asked by his son about the event, stating that the smell had permeated for miles before they even got to the camp.
While the old pastor used his father as an example of what farm life was like in a small rural county where he grew up, this new pastor gives us things like concentration camps and why Jesus was really opposed to slavery but could not say much about it because he would have ended up on an even earlier Roman cross if he had done so. The old pastor was something of a social Darwinist while the new pastor has a definite social conscious. It is quite a contrast.
We asked the president of the church council what he thought about the new pastor and he said that he was reserving judgment and we tell you this because in a recent Sunday school class, this church leader informed us that he had been reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and that it was a good and interesting work.
You may wonder why we are informing you of all of this but there is really a good and compelling reason for doing so. There is a tendency in the press and among talking heads sometimes to try to make us believe that the neocons and conservatives generally are a force unto themselves and that their leaders are divorced from the rest of the population who supported and elected them. This is not so. There are a large number of people out there in both red and blue states who back these people and who both influence and are influenced by their beliefs. They could not exist at the top of their political and social pyramid if there were not the worker ants below them supporting what they say and what they do.
The new pastor that we previously spoke about brings the message of love that underpinned Jesus Christ’s whole ministry while he was here on this earth but there are many who are so loaded up with hate for so many others such as the poor, non whites, and other minorities that they will never be able to hear what a man like this has to say. And that is both a sad and foreboding thing to contemplate as we move forward in America because these people are like a cancer among us who will, given enough time, bring the whole body politic to its knees. Perhaps they already have!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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