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Jesus' Game Plan

Writer's picture: Rich ScheenstraRich Scheenstra

You would hardly call me an ardent sports enthusiast, but I usually check the LA Lakers and Detroit Lions highlights the day after their games – if they win. The Lakers have a new coach this year, J.J. Reddick. He’s brainy and methodical. A former player himself, he’s an astute student of the game. For Reddick, it’s all about following the game plan. Don’t get rattled when the other team scores or you make a few mistakes. Just keep following the game plan.




Many of us feel pretty rattled right now. It's crazy out there – crazy, chaotic, and frightening. In this post, I'm going to focus on the two things that most concern me right now:


1) We’ve elected a man who is possibly a psychopath to be our President.

2) We’ve elected a man who is possibly a psychopath to be our President.


Before you accuse me of overreacting, being dramatic, or just being a poor sport, hear me out. I'll acknowledge that I may be wrong. I hope I am. I would appreciate it if you could show me how I’m wrong. Let me share with you how I got here, and then maybe you can show me where I got off track.


I hadn't listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast for a while after the election, limiting the amount of time I gave to politics. But recently I saw that he’d done another podcast on attention, which is a particular interest of mine. The podcast included an interview with political commentator and news anchor Chris Hayes, whose book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource just came out last week. At one point, Ezra referred to Donald Trump as an “attention psychopath" – which got my attention. I decided to look up the word “psychopath.”


First, it’s not a recognized clinical diagnosis, though it’s often associated with antisocial personality disorder. This is how the Google AI overview describes a psychopath. It aligns with other descriptions I’ve read:


A "psychopath" is a term used to describe someone who exhibits a severe lack of empathy, remorse, and conscience, often displaying manipulative, charming, and exploitative behavior, with a tendency to act impulsively and disregard social norms, usually characterized by callous and deceitful actions. Here are key characteristics of a psychopath:

~ Lack of empathy: Inability to understand or share the feelings of

others

~ Superficial charm: Appearing friendly and likable on the surface

~ Manipulation: Skillfully using others to achieve their own goals

~ Grandiose sense of self-worth: Exaggerated belief in their own

importance

~ Pathological lying: Frequent and effortless fabrication of stories

~ Impulsivity: Acting without considering consequences

~ Lack of remorse or guilt: Not feeling bad about harmful actions

~ Poor behavioral controls: Difficulty regulating emotions and

behavior


I understand that someone doesn’t have to have all these characteristics to be a psychopath. What’s frightening is that Trump appears to have all of them. Granted, I’m only a pastor, not a psychiatrist. Whether or not Trump should technically be called a psychopath, the fact that he displays most or all of these characteristics ought to be concerning enough. This may also help explain the chaos of Trump's first two weeks in office (or has it been two months?). We also need to factor in Trump’s vindictiveness and lust for power. Both Trump and his FBI nominee have said this is payback time. So far, Trump's avalanche of executive orders caters to his craving for power, with relative disregard for the Constitution.


So a psychopath who craves power and delights in retribution is back in the saddle, only without the people who restrained him during his first term. (This is just one day's news.)


I don’t doubt there are problems with our immigration system and that federal departments could use a tune-up, if not an overhaul. There are likely D.E.I policies that need updating. I just don’t trust a loyalty-demanding psychopath to make things better rather than worse.


The lack of competence and character in Trump's cabinet nominees and agency replacements tells us that he’s trying to create an entire government that is an extension of himself, a kind of dictatorship in disguise. J.D. Vance has suggested that Trump doesn’t need to obey Congress or the courts. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, said he sees the Republicans’ job as basically to do whatever the president wants. The CEOs of major corporations are tripping over each other to kiss Trump's ring.


I believe the last thing the world needs right now is a possible psychopath overseeing the world’s most powerful nation – trash-talking our allies, threatening their economies, invading their territories, and pulling out of alliances, treaties, and organizations that have made this world safer than many people realize. (China is happy to welcome them, by the way.)


Which brings me to my second concern. What bothers me almost as much as Trump being President is how he got here. We elected him. I mean “we” in two ways. First, by “we,” I’m referring to the slim majority of voters who chose Trump not only over Kamala Harris but over every other Republican candidate during the primaries. We elected him fair and square. We fairly elected an election denier who stirred up a riot that turned into an insurrection, and who, as commander-in-chief, took no action for three hours while 140 women and men in blue were brutally beaten; and has now pardoned and released all the rioters from prison, including those who destroyed property and committed violence. True to form, Trump has also removed security protection from three of his former senior officials – John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Gen. Mark Milley – for their criticism of Trump. (Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime Trump loyalist, disagrees with Trump's decision and admits the former officials' lives remain in "real danger" because of Iranian death threats.)


One commentator wrote that for Trump, "Malice is policy." Another noted, "Cruelty is the point."


Can you repeat your arguments that Trump isn't a psychopath?


As conservative David French said recently, he knows many Republican senators who voted against Donald Trump's impeachment because they assumed voters would do their dirty work for them. It ends up that if you keep telling your Republican supporters that Trump was innocent, they believe you. Funny that.


I understand that Republican members of Congress are in a bind. As French pointed out, to stand up to Trump is not only to put your political career at risk but to put you and your family's lives in danger. That's why Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator to vote for Trump's impeachment, has had to spend $5000 a day on security.


I may not be a psychiatrist, but I am a pastor; I know evil when I see it.


But there is another “we” that concerns me even more. We Christians. Those of us who claim to be Christ followers are more responsible than any other group for Trump's election. Fifty-six percent of all self-identified Christians voted for him, with majorities in all categories (including mainline). I believe Trump won fair and square. I don’t hear Christians blaming Dominion voting machines for inaccurately counting their votes. Trump is who we wanted. There’s just no getting around the fact that the country with the largest Christian population in the world chose someone who sounds and acts like a psychopath, lusts for power like an autocrat, and says his favorite Bible verse is “An eye for an eye.”


One of two things appears to be true: either most Christians are awful at judging character (“I like how he speaks his mind”), or we don’t think that character is vital for the job (“I didn’t vote for a pastor”). Many go so far as to say that Trump is God’s chosen man, a kind of messiah, while others compare Trump to Cyrus, the Persian king that God used to make a way for Jews to return to their homeland 2500 years ago. (For the record, how God chooses to use foreign enemy rulers is his business. Choosing an evil ruler, a possible psychopath, to be the leader of your own country is the height of folly. Jesus called this tempting God, and it never goes well.)


All this reflects a colossal failure in Christian discipleship. Brian Zahnd blames the shepherds rather than the sheep. Just this morning, I read:


As [Jesus] went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things (Mark 6:34).


The people had shepherds, but the shepherds weren’t doing their jobs. As was the case in Jesus' day, it’s challenging today for pastors to take a stand against someone like Trump. I entirely understand that there are all sorts of risks and pitfalls. Personally, I feel compassion for the shepherds as well as for the sheep. Church members may leave or may ask the pastor to leave. Trouble is, this leaves the sheep vulnerable to being discipled by a possible psychopath like Trump and his MAGA movement.


I get that Jesus didn’t say very much about the political administrations of his day. But what little he said and did spoke volumes. For example, he called Herod a fox. When asked about paying taxes, Jesus asked to see a coin. On that coin was the inscription, “Tiberius Caesar Son of Divine Augustus.” When Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s... and to God what is God’s," he undercut Caesar’s divine claims. When Jesus went into the temple and overturned the money changers' tables, he challenged the local political/religious authorities and the temple establishment. The fact that he did this within the temple while it was in full operation was scandalous.


And he paid the ultimate price for his actions.


The big problem I see is that if we’d been properly discipling our people all along, the sheep would have recognized all on their own that Trump was a fox. He’s not even a fox in sheep’s clothing. Trump likes coming off as an alpha male, cruel, vindictive, and a braggart. His lust for power is on full display. He fuels and feeds on a muscular form of Christianity that's become popular over the last half-century. That Trump was elected already in 2016 is a scathing indictment of how we had been discipling or training people up to that point.


I realize I’m being hard on the church and especially its shepherds. (Not my own; I'm proud of her.) While I called out Trump to my congregation several times before the 2016 election, I've made plenty of other mistakes as a pastor. It’s a tough job, with lots of pressure. Just being a Christian is difficult. It's hard not to feel that you are constantly compromising. The gods of Venus (pleasure and sex), Mars (control and violence), Mammon (money and possessions), and Babel (nationalism and empire) continually nip at our heels. Since we're all still recovering from the sin disease, our compromised spiritual immune system leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of temptations, deceptions, and, yes, even psychopaths like Trump.


So what are we to do?


Get back to our game plan, Jesus’ game plan. Politically and in various ways, things were a hot mess when Jesus arrived on the scene. There were huge economic disparities, a paranoid, attention-seeking tyrant for a king, crushing taxes, little or no free speech, xenophobia, the constant threat of violence, religious legalism and factionalism, and the humiliation of living under a foreign power. Jesus' game plan? “Follow me."


Jesus’ game plan was never very complicated. Put simply, it was for people to become his student/apprentices (disciples) in order to learn to live and love like Jesus. Many people thought this was nice, sort of, but couldn't imagine what impact this would have on their political/economic situation. Jesus' game plan didn’t align with anyone else’s game plan. Most Jews believed the promised Messiah would become an alpha male political and military leader – that his first action would be to get rid of the Roman occupiers and impose a theocratic government. (Christian Nationalists, take heed.) Religious leaders believed that the Messiah would reward all the good people, the Yahweh loyalists, and send all the bad people packing to hell. Of course, the clergy assumed they'd end up in the good place. They calculated that crucifying an imposter like Jesus would give them an extra shoe in. When given the choice, they chose Caesar (“We have no king but Caesar”) and Jesus Barabbas (a populist revolutionary) over Jesus of Nazareth.


Today, millions of Christians strangely believe that God will reward them and our nation for electing Donald Trump. January 6, with its Christian flag-waving rioters, wasn’t an anomaly. Sisters and brothers, we've lost our way! Beware of those self-identified prophets who tell you Trump is our savior:


Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they are deluding you. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord (Jeremiah 23:16).


We need to get back to our game plan. We need to become Jesus’ disciples again, apprentices in living and loving like Jesus.


The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in what is often called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). In this initial body of instruction, Jesus laid out what he would be teaching his students going forward. We might call it his syllabus. There’s nothing in this syllabus about military or political strategies. There isn’t a playbook or even a rulebook – just hyperbolic metaphors intended to highlight the importance of certain qualities Jesus wanted his followers to develop: like not harboring a grudge, going out of your way to seek reconciliation, honoring your commitments, being truthful, loving your neighbor (including the stranger), loving your enemies (including political opponents), practicing radical forgiveness, detaching yourself from the stickiness of money and possessions, trusting God for tomorrow, avoiding even the whiff of sounding pious or self-righteous, refusing to condemn others, being generous without blowing your own horn, being on guard against false prophets devoid of character, and just trying to be like your Father in heaven – who loves all people, both the good and the bad.


Jesus used bizarre images like plucking out one’s eye, cutting off one’s hand, and stripping down naked in a courtroom to communicate that he wanted us to play full out and not settle for righteousness that's only skin deep. He said he wanted his followers to be the salt of the earth, a city on a hill (not taking the Hill), and to go out and recruit other disciples, teaching them everything he'd told them. In other spiritual talks, he said we'd need a new birth, a spiritual transfusion, and one another's accountability and support to make much progress.


It's clear from the gospel accounts that Jesus had his hands full, just as he does today.


What I’m saying is that it’s not Donald Trump’s character that’s the primary problem here; it’s ours. I mean, Christians. We're just not good enough. It's not the world that's the problem; we are. It's time to stop excusing our behavior with bumper stickers like, "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven." Instead of engaging in culture wars, we should be cultivating our own character. Our piety is too shallow and self-righteous, and our understanding of justice too small. What appalls me is that more Christians aren’t appalled by Trump. It seems that for some Christians, character has been reduced to loving what Elizabeth Oldfield calls PLMs (People Like Me) and otherwise focusing almost entirely on gender and sex issues – subjects Jesus said very little about – and how many times in a day we can squeeze the word "woke" into a conversation (trying to erase from our memories the fact that racism is America's original sin, and like sin itself, isn't going away anytime soon).


Maybe this is a caricature, but caricatures often have some basis in fact. (And yes, there are many, many exceptions across the theological spectrum.)


What do I mean by character? Our character reflects what we care about, and what we do about what we care about. Basically, character is “care-in-action.”


That’s all that Bishop Mariann Budde asked of President Trump when she addressed him at the National Cathedral. She gently asked him to show mercy to, care about, and care for the vulnerable. It seems to have hit a nerve since his response was to write:


She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!


Who talks like that? By "who" I mean anyone, much less the President of the United States. Maybe a psychopath does. I suspect it also takes a psychopath to blame a helicopter/plane crash on D.E.I. policies within minutes of the accident.


My Christian sisters and brothers, do you realize what we've done? Can't you see when you're being played?


After listening to Donald Trump for about 15 seconds, it’s hard not to conclude that he’s full of himself. One reason I think Christians are okay with Trump is that we tend to be full of ourselves as well. And yes, I include myself. I’ve been convicted of that lately. Over the next while, I will attempt to write a series of posts on the Beatitudes, which function as a kind of preamble to the Sermon on the Mount. I’m also going to take the risk of including a short song I’ve written for each of the Beatitudes. Maybe it's art, even the amateur kind, that, as much as anything, will get us through the next four years.


The first beatitude is, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I imagine many of us feel poor in spirit these days, so Jesus has my attention. But I’ve also learned from experience that it’s possible to be poor in spirit and still be full of oneself. Jesus wants to help us with that.


I'm not suggesting at all that we shouldn't be doing anything. After all, character is care-in-action. Sharon and I want to ask the Spirit each day if anything is being asked of us. Last night, she wrote a letter to our congressman while I worked on this post. She also emailed a pastor of a local Latino congregation to ask if there were things we could pray about or do. We want to financially support organizations helping victims of Trump's policies. It can mean engaging in the delicate dance of trying to interact constructively with people on Facebook and discerning when that won't be the best use of our time. We want to be supporting and comforting people in our circle who are being traumatized by Trump's words and actions, sometimes because of their history of abuse and because they feel personally threatened by Trump's rhetoric and shenanigans. We also want to support local community leaders using their clout and authority to defend children and vulnerable families.


We also realize something much more costly may be asked of us.


And we don't want Trump’s game plan to distract us from Jesus’ game plan. While we all need to keep an eye on what Trump is up to, if I read Jesus correctly, working on our character has to be our first priority. That’s where the long-term solution lies to what’s ailing us as a nation and as a church.


Where's the hope? The apostle Paul lays out one path:


But we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope... (Romans 5:3-4).


In J.R.R Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo says, "I wish it need not have happened in my time."


"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”


I believe the Beatitudes can help prepare us for what's ahead. They're also great discussion starters, so I hope you’ll chime in with your own thoughts.


By the way, happy Black History Month. I suspect our Black sisters and brothers have a lot to teach us about how to live in such times.




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