Mike’s Rumblings 03-01-24

Faith Conversations

This is an audio version of Mike Murphy‘s Friday rumblings. This is a regular post on Facebook that I’ve turned into a podcast. I decided Mike’s words needed a wider audience. You may agree or disagree with what he says, but there is certainly much food for thought contained here. You can friend Mike on Facebook for the printed version or read it below

Rumblings. 3.1.24.

1. A story about America in 10 chapters.

Chapter 1. Normal day.

Chapter 2. Shootings.

Chapter 3. Panic

Chapter 4. Weeping

Chapter 5. Thoughts and prayers.

Chapter 6. Grieving

Chapter 7. The Funeral (s)

Chapter 8. Talking heads analysis

Chapter 9. Vigorous 2nd Amendment defense

Chapter 10. Nothing changes

Pretty crappy story, isn’t it?

2. When the world around me starts getting a bit ‘iffy’ I need to remind myself that I am first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God and there’s nothing there that’s at all ‘iffy’.

3. I’ve said it before and I will say it again and again in the hope you will say it again and again to those in your spheres of influence. Here it is:

“Make no mistake about it, there’s only one issue on the ballot this fall. It’s about whether or not we will vote to preserve our democracy and its freedoms or take a giant step towards authoritarianism.”

4. “Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward

is to be controlled

by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool

is to be led

by the opportunists

who control the fool.

To be led by a thief

is to offer up

your most precious treasures

to be stolen.

To be led by a liar

is to ask

to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant

is to sell yourself

and those you love

into slavery.” ~ Octavia E. Butler

5. One of our presidential candidates is comparing himself to the Russian dissident Navalny who recently died in a Siberian prison.

Navalny was a courageous leader, a man of faith, a burr in Putin’s saddle, and a truth teller.

The presidential candidate is none of these things. He’s not brave and his faith is in himself, not God. He is a habitual liar who thinks Putin is worth emulating.

They are not even remotely alike. No comparison should ever again be attempted. But I’m sure he will try again and his crowd will giggle with delight. What foolish people they are.

6. “Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.” ~ H. Jackson Brown

Those who do ‘make fun of’ them, reveal a whole lot about the prejudices, rudeness, and immaturity that defines their lives.

7. How then shall we live out our faith?

“Sometimes the best evangelism is simply telling people you’re a Christian and then not being a complete jerk.” ~ John Pavlovitz

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

8. When asked how Fascism starts, Bertrand Russell once said: “First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.”

To fascinate a fool isn’t all that difficult. Just remind them of their prejudices and then show them bright shiny objects.

Muzzling the intelligent (don’t make the mistake of measuring them by their degrees or title or lack thereof) is quite a bit harder for they have this tendency to move around and underground and then become the resistance. But even smart people like to be flattered. That’s what draws them out and that’s when they are far less muzzle resistant.

9. “Sometimes in the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper in the heart, giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, and hope to despair.” ~ Howard Thurman

“In the stillness of the quiet” God does some of His best work. What’s sad is that we choose to be noisy more often than not and we wonder why we haven’t heard from God.

10. “…One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true — except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite! This is the subversive genius of the Hebrew prophets. They wrote from a bottom-up perspective.

Imagine a history of colonial America written by Cherokee Indians and African slaves. That would be a different way of telling the story! And that’s what the Bible does. It’s the story of Egypt told by the slaves. The story of Babylon told by the exiles. The story of Rome told by the occupied.

What about those brief moments when Israel appeared to be on top? In those cases the prophets told Israel’s story from the perspective of the peasant poor as a critique of the royal elite. Like when Amos denounced the wives of the Israelite aristocracy as “the fat cows of Bashan.”

Every story is told from a vantage point; it has a bias. The bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass. But what happens if we lose sight of the prophetically subversive vantage point of the Bible? What happens if those on top read themselves into the story, not as imperial Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, but as the Israelites?

That’s when you get the bizarre phenomenon of the elite and entitled using the Bible to endorse their dominance as God’s will. This is Roman Christianity after Constantine. This is Christendom on crusade. This is colonists seeing America as their promised land and the native inhabitants as Canaanites to be conquered. This is the whole history of European colonialism. This is Jim Crow. This is the American prosperity gospel.

This is the domestication of Scripture. This is making the Bible dance a jig for our own amusement…” ~ Brian Zahnd

We like to read scripture in ways that endorse our politics, justify our behaviors and to elevate our cause. In doing so, we lose sight of what it’s actually saying and ignore its prophetic edges. And then scripture becomes quite pedestrian, just words on a page, with no power to make a holy mess of our lives.

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