Tag Archives: social media

This is Your Soul. This is Your Soul on Hate

(Photo by Aaron Masaryk on Unsplash)

If you are as old as I am, you may remember the powerful commercial by the Ad Council to illustrate drug use. Above a sizzling frying pan, you saw an egg and heard the monotone words: “This is your brain.” The egg was cracked and dropped onto the pan, followed by these matter-of-fact words: “This is your brain on drugs.”

Drugs fry your brain, we understood without question, yet questioning how much we wanted eggs for breakfast anymore.

What the Ad Council did not mention is drug use that becomes drug addiction can divide families…can alter one’s perception of one’s self and one’s neighbor…can steal hope and shape the future.

That old ad keeps coming back to me because something is happening in Christian communities, or at least in the one I serve as a pastor. The same thing is happening among some groups of friends and certainly among families.

I’ll stick with what I know as a pastor. The one body of Christ I’ve been called to lead has been disrupted not only by a pandemic, but also by a strange strain of sizzling hot hate. It is deep hate against “the other side” and I see it most clearly on Facebook.

Clearly I don’t see many people, so once in a while I will check a person’s Facebook page if they pop into my prayers. Sometimes I can learn something about the person’s life that might need specific prayers.

What I might find is deep anger, mistrust, and sizzling hot hate in shared posts and capital letters. Hating quarantine. Hating a political party. Hating wearing masks. Hating. Hating.

I see it on the pages of people whom I know to be sincerely generous and kind. I have walked with them through tragedy and confirmed their kids and baptized their grandkids. I know them past their Facebook pages and the hate that sizzles on their pages.

And I worry so much about their souls. Not in the “will they go to heaven” sort of way. Jesus already took care of that worry. But I wonder in the “how are you surviving” sort of way. What is such hate doing to the way you are loving Jesus and seeing the world and being in relationship with your neighbor?

I think you can remove the word “drugs” in the egg ad and replace it with the word “hate”. Hate can divide families…can alter one’s perception of one’s self and one’s neighbor…can steal hope and shape the future.

I suspect if you are reading these words, you may not be the hater. But if your Facebook page does reflect sizzling hot hate, take a quick inventory of whether it’s really you in there. Is that really you on your Facebook page, or have you let hate shape who you are on social media because it is what’s trending?

An Instragram post on @henrinouwensociety yesterday reads: “Prayer converts the enemy into a friend.” If that is true, then prayer may be able to take the sizzle out of hate. It may be able to mend broken relationships. Certainly, the death of Christ did something even greater – set forgiveness where there was none, set life where there was death.

Who knew a pandemic that in theory would bring people closer together to fight harder against it, (think The Great Depression and WWII and 9/11) would be the thing that lets loose the hate?

Against All Odds: Christian Hope

(Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com)

To be a Christian is to carry within ourselves a heavy dose of idealism. Day in and day out we must be idealists to hold hopes for this world that are against all odds.

Against all odds, we hope for a world that recognizes a shared humanity. Where people who are white name our sordid history with people who are not white, and then together propose to make it better.

Against all odds, we (Lutherans) idealistically tell babies at baptism to work for justice and peace throughout their lives, even though my own culture will tell them to perpetuate unjust systems that oppress the poor.

Against all odds, we hope for communities to work together to contend with a global pandemic, even it means wearing a mask to the grocery store and to church. Against all odds, we pray and pray for people to care more about each other than their politics, supporting community leaders and putting a faithful stop to angry Facebook memes.

Today is another day that demands outrageous idealism from each one of us who claims to be a Christian, which means to love our neighbor. Perhaps we might even dare to believe, against all odds, that Jesus Christ would make all things new again today. And maybe even tomorrow. All things. All people. All cultures. All communities.

Against all odds.

Boiling Point

For weeks I waited for the pieces to come together to launch this website and tell you stories. My intention has been to share tales that might encourage people, maybe a person like you, and add levity to the daily work of raising kids, sustaining marriage, and all that you may do as one day spills into another.

And then George Floyd was murdered. Recently before, in my own America were the murders of other black Americans: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Dreasjon (Sean) Reed. Boiling point.

The pot had been simmering. For years and years heated by angry words, unchecked bias, and inequality that Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered for in 1968. The simmering pot of racism in a country someone once called a melting pot is now a boiling pot.

For a couple of years I had fled the Facebook and Twitter scene to avoid this kind of simmering. Social media can be anxiety-producing and I figured there was enough of that in my life so goodbye Facebook and Twitter. I deleted the apps on my phone and said goodbye to my newsfeed.

And that was nice. It was nice not to know all the anxiety-producing news and go about my life. It was nice to narrow my gaze to my own work and get ready to launch a website. It was nice to ignore the simmering pot.

Now the pot boils and there is no ignoring. I need to see the words on Facebook and Twitter. Otherwise, how would I believe the ignorance from my very own president? There is no filter on his Twitter feed. (Except when his words are too violent and Twitter has to take them down. ) There is no news bias on his feed. No one else to blame. As much as his subordinates would love to take away his Twitter account, I hope they never do. It is through those words of his that we see the words that hold true for the people who adore him.

Yearning for a glorified America is to yearn for a colorblind America with no awareness of the tension among people that needs to be named. The famous Twitter feed suggests we let the white people in charge take charge with military force. He stood in front of a medic station on a church lawn where people had been providing water, holding the written word of a God who sets people free.

We are to be color-amazed, as Bishop Eaton has preached. We are to be amazed at the uniqueness of people, the value of each breath, and the strength in each voice. This is not a time of this or that, them or me, us or you. No person is perfect in this boiling pot. We have all sinned. We have leaned on political allegiance instead of the freedom of Jesus Christ that is for each person.

There is a story our nation needs to tell. We can delete the apps and ignore it, but the simmering pot now boils. So pray. Pray all day long as you hear the news and realize we have so much to learn about this boiling pot. Pray, because only prayer (not the news) changes our perspective. Pray and realize the story of rage and racism is indeed your story and mine.

How Do I Explain #GeorgeFloyd to an 8-Year Old?

Photo Credit: @Joshhild

“What are you watching?” asked my daughter, as I stood in our kitchen staring at my phone.

In a moment, I had to decide how to explain racism and riots to an 8-year old. Or, I could turn off my phone and let the moment go. Isn’t that so much easier? To believe whatever is happening on a screen is far away and someone else has to live with it?

I was watching Pastor Ingrid C. A. Rasumussen on Facebook walk through the neighborhood of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis. Touring littered streets, she explained the true identity of the damaged buildings that exposed generations of anger. Like vapor, smoke rose up here and there, like injustice that rises up here and there and here and there.

“I am watching a pastor show us a neighborhood where there was a riot.”

“Did they wreck things?” she demanded to know. “Someone is going to owe a lot of money! Why did they do that?”

“His name,” I slowly began, “was George Floyd. And he was murdered by a police officer, and many people are angry about it.”

With my husband, we tried to explain there are police whose job is to keep people safe, and there are people who are black and there is an ugly history we can’t seem to shake off.

In the end, dear daughter, this world is not yet as it should be. People who happen to be black are not as safe as people who happen to be white. Last week was one of many moments the vapor of injustice rose up in a city we know well and love very much.

There is no perfect dialogue to explain George Floyd’s murder to an 8-year old. It would be perfectly easy to believe his story need not be tied up with our story. But I want my kids to know some hurts in the world are not easy to explain, and those hurts are our hurts, too.