Popular Ain't Always Good

The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 2:1-10 and John 3:14-21.

Someone defined a politician as a person who goes after people's votes by promising to protect both the rich and the poor from each other. Politicians know that if you want to win votes, it's more important that your policies are popular than that they are consistent or make sense or actually work. No matter how much debt the country is in, you will never hear a politician say that he will raise your taxes, just as he will never say he will cut defense spending, despite the fact that the US spends more on defense than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine combined.

Senator Harry Truman from Independence, Missouri got noticed for chairing a committee to reduce waste and inefficiency in the military and was selected by FDR to be his vice president. When Roosevelt died, Truman succeeded him as president. People may say they revere Truman but he wouldn't be elected today. Even in his own time he came so close to losing that one major newspaper didn't bother to wait for the final vote tally and printed a story that his opponent, Thomas Dewey, had won. The most famous photo of Truman is him holding up the erroneous headline and beaming at the irony of it.

Truman's problem was that he was outspoken. His nickname was “Give Hell Harry.” Truman said he just told people the truth and they thought it was hell. Harry Truman wouldn't make it in today's world of polls and spin doctors.

Did you know that the art of public relations was invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew? He took his uncle's insights, which are that people are (1) motivated by their subconscious and (2) avoid uncomfortable truths, and weaponized them. Whereas Freud sought to help people face unpleasant truths about themselves, his nephew realized that, as T.S. Eliot put it, “mankind cannot bear too much reality.” Public relations is all about giving people attractive alternatives to harsh truths. So tobacco companies ran ads saying 9 out of 10 doctors recommended their cigarettes. Rock Hudson's agent had his secretary marry the star rather than disillusion fans who saw Hudson as the perfect romantic foil to Doris Day or Susan Saint James. And we baby boomers watched public safety films that assured us that nuclear war was survivable as long as you “duck and cover.”

Nothing's changed. We are told that the economy is healthy so long as the stock market shows that large companies and rich people are making lots of money, despite how hard things are for the average person. We are told that our for-profit healthcare system is the best in the world, though we rank 30^th among nations for healthcare quality and 66.5% of bankruptcies in the US are due to medical bills. Diet plans tell us that this superfood or this regimen will help us lose weight when it usually boils down to eating less and exercising more.

We live in a consumer society. We tell people what they want to hear so they will vote for us, or buy our products, or go to our churches. God forbid we say anything unpopular, no matter how true it might be. People don't want to hear a jeremiad, which is a tale of woe and condemnation. It gets its name from the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah would have liked to say things that pleased everyone but he was called by God to preach to his people in the twilight of the kingdom of Judah. Egypt and Babylon were major powers in the Middle East at that time and they were fighting over the corpse of the Assyrian empire. After the death of the righteous king Josiah, Judah was ruled by puppets of either Egypt or Babylon. Jeremiah, who probably had a hand in the religious reforms of Josiah, felt compelled to warn these new kings, the priests and the people that they were straying from God's ways. He also counseled against opposing Babylon, which got him branded as a traitor. (Jeremiah 15:10) King Jehoakim was so displeased that he cut the scroll of Jeremiah's prophecies into strips and burned them, piece by piece. (Jeremiah 36:23) God told Jeremiah to write them down again.

Jeremiah not only told the truth to earthly powers, he was also honest with God. He asked God why his people had to suffer. We get an answer in 2 Chronicles 36:15. “The Lord God of their ancestors continually warned them through his messengers, for he felt compassion for his people and his dwelling place.” God knows you can't make a bad situation good by lying about it. To solve a problem you start by being perfectly honest about it.

One of my favorite shows was House M.D. and not just because the main character was based on Sherlock Holmes (who in turn was actually based on a real doctor, Joseph Bell.) The fictional Dr. Gregory House, if you remember, was a brilliant diagnostician with the world's worst bedside manner. His chief complaint was that everyone lies and that, in doing so, they are keeping from him the very information that might save their lives. House was merciless in his quest for truth and his success rate was astounding. The truth is, though, that in the real world his lack of tact and disdain for legal niceties would get him fired faster than a politician's speechwriter if he was too honest. But it is true that if you hide unpleasant details from your doctor, you can get the wrong diagnosis and thus the wrong treatment. God can sometimes be blunt. He has little use for the games we play or the ways we diminish and deny our harmful thoughts, words and deeds. But we ignore or water down or add to his words at our own peril. (Deuteronomy 4:2; Proverbs 30:5-6; Revelation 22:18-19)

Speaking of adding to God's word, there is another famous person associated with Independence, Missouri. But unlike Harry Truman, Joseph Smith told people what they wanted to hear. Smith told men that they all could receive prophecies from God, because, if they were good Latter Day Saints, they would become gods of their own worlds after death. He also told them they could have as many wives as they wanted. These doctrines, not found in the Bible, caused problems precisely because they were so popular (with his male followers, that is.) But if every man could be God's spokesman, you suddenly had all kinds of contradictory prophecies. More troubling to Smith was that if every man was a prophet, his position in his own church ceased to be unique. So Joseph Smith had another revelation that only he could have revelations.

But the genie was out of the bottle and the Mormon church has continued to splinter as various men decided they were God's mouthpiece. Today there are numerous small western towns from Mexico to Canada ruled by Mormon fundamentalist “prophets” who dissent from the official Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. These men all believe the church should never have abandoned the polygamy doctrine. However, according to Jon Krakauer in his book Under the Banner of Heaven the plural marriage commandment “very nearly shattered the church, brought about Joseph Smith's death at the hands of a lynch mob, and has been reverberating through American society ever since.” Krakauer's investigation of these communities shows that girls as young as 14 are pulled out of school to marry men 2 or 3 times their age, that these men have absolute authority over their wives and that multiple marriages can so complicate family relationships that a woman can become the stepmother of her own stepmother. So, women, appreciate your rights and that your husband only has one wife—you.

The interesting thing is that the supposed basis for the idea of polygamous marriage was those of the biblical patriarchs. And yet none of those marriages are depicted as harmonious. Barren Sarah offers Abraham her handmaid, which was a custom of that time and place. But then she harasses the poor woman when she gets pregnant as planned. (Genesis 16:3-6) David's dynasty was threatened by the intrigues of his wives and heirs. And sex must have become a chore for Jacob as each of his 4 wives angled to be his favorite by trying to provide him with the most sons. The passage in Genesis in which Jacob fathers 12 kids in 29 verses in a rapid fire “birthathon” comes across as a farce. (Genesis 29:31-30:24) But look closer and you see resentment, jealousy and competition rather than cooperation. Men, read this and appreciate your one wife.

As usual, what is touted as fundamentalism becomes, as one scholar calls it, a radical superficialism. That is, the reading of the scriptures of the religion becomes literal but shallow. Nuances, distinctions and context are glossed over. Furthermore most fundamentalists tend to overemphasize some aspects of the faith while ignoring others. Krakauer documents how often in the Mormon splinter groups their polygamy leads to actual incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Some of these Mormon fundamentalists also justify violating other very explicit Mormon commandments against drinking and taking drugs. Krakauer's book began with the horrific murders of a bright young Mormon woman and her infant daughter by her husband's fundamentalist brothers. Her crime: knowing the Book of Mormon well enough to stand up to her radicalized brothers-in-law. When these “mouthpieces of God” could not answer her very appropriate questions, they decided to shut her up. Permanently.

Joseph Smith added to God's revelation in the Bible and his LDS church is one of the fastest growing faiths today. Other people try to attract followers by subtracting from God's word. The Jesus Seminar is a group of religion professors who determine what parts of the gospels are historical by voting with colored marbles. They have concluded that Jesus said only 18% of what is attributed to him. Many of the individual members of the Jesus Seminar have put out books with their own recontructions of what the Jesus of history, as opposed to the Christ of faith, was like. This so-called scientific approach has yielded a different Jesus for each scholar. As Harry Truman said of economists, if you laid all these scholars end to end they'd all point in different directions.

Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson points out that their common methodology consists of first dismissing various objectionable parts of the oldest documents we have on Jesus, that is, the New Testament writings. Then they fill in the gaps with speculation, some based on history and culture and some on their personal interpretations. Small wonder that each writer finds a Jesus who reflects his own views: an apocalyptic preacher, an enigmatic philosopher, a social reformer, or just another rabbi. Johnson notes that in each case the reconstructed Jesus is so unremarkable that it makes you wonder why anyone bothered to crucify him or why his movement is still growing 2000 years later. Dr. Johnson points out that the Jesus who changed history was not one of the variants found in these scholars' books but the one found in the gospels. It's the entirety of the Jesus in the Bible—his teachings, life, death and resurrection—who has inspired so many to follow him.

Whether we add to or subtract from the Bible the results are the same: we create a God in our own image. He has our prejudices and our moral, political and social outlook. Such a God may be comforting but he is unlikely to tell us anything we don't already know or confront us with anything we don't wish to face. Such a God doesn't so much forgive us our sins as excuse them. Or turn them into virtues. One politician claiming to be a Christian says he has never asked God for forgiveness. He just tries to do better. If so, why did Jesus go to the cross for him? Or did he? Perhaps this politician, like many so-called Christians, finds the image of Christ crucified a bummer. Perhaps he worships the “Buddy Christ” that Kevin Smith so astutely introduced in his satirical movie Dogma. With his big smile, friendly wink and cheery “thumbs up” the Buddy Christ is the smiley face of today's positive thinking form of theology.

You see this inoffensive, nice guy Jesus more and more. We don't really want to hear about sin or self-denial or judgment or hell. We only want to hear about love—but movie love, not real love. We don't want to hear about dealing with imperfection or pain or sacrifice or having to forgive the one you love or asking for forgiveness from them—much less loving our enemies, though that's what God does when we oppose him. We don't want those truths. We don't want reality. We want fantasy.

So those of us who take the Bible seriously, in all its complexity, are now called fundamentalists, with the same vehemence that conservatives use for the term liberals or liberals use for the term conservatives. People try to force Christians into one of two camps: those who overemphasize God's righteousness and those who overemphasize God's compassion. Christians who do not fall into those neat superficial categories are marginalized or ignored, rather like those who, in politics, are neither right-wing or left-wing. Because nuance is so hard to reduce to a snappy sappy bumper sticker slogan or a stirring rallying cry.

Jeremiah, who records more of his personal feelings than any other prophet, would understand. He didn't want to tell people bad news. (Jeremiah 20:9) But if you don't know how bad things are, how will you recognize or understand the good news that they can be fixed? How can you understand redemption without grappling with sin? How can you appreciate how essential God's grace is to our salvation if you haven't acknowledged how impossible it is to save yourself by your own efforts? How can you see the importance of light if you haven't found yourself groping around in the darkness? How can you understand the joy of Easter without facing the pain and horror of Good Friday? So how can we know God's love and forgiveness and transforming power and then preach popular views rather than the good news?

Originally preached on March 26, 2006. There has been some updating.