By Bill Mefford
Last week I was at a Faith Leader’s Summit at the Department of Education, something many administrations do with various departments to get their message out to the faith community. I went to hear more about what the DOE is doing on various issues that my office cares about regarding religious freedom and vouchers. These kinds of events are usually fairly unspectacular since the aim is for departments to put their best foot forward and not talk about the negatives, which for this DOE under the leadership of Betsy DeVos, the negatives have been pretty glaring.
So, I was shocked when one mid-level bureaucrat made the outrageous statement, "Teachers are the most important people in public schools. We just need teachers to start behaving professionally. We need teachers to get results." It is unbelievable that we have people working in government departments that hate the very people who that department is supposed to serve. Teachers are not the important people in our schools - they are the most important people in our society and they should be given infinitely more respect.
But the day got even weirder when an attorney at the DOE got up and started talking about the fall in Genesis. Yes, I said that right; an attorney at the Department of Education talked to us about the fall of Adam and Eve. He said that we normally think about the fault of the fall ( when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit) as being placed on Eve since that is who Adam blamed when he was confronted by God. The attorney’s point was that he saw too many people in society who are like Adam in that they blame other people when things go wrong and they refuse to assume moral culpability. No one takes moral responsibility anymore.
I sat there stunned - my jaw once again hanging open. Here was a political appointee by the trump administration stating his deep concern about people in society not taking moral responsibility for the wrongs they have committed when the very man who appointed him has refused his entire life to take any moral responsibility for a single thing he has done. The utter disconnect that is required for a member of this administration to stand up and make a theological point about how no one in society takes seriously their moral agency anymore at the very moment when the head of this administration has been outed to show that he is using the mechanisms of the government for his own political and financial gain is nothing short of delusional. The man must be absolutely delusional.
I was literally floored and I looked around to see if anyone was as visibly stunned as I was. If anyone else was surprised they sure as hell didn’t show it. But it made me wonder how dishonest we can be not just with other people, as this DOE attorney was with us, but how dishonest we can be with ourselves.
I look at where the church I grew up in, the United Methodist Church, is right now; the desperate attempts by so many institutional leaders to hold on to their mini-fiefdoms and large budgets and out-sized salaries in comparison to the scores of local pastors struggling to make it. Even though the church is no longer institutionally viable, people in leadership are doing all they can to keep the institution together. In all of this, what I see is a deep level of dishonesty steeped in disconnection.
At the root of our calling as followers of the biblical Jesus is our calling to be connected to God and connected with one another. Loss of that connection has always opened the doors to all kinds of sin; oppression, racism, classism, misogyny, marginalization, hatred, vertical hierarchies, and so much more.
God values connection. In fact, God favors the transformational power of connection so strongly and so passionately that when God speaks through the prophet Isaiah (58:7) God prescribes authentic worship that includes the following:
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Genuine worship means “to not hide yourself” from the most vulnerable and the people we are called to love and serve. This is how we know God. Being honest with one another and being honest with ourselves places us in direct connection with the Creator of the world. The God of the Old and New Testaments is relational and has created us for relationships with one another. What presents obstacles to our relationships with one another and with God is our unwillingness or, in donald trump’s case, complete inability to be honest. Even when we see the obvious disconnect on the part of the attorney at the DOE, or Republicans in Congress, or from so many institutional leaders with the United Methodist Church, connecting with God requires that we be brutally honest with one another and with ourselves. Let us not be hid, but let us be honest and vulnerable so that we might remain connected.