Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #302: Brian Zahnd - PostCards From Babylon

This episode of Voices in My Head is brought to you by Podbean. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. Visit podbean.com/voices to find out more. That's podbean.com/voices. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames. RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head. Brian Zond is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in St. Joseph, Missouri. Brian and his wife Perry founded the church in 1981. Brian is also the author of several books including Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Water to Wine, A Farewell to Mars, Beauty Will Save the World, and unconditional, the call of Jesus to radical forgiveness. His new book, Postcards from Bab— sorry, Postcards from Babylon: The Church in American Exile, releases on January 14th, and we are going to be discussing that book today. Brian Zahnd, welcome back to Voices in My Head.

Thank you, Rick. Good to be with you again. You know, Rick, I think, you know, I think I've done like a million podcast somewhere, but I know factually that you're the first podcast I ever did.

Is that right? Well, what an honor.

Oh, it's just like, you know, sort of like talking on the phone.

Oh yeah. Well, you know, and that was a really special one to me too because I had just read Unconditional and I thought, wow, what a powerful book, and I needed it in my own life at that time. And I was just getting started podcasting at that point. And I think this is maybe the 5th or 6th time you've been on the show And so I'm so, so glad to have you back again. I actually felt bad last time because I was having internet trouble and I had to cut the interview short just because everything kept cutting out. But so hopefully today, knock on wood, it's all gonna be perfect audio for our listeners today. But I really enjoyed the new book, and I know a lot of people are gonna be very excited to read it when it releases on January 24th— or sorry, I'm messing it up— January 14th, not 24th. But on January 14th, your newest book Postcards from Babylon, the Church in American Exile releases. And in the foreword of the book, Walter Brueggemann writes a pretty good assessment of what I think you're trying to accomplish here. And Brueggemann writes this, and I'm just going to read it for the listeners to hear. It says, the more I learn of Zahn's work, the more I have deep respect and appreciation for his truth-telling. The book is a reprimand and an invitation to his fellow evangelicals about how the way has been lost and what it will mean to come Home. So my first question is, do you feel like that call to come home is being heard by your fellow evangelicals, to come home? Or do you think the cost is too great for them to come back at this point?

In many of them, I'm a little bit, uh, the sake of honesty, I think I need to be a little bit pessimistic in my answer if we're talking about evangelicalism as a whole, which by the way is kind of an unwieldy term. What do we mean by that? Um, you know, uh, prophetic calls to repentance and rethinking are never heard widely, it seems. Uh, Jesus says, you know, let him who has ears to hear, hear. And if you pressed Jesus on, well, what about those that don't hear? I think Jesus would simply say, "What about 'em? There's nothing you can do." So I use the word pessimistic. I don't feel pessimistic. I feel that I have something to say and I know people will hear it, but I don't think that you're going to see what we come to understand anyway as religious right evangelicalism in mass make some sort of massive turn away from the trajectory they've been on for a long time now. I just think we've reached the point now where it's a kind of eruption of the real, eruption of the real. And, and maybe that which was always latently the case is now pretty obvious, and that is that this is about power and not about, uh, whatever. It's not about morality. It's not about family values, it's not about Christian ethics, it's not about Christian witness, it is about proximity to power, and that's become pretty evident. And now we're deep into a situation of tribalism where people are really getting their identity oftentimes not from their baptismal identity of a follower of Jesus, but in a, you know, Republican religious right Trumpist sort of way Um, I don't know, I lost my thread.

Yeah, no, that's—

I just— I say, okay, there will be those that will hear, but as a movement, I don't— I think it's going to continue that on the track it's on to the bitter end, and it will be a bitter end.

Yeah, yeah. And that's the unfortunate part. I, uh, I promise I'm not going to make this about me today. I'm going to talk about you. But when you were talking, it reminded me of something. I'm— I just, uh, finished recording a Rich Mullins song that had never been released before, and it's for the new album. And the song is called "Thunder," and there's this great line in the beginning, and it reminds me of what we're talking about here today and what you're writing about in the book. Rich Mullins was referring to Jesus, and the line says, "You walked in when the prophets had grown tired, being so inspired but rarely being heard." And I think sometimes, and I wonder if you can relate to that feeling at times of, you know, prophets, those who speak on behalf of God, being so inspired and yet rarely being heard, you know?

And I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna claim the mantle of prophet for myself, but I will say if anyone is going to operate prophetically in the sense of using that word, I think you have to be willing to risk being unheard. I mean, if Scripture is any indicator That is more often than not the plight of the prophet. And they may be, they may be heard later. They'll be heard by some. They'll be heard by a few, uh, you know. But yeah, but I, I think, I mean, if you're going to write on a popular level, that's one thing. If you're going to attempt to write on a prophetic level, then you have to risk being either not heard or misunderstood, maligned. I mean, that just goes with the territory.

Yeah, and I think that's a lot of what is happening. And when, when someone writes as directly as you do and preaches as directly as you do, which I feel like is pretty straightforward Jesus, you know, it often comes across as, well, you, you just, you just must be some liberal Democrat or something. You're going, no, this is, this is gospel. It doesn't fit into those categories that we're talking about. But, but, you know, in the first chapter of your new book, you talk about growing up in the Jesus Movement. And I've heard you talk about that before, and it's, it's a wonderful testimony to kind of hear how you came up in that. And I'll let readers kind of dive into that and hear more of your story. And you deal with some of that even in some of your other books. But growing up in the Jesus Movement, You talk about how the movement understood how countercultural Jesus really is, and you write that the Jesus of the Gospels is far more suited for an FBI wanted poster than for being the poster child of American values. And I wonder if you could unpack that a bit for our listeners.

Well, here I am. I make no secret about my age. I'm on the cusp of 60. I'll be, I'll be, uh, In March I'll be 60, and so I'm looking back at the Jesus Movement. I, I may be a little bit clouded with nostalgia, but I think I have a pretty objective view of that period of time. I mean, it really is my spiritual roots. I would be one of the youngest ones that could have been a leader at that time. I was pretty young. I was leading a coffeehouse ministry by the time I was 17. And anyway, it really was a radical time. It was— a lot came out of that. What I'm really referring to in sort of an anecdotal way is a very popular poster that was around during that time, and it had a very familiar picture of Jesus. It came— it became familiar because of what that poster looked like, just sort of a profile of what you might imagine Jesus of Nazareth looking. And it's a wanted poster. It says, wanted: Jesus Christ, alias the Messiah, the Son of God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, notorious leader of an underground liberation movement, wanted for the following charges: practicing medicine, winemaking, and food distribution without a license. Interfering with businessmen in the temple. Associating with known criminals, radicals, subversive prostitutes, and street people. Appearance— you have to remember, this is the early '70s— appearance: tippy, a typical hippie type, long hair, beard, robe, sandals. Hangs around slum areas. Few rich friends. Often sneaks into the desert. Beware, this man is extremely dangerous. His insidiously inflammatory message is particularly dangerous to young people Who haven't been taught to ignore him yet. And then at the very bottom of the, of the poster in large letters, it says, warning, he is still at large. You know, I mean, that, that could be a bit of Christian kitsch, and yet I think there's something really powerful in that, that, that the Jesus of the Gospels is always subversive and dangerous to the principalities and powers.

Hm.

Let me, let me attempt a succinct definition of what I mean by principalities and powers, because I don't want to just throw that around and assume people understand what I'm saying. The principalities and powers are the very rich, the very powerful, the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the spirit that operates through it all. Jesus is always a challenge to those sorts of institutions, structures, principalities, and powers. And, uh, the Jesus Movement seemed to understand that. Now, we got a lot of stuff wrong. Our eschatology was a train wreck, and, and there was, there was definitely, uh, more than a little bit of youthful arrogance. And sometimes we felt like we could just, you know, on our own reinvent the church. So there were a lot of mistakes made, and yet the understanding, the intuition that Jesus was radical and did not fit comfortably with the established institutions of Americanism, that we got right.

Hmm, yeah. Well, and I love that poster, and I had seen that before, but it had been some—

You see that poster? You know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, it had been some time since I had seen it, and I was so glad to be reminded of it again. And I really do think it's interesting. Interesting the way that counterculturalism seemed to have been captured with the Jesus Movement in a way that I don't think I hear as much in the church today. And I've often thought, especially over the last couple of years when we've seen a lot of Christians just so throw in with the empire, so to speak, we've kind of lost that idea of us being different as Christians and us sort of being the— what, you know, William William Monn and Stanley Harawass, as they talk about in their books about the resident aliens and being a colony of heaven here on earth that live differently and act differently. And I really appreciate the way that you are bringing that out in this new book, that, you know what, Christians, we really are supposed to be different, and not in the ways you might think if you only follow, like, the pop Christian politics of the day. We are really supposed to be different people and transcend any of those things. And you talk about in the book, not just about Christians, but how in scripture the early followers of Jesus were called the Way. And the followers, they were— what made the followers of the Way so radical was that they worshiped— it wasn't that they worshiped Jesus as God, but that they worshiped him as emperor. And that is a very important distinction that I think is lost on those of us today who are near American evangelicalism. Have you found that to be a hard teaching for the people that you minister to week after week at your church?

Well, I've been teaching this for about 14 or 15 years, and so I think in my own local church I'm making some headway. But it really is— the seminal confession of the early church, and really of Christianity itself, is this: Jesus Jesus is Lord. The problem is, 2,000 years removed from its original proclamation, it has become very tame, very tepid. What we mean by Jesus is Lord usually in our present context is Jesus is Lord of my spiritual life. Jesus is Lord off in heaven somewhere. Someday he'll come back and straighten things out. Uh, but right now, if we're talking about running the world, we leave that up to the politicians and the governments, and Jesus is Lord of my spiritual life. Of course, the earliest confession of Jesus as Lord had nothing to do with that. Uh, for example, terms like Lord, Son of God, Savior of the world, Prince of Peace were all imperial titles given to the emperor by the Roman Senate, and they would appear on the coins, which was the means of mass communication of the day. So on, you would have a picture of the emperor on the coin, say the denarii or something like that, and then you would have one of his imperial titles, and one would be Lord. So when Christians confess that Jesus Jesus is Lord, they were saying that by implication Caesar is not. Rome was remarkably religiously tolerant. They understood that if they were going to be a vast continental-sized empire or even bigger than that, that they had to have a certain amount of tolerance for local religions. Christians, the early Christians were not primarily persecuted over some religious conviction. In other words, If Christians said, uh, well, we're going to teach people— we're proclaiming the gospel that announces how people can go to heaven when they die, the Roman Empire would have said, yeah, we don't care, you can go anywhere you want when you die.

Yeah.

Now, well, the early Christians were not just telling people how to go to heaven when they died, they were announcing that the world had a new emperor and how the world needed to acknowledge that your knee, be baptized in Jesus' name, and be a part of this salvific eruption into the world that Jesus called the kingdom of God, and that Christians summed up by the confession, Jesus is Lord. I'm afraid a lot of that, most of that, has been lost post-Constantine, post-Christendom. And now it's America, more than any other nation right now, that wants to carry, um, I don't know what I'm gonna call it, to carry the, the the torch for Christendom, that is, right, for a marriage of the kingdom of Jesus and the nation-state.

Yeah, but it makes a pretty ugly marriage, that's for sure, when it comes together.

What happens— what happened was, um, you know, for 300 years the church was a rival to the Roman Empire. And it was necessarily subversive and countercultural and at times dangerous. But then when you had the so-called conversion of Constantine— I say so-called, I think I can say that. I mean, even Constantine himself delayed his baptism until his deathbed, which was not the Christian practice. I think Constantine acknowledges that you really can't be an emperor and a Christian simultaneously. And so he waited until his deathbed for his baptism and his actual becoming of a Christian. Well, once the church decided that, well, we're going to attempt to heal the world through an emperor who wields the sword, then it becomes uncomfortable. Well, what about Jesus? That's when Jesus gets demoted to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs, as I—

Yeah.

So Jesus' job now is to get our souls into heaven, but the running of the world we're going to leave to the emperor. The emperor. And, and, and so that's where it begins. It's 17 centuries ago. And then you have these various empires that are hosting the church, uh, the church flirts around with that, whether it's Byzantium or Russia, or whether it's Spain or Portugal or Britain or Germany. Now we're seeing the United States do that. So this is a— this is not a new challenge, but it's a challenge that is to be a Christian, to be faithful to Christ in a church that's hosted by a global superpower, there's a challenge to that that we can't back away from.

Yeah, well, and it's a difficult time as a Christian, I think, in this country because the lines are very blurred. And, you know, just yesterday, I think it was, I saw an article online, and I'm sure you'll relate to this, and your book is not about Trump or Trumpers or anything like that, but it, but it, you know, you talk about it a couple times.

I addressed it a little bit toward the end.

Yeah, and in an article, I think you would resonate with this, Darrell Lackey wrote an article that was published on Patheos on January 1st, and he said, if we were to use the standards evangelicals have applied to all presidents before Trump when it came to sexual ethics, marriage, and character in general, a case for Trump could never have been made without a resort to straight-up hypocrisy, which is exactly what happened. And, um, and I think that—

and that your democracy is evident.

Yes, it's, it's—

and, and the sad thing is, I mean, look, you know, I, I have certain political opinions that might reflect poorly upon President Trump, but that's not really my primary concern. My primary concern is the church. And that the evangelical church that has been characterized by a zeal for personal evangelism is squandering its witness, and that the rest of the, you know, whoever, the, the people that we might hope to be able to speak to about, about Jesus as Savior, see that for what it is, and it's blatant hypocrisy, and suddenly they're not interested at all in our message.

It's doing a lot of damage to our witness and, and making us less and less countercultural, as you have talked about.

During the process of writing the book, uh, my working— it was always clunky, but my working subtitle was "Making Christianity Countercultural Again." And finally I sensibly abandoned that and went with "Church in American Exile." Uh, which— but they're saying the same thing. Yeah, we have to see ourselves as exiles. And that's where I draw upon the experience of the Hebrews in, in Babylonian and Persian exile, and also the early Christians living as exiles, because Peter adopts that terminology for Christians living in the Roman Empire. They weren't, they weren't literal political ethnic exiles. They had become exiles because of their baptism. Suddenly they were no longer at home in the empire. And so I, I guess if I were going to sum up what I'm attempting to do in the book, although I don't know if this is a fair summary, I, um, Christians in America really need to see, um, America not as a kind of biblical Israel, but as a kind of biblical Babylon.

Yes.

And then we have to learn how to live in fidelity to Christ as citizens within Babylon, so that we, we seek the well-being of the city that God has caused us to dwell in, you know, to use Jeremiah's language. And yet there's a line we can't cross. And so you see that that's what Daniel's all about. You see You see how Daniel and his friends, they can even be in the employ of the empire, but they must always understand that there are— that they have to be willing to risk fiery furnaces and lion's dens and that sort of thing.

Yes, and I especially wanted to point that out to listeners because the section in the book where you talk about that is very powerful, and I've even heard you preach online before about that, and, and I've tried to convey to people at my own church, you know, the idea that, like you've talked about before, we can be like Daniel and be a part of it until we can't. And there's a sense in which we have to understand who Lord— who our Lord really is and what he allows and what he doesn't allow. And, and again, that gets back to the counterculturalness. I wish I could remember where I had had read this years ago, but I remember a while back when I was a youth pastor, which has been over 10 years ago now, but I read an article to some teens at the time about a Jewish boy who would not play basketball on the Sabbath, but he was the star basketball player of his team.

Oh yeah, that's, that's, uh, yeah, I know this book.

Yeah, and I can't— my, my mind is just not up today. I didn't get much sleep last night, so my recall is not very good. Yes, I think you're right. I think you're right. But yeah, the idea that he was such a witness because he was such a good ballplayer, they weren't going to let him go. And yet the players made a habit of, after the games that he couldn't be at on the Sabbath, they would go over to his house and, you know, kind of relive the game with him and talk with him. And it became very clear that there was something different about the student's life, and that was the priority. And I've always tried to express that to people, say, you know, there is, there is something that people really will notice if we do live this life differently. But please go ahead, you were about to say something.

I would say, and this is all, this is, there's an irony to this, but I think that the Jewish people prior to the nation-state of Israel, 1948, their long exile and sojourn and and diaspora is a powerful model for the church to imitate about how to live within the world. So you have Judaism that survived through all of these long, long, long centuries, and they were scattered all over the world. They could participate in, you know, they could be in Russia or they could be in England, they could be in the United States, they could be, you know, they could be wherever. They could be in Egypt, um, and they could, they could serve, they could support the civic endeavors and the business endeavors where they are, but they maintain their own unique, distinct identity. And, uh, that's what Christians are called to do. We don't have a Christian nation. We are the kingdom of Christ. We can, we can have citizenship within, you know, all of these nations. But we have to understand that that is not where our primary allegiance is pledged. And so the Jewish people in diaspora, I think, really is a model for what the church is supposed to be like. But what happened was, with Constantine onward, the church just got completely seduced by the idea of having Caesar's sword and being able to wield it for, you know, for their own ends, and that's been a disaster for us.

Yeah. Well, at the beginning of our conversation, I had quoted Dr. Brueggemann, and—

By the way, he agreed to write my foreword. Tremendous honor for me because I have the highest respect for Walter Brueggemann.

Isn't that amazing? I just was emailing him last week because He's been on the show a few times and we've become friends as well.

And, and, uh, soul too, besides being a brilliant old— yes, scholar and a prophet in his own right. He's just so very kind and generous. Yeah, I love him. I just love him dearly.

Yeah, there's the joy of Jesus in him for sure. That's for sure. But when, when we kind of started, one of the first questions that I had to do was a little bit with what he had written in the foreword, and I want to just kind of bring it back around to that for a moment as we start to wrap up our conversation today. Because one thing that he summarized what you're trying to do in this book, and I agree, is, um, you're, you're trying to get us to tell the truth, you know, and trying to get evangelicals especially, but really anyone who has ears to hear, to sort of return. And there's this, this idea of, um, you know, in Hosea there's a beautiful passage about God wooing his adulterous wife back to him, you know. And there's this idea of like the call that we have, but it's not an easy challenge. And there's— you talk about yourself in the book sometimes where you've had to make some choices of being countercultural and even refusing some speaking engagements and things. And I have to— I want to be careful when I tread on this because We have a lot of different listeners. I want to talk for just a moment though, because I think it's a pretty powerful example of maybe times when we can't participate. The story you tell about being invited to be on Paula White Cain's show. I've had Jonathan Cain from Journey on the podcast a couple of times. Jonathan is married to Paula. We didn't really talk to Paula that much. It was interesting to hear Jonathan's kind of story about his return to faith through the years. And I was actually shocked to find out they were married through all that. But, but it was very interesting just to hear different sort of converging stories about faith. And I wonder if you would mind telling us the story, because this goes back to well before Trump was running for president, years beyond that, back to when you had written the book Unconditional. And there's a story you tell in the book about refusing an invitation to be on the show. And I wonder if you could maybe just sort of relate some of that. And the reason I'm asking that is because I feel like it is a pretty good example of maybe some of the ways where we as Christians might have to at some point say, I just don't feel comfortable participating in this.

Yeah, I can see when it happened. I have a copy of my book Unconditional Care. I'm picking it up right now and thumbing through it looking for the copyright date. 2010, so this is when this happened. In 2010, we're talking 9 years ago now because it did come out the first year, um, Charisma published my book Unconditional: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness. They made it their book of the year. They, they promoted it very strongly. I was— I attended a lot of big, you know, book convention, booksellers conventions, and did lots of book signings and did many— this is a little bit pre-podcast, so I did a lot of radio interviews, I did some television interviews, I think I was on Daystar, TBN, you know, I was happy to go on and talk about forgiveness in the light of Christ. Then the publicist scheduled me to appear on Paula White's show, and I balked, and I just said, you know, that's a kind of consumerist Christianity. That I just don't care to be identified with. And I just— it was a personal conviction. And so I just simply told the publicist, I'm going to decline that. I'm not going to appear on that show. That's all I said. And I thought that would be the end of it. And it wasn't. And then one of the head people in the organization called me and tried to twist my arm. And I said, I won't do it. And then, I don't want to name names here, but the top guy at the publishing company called me 3 times in one day. And finally I said, look, he said, well, I understand, I know Paula's been divorced, but it wasn't her fault. I said, it has nothing to do with that. And now I'm going to use some strong language. I said, the reason I'm declining to appear on this show is essentially Paula White represents a different religion than what I'm trying to represent in Jesus Christ. And the best example I can give of you— this is, I'm telling this to the publisher— is that she regularly has this guy Donald Trump on her program. I said, what does he have to do with— she admires him because he's, you know, purportedly a billionaire. Well, so what? I mean, his ethics, his lifestyle is is a blatant manifestation of everything that is contrary to following Jesus. And so that finally ended the conversation. But the irony of that story is that I— that when looking for an example to explain to my publisher why I refused to appear on her show was I, I cited her fawning adulation for Donald Trump. And this is long before Trump was a kind of political figure. Figure.

Sure.

I just said, well, in fact, I have, uh, I have sermon notes where I can show you that I use occasionally, at least twice that I know of, I use Donald Trump as an example of a pursuit of business that's off limits for Christians. And I remember years ago seeing a young man in our church that, you know, I had led to the Lord and had been helping to disciple, and I saw he was reading one of Donald Trump's books. It wasn't The Art of the Deal, it was one of his more recent ones. And I took him aside and I said, you know, there are better models you could find for being a Christian businessman than Donald Trump. And I think in the book I even cite some of what he says in that book, and it's pretty atrocious. I mean, it's about as far from the Sermon on the Mount as you can get. Sure. And I guess I say all that to say that now to look at the widely reported number of 81% of white evangelicals decided that this would be a good idea, and not just a good idea politically, but somehow believe that God had raised up Donald Trump. I just am completely incredulous at that. What I want to tell our listeners is, is that what God has raised up is Jesus Christ from the dead. And Jesus is Lord. And God accomplishes his purpose through the baptized community of those that will confess that Jesus is Lord and are willing to live a radically countercultural life and take the persecution that comes with it.

Hmm, yeah, that's, uh, that's some powerful stuff. And, and you know, one thing that I, I think we both would probably want to make clear, um as we're having this conversation and ending it, there are times that I think maybe people who are critics of people like Donald Trump think that we hate them or something. And in the Gospels, you know, if the Gospel shapes us, it's actually the opposite that's true. And I was struck by this the other day, just thinking about the way it's hard to find a better example of someone who his life daily and habitually lives out the exact opposite of every single fruit of the Spirit. You know, the, the love, the joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Yeah. And I've never seen any of that exhibited in him. And yet what I would say to people who are Christians and just staunchly support everything he does, I would want to say to them, why don't you love him? And why don't you want him to find salvation? Why don't you want him to turn to God? Wouldn't it be the better thing for Christians to say to a man like this 'You need Jesus desperately,' and not to say Jesus is way behind you and everything you're doing. And, um, I've often thought we're showing— those who are the biggest supporters of him who are Christians are showing him the least amount of Christian love possible, because it shows they're not really caring for, um, caring for his actual spiritual life, who he is at his core. And he desperately needs salvation. I truly believe that. And I think if we would become people who really sought to seek and pray for not just like wisdom for the president, but pray for things like repentance for the president. I mean, what a, what a difference it might make in our prayer lives and our lives as people. And again, getting back to that countercultural assessment of what we are called to be as the body of Christ. Yeah, I, I don't know that Christians ever hated Caesar or ever, um, you know, and that's what I'm asking for, is a kind of holy ambivalence. Yes.

The church I pastor, Word Alive Church, I've pastored for 37 years. I can tell you, this is, this is going to be a guess, but I think I'm probably in the neighborhood. I am pretty sure that at least half of our church are Trump voters. What they're not is unconditional Trump supporters. That is what, what really we've cultivated at Word Alive Church is a culture of kindness. And so there's room for people to say, I just think that this guy was a better option than Hillary Clinton. So I voted for Donald Trump. But what they would understand is out of bounds is to use support for a political candidate as a cover for being ugly and abusive and unkind. So, uh, World Life is not a monolith in any way. In fact, it pretty much just represents the demographics of the Midwest city where I pastor. Uh, so we have plenty of Trump voters, but they're going to carry that lightly. They're going to say, ah, you know, this is, you know, that was my That was how I cast my vote, but I don't think they would be using the language of God raised up and all that. I would like to see Christians return to a kind of holy ambivalence about whose turn it is to be Caesar.

Yeah, and I agree with you, and I think that's important too, that we tell, remind our people, it doesn't matter who's in office, we still live the same way, and our call is still to follow Jesus. Jesus said, "Come follow me," to everybody, and if it was a tax collector, he had to have some life change, you know, and some things had to happen. And we, and we call everyone to that, and it doesn't matter which leader.

His, in his 12 disciples, he had Matthew, a tax collector, which is a little bit, you know, do we understand what that is? This is a man in full collusion, a collaboration with the occupying Romans. So this guy is just saying, yeah, I know we've been invaded and occupied by the enemy, but 'You know, we can make some money here.' That's Matthew, all right? At the other end, you have one of the, one of the, uh, one of the disciples is described as Simon the Zealot. And the Zealots were the ones that were advocating for violent overthrow of the occupying Roman, uh, you know, it'd be like having Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore as disciples, except even more extreme than that.

Wow.

On the cross, Jesus stretches out his hands to the right and to the left. Seeking to draw them into his saving love. And I think that's how we have to see this.

Yes, yes. And I think that's a very important distinction. And the call is, is to a loving God who wants to bring us all into his kingdom together, and not the other way around. We don't, we don't bring him into ours, he invites us into his. So, well, this has been a great time, Brian, today. And thankfully the internet connection held out this time, so that was, that was wonderful. Um, I just, I really I really appreciate you, and I wanted to tell you again while I had you on the show how much you and your sermons and your writing have meant to me over the years. And it's just been wonderful. It's always an honor to have you on here, and I want to thank you for the work that you do. It can't always be easy, and I know it isn't, and I know you face a fair amount of criticism, especially on, you know, places like Twitter and internet sites. But I think you carry it with a certain grace, and I don't think I ever see you respond in an un-Christlike manner. And I know these words are hard to tell people at times, but I want to thank you for saying them and for speaking them, because I think we need to hear them. And I just want to thank you for your faithfulness in that.

Thank you, Rick Lee James. That's very kind of you. Thank you.

Sure. Well, I wonder if we could, as we close out our time today— this was actually from my devotions this morning, but you quote a lot from Revelation in this book. And, um, and this morning in my devotions— yes, and, and when I opened up the, the lectionary reading this morning, Revelation 2:1-7 was there. And I think if it's all right with you, I'm just going to close our time together reading this passage of scripture because it has a lot to do with what we're talking about.

Amen.

Yes. And it says, to the angel of the church in Ephesus— and maybe, maybe I could say the angel of the church in the United States of America, maybe we could kind of do that. These are the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers. You have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of My name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. 2:5 Remember then from what you have fallen; repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. 2:6 Yet this is to your credit: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God. And I think that's just a great way for us to maybe end our conversation today, that we would have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church. Brian Zahn, thank you once again for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Thank you, Rick.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voice This is in my head.