Rest, reflection, lament, and love: Jim Wallis’ keynote address at the 150th Convention

During the Friday evening dinner at the 150th Diocesan Convention, we heard a keynote address by Jim Wallis, the New York Times bestselling author, public theologian, renowned preacher and commentator on ethics and public life. His latest book is The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy. (Time: 43:07.)

Video Transcript

So I know that many of you have been pastoring a lot of people this week. Am I right? It’s a blessing for all of you that you’re here for this time together, because here you need to pastor each other.

So I want to start by saying, I’m married to a vicar. My wife, Joy Carol, just came home two weeks ago from the 30th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Church of England, of which she was one in the first group. [Applause.] And she had to bring the right robe, of course. And they walked down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral, all these women who were first ordained 30 years ago, and the congregation gave them a standing ovation. Joy is also, some of you might know, known in the UK as the real Vicar of Dibley. [Laughter, applause.] If you’ve seen the show, Joy was a consultant to the cast and to the script, and became the pastor of the whole TV crew. And she and Dawn French remain great pals and buddies. And I love the story of when she was shadowing Joy to figure out what priests do and all that stuff. And Joy was going to a funeral, the Church of England parish, she did a lot of funerals. And so Dawn wanted to shadow her, you know, Dawn French, the great British actor. So Joy said, Okay, you can’t go in your Jaguar. You get a ride in my Fiat with me, and no one can know that you’re there. It wouldn’t be fair, that Dawn French shows up at the funeral of their loved one. So Dawn French was in the back with the organist, with their big hat on, disguised as the page turner for the organist. [Laughter.]

So Joy and I’ve been talking about pastoring in these days. I, as you know, talk a lot about the prophetic tradition in our scriptures – prophetic preaching on justice, on peace, on bringing people together. But I want to share some thoughts, I’m going to call rest, reflection, lament, and love. Rest, reflection, lament, and love.

Expressing our sorrow, our pain, our confusion, our frustration, our divisions, our feelings of helplessness, even hopelessness – though we aren’t supposed to feel that way – before God, is the place to begin after an election like this. It’s called lament. It’s a biblical notion of how, when you surround yourself before God with all those feelings – and I know you have those feelings tonight – lament is to acknowledge them, to name them, to own them. We are humanly tempted toward despair all the time, but grief is deeper than despair. Grief is better than despair. You have all told many people who have lost a loved one, you’ve said, Take some time to grieve. You’ve said that, right? Good pastor word, take some time to grieve. So I’m saying tonight, take some time to grieve, because grief is much better than despair.

I was in city after city before this election, for months. I can’t even count how many. But I always said, there’s two kinds of time in the Bible. One is chronos time, regular time, tick-tock time, incremental time, the time that we’re in most of the time. The other kind, though, is kairos time, a time that can change time for decades, even generations. I believed this was a kairos moment for this nation, but I didn’t, and nobody I know expected it to come out the way it was, the way it did. I mean, faith leaders were talking and gathering and getting ready for a close election, with protests and legal battles and plans to decertify whoever won and threats of violence everywhere. Intimidation. Voter suppression. I had a call last night with our 50 state clergy leaders from 10 battle ground states, part of something we call Faith United to Save Democracy. On the phone last night, we’re all Black clergy, 50 national Black clergy, ready for all the things I just described, none of which happened. And instead of, instead of reflecting on what we saw and learned, we just needed to stop and pastor each other. And so many of them told me, I don’t know what to preach on Sunday. I see a lot of nodding heads. A lot of you may be feeling the same thing. What to even preach on Sunday, when they, when we, are in this place, this moment of kairos.

Now, it didn’t turn out the way that I thought, but I am beginning to understand this really is a kairos moment. Eddie Glaude, who wrote the foreword of my book, I love it when he says, everything is falling apart and everything is possible all at the same time. That’s where we are. And before, I mean, I’m known for strategizing, and people want to know what’s next and, and I’m deciding it’s too soon to do that, so I’m not going to give you a strategy tonight. For many of you, a resistance strategy, we’re not ready for that. You’ve got to live in this moment. Go deep into this moment. Things like, take a walk. My wife and I took a walk yesterday, and the phone was ringing the whole time. I just wouldn’t pick it up, breathing that air on the outside. It was so close, and one candidate swept all the swing states, did better than ever in places like New Jersey, won the popular vote, and become, as the New York Times said today, a vessel for so much anger and grievance and fear, a vessel for all of that. So what do we do?

Last night, on the phone, I heard black women pastors say, black woman pastor, I’m used to being scrutinized and doubted that I can do this work. I felt that my whole life, but I never felt so rejected before. Personally rejected. Another black woman pastor said, You know, I’m a consultant, I’m a strategist. I’m used to winning and losing elections, but I’ve never cried before. My heart is broken. And I want everyone in this room, particularly white Christians, to know that every Black parent I know is terrified for their children. And one of our pastors had her grandson sitting on her lap last night, little guy, and at one point she apologized for having to take care of her grandson during the call. I said, Oh, please don’t apologize. I’ve been watching him the whole night on this call. Little guy. He stayed in the call and he listened. Black parents are – any parent that is parenting children of color is afraid. That’s a fact. It’s real, and that’s what’s going on all over the country.

So how do we be quiet? Go for a walk. How do we drink lots of water? Be careful on the other stuff. How do we listen and how do we who pastor so many people, how do we find what we need for ourselves? How do we hold each other? How do we – it’s a good time to connect with the people you love, especially your kids. The people you love and who love you and tell them you love them, but you need their love too, to bless a lot of people and to receive the blessings that we are going to need. This is a moment that I haven’t lived into enough to know what to do next. So learning to lament biblically should be our first step now, expressing all that we feel before God. Rest, I’m telling you, take some time to rest. Get some sleep, some time to be quiet. Get some exercise. Go for that walk, go outside. Reach out to people that you love and who love you. Remember that God is at work in our nation, in the wider world, in ways that we can trust, even if we don’t feel it or understand it.

I’m very struck in all the places I was able to speak over these last several months how – yeah, we, the original title for this thing was something about Christian nationalism. I spoke a lot about that false religion, distorted faith, all that, but most of that was, the time was going through the teachings of Jesus – iconic biblical texts. This book is just six iconic biblical texts. That’s all it is. Rethinking, rethinking, relearning, reframing ancient texts for a time like this. And I found people, these students, young, old, all kinds of very diverse crowds, really hungering for Jesus. Hungering for these texts, loving to hear them, wanting to hear more. And for me, that’s the one thing so far I’m thinking that maybe, maybe these texts of Jesus can remind us of something we often forget. This movement that we were called into, the kingdom of God, followers of Jesus. This movement was meant to be a minority counter-cultural movement. [Applause.] A minority counter-cultural movement.

And Jesus, our leader, didn’t have many secular wins, did he? He went to a cross. And the other day, I looked up at all the – Vincent Harding taught me about the cloud of witnesses, my family of faith, they’re all up there on the wall, and Martin and Bonhoeffer and Desmond Tutu, they’re all there. And many of the most of them, didn’t have secular wins. But they still inspire me after all these years. So this isn’t about winning, or it certainly isn’t a quest for power, which is my biggest critique of the Christian Nationalists – the will to power is not the way of Jesus. It just isn’t. But what if this moment, and I don’t know how, so I can’t answer that, what if this moment where the teachings of Jesus did not win in this election, in this moment, other things won, but in this, what if this moment, now that we’re in, what if that could help remind us, as Christians, the kind of movement that we’re in? Well, there could be a deeper hunger for Jesus, despite the results of the election, than we ever had before. That’s a great way to pastor people.

Every single – the first 300 years of our movement were this counter-cultural movement, before it got institutionalized. Three hundred years these followers felt like they were trying to change the culture, their counter-culture. They had this thing called the Beatitudes. I’ll just send a quick story of a bishop in one of our mainline churches that I was having lunch with during the campaign. She said, I’m getting my pastors in there saying they’re getting all this terrible pushback and feedback, even threats, from congregants who are – and I didn’t say Trump, I didn’t say Biden back then, I didn’t say election – I just put a scripture in the Sunday bulletin, and they said it was undermining of their favorite candidate. I said, and the bishop said, what was the Scripture? He says, the Beatitudes. [Laughter.]

So what if this moment brought us back to the Beatitudes, the way of Jesus. That’s the best way to pastor people who voted in this election for all kinds of reasons. Some out of the fear that it inspired. I was with a wonderful community organizer who’s a longtime friend of mine, a veteran during the campaign, and he said this. He said, Fear shuts off part of our brain. I said, What? Yeah, when fear sets in, the, our brain waves change. It goes from our cerebral cortex, which is our rational thinking part of our brain, in the back, which is about fighting and flight. Fight, flight, save yourself. So I just quoted him in one of these talks, and afterwards, a doctor comes up to the book table and says, He’s right. I’m a doctor. We put people through MRIs. We can see their brain waves change in that big chamber, that, that chamber that you sit in, it’s scary to be in that chamber, and then the results could change or end your life. And we see, we monitor the brain waves changing from the cerebral rationality to the irrational fight, flight, fear. And fear was just triggered all over the place in this election.

Which brings another text of Jesus. He says, You’ll know the truth, and the truth will set you free. So I went into that more deeply, and I finally understood for the first time that the opposite of truth isn’t just lies. It’s captivity. It’s captivity. Fear and truth are indivisible. Freedom, excuse me, freedom and fear and truth are indivisible. And there’s a whole lot of people out there that I know, I was raised with, and many of them are good people, but they’re captive to lies. They’re just captive. So instead of pointing our finger and telling them they’re this, that and the other, how do we set our people free who are captive to lies? That’s a pastoral task.

I’ve talked to a lot of journalists this last several months, and we often would talk after the interviews, and they would want to tell me that their vocation, they want their vocation, to be truth tellers. That’s the best of what they’re supposed to be. And a lot of them are trying hard. Hard. And I said, you know, that’s also a clergy vocation, to be truth tellers, to tell the truth. But what I’m thinking about now is when I, when I have megachurch pastors, white evangelical megachurch pastors call me and say, I have my people for two hours a week, if I’m lucky. And, and certain news networks have them 24/7. I can’t compete. And now, many people who voted last Tuesday, they don’t even listen to networks and read newspapers. My newspapers for sure. They get their news off websites that have no accountability at all to the facts and truth. People just say stuff.

And I was sometimes staggered by the stuff that just got said over and over and over again. And sometimes powerful men realize that if they just keep lying over and over and over again, people will start to believe it. News stories often go away after two or three days, but when I heard in the presidential debate that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating people’s beloved dogs and cats, I rolled my eyes and I just shook my head. It didn’t go away. It got deeper and deeper, worse and worse. And note that people being lied about were non white immigrants. That’s who was being lied about over and over again. And no one lying about that said, he wouldn’t mind Norwegian immigrants. So a Norwegian official showed up at one of my gatherings and said, We don’t want to come. Who, who’s being lied about?

Or, I love the Good Samaritan parable where this lawyer comes to Jesus and, and it says he’s trying to, you know, test him and trip him up. And my deeper study showed me it was a Washington lawyer. [Laughter.] I know that tone of voice. So how, what do I do to inherit eternal life? Well, Jesus says, I think you know it’s in the law. I’m sure you’ve read it. You love the Lord your God, he said, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and then you love your neighbor as yourself. Okay, okay. But then the question comes, the most important question for a democracy, especially for a nation struggling to become a multiracial democracy. The most important question: Who is my neighbor? Not, Who is my neighbor, but exactly who is my neighbor. Who am I obligated to? And the title I gave to that chapter in the book about Good Samaritan was your neighbor probably doesn’t live inside your neighborhood. The text says, Jesus, well, I’ll give you an example, and he gives the Samaritan as an example. Now, in Judean culture, people didn’t think there were any good Samaritans. They were mixed race. They’re half breed, they’re dangerous. They’re false worshipers. Stay away from them. In fact, there were rumors that there were Samaritans in Mexico coming across the border with guns and no, that’s a different group. Sorry. [Laughter.] But they were othered like that. They were othered, people who were othered, Samaritans were othered. And here’s an “other” helping a man by the side of the road whom Jewish scholars convinced me was Jewish. An “other” helping someone other to him. He says, That’s my example. So instead of turning neighbors into enemies, doing a trajectory of fear and hate and even violence, Jesus says, Love your neighbor. First love God, but then love your neighbor as yourself. Who is my neighbor is going to be the question. And so our preaching and teaching should be helping people understand who their neighbors are, outside their neighborhood and their culture.

None of why we’re segregated is accidental. My dad came back from World War II in the Pacific on a ship, engineering officer, and when you got back home, GIs like my dad got an FHA loan for their first house, GI bill for education. And when you get education, housing, you’re middle class. My government made us middle class. No Black sailors on his ship got an FHA loan or GI Bill. No Black GIs did, and that’s why my neighborhood was all white, my school was all white, and that’s why my church was all white. It wasn’t accidental. We had been structured out of relationship to each other, because moms and dads like to bond over their kids, and, you know, hopes and dreams and fears and health and – but when still today, as I sit here tonight, 80% of white people in America have not one single person or family of color in their inner circle. The bonding that we do and that we encourage as Christians just doesn’t happen when we’re nowhere near each other.

I also learned that Galatians text that we love, Galatians, 3:28. There is no Jew or Gentile, bond or free, male or female. We’re all one in Christ Jesus. We love that text. I do. You do too. We’ve preached it forever. I didn’t know that text was preached at every single baptism in the early church. That text. As if to say, well, we have these divisions, you know, race, class, gender, that’s it. And our mission, our leader says, is to, is to help overcome those divisions, divisive barriers. We’re not perfect. We often make mistakes, but this is an extracurricular for us, or a social action committee. This is tied to our mission. And I read and learned that at Fisk University, they have a whole museum of white slave holder Bibles. Guess what, guess what text was removed from every single one of them. Galatians 3:28. The abolitionist movement called it the abolitionist text. What I love to see us preach Galatians 3:28, now, at all of our baptisms. So I want to not point fingers. I want to go back to the text. The text, the text.

Speaking of retired bishops, a dear friend of mine just retired from your church, Michael Curry, and this would – he would always say to me, Jim, keep going back to the text. The text, a divided church, a politically diverse church. Go to the text, go to the text. Go to the text. There are reckonings coming for this country, for both Democrats and Republicans, and for our churches who have conformed to this world as Romans 12, Romans 12:2 warns us against. In the days ahead, though, just rest. It’s okay. And as a Black preacher said last night, quoting a gospel song, Sometimes it’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay not to be okay. Offer lots of hugs, take deep breaths and walk in God’s natural world.

And two scriptures that I keep, in the last few days, going back to. One, is Micah, when we ask, How do we talk to people who see things so differently, or who voted so differently. I hear that, how is, how could it be so close? Micah says, What does the Lord require of you? To do justice. And I’m glad that comes first. The God of the Bible is not a God of charity. It’s a God of justice. Do justice, but then it says love kindness, and then walk humbly with your God. I want to say that we social justice advocates sometimes scream justice, but not so kindly, not with the kindness that Micah’s asking for.  I’ll confess, I’m the oldest I have ever been tonight [laughter] and I haven’t always got things right. I. I still don’t. And I have to walk humbly, because the best I do and best I can think, best I can strategize, I know I won’t always get it right. So do justice, but be kind and walk humbly. Speak humbly with your friends and neighbors.

I’ll close with this. I talked about fear, and so I went to all of the scriptures in the Bible on fear. And I heard all the fears about candidates and all the rest. With so much fear in the air, I went back to the scriptures, as we always should, but sometimes don’t. God is love. Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because he is as we are in the world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say I love God and hate their brothers and sisters are liars. For those who do not love a brother or a sister, whom they have not seen, who they have seen, cannot love God who they have not seen.

Psalm 27 – I’m reading a lot of Psalms this week, a lot of Psalms. So here’s just a couple for you. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid. When evildoers assail me and devour my flesh, my adversaries and foes, they shall stumble and fall. Though an army and camp are against me, my heart shall not fear. The war rise up against me, I will be confident. Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a path, level path, because of my enemies. Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, the false witnesses that have risen up against me, for they are breathing out violence. I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage.

I will give you one little test of our politics going forward, no matter what, which was my conversion text, which brought me back to Christ. I got kicked out of my little white Evangelical church in Detroit because I was listening to my city around me, and teenage kid watching the news, reading papers – I just had these questions. Something seemed really wrong, really big and really wrong, and we weren’t talking about it in my white world. Why does life seem so different in Black Detroit, from what I can see and read, than in a white Detroit? Why – I hear there are black churches? I never heard that before. We’ve never visited, never had anybody come. And the only honest answer I got was, son, if you keep asking these questions, you’re going to get into lots of trouble. And that proved to be true. [Laughter.]

So when I went to my university, I was secular. Now, when elder told me Christianity, son, has nothing to do with racism, that’s political and our faith is personal, that’s the night that I left. I didn’t have words to go around that until I came back to Christ. Which are these? God is personal. If God isn’t personal, what’s the point? God knows each one of us, all about us, and wants a relationship anyway. God is personal, but never private. And the privatizing of faith is the great heresy of our white Christian tradition and my white evangelical tradition. They’re political now over issues they’ve chosen.

But at Michigan State, we shut down the university – 1970, a lot of you might remember that, they’re old people like me – but afterwards, I never got shed of Jesus, I guess, because I went back to read the scriptures on my own, no campus ministers, and I read the book of Matthew. I got to this text in Matthew 25, I called the “It was me” text. I was hungry. I was, I was a mom with two or three jobs, but I still needed SNAP food stamps, and they just cut it. Jesus says, that was me. I was a mom in Flint, and I couldn’t get clean water without lead poisoning for my kids. The white moms in the suburbs, they were fine, but not me. I couldn’t get clean water for my thirsty kids. Jesus says, that was me too. I was a farmer in Guatemala, and because of climate change, I couldn’t grow food on my land anymore. Then this army came to me and said, We want your boy to be a boy soldier, and if you don’t give us, give him to us, we’ll have our, our soldiers come gang rape your daughter. So I gathered up what little we had that we could carry, like, naked, and walked thousands of miles to this country where we could have asylum. They would take us in. And they took us in and they took our kids out of our arms and put them in cages by themselves, and we were in other cages. And Jesus says, that was me. That was me and me too.

So the one test of our politics going forward is we should have the politics for the least of these. That’s who we are, regardless of our policy preferences or who we voted for. What happens to the least of these? That’s our politics.

And so, when Jesus says, I was a stranger and you welcomed me – now I know how complicated immigration policy is. I’ve worked on that with Republicans and Democrats, they both failed. But when you demean and demonize and threaten to deport millions of strangers, that’s contrary – antithetical – to what Jesus taught. So when the big deportation happened last time and they separated families from their kids, I got called into a meeting at the Senate. And I was told that there were Senators, Republicans and Democrats of faith, who were really struggling with that policy and didn’t know what to do. Democrats were against it, but so were a number of Republicans, and they wanted a private, confidential talk. So in the back office of the senator, it was in his little room, so much that we had senators sitting on the floor because nobody wanted to acknowledge their meeting. And we talked about this, this text, and those kids and families. And that led to more conversations, and more, and finally, a letter was sent to the President, then-President, saying we are people of faith, different parties. We are people of faith, and we are appalled by this, and we’re telling you not to do it again. And that’s when the thing stopped. Never got press.

Other thing that stopped it was, these couples came out to the protests, you know, protesting the family separation, and usually when young couples come to protest, they leave their kids at home with a babysitter or a nanny or grandma or something. Now they brought their kids with them, holding their kids in their arms, as if to say, these are our kids and those are our kids too. Those are our kids too. So whatever happens in this election, the Jesus test of our politics is what happens to the least of these. So whatever they do, whatever they threaten, we need to be there, all of us as Christians, for the least of these.

So I’ll close with back to the beginning about going for a walk. When I go for walks, I go back again and again to a Psalm, a Psalm that I want to end with tonight. And since we’re going to bless each other and love each other and hold each other, could you stand with me and just hold on to each other’s hands just around your tables. And if you would just listen to the psalm. It’s my favorite walking Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. Despite all my church business, [laughter] he leads me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness. Quick comment, the word “righteousness” in the Old Testament is the same as the word justice. He leads me in the paths of justice, for his name’s sake. Therefore, when you’re walking the paths of justice and righteousness, then it says, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, because thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou prepare us a table before me in the presence of my enemies. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. In all our activity, be – remember Psalm 46. Be still and know that I am God. Thank you very much. [Applause.]