Franklin Graham Falls Far from the Tree AND Rolls Down a Hill

Bill Maher said it best regarding President Obama: “It’s not that these folks don’t like the food or the restaurant; they don’t like the waiter”.  Whatever he brings is unacceptable.  President Obama has persistently shown amazing calm and integrity in the face of so much ignorance. This should only serve to illumine his intellectual brilliance and character in the face of our unabashedly Babylonian Capitol Hill. Instead, it appears that too many Republicans, including those who could not negotiate their way into a bathroom stall with a full bladder, will raise any unfounded argument in an attempt to discredit him. My Mom used to say, “A drowning man will grab at straw.”  If it’s not the birth certificate, it’s his profession of faith, or it’s ridiculously disjointed statements like: “The Muslims define him as Muslim so he must be Muslim”.  Franklin Graham’s recent statements questioning the President’s Christianity are an international, racism-loaded travesty.  So what else do you think, Franklin? Is the Dalai Lama really a closet Pentecostal?

Billy Graham doesn’t have to wait to turn over in his grave; he’s probably doing donuts in his wheelchair in lamentation of his son’s humiliating ignorance. I suspect Billy’s most private moments might include some Job-like responses, such as rent garments and ashes on his head.  Franklin has proved that this apple has not only fallen far, far from the tree, but rolled down a hill into an abyss of theological ignorance.  

In Romans 10:9, Paul made it plain and simple: Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart.  The President has unapologetically and unwaveringly professed Jesus Christ with his mouth on national TV and in print several times, sometimes making emphatic statements affirming the Resurrection.  I don’t foresee him recanting this after he’s re-elected in November or even years from now.  In my own, albeit naïve, discernment I cannot imagine him stating at some future point that he “exercised a critical lapse in judgment”, in professing Jesus Christ.  

Well, Franklin, if you’re not satisfied with the verbal confession, do you wanna try your hand at medicine, too, and prove that you can botch a coronary exploration into the heart of a man of such integrity?   (Hint: Why don’t you leave the "heart" part up to God?)

Baby Boomer Check-In

We Baby Boomers have lived the gamut of racial iterations. From civil disobedience to urban infernos to Molotov cocktails, from KKK to Black Panthers to Skin Heads, from peaceful marches and unifying fire and brimstone speeches, to fire hoses, tear-gas and German shepherd attack dogs. Many of us were in grammar school during the Civil Rights era and in high school or college when race riots and unrest blazed across college campuses and major cities in the North and South. And we were just coming of age when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were killed.

It seems that all of a sudden, after being baptized by fire (literally) in cities and on college campuses and singing pop songs that didn’t just rap, but preached and proselytized, we were somehow lulled to sleep in our corporate or nonprofit jobs. Those moral and ethical compasses of music and dissension were traded for mind-numbing and socially deceiving “diversity” training. We responded like the nation of sheep that we are. In no time, most of what was supposed to be open and transforming discussion about the messed up muck of white racism against African Americans in this country got trumped by women’s rights and further diluted with the concerns of everybody else’s disenfranchisement. And I mean everybody.

I remember a water-cooler conversation with a white guy on my job, who was of European descent. He went on and on about the historical violence of one group of Europeans against another, and I thought, “I’ll never explain to this guy that when he and I walk into the same job interview, the fact that he’s white gives him an advantage, even if he’s as dumb as a rock.” He’ll spend the first 20 minutes establishing that he’s as dumb as dirt, because the interviewer will have trouble believing it; and I’ll spend the first 20 minutes proving that I’m not, because the interviewer will expect me to be. 

One of the funniest skits I ever saw on Saturday Night Live was when Dan Akroyd and some other well-groomed, corporate-looking white guys in business suits were on a fictitious talk show demanding that white men need to have their rights acknowledged, too – that they just wanted to be heard as white men, and were tired of being overlooked and ignored. It was hilarious! The minority melting pot had raised enough steam to cloud even white male dominance, and they were suddenly the ones pushed to the margins.

The point is that as a nation, we never got around to fixing the lingering problem between African Americans and white people – not outside the church and certainly not inside the church. No wonder so many of the most prejudiced people are adamant that they are not racist.  They thought that getting paid to sit through mandatory sensitivity training of a sort would heal them of all hatred and disdain. They thought all they had to do was learn to be curious and nice. How sadly naïve.

So I just heard through a casual conversation about a white church that is strongly resisting the cross-racial appointment of a black pastor. The gripe, which was publicly verbalized, is that their white church will eventually end up “filled with [black people] or “their kind”.  Is this a form of xenophobia? Are we still considered foreigners and strangers? Haven't we been American long enough to render our African side less foreign by now, especially in worship?