There are some 40,000 Christian denominations worldwide. Most of us are familiar with 15 or 20 of them.

It sounds neighborly to say that we all basically believe in the same God.

But that’s not true.

The God I believe in is summed up in Matthew 5:38-48 and Luke 6:27-36 (mostly the same material). I call this “core scripture.”

Here, Jesus gives us His picture of God as loving all people all the time. He says God is kind even to “the ungrateful and the wicked.”

The word for this kind of love is “grace.”

Unconditional love.

And Jesus says this is the only kind of love that makes a difference.

Loving those who love you is easy. “What reward do you get” for doing that? He asks.

Many Christians do not share this understanding of God.

How do I know?

We all know Christians who believe things that contradict Jesus.

Many Christians believe God destroyed the world with a flood.

They believe God decided creation was a mistake. God goofed!

Then God tried to correct the blunder by wiping out everything that would not fit on a big boat.

And then regretted that!

This angry, unhappy, vengeful, mistake-prone God is not the God we know in Jesus Christ.

This is not the God who loves all people all the time. If Jesus is right about God, the Flood Story is wrong.

So—

Which do you choose?

• • •

Try St. Matthew.

We choose Jesus.

Thanksgiving service at 11:00. Dinner after.

The election is over, but I am writing this on Monday, so I have no idea who won.

So—this is not Friday’s Word.

I have to get the church newsletter to Jason on Monday and will wait until Wednesday to post Friday’s Word with the Star Telegram.

I will share that post with our newsletter folk later.

It’s on our minds—here, four days before.
The great Carl Jung, noted psychiatrist, said that, in a crisis, we could depend on only 40 percent of the population to act rationally.
We know already that 46 percent of Americans will not act rationally. They support someone who is clearly racist, vengeful, and cruel.
They have made a firm commitment to values that are nowhere close to Christian.

I used to think we were getting better. I thought people had become less racist, less ugly to the neighbor.
Now, I don’t know.
We may be worse.

There was a time when anyone who admired Hitler would not be considered for any job.
Now, 46 percent of our people don’t seem to care.
And here’s the sad thing:
Most of those people go by the name Christian.

That would suggest to us that something is seriously wrong in the church.
Not in all churches—but in many churches, even in whole denominations.

We need an explanation.
We need to figure out why so many Christians are so accepting of racism, vengeance, and cruelty.
And I do think I know. God, in the Old Testament, is often pictured as racist, vengeful, and cruel.

And for the biblical inerrantists, all scripture is equal. They feel free to choose that vengeful image of God over the God of grace we have in Jesus.
The Gospel has no priority at all with many Christians.
They think God hated the Amalekites, so they can hate immigrants.

Lord, save us.

This is a strange time.

This may turn out to be the quiet before the storm, the days before the fall, the last light before darkness comes.

In just 11 days, we may lose that which so many have died to save: our democracy.

I used to think Germany must have been a truly perverse nation to elect Hitler.

(Yes, he was elected.)

In 1932, the Nazi Party won only 33 percent of the vote, but that was enough for Hitler to insist that he be appointed Chancellor.

That 33 percent looks pretty good compared to us.

Nearly half of our people are vulnerable to the same prejudicial hatreds that drove the Germans.

Germans hated Jews and gay people.

In our country, the reviled groups are still the Jews and gay people, but add immigrants.

Germany was a mostly Christian nation, the land of Martin Luther. But as in America today, Christians in Germany held onto their hatreds and fears of anyone different.

Recently, millions of Methodists left the UMC so they could continue to marginalize gay people.

Millions of American Christians today support someone who called immigrants “vermin.”

(That, by the way, was Hitler’s word for Jews.)

However things go in 11 days, we are looking at a massive failure of the church.

I will tell you again: at the root of our problem is biblical inerrancy.

A majority of Christians worship the Bible, not Jesus. They have never accepted his call to love all people. Now we face the cost of that failure.

May God help us.