LISTENING TO STRANGERS [M, 6-14-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

LISTENING TO STRANGERS    [M, 6-14-20]

Our pastor, Jimmy Moore, preached a sermon yesterday, about attitudes about inclusion, race and such, that was as close to perfect as a sermon can get—construction, theology, delivery, usefulness. Unfortunately, he also quoted research from one of our mutual colleagues that shows sermons are irrelevant in getting people to change their opinions. So much for a useful sermon.

However, he had crowd-sourced the sermon on Facebook, asking all and sundry how they go about trying to converse with people whose viewpoints are different/opposite.

There were many quite helpful responses. The one that intrigues me most, though, was from Erin James Predmore, who said that she asks “…what would they need to see, hear, or experience to consider my viewpoint valid?”

So, I thought: if that is useful in one direction, it has to be useful in the other also.

Obviously, one cannot have a conversation at all with the irrational fringe, folks who say things like George Floyd was a menace to society and the police did us a favor by killing him, the way a young man here in Bloomington did a couple of days ago. There’s no point in trying. There is nothing I could see, hear, or experience that would cause me to consider that viewpoint valid.

But 40% or so, maybe more, according to which poll when, approves of the Donald Trump presidency. They can’t be dismissed as irrational fringe. So, I asked of myself: what would I need to see, hear, or experience to consider that Donald Trump should be reelected?

So far, it hasn’t worked. I would have to see, hear, and experience Donald Trump’s conversion from being Donald Trump. If I saw him march in a rally protesting racism, if I heard him apologize to people he has belittled, if I experienced a moment when he put on a mask and went to the hospital and prayed for people with Covid19…

I’m not sure there is any hope for reconciliation of viewpoints on such matters, for they are not differences of opinion, but differences of morality. So, despite my statement above about Jimmy’s sermon being useful—probably not.

When I told Helen about the uselessness of Jimmy’s sermon, though, despite its excellence, she demurred. She said, “Sermons are like those warning sounds cars give you when you stray from your correct lane.”

Helen has always been the best theologian in the family.

John Robert McFarland

Well, I SAID in yesterday’s column, when I vowed to write no more, forever, that if, however, a new story showed up… I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.