nontoxic

Maybe a "hero" is a bit beyond and more in one's eyes than someone you can say, "I admire." Many people have heroes, one of mine for thirty and more years is William H. Willimon. I don't know Will, as his friends call him, except through his writings that helped me so often during the years I was a parish priest and needed some thoughts to ignite my getting a sermon together for Sunday and his periodical publication with its cover page color by church season was on my desk, as it always was, purple, red, green, with sermons and commentary. 

By the time I was done as a parish priest, two decades of that preaching aid sat in my deskside file stacked by church season and within season by lectionary year. I had any and various number of published helps those years, but always Willimon because his was always best, most reliable, most resourceful, most imaginative, except when he brought in a guest writer.

At some point along, it was 2004 through 2012, Willimon was made a United Methodist bishop, and I don't recall whether he continued the preaching publication through those years before he returned to academia and parish ministry. That was during my last regular church assignment, and looking back I sort of lose track. 

Yesterday I came across, and this morning have been reading, some of Willimon's other recent writings, including blogposts that did not exist when he and I "were boys." Eleven years younger than I, Willimon is a man of integrity and who says it straight without flinching, I haven't always had his courage and confidence, and our faith is not quite the same, his is better but I unfortunately have a telescope. As to his writing, I'm talking not only his spiritual drive and leadership, but what he has said and says about politicians who are the worst that we can be and do because, like "we are what we eat," we are who and what we elect. 

From North Carolina and back there now, Will left his university post to serve eight years as Bishop of the North Alabama UMC Conference, where he seemed to have gained a broader and perhaps more horrifying exposure to what humans can be, where his field for plowing the political scene included a particularly malodorous governor and state supreme court chief justice as examples of our electing to influential office the worse of what we humans can be, not only absolute dead set Certainty, but bottom of the barrel Evil, Selfishness, Amorality, Selfishness, Greed, Selfishness, Arrogance. 

Wondering whether Baptist or Episcopal clergy would have, as Willimon has had, guts to call filth filth, I doubt: many of them write checks as the collection plate is passed, and after all, the church does need the money for the Lord's work, eh? Honestly, looking back on myself, I tried it long years ago and, while convincing no one, not one person, I did watch some once friendly, cordial, helpful, smiling faces go off grim and glaring at me. We are even worse than we know, where the state of the nation today is not at all the fault of its Unspeakable Representative at the top of it, who has always been what he has always been as anyone could plainly see. The poor man did not put himself in office, our democracy doesn't work like that yet; it takes an electorate beyond the palisade. 

Perhaps in due course we shall see to what extent the electorate is cognizant; or ongoing complicit because complicity seems in its interest, not so much economically as, psychosocially: we are terrified of perceived different and therefore competing groups. We are in a serious demographic shift that will require a different crayola pack, and they won't be willing to sit in the balcony.