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Church and Main is a podcast at the intersection of faith and modern life. Join Pastor Dennis Sanders as he shares the stories of faith interacting with the ever-changing world of the 21st century.
Music.
Hey everyone, welcome to Church and Main. The podcast is at the intersection
of faith and modern life. I am Dennis Sanders, your host.
Church and Main is a podcast that is looking for God in the midst of all the
issues that are affecting the church and the larger society.
And you can learn more about the podcast, you can listen to past episodes,
and donate by checking us out at churchandmaine.org or churchandmaine.substack.com.
And when you are at the Substack, you can also see some articles that I've written
that don't show up on the other website.
And either website, consider subscribing to the podcast.
And you can do that on your favorite podcast app. you can also do that at the Substack page.
And if possible, consider leaving a review. That helps others find the podcast.
So I've wanted to do this episode for a long time, and I'm not going to go into
a really long intro here,
but I am really pleased and thankful
that I had the opportunity to talk to Professor Joy J. Moore today.
She is the professor of of Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
That is my alma mater. She is also at this time serving as visiting professor of religion.
And is also the Chapman Benson Lecturer at Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama.
Reverend Moore is a United Methodist minister, and she sees herself as an ecclesial storyteller.
And that basically means that she tells what she describes as community-forming
stories from the Bible as a follower of Jesus.
Reverend Moore was also a parish minister, And her last congregation,
actually, before she came to Luther was at Bethel United Methodist Church,
a church that I am very familiar with in Flint, Michigan, which is my hometown.
She was there as the city was going through its water crisis in 2015 and 2016.
She is also one third of the host of the Sermon Brave Wave podcast from Luther.
That looks at the revised common lectionary passages for the week, each week.
Now, this was an engaging conversation. We talked about how we can be followers
of Jesus in such a chaotic time, and especially a time that's so politically and socially divisive.
And we also talk about race in America and why we don't hear as much about racial
reconciliation these days.
I really had a great time talking to Professor Moore, and I think that you will enjoy this interview.
So without further ado, here is Professor Joy Moore.
Music.
Dr. Moore, I am glad to have you here. I've been looking forward to talking to you.
And to be honest, I've been trying to find a reason to talk to you.
And I think, you know, it's kind of funny in this year, it's an election year,
everyone's kind of talking about different things.
And we're all kind of not looking forward to this election year.
And i think you
know for a lot of reasons we're just because of
of the state of our our civic culture
it's not even just our politics it doesn't seem like we can um come together
and um just kind of as a beginning you know there was a lot of talk a few weeks
ago of the the duet at the grammys with Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs.
And one of the things I remember reading in the Atlantic magazine was that this
was something that for a few moments, red and blue America could come together.
And I think right now it seems like our culture is so divided,
but it's also that our church is so divided, and we don't know how to talk about issues.
And so I wanted to bring you on today just to kind of talk about what is it
that's going on in our culture today that, especially within the church,
and when I say that, I don't mean simply evangelical Christianity,
but also within mainline churches.
I could even include Catholicism or Orthodox, that we just can't talk without
it being at each other's throats.
Mm-hmm. It's interesting that we are scripturally illiterate.
To the point that we don't recognize this isn't the first time that humanity
has not been able to talk with one another.
And my biblical imagination is re-understanding Genesis chapter 11,
where because of the evil in the world, God separated the nations.
And it's described that they were separated into different languages.
And we know that language is a result of culture.
It's also a result of location.
I tell my students in Alaska or in Minnesota.
You can have a lot more words for snow than you would need, say,
in Florida or in Alabama Because it's so central to your existence.
You're going to have an idea of clean snow and fluffy snow and snowmen making snow and skiing snow.
And so you wind up with all of these ways to talk about snow,
not so much in a different climate.
And so language becomes a way of speaking out of where we are and the landscape around us.
And in some ways, our inability to talk with one another is twofold.
It's a result of focusing on our desire to make a name for ourselves.
Hmm, I wonder where I got that line from.
And wanting to place God away from us so that we get credit for going to God.
Think of that image. Building a tower to God.
What have we done? We've centered God or de-centered God from our lives.
And then we say we go to church. church where church in the original language
would be the gathering, the assembly, the ecclesia, right?
So, it's when the people assemble, not a building or a place, right?
So, we've set God outside of our regular lives.
And maybe the fact that we can't speak to one another is because we don't have
anything to speak of the same anymore.
We can't talk about our humanity as in we are all created as divine facsimiles.
We have to, well, modify our identity by our politics or our nation or, you know,
I don't know how long after the Super Bowl this is going to air,
But what team we want to win.
I mean, those modifiers can seem innocuous, but the reality is they spend more time dividing us.
And so that bleeds over into every aspect of our lives.
And as you said, our civic discourse right now is trying to make a name for
ourselves over and against others.
So that moment in the Grammys, red states and blue states.
I'm pretty sure that there's someone who votes on both sides of the ticket in all 50 states.
I think I'm accurate about that. But what we want to do is we want other people
by saying, your state is, and all of a sudden, I'm trying to make a name for myself.
No, no, no, I didn't vote that way. Or I'm proud to say that's how I voted.
And we aren't finding a way to speak.
Well, what are the things that we need our leadership in the government to do
for our state, for our country?
And so we're losing the language of speaking together of the assembled people.
So when you kind of talk about the Tower of Babel and all that,
does this basically mean in some ways we've kind of focusing on all the descriptors
that it's a form of idolatry?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
The first temptation, and I should probably say I'm teaching an ethics course
using the Ten Commandments,
so I'm kind of stuck right now on the fact that this conditional covenant that
God made with Israel begins with restoring the relationship between them and God.
God, and then therefore living in a restored relationship with the facsimiles
of God, those God created to bear God's image.
And when we want to make a name for ourselves and when we want to put God in
a space that we go to rather than allowing God to be everywhere,
that's exactly what it is.
It's idolatry. And the condition of the way the Ten Commandments were given,
if you read it in the context, and not just for, you know, ten rules that I
can, you know, hang up on a wall or carve into stone. Stone. stone.
God has shown up and shown out for Israel, destroying the greatest empire that they know.
Setting them free from captivity, and asking them to say or to respond,
I'm God. This is what I can do.
Look what I've done for you. I've got your back.
Here's how I I want you to live in relationship with me, in relationship with one another.
Anything other than that breaks the commandment because we are using for our
pleasure what is supposed to be things that we're either to enjoy,
to be in the recognition that God the Creator has given us so much beauty to enjoy.
Or we've taken the things to use them to create, what's the word I want to say,
to create distractions from the beauty of being in a relationship with God.
And both of those are idolatrous. Mm-hmm.
So, you know, if we look at this, especially in our current climate,
how has politics become a distraction that makes us look away from God's beauty?
Because it is a distraction.
It's not being used in the way I think that it was intended to be used,
or at least we hope it would be used, but it's being used in a different way.
Well, for that, because I just like to work out of my scriptural imagination,
I go to first century. 1 Samuel 8.
When the people of God desired to be like everybody else,
and when you think of what—I just speak of our nation, but the truth is I can
do this from every political group around the world today.
They are not creating communities for their people.
They are creating systems that will allow a few to be in power over,
and that automatically creates a population over whom that few has some type of authority.
And so in 1 Samuel, when Israel,
who was supposed to be, as I just described, in a unique relationship with God,
and what I should say is chapter 12 in Genesis, that call to Abraham and Sarah,
was never about one particular nation, not to be privileged.
It was the responsibility of their descendants to be such a blessing to all
those nations scattered in Genesis 11,
that they would recognize there is a God and that this God would have their back too.
That's what it means to be blessed or happy in the Lord.
And Israel began to say, no, we want to be like all the other nations.
We want to be power over. over. And that's what you see in how they acted once they got into Canaan.
And so here they are generations later, and they ask for a king as if,
to Samuel's disbelief, God isn't their king.
And God says to Samuel, give them what they want, but tell them what they're
going to have. Your king is going to take care of his cronies.
And that's what politicians do now. Our politicians, I don't want to have to
talk about the other team.
We can talk about our own team. And that isn't describing what team I'm on.
If we're honest, both sides need to acknowledge that there is no one that is
at the helm or desires to be at the helm that is perfect, if we're honest.
And so they're going to take care of the people that will take care of them,
ignoring or displacing the other.
They're going to keep you in war, wars and rumors of wars.
They're going to send your sons, now sons and daughters, into military.
What is the best way for our economy to be expanded?
It's to sell military equipment. The war economy works very well.
It sounds very much like the warning that was given in 1 Samuel 8 is the warning
we should attend to today.
They're going to take the best of your land, the best of what you create.
You will become their slaves.
You will work for them.
I thought our political leaders, our governments, were to serve the people.
And so using that a biblical interpretation,
it seems to me that the problems that we have are because, at least for those
who are called to point to a different system, the church, we've become like everybody else.
And so, we have language that, I don't know how your listeners will respond
to this, but we have language of Christian nationalism.
And some people wear that proudly.
They want this to be a Christian nation.
But it's very interesting that Paul Paul did not set to change the Roman Empire.
He set about calling the called-out community,
the church, the assembly, the ecclesia, the followers of Christ,
to be so peculiar in the Roman and Greek culture that Gentiles were saying,
we want to follow this God of the Jews made known in Jesus.
I don't hear people saying that about the church today.
Hmm.
Talking about that whole being of a peculiar people, I mean,
I think in our discourse, when we're talking about politics and power and the church,
we would probably say that that definitely characterizes American evangelicalism.
And I think that there is some truth to that.
Can that actually characterize other parts of the church? I mean,
are other parts also bowing down in different ways to different kings?
Is it just that their king is a little bit different than the king that the other one wants?
I try to communicate the idea of what fundamentalism looks like on the left
and on the right it's the same.
It turns around to what you brought up earlier. Is this not idolatry?
It is. We have different lines or we expect people to stand on one side or the other of the drawn line.
And then we hold that up to say, if you don't speak the way that I speak,
act the way that I expect you to act in relationship to this ideology or these practices,
then you aren't in my group.
I other you, and that can be true of the left or the right.
So I think your question is, it's hard for us, but I think that's the very place
where the church has to stand.
We have to be able to recognize that, well, again, to use a vibe.
In Judges. I know we don't like to go to Judges, but I read the book of Judges
beginning with chapter 1 through chapter 2, verse 6.
And what you have there is in Judges, my students actually pointed,
my undergraduate students actually pointed this this out to me.
When you read the beginning of Judges, they don't go to God to find out how
they're to conquer the land.
They go to each other, which is different than Joshua, which would be a very
different conversation.
But in Joshua, Joshua reminds them to go to God.
In Judges, they go to one another, and then they make agreements with the people who who may be so evil.
And you define what evil is. I'm not going to tell you what I think that evil is.
But whatever line we cross, we have a line of what evil is.
And in this story, the Canaanites would represent that extreme evil.
And God is saying, I don't want you to associate with that.
I don't want you to make deals with that. And they begin to do that,
and it gets to the point where the language begins to shift from them being
victorious to them not being able to win,
and then from them not living merely the Canaanites living with them,
but them actually enslaving the Canaanites.
We just read that the Creator has torn down the biggest empire to set people
free, and they think that they can now enslave others?
That wasn't what they were asked to do.
So in chapter 2, the angel of the Lord comes and says, you've not done what
you've been asked to do, so God is going to do to you what God has been doing to the Canaanites.
And that's the story of Judges. That's the context for the story of Judges.
Fast forward, Israel winds up in exile because they have become like the worshipers of Baal.
And God says, sin is sin, evil is evil.
And just because I've called you, if you are not following my way,
There are consequences.
And I believe that there are consequences for our choices today.
And if I dare to use the idea that Paul talks about where he says people that
are not followers of Christ will be held accountable for what they know to be right.
It doesn't matter whether you're far to the left or far to the right.
You have a moral compass.
And if you are not holding integrity to that moral compass, that hypocrisy is
going to make it very hard for people outside of your community to say,
I want to be a part of that group.
In the first century, what was so incredible about the followers of Christ is
they held to the integrity of the hospitality and the hope that they offered.
And they offered it regardless of what Greek and Roman culture said was your
social status, your economic status, or your gender identity.
They offered that same hospitality and that same hope. And people said, what's with you guys?
I think I want some of that.
That's because of their integrity.
You got me answering the questions too long. Well, that's how I blame that on you.
I have no problem with you doing that. That is okay.
But I think you have that point of what the scriptures kind of talked about
with the people of Israel, is that they wanted to be like everyone else,
and there were consequences for that. that.
And I also think, you know, the thing that's probably hard here is,
and as you talked about with the first century church, maybe how hard it is to be a peculiar people.
Because we want to be, it's just a lot easier just to go with the crowd.
I mean, to do what everyone else is doing, to do all of, you know, to follow the leader.
And I think it's also easy to kind of of make God into our own kind of little
cheerleader for our side and not for your side.
And, you know, there's just this very little,
Actually, I think what it comes down to is that it doesn't seem like there's
very much humility of understanding that we are limited.
And maybe now I'll bring in a biblical story because it made me think about
the temptation of Adam and Eve about knowing good and evil.
And the reality is we don't really always know good and evil.
We confuse the two. You know, that was the lie that the snake told us.
It's like, oh, you'll know this. No, we won't.
And I think we kind of fall into that always again and again.
We think we know what's going to be good and bad.
And no, we don't. We don't have, we are not God.
And that's just it. We're not God. Even when we know we can't handle it.
But even when we know what is good and what is evil, we can't handle it.
We don't know how to handle the consequences of our actions.
So I'm disappointed to find out that the idea of the frog boiling in the kettle
is actually probably biologically not accurate.
But it's a great metaphor. It's a great metaphor still, yeah.
It's a great metaphor, yeah. Yeah, and so the truth is, if you're in that jacuzzi,
you don't pay attention to, oh, maybe it got too hot and I should get out because
I was so comfortable a moment ago.
And then when I do recognize it, I'm already scalded, right?
And that's the way our being like everyone else is.
For those first few years, decades?
I don't know if it's been a century yet, because I look at time and I realize
that some of the things that people in their 80s and 90s have seen before,
some of the things that we're going, if we're honest, they've seen before.
So definitely decades.
And after those decades pass, we find ourselves saying, this is uncomfortable,
and I don't know what to do with it, because I've participated in it.
I've turned my faith away from it. I've allowed it. I've excused it.
I remember being that kid who all of my friends had a curfew when we were growing up.
And outside of being in the house when the streetlights come on, I didn't have a curfew.
I didn't have a time when my mom said, you know, you better be home.
You know, when I was in high school.
And I'm that kid that came home one day from school and said,
Mom, how come I don't have a curfew?
Duh. Take advantage of this, girlfriend. Don't.
But I went home and I said, Mom, how come I don't have a curfew?
All my girlfriends have a curfew.
And my mom just looked at me and said in Mama's tone, you know when to be in this house.
And I did and I and as I look back she didn't give me an hour then but I never
got in trouble for coming in too late.
I knew, and I think that's what it means when it says that we will know in our hearts what is right,
that God says, you know, that we're not going to need someone to tell us where
to worship or how to worship.
But in order for that to true, we have to be in such living sympathy with the
Creator, like I was with my mom. mom, I knew, right?
We were on the same page. If I had been going through a rebellion stage,
I would not have asked, right?
But I was in that living sympathy with my mother, and I wanted to be sure, and she knew.
She knew I was in relationship with her. She didn't have to give it to me, right?
When we are in that right relationship with God, then it's not our knowing good
and evil that is guiding us.
It's the Spirit informing us.
Adam and Eve at that temptation chose to know good and evil, wanting to be like God.
Sam Wells, who used to be the dean of the chapel at Duke, says they chose not
to be in relationship with God, but rather to be like God.
And my spin on that is, and we can't handle that.
Drawing kind of on that to kind of the topic of reconciliation.
And I was reading an article that you wrote about reconciliation.
And the funny thing is, especially when it comes to the topic of race,
I almost don't hear the word reconciliation anymore.
It just doesn't exist. And I could talk about, and that really even could go
into other issues that we could talk about.
But I don't hear that. I don't hear much about how do we come together?
How do we knit things together? other.
Why is that? Why do we not want to talk about, I mean, especially racial reconciliation?
And it seems, and this is not just a problem on one side, it just seems like.
Everyone just, we don't want to talk about that anymore. It's interesting.
There's been some criticism around this, but Jim Wallace said that racism is
the ontological sin of America.
If a nation can have an ontological sin, then racism would be it.
And when we think about it, everything that we've talked about so far is talking
about a broken relationship between humanity and our Creator.
And the immediate result of that broken relationship was a broken relationship
between creation, you know, right?
Not just humans with humans, but also with the land, with the earth.
With the land and nature.
And nature. And so, God's work through all of this has been to recover the good
that creation was intended to be.
And every time the people of God walk with God in that living sympathy,
then what we see are communities come together, right? Right.
And when they don't, when God is put aside, then we have to put up little lines
to say, okay, if you want God to walk with you, you can't be with us as we build this tower. Right.
Because we're going to put God up here and we're going to go to God. Right. Well, that.
Even before God separates the nations, we can imagine that it's dividing the people, right?
What is the most evident way of dividing people?
It's not culturally, it's not ethnically, it's not tribally,
it's not by gender, it's not by class. class.
It is to assign an identity that is completely socially constructed called race,
which we did a few hundred years ago.
There is no racial identification in the Bible. It does not exist.
This is something humanity has created in our desire to be like God.
We wanted to create name something we have, and we can't handle the consequences.
And the consequences are that we've created this thing, and we don't want to
admit, first of all, that it's not existent.
If you want to find reconciliation, the first thing we have to do is we have
to stop Stop essentializing.
That's a word you used before we were recording the ideology, this false ideology.
That does not mean the consequences of the creation of this idea does not affect
us all. It affects us all because we have created systems in our government.
We have created systems in our education.
We have created systems economically that allow the oppression of people based
on this constructed idea.
And just saying.
I'm not going to see color. That's impossible. Because I need you to recognize
that you may say you don't see color.
But when I walk into a room, when you and I walk into a room,
there are people there who are going to say, what are you doing here?
Who invited you? What can you you offer?
And or, oh my goodness, things have changed.
Even if we say that positively, oh, look at us. Things have changed.
Immediately, what have we done? We have seen this socially constructed idea of race.
So there's no such thing as colorblindness, okay?
I need you to recognize recognize the consequences of this idea.
But on the other side, we want to say, well, there can be no reconciliation
if you don't acknowledge.
That's true. But there also can
be no reconciliation if both sides aren't willing to meet in the middle.
I need folks to realize I'm I'm not perfect, and I'm going to be as grace-filled
to you as I possibly can. Can you return the favor?
And if that's possible, then with humility, as you mentioned earlier,
we come together and we try to find, what are the things we share in common?
And if I'm coming together simply to bridge the racial divide,
it's not going to happen.
I like to use the example of building Habitat houses, Habitat for Humanity houses.
At that point, we all come together, most of us having no idea how to put up,
I can't even say it, put up drywall, right?
And we find our common inability laughable, and we have a common goal.
And the goal is not to bring black folks and white folks together.
The goal is to build this house.
And all of a sudden, we realize that we can tell stories that sound a lot alike
about how we grew up, coming in when the streetlights came on,
playing hopscotch or jump rope,
playing basketball without a hoop, right? Right.
There are ways that our lives are similar that come out of sharing space that
is more authentic when we share a common goal.
And that goal has to be bigger than that.
Uh, essentializing our difference created by the ideology of race.
If that's, if we are saying, I need you to be black and I need you to be white.
And I, I find it fascinating that while we talk about Brown,
the reality is we only use that language for black and white.
No one would ever approach a person of Asian ancestry, and that in itself is such a broad category.
But no one would go to someone and call them yellow, right?
But we use the language black and white. What does that mean?
If what we do is we come together as Americans, wow, what an incredible step
to say. I preached this at Luther a couple of years ago.
Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis, a movie was made by them with Henson,
Taraji Henson, playing Ann Atwater.
It's how the schools were desegregated in Durham, North Carolina.
Oh, I think I've heard about that. You know, yeah. Best of Enemies is the name of the movie.
Great book, excellent movie, but I love Taraji.
But she did a wonderful job of recreating the story of Ann Atwater,
who was an African-American woman, activist in the NAACP. And C.P.
Ellis, also born in Durham, North Carolina, of white ancestry,
he was the head of the KKK.
Not exactly two people you expect to work together. But what the NAACP recognized,
and they had to first convince Ann Atwater of this, and then she was able to
convince C.P. Ellis of this.
And that is that, to go all the way back to the early part of our conversation,
that king you wanted, that government that will take care of his cronies, Um,
there was a group of people that were creating a segregated system that was
not serving poor whites.
And what the NAACP realized was if they wanted to serve what was classified as poor Blacks,
which was all the Blacks, they needed to partner with those in the white community
who weren't being benefited by the school system, poor whites.
And the person to get that, who had the voice to speak to that community, was C.P. Ellis.
And C.P. Ellis wanted his community to thrive.
He cared about his children.
And so he accepted Ann Atwater's invitation.
And together, they were able to move forward to desegregate the schools. But he lost everything.
When he decided to work with and for persons of African descent,
persons that identified or believed themselves to be white, disowned him.
He lost all of his status.
He was ostracized. In fact, when he died, Ann Atwater paid for his funeral.
Fast forward to September 2016.
Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter in New York City.
He and a group of Black Lives Matter activists go to what was a Trump rally in Washington, D.C.
On September—it was September, I want to say 2016.
And they were given—he was given—Hawk Newsom was given two minutes to speak
to these activists at the Trump rally. And what he did was he identified, I'm an American.
I'm an African American, but I'm an American.
I'm a Christian.
And I believe that our nation says that if you have a bad cop,
you need to say something.
Just like if you have a bad politician, you need to say something.
And each time he made those kinds of rhetorical parallels, the audience began to lean in with him.
And when he finished speaking, those people who would identify themselves as
white supremacists, Christian nationalists, anti-Black Lives Matter,
began to say they wanted to befriend
him, that they realized that they had something in common with him.
I invite your listeners to look up the YouTube recording of this in an interview,
because I bring that story up because Hawk Newsome's mind was also changed.
He realized what he said was true.
If we are going to change the world, we must do this together.
And when he went back to New York City, they didn't want him to be the leader
or the voice for Black Lives Matter.
Back to what I said earlier about fundamentalism on the left and the right.
Whenever we have made an idolatry of any ideology, we are not going to find
a way to find reconciliation.
Reconciliation we have made the
social constructed idea of
race an idol and until we remove that idol we will not from the left from the
right from i want to use the color language from the black or the white side,
we will not find reconciliation.
Because reconciliation only comes when we find our identity as human beings
created in the image of a good God.
Yeah, it makes me think in both of those situations that if you want to change the world,
old you have to be open to change to
be changed and in ways to some ways to be open to the to put it a church context
to be open to the spirit changing you yes because i think maybe in our culture
we want the world changed because we think we've already are perfect and it's like,
no no no we have to change too that's right that's right uh in hollywood,
A good story, this is the language that they use, a good story has a conflict
and it has a moment of redemption.
The Hollywood writer-producer that used that language said to a group of theologians,
that's your language, redemption.
That's church language. Hollywood says the best story has a moment of redemption.
And when you think about it, there's that moment of resolution of the conflict,
of the tension that makes for a good movie, a good novel, right?
The hope of the Christian message is that the Creator God is redeeming a fallen creation,
which means we have to recognize our need, as you just said so well,
our need to be transformed, our need to be changed.
It's not just that the people on the other side are wrong.
We both, we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
And if we're willing to admit that depravity, then we're willing to say,
maybe God is still at work setting things right.
And that's a hope-filled language that I think everybody could benefit from hearing.
I just have to let that hang because it's kind of like, wow.
Just kind of, it's just a lot. But I think it is true.
I mean, it's, I think that there is
way too much kind of, the sense of self-righteousness and a lack of grace.
You just don't hear a huge amount of grace in our society.
Society, and to have room for graces to really understand I don't have all the answers,
that I'm not perfect, and that that other person is also a child of God.
And I think, sadly, we're not there yet.
Well, that's very powerful, what you just said, to see the other as a child of God.
That takes us all the way back to how have we othered one another?
And how have we allowed society to other us?
Where we begin to accept, tell me what label will allow me to fit in.
We are compromising our own identity as created in the image of God or redeemed by our baptism.
So that we are siblings in Christ.
And when we see the other in that identity, I've found grace because of Jesus Christ.
You find grace because of Jesus Christ. And as that old adage goes,
because at the foot of the cross, we're standing on the same level ground.
What a wonderful place to meet.
An important place to meet. Hmm.
Well, thank you for this conversation. This is, as I said before,
kind of opening up this year is we're not all looking, well,
none of us are looking forward to the kind of the political fights that are happening.
But this is a moment of hope of what can be, and maybe that can happen if even only on a small scale,
to hear these words of hope, to understand as you were saying that all is level at the cross. Mm-hmm.
If I add this idea of what's happening with the political situation,
all of us, all of your listeners, viewers, need to decide how we're going to
respond no matter who wins the election.
I mean, I know we don't know even fully. We can anticipate who's running,
but we don't even fully know that. A lot can happen between now and November.
But whether it's our team or not, how we respond in victory or in defeat will
make a difference for the next four years.
How I respond whether in victory or in defeat is what will make a difference.
And then it becomes a kind of a
witness for the church of how and as Christians how do we respond yes yes,
well if people would like to connect with you How can they do that?
You can hear me weekly on the sermon brainwave, workingpreacher.org.
I'm at Luther Seminary, and so you can find me there on the faculty page.
Currently, this year, I'm on leave, and I am a visiting professor of religion
in Montgomery, Alabama.
So if you're down in Montgomery, jump over to Huntington College and say hello
to me, and I'd love to come and walk with you through the Legacy Memorial or the museums down here,
and I'm doing some work on just our civil rights history,
and it's been thrilling.
So if you're anywhere near Montgomery, you can look me up at Huntington College
until I return to Luther Seminary in the Twin Cities.
Well, there's one thing I've been wanting to do for a long time is actually
what I've been calling a civil rights tour, especially in Alabama.
I've gone through most of the South. My dad's side of the family is from Louisiana.
Strangely enough, Alabama is the only state in the South I have not been to.
I had not either, and I was surprised to realize that. Yeah, until a year ago.
Well, yeah, it's been a year ago. I was in Benin, West Africa,
and then I came back to a conference that was actually being hosted by Huntington.
It's actually how I wound up with this opportunity.
And so I came back from Benin, West Africa.
I'd love to talk to you about that. And then I went to the Legacy Memorial.
Talk about an incredible way of tying the history together.
So, Dennis, if you come down while I'm down here, if you can get down here in the next few months,
I would love to walk you through the birthplace of the civil rights movement
that is also the seat of the Confederacy.
Talk about history. Exactly.
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, I will definitely be thinking about that
because it's like, again, I do want to kind of do that type of a tour to all of that history.
So, Spencer Moore, thank you so much for taking the time.
And I definitely will have you back on to talk more at some time in the very near future.
I love that. Thank you so much. And I'm so grateful to be able to be with you on this conversation.
Very important conversations, as all of your podcasts are. So thank you for
the work that you're doing. All right.
Music.
Well, I hope you had a good time listening to the conversation as much as I
enjoyed having that time to chat with Reverend Moore.
And I did put links to some information there if you would like to just learn
more about Reverend Moore.
And that will be in the show notes. Uh, just one, uh, note of clarification
that's coming up is that, um,
episodes kind of coming up might be a little bit more scarce or not always as frequent.
Um, part of that is because, um, this is Lent and we're getting closer and closer
to Holy Week and Easter, um, very busy time for pastors like me.
So that's one reason. And, um, the other reason is just, um,
some, um, family issues that have come up.
I won't go into much, um, detail right now, but I will share later,
but they're important issues that are taking my time.
Um, so it doesn't mean that, you know, you won't see another thing out for another
month or something, but it may not always come as quickly as they have.
Um, so just to let you know about that.
That's it for this episode of Church in Maine Remember to rate and review the
episode On whatever podcast app that you listen to this podcast,
Pass the episode along to family and friends Who might be interested in hearing
this And finally, consider donating So that we can continue to produce more episodes,
As I said, that's it for this episode of Church in Maine I'm Dennis Sanders, your host host.
As I always say, thank you so much for listening. Take care,
Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.
Music.