Courage and the Church

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Humble Opinion is one of the finest writers on the modern scene. She is a lady whom I would describe as having class, but she also writes so well and so personably. You know, you feel like you’re getting a letter from your aunt, and it’s very enjoyable to read what she writes. In addition to her several books, she has written a column, she writes a column really every week for the Opinion Journal, which you can read online. She outdid herself this week. Because of the fact that she has so many connections, she was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, for example, and wrote, really, I think, one of his very best speeches. She gets invitations places that you and I would not get invited to. I brought away some important ideas from her column this week that I want to try to develop for you in a different aspect from what she was developing. Nevertheless, I think they’re important. She said, I had a great experience the other night. I met some of the 114 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award. It was at their annual dinner held as has been for the last four years at the New York Stock Exchange. I met Nick Oresko. Nick is in his 80s, small, 5’5″, soft white hair, pale pink skin, thick torso, walks with a cane. You know, you haven’t been around this world very long unless you’ve met men exactly like this without knowing who they are, where they came from, or how they got to the place they got to. Just a nice old guy you’d pass on the street or in the airport without really seeing him. Around his neck was a sky blue ribbon, and hanging from that ribbon the medal. And you should know that military men refer to the Congressional Medal of Honor merely as the medal. He let me turn it over. It had his name, his rank, and then January 23, 1945, near Teddington, Germany. Teddington, Germany. The Battle of the Bulge. When I got home, I looked up his citation on my beloved Internet where you can Google heroism. U.S. Army Master Sergeant Nicholas Oresko of Company C, 302nd Infantry, 94th Infantry Division, was a platoon leader in an attack against a strong enemy position. And the platoon sergeant, the master sergeant who is the platoon sergeant, these are the guys who in many ways really make the Army work. Here’s what this commendation read. Deadly automatic fire from the flanks pinned down his unit. Realizing that a machine gun in a nearby bunker must be eliminated, he swiftly worked ahead alone, braving bullets which struck about him until close enough to throw a grenade into the German position. He rushed the bunker and with point-blank rifle fire killed all the hostile occupants who survived the grenade blast. Another machine gun opened up on him, knocking him down and seriously wounding him in the hip. Refusing to withdraw from the battle, he placed himself at the head of his platoon to continue the assault. As withering machine gun and rifle fire swept the area, he struck out alone in advance of his men to a second bunker, With a grenade, he crippled the dug-in machine gun defending this position, then wiped out the troops manning it with his rifle, completing his second self-imposed one-man attack. Although weak from loss of blood, he refused to be evacuated until assured the mission was successfully accomplished. Indomitable courage and unswerving devotion to the attack in the face of bitter resistance, and while wounded, Master Sergeant Oresko killed 12 Germans, prevented a delay in the assault, and made it possible for Company C to obtain its objective with minimum casualties. Great writer that she is. She’s using this story to set up a point she wanted to make. And it’s an idea that really should resonate with every one of us. She then talked to another man who was there. I talked to James Livingston of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, a Marine, a warrior in Vietnam who led in battle despite of bad wounds and worse odds. I told him I was wondering about something. Most of us try to be brave each day in whatever circumstances, which means most of us show ourselves, our courage, with time. What is it like, I asked, to find out when you’re a young man and in a way that’s irrefutable that you are brave? What does it do to your life when no one, including you, will ever question whether you have the guts? He shook his head. The medal didn’t prove courage, he said. It’s not bravery. It’s taking responsibility. I couldn’t help myself. I exclaimed out loud when I read that on my computer screen because it was so obviously true. Each of the recipients, he said, had taken responsibility for the men and the moment at a tense and demanding time. They cared for others. They took care of their men. It’s not bravery. It’s taking responsibility. I mean, that reply was stunning to me. I recognized it immediately as true. Now, I don’t know if you are familiar with the story of Sergeant York. It’s eerily similar to the first story Ms. Noonan cited in this piece. If you’ve never seen the movie Sergeant York, you owe it to yourself to see that film. Alvin C. York was a pacifist who did not believe in killing. He was a mountain boy. I mean, he was about as far back in the sticks as you can get and living a very hard life with his mama. And it was really a tough place. And he was kind of a rounder in his young days. One night riding home from a drinking spree in a local saloon, lightning struck a tree right next to him and nearly killed him. It really got his attention. It was followed very closely thereafter by a conversion to Christian faith, a very, very fundamentalist Christian faith, which you would expect it to be back there. And as a part of that, he became a pacifist. He did not believe in killing. Well, Sergeant York, in much the same way as the gentleman that Ms. Newman described, his award, did much the same thing in wiping out German machine gun nests, killing German soldiers, and so forth. And he had gained and earned the respect of his officers in his unit because they knew that the man was sincere to the Corps. And because he didn’t believe in killing, they couldn’t let him off, but they still allowed him. He carried the rifle. He was part of his unit. And they felt that when the time came, he would do the right thing. Well, they were right. But after it was over with, a sympathetic commanding officer asked him about why he did what he did, given his deep and profound conviction against killing. He said, well… I’m as much again killing as ever, sir. But it was this way, Colonel. When I started out, I felt just like you said. But when I hear them machine guns are going and all them fellows are dropping around me, I figured them guns was killing hundreds, maybe thousands, and there wasn’t nothing anybody could do but to stop them guns. And that’s what I done. Total simplicity. But he accepted responsibility for the men that he was with. Somebody had to do it, and he did it. It’s a really great story. If you haven’t seen the movie, you know, really, you do owe it to yourself to see it. He took responsibility, saved the lives of his fellow soldiers. Later, someone wanted him to do something. I forget from the movie what it was they wanted him to do, to capitalize on his fame. I don’t know. He wasn’t endorsing a serial, I don’t think. It was something like that, though. He said this, what we’d done in France, we had to do. And some has done it, didn’t come back. And that kind of thing ain’t for buying and selling. Now this is the kind of person you can be so grateful to have on your side. This kind of character. It’s interesting to me that most of these men are a little embarrassed at being called heroes. I really identify with that because in a strange way, it diminishes what they have done. Merely to call them heroes. I think of that often when I watch some gushing talking head on television telling somebody that he’s a hero for something or other that he has done and look at the embarrassed expression on the poor guy’s face or the lady because many of them are women. Now I need to cite one more example familiar to us all. He was a shepherd boy who took responsibility for his flock of sheep. He’s just a boy now, mind you, sent out by his father to take care of a flock of sheep and not a particularly large one at that. On two different occasions, one, there was a lion that was stalking his flock. He fought the lion, killed it. Another occasion, a bear was after his sheep, and he met the bear hand-to-hand, as it were, or hand-to-paw, and killed this bear with a handful of the bear’s fur in his hand as he drove the knife into the animal. Why did he do that for? Was this bravery? Common sense would have said you better head for the tall timber or get up a tree. These are just sheep. No, he couldn’t do it. There was something down inside of David, a man whom all of us know from our reading of the Bible. He had to accept responsibility. These sheep were his responsibility, and he would not walk away to them. For him, responsibility was a way of life. It wasn’t especially brave. In fact, I think I get the impression that many of these men, when they are in the moment of crisis, don’t even give a second thought to courage, bravery, or anything else. It just has to be done. And they do it. Fully realizing it can, may probably cost them their life. When David then came to the camp of Israel and saw them being challenged by a big giant named Goliath, He never had a second thought. He didn’t sit there and agonize over it. Well, shall I do it? Shall I not do it? Because nobody else was doing it. All the rest of the men would take off like a scared rabbit when Goliath came out. And David realized it was not somebody else’s responsibility. It was his as much as anyone’s. So he said to Saul, let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine. Your servant will go and fight him. You know, where does this kind of thing come from in a person? Now, I cite these examples to illustrate that bravery has, what we call bravery, has existed in every age of man. It always has. It always will. It just doesn’t exist everywhere, all the time. It isn’t bravery or foolhardiness that motivates these men. Bravery is required. I would have to say, but it’s responsibility that motivates. And I must say, among Christians today, there are those who are willing to take responsibility, and they deserve our respect, our support, our backing. They certainly don’t deserve to have us cutting their legs off. Paul said something interesting in his letter to the Philippians. You’ll find it in the second chapter. It’s just short, verse 19 says, He said, I trust in the Lord to send Timothy shortly to you, that I may be of good comfort when I know your state. For I have no man like-minded who will naturally care for your state. For all seek their own and not the things which are Jesus Christ’s. You know, it is such a shame to read this from Paul. Another occasion he said, you know, everybody’s left me. You know, one guy is still here, but everybody else is going back to his own business, his own way of life or whatever it is he was doing. Because why? Was it because they were afraid? Well, maybe, but Paul was probably afraid at times and Timothy was probably afraid at times. But they had a responsibility and they took it and they carried it. It would not have occurred to Paul to back down to save his miserable hide. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind. To him, he had a duty, a responsibility, and he had to do it. And here’s Timothy, the one man he knows, who has that same spirit, that same desire, that same sense of responsibility, who would as soon have his arm fall off as to fail to pick up something that was his responsibility to pick it up. Timothy, like David, wouldn’t have given it a second thought. For some of these men that Peggy Noonan was talking about, it’s embarrassing to be honored with the medal, but they accept the medal. This may sound strange to you. They accept it as a kind of duty. She said, other recipients sounded a refrain that lingered like taps. They felt they’d been awarded their great honor in part in the name of unknown heroes of the armed forces who’d performed spectacular acts of courage but had died along with all the witnesses who would have told the story of what they did. And of course, I don’t know what the percentages are, but a very large percentage of those who have won the Medal of Honor were given it posthumously. For each of the holders of the Medal of Honor, there had been witnesses, survivors who could testify. For some great heroes of engagements large and small, maybe the greatest heroes of all, no one lived to tell the tale. And so they felt they wore their medals in part for the ones known only to God. Even the wearing of the medal was an act of duty and not just a personal honor, but the honor toward the country. One more thing that Ms. Noonan uses to make her transition. She said in a brief film on the recipients that was played at the dinner, Leo Thorsen, a veteran of Vietnam, said something that lingered. He was asked what, when he performed his great act, he was sacrificing for Vietnam. He couldn’t answer for a few seconds. You could tell he was searching for the right words, the right sentence. And then he said, I get emotional about it, but we’re a free country. He said that with a kind of wonder and gratitude, and of course, he said it all. And I must confess, I think it does say it all because it is that freedom that allows us to be what we are. Without the freedom, men like this would not exist. They would not be there. Oh, they might fight for one another in combat, but they would not be fighting and dying for their country in the way that these men were doing. Now, all this was the first thing I took away from Ms. Noonan’s column. We need to support and encourage those among us who take responsibility for the things that the church must do. We must, of course, as much as we can within us, take our responsibilities, pick them up and carry them forward, and we must support those who do carry those responsibilities. And whatever else we do, we must not play the role of David’s brothers, who made fun of him, ridiculed him, told him to go back home, and they themselves had run in the presence of the giant of Gath. Now here’s where Peggy Noonan went next, and it got me into the second point that I want to take away from her column. What always got me thinking about the next day was immigration. I know that seems like a lurch, but there’s part of the debate that isn’t sufficiently noted. And I was amused by this because she was fully aware of how the people would say immigration. And all week long, all week long, I’ve been hearing immigration, immigration, immigration. I’m so tired of it. When it comes on the radio, television, I turn it off. I go look at something else. It just goes on and on and on. Normally, I would have turned her off at this point, and I’m really glad I didn’t. She says, I know this seems like a lurch. There’s a part of this debate that has not been sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration, and we all know them. Economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anybody being able to come in. But there’s another thing. It’s not fear of them. It’s anxiety about us. It’s the broad public knowledge or intuition in America that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don’t do that, you will lose it all. Now, I stumbled over that a little bit. Shall I read it again? Because I don’t think we should miss this. She said, it’s not fear about them. It’s anxiety about us. It is the broad public knowledge or intuition in America that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if we don’t do that, you’ll lose it all. Now, I’m sure you figured out by now, you know, as I said, that I’m trying to apply these principles that I’m finding here to the church because it just rang in my head as I read through her editorial of how appropriate it was, how apt it was for the church, for Christians at large in the world today. It’s not that I’m not unconcerned about political issues in the country. I am concerned about them. But huge principles like these apply nearly everywhere. We also have an anxiety about us. about who we are, about our failures, our differences, our spats, our whatever it is, but we have our own anxieties about us. And we let those anxieties prevent us from doing and saying things that need to be said and done. We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And we are not doing the equivalent of that in the church either for whatever reason, at least not doing it well enough. She went on to say, we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation, their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. You know what Speaking Valley Girl is? You know, she describes it. So I’m like, no, and he’s all, yeah, and I’m like, in your dreams. That’s a special language that young girls speak these days. Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon, or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows, and to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch. So far, we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good. But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend. Actually, we aren’t so much losing it as we are throwing it away. It is being deconstructed in classrooms all across this country as that great legend that is this country is just being thrown away, run through the shredder, disposed of. And in the church, we are making much the same mistake. Sure, we have our black sheep. Do you realize so does every church? So does every denomination have its black sheep. So does our nation. It has had its black sheep down through time. But we also have our unique gifts, our special contribution to make, and we need to be, well, patriotic about it, even in the church. So what if Washington had wooden teeth? He was a man who took responsibility at a time when it looked very much like it was a losing cause. And he fought on. And his men fought on. And his men fought on because it was him. Because he accepted responsibility for them. So what if Lincoln was every bad thing that anyone ever said about Lincoln? He was a man who took responsibility for the saving of the Union. Why is it necessary to cut his legs off now, at this time in history? Some idiot wanted to argue that Lincoln was a homosexual. On the evidence, he was not. But even if he were, why do we need to know that? He may have had a bad marriage, but it is of no relevance whatsoever to his place in the history of this country. Because if Washington was the father of the country, Lincoln was the savior of the Union. And both of them had huge roles to play. Our line of presidents in this country have had their black sheep in the White House. But they have been our presidents, and we don’t have really the necessity of cutting their legs off either. Because we’re not helping ourselves and we’re not helping the country when we diss past presidents of the United States. That doesn’t mean you don’t discuss what they did wrong. I mean, that’s perfectly all right to do. Peggy Noonan goes on to say, what is the legend, the myth? And by the way, I want to clarify one little thing before I go forward. The word myth or legend, as she uses it here, is not about fiction. She’s using it in the classical sense that the myth is the story of the nation. In our case, if we were talking about our myth, it is the story of our church that we should tell and tell and tell and retell so it becomes a part of our spiritual DNA, as it were. What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they, that is these immigrants coming in, are joining something special. The streets are paved with more than gold. They’re paved with the greatest thoughts men ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house raisings, the stubbornness, the Puritans, the Indians, the city on a hill. The genius cluster, she calls them, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, and all the rest that came along at exactly the same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used, as in a high IQ followed by high attainment, but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? I once asked a great historian if he had any thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was providential. And I have long since come to the same conclusion. There are several scriptures that came to my mind as I asked myself, how does this apply to us? God has made this little flock special in his own way. But we are not supposed to compare ourselves with others who differ in various ways from us. And when I say our little flock, I’m not necessarily just talking about this group of people in the room I’m talking to here, because there’s a larger little flock that will hear me on tape recordings of this sermon later on. It doesn’t matter what these other churches, denominations, organizations, you name it, whatever they do, doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do with what God has given us that he has not for whatever reason given to them is none of our business. It’s not our business. It was given or not given to them. Now, I think this is really important. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and he made an interesting comment, first of all talking about himself and the men who worked with him and then developing it further. This is 2 Corinthians 10, verse 12. It’s a short reading. We dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. We, however, will not boast beyond measure, but within the limits of the sphere which God has appointed us, a sphere which especially includes you. What an interesting way of putting this thing. And the word sphere, which this is the New King’s version, which they chose to use here, I think is really interesting. I think King James has measure there, which doesn’t say that much to us. But what he is saying is this. We have, as a Christian community, a sphere of influence. We have a bubble. We have an area that we can have some kind of an effect on. And it is within that is where we have to apply ourselves. And we have no business whatsoever worrying our heads over what some church in another part of town of another denomination with a different set of doctrines, what they’re doing, not doing, or anything else is utterly irrelevant to us unless somewhere along the line we intersect, and in which cases it should hopefully complement and not detract. And the best chance of it working to good and not evil is that we aren’t trying to cut their legs off either along the way. so that when we do encounter people who differ with us, we encounter them with respect. This is crucial. If we’re capable of recognizing that God has appointed us a sphere of influence, if we are capable of taking responsibility for that sphere and leaving the rest to God, then we can be called heroes in the kingdom of God no matter how small our role. if we take responsibility within our sphere of influence and leave the other people to do theirs. Peggy Noonan isn’t done yet, though. She said, we fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of a nation does this? We went to Europe, fought and died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world, and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it again. What kind of a nation does this? Only a very great one, maybe the greatest of all. Do we teach our immigrants that that’s what they’re joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue and they will uphold? Do we today act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday, to use Valley Girl talk. We don’t want to be impolite. We don’t want to offend. We don’t want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas. And yet, what is true of people is probably true of nations. Listen carefully to what she’s saying here. What is true of people is also true of nations. If you don’t have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won’t long sustain a well-grounded respect for others. Crucial, that word, R-E-S-P-E-C-T. And this is the second big idea that I took from this column, that we as a church have to learn to maintain our self-respect. It doesn’t involve denying who we are or where we’ve come, but we do need to maintain it. It’s not easy to do in an age where self-esteem has replaced self-respect, and there is a world of difference between them. Because self-respect calls upon you to believe you’re a good and right and accomplished person when you haven’t done anything. Self-respect means you go out and do things so that you will earn respect. If we don’t do this, we could lose the special place we hold in God’s scheme of things. And I honestly believe we do hold a special place. It is our place. And we have a task that God has called upon us to do. Too many of us Now, I realize I’m speaking to the choir here, but I’m also speaking to people who did this and found their way back. Other people are still out there. The community, we have forsaken the community of saints, the community that Jesus Christ said he would build. He said, I will build my assembly. Now, why in the world do we think we are to go running off and leaving it? Now, I’ll grant you, sometimes you have to, but it isn’t something you should be eager to do. And when you’re out there by yourself, you should be looking for another one. We need to get over the tantrum, stop cutting the legs off our story, stop trashing those that came before us down this long road. It’s not helping anybody, anywhere, anytime to do that. It’s a form of self-justification and it’s even a form of self-pity. We need to get over it. Also need to remember that in handling too much trash, dishing too much trash, you become trash yourself. She goes on to say, because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special. Some of them understandably get the impression they’ve joined not a great enterprise, but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It’s a good place. It’s got no legends, no meaning. It imparts no spirit. No, there we are. Do we have legends? Do we have meaning? Do we impart spirit? Who’s at fault, she says? Those of us who let the myth die or let it change or refuse to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh grade history class who decides the impressionable young man’s before him need to be informed as their first serious lesson that the founders were hypocrites. The Bill of Rights, nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without. Oh, yeah, this is taught oftentimes in school, high school. And as she’s saying, that’s not the first thing we need to learn about our history. He says you can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud, too, if you want to. but you need to bear in mind if you do, you’re becoming mud yourself. She goes on, it’s not just the nitwits wherever they are in the schools, the academy, the media, although they’re harmful enough. It’s also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical to provide a new look at the old text. They’re not noticing that the old text is The legend, the myth, isn’t being taught anymore. Only the commentary is being taught. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they’ve never heard the positive side of the argument? How will they know? So my first point was true heroism is accepting responsibility. My second one is to maintain a respect for the community of the saints as we should be maintaining a respect for the community we live in. Tell our story again and again. It deserves respect. I got one more thing that I took away from Ms. Noonan’s column. I think all of these things are biblical as they can be. There are more scriptures. I could line them up, you know, and we could be here for two hours. But anyway, point three, those who teach and who think for a living about American history need to be told, keep the text, teach the text, and only then if you must deconstruct the text. Don’t lose it. First, know it. Second, teach it. And only then do you go back and start deconstructing it or taking it apart if you absolutely have to do that. This is her point. When you don’t love something, you lose it. And if we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons, but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation and gratitude for a history that is something new in the long story of man, we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Lou Thorsness, who couldn’t quite find the words. He only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only when you do that can you become emotional about it. Only then are you truly American. Third thing that I took away from this is keep the text alive. Learn the text. Teach the text. We have been, in some cases, starting to deconstruct the text ourselves before we even really knew what it was. I am appalled at some of the garbage floating around in the general area. It’s like all the Jetson that washes up on the beach from time to time. It’s like the swill going back and forth through New Orleans after that hurricane of garbage, pure garbage. And it’s coming from people who want to become teachers of the law, teachers of the Bible, who don’t know the text. The first thing you’ve got to do is to master the book as it is. Not like you think it is. You don’t start teaching the commentary until you have a good grasp of what the text actually says. And as I read some of the stuff, it comes across my desk from time to time from people. And sometimes we’ll read a whole page of it. Sometimes I don’t get very far because it’s just obvious from the first paragraph that the person I’m reading doesn’t know the basics. Jeremiah chapter 23 says, Verse 28 rings in my ears all my life. It says, that prophet that has a dream. You think you’re a prophet? You got a dream? Okay. Let him tell the dream. He that has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? You realize what Jeremiah is saying? He’s saying all these prophets out here who are prophesying and claiming to speak for God are chaff. What’s the chaff to the wheat? He that has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. Is not my word like a fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks in pieces the rock? You bet it is. This last is a challenge to me. Because one thing I know, and I know it just as surely as I know that you folks are sitting in front of me today, I have his word. I may not understand every aspect of it. I sometimes have to answer questions. I don’t know, which is a very healthy thing. But I do know what I’ve got. I know I have his word, and I know, therefore, since I do have it, I have an obligation to speak it and a further obligation to be faithful to it. I don’t have all the answers. I have not followed the way perfectly in my 72 years on this planet. I feel quite sure that I have been seriously wrong in the past about any number of things. But I still have the text. And the text has a way of pulling me out of the ditch. If I will just remember it, if I will just keep going back again and again to the text, it will bring me through. Three big ideas emerge from Peggy Noonan’s column which rather match the scriptures and also are, I think, instructive of a problem that we have in the church at large. Idea number one, true heroism is accepting responsibility. Idea number two, respect and maintain the story of the community of the saints. Don’t trash one another. Idea number three, keep the text. Learn the text. Teach the text. And I’ll close with Isaiah 66, verse 1. Thus saith the Lord, Heaven is my throne. Earth is my footstool. Where is the house you’re going to build for me? Where is the place of my rest? What do you think you’re going to do to impress me? For all these things my hand has made, and all these things exist, says the Lord. But on this one will I look. On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word. Trembles at my word. Who has complete respect for the text.