You get the feeling from reading them that we might be loved

This old concert recording of Rich Mullins at a Wheaton College chapel service in 1997 is an internet classic, but listening through it again today I was struck by his wisdom about the love of God:

I am at an academic place so I need to speak highly of serious stuff. Although I have trouble with serious stuff, I have to admit, because I just think life’s too short to get too heavy about everything. And I think there are easier ways to lose money than by farming, and I think there are easier ways to become boring than by becoming academic. And I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the Theory of Relativity is. But I think what we all really want to know anyway is whether we are loved or not. And that’s why I like the Scriptures, because you get the feeling from reading them that we might be. And if we were able to really know that, we wouldn’t worry about the rest of the stuff. The rest of it would be more fun, I think. Cause right now we take it so seriously, I think, because of our basic insecurity about whether we are loved are not.

I think you should study because your folks have probably sunk a lot of money into this, and it’d be ungrateful not to. But your life doesn’t depend on it. That was what I loved about being a student in my 40s as opposed to in my 20s is I had the great knowledge that you could live for at least half a century and not know a thing and get along pretty well.

A Hymn Aptly Chosen

One of the fun things about attending a church in a new and unfamiliar tradition is that things that may be common, old hat, or even tiredly predictable to lifelong participants in the tradition are new and can bring delight to us newbs.

Current example: yesterday morning I thumbed through the worship booklet before the service and saw that the gospel hymn was familiar: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. I know this one primarily as “The Navy Hymn”, could probably sing the first verse from memory, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sung it in church before. A bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s at least fun to sing.

And it was, indeed, fun to sing. It’s in a good range, it’s got some fun harmonic progressions, and for being a small and older congregation, there are still some good harmony singers belting it out.

Then the deacon started into the gospel reading and suddenly the reason for the song selection became very clear.

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

Well played, Father Brian. Well played.

An Appliance Installation in Four Lowe’s Trips

Setting: a local homeowner has an old dishwasher that is dying. A new dishwasher was delivered and is sitting in the garage, waiting to be installed.

Lowe’s Trip #1: Electrical Stuff

The old dishwasher had just a raw electrical cable coming from the unit. The wire ran through a hole in the floor and was connected up to the breaker box in the basement using wire nuts. The new dishwasher has a proper electric plug. So on the way home from work I hit Lowe’s for a grey electrical box, a GFCI plugin, and an outlet cover plate.

Came home, wired up the box before dinner. Got out a big drill bit and expanded the hole in the floor to fit the big plug.

Lowe’s Trip #2: Water line

I don’t do plumbing work that often, but when I do, it’s the little latent leaks that make me nervous. I read the installation manual for the dishwasher and it suggested “hook up the water line, turn on the water, and check for leaks before putting the unit in place”. Great idea, I thought. However, the existing water line wasn’t long enough to make that work.

Hit Lowe’s again, bought a longer water line. Hooked it up to the dishwasher. Ran the hose down through a separate hole in the floor, hooked it up to the water pipe in the basement. Turned the water on. No leaks.

Ran the electric plug end through the hole in the floor, plugged it in. We have power. Now we just need to hook up the drain hose.

The drain hose boot is marked that it will accommodate up to a 7/8” pipe. The PVC drain pipe plumbed up to the dishwasher location is marked 3/4”, but it turns out that’s 3/4” inside diameter. Outside diameter is a solid one inch. And the rubber boot doesn’t stretch that much.

Lowe’s Trip #3: Drain Pipe Fitting

Perused the PVC aisle. Then to the next aisle over with kitchen plumbing supplies. A “standard” dishwasher install would have it near the sink so the drain hose could tie in to the sink drain. Ours is on the opposite side of the kitchen, so whoever did the first dishwasher install here (sometime well after the house was built in 1959) ran the PVC drain line down through the floor and across the basement ceiling to tie in to the drain there. But I digress.

On the second trip through the PVC aisle, my wife notices the exact fitting we need. Sized to fit the 1” outside diameter pipe on one end, with a tapering ribbed end opposite it to grab a drain boot. I knew I had PVC glue at home, so paid for the fitting and headed back.

Grabbed the cans of PVC primer and glue from the basement. Opened up the primer and primed both pieces. Opened up the glue. It had solidified into jelly. Read the instructions on the back of the can. “Do not use if glue has hardened.” Deep, frustrated sigh.

Lowe’s Trip #4: PVC Glue

I know exactly where it is after perusing the PVC aisle less than twenty minutes previous. Head back home.

Glued up the fitting to the drain pipe. Let it sit for twenty minutes to harden up. Hooked up the drain hose. Carefully slid the dishwasher back into its slot. Confirmed that the hoses weren’t kinked. Nervously checked for drips under the water line fitting a couple more times. Still seemed ok.

PVC glue said to wait two hours before putting any pressure on the joint. Two hours later was getting close to bedtime, so we put the unit on the quick cycle to try it out. Had a minor heart attack when the display turned off every time we shut the dishwasher door. Found the full manual online and discovered that was by design. Let it run. 60 minutes later: clean dishes.

Here’s hoping I don’t have to repeat that task any time soon.

Christianity no longer has an Effective Cosmology

Some 18 months ago I was just getting acquainted with Dr. Ilia Delio’s writing, and shared a brief paragraph about getting our theology better aligned with our cosmology. Today I’m reading her book Christ in Evolution, wherein she provides a longer version of that insight. I heard her say something similar on the B4NP podcast, and it was the biggest lightbulb moment I’ve had in a while. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it, but the core of the idea seems just right.

So from chapter 1 (paragraph breaks and emphasis mine):

In his book A Window to the Divine, Zachary Hayes writes that “a careful reading of the theological tradition prior to the modern era indicates that before the so-called Copernican revolution … there existed a religious cosmology that involved not only the insights of faith but the physical understanding of the cosmos as it was known at that time. The breakdown of such a cosmology by the shift from a geocentric model to a heliocentric model led eventually to the isolation of theology from the development of modern science.”

The most fundamental shift in our understanding of the cosmos is the move from the vision of a universe launched essentially in its present form by the hand of the creator at the beginning of time to a vision of the cosmos as a dynamic, unfolding chemical process, immensely large in both time and space…

According to Hayes, we live in two worlds. In our everyday experience we live in a culture deeply conditioned by the insights and theories of modern science. But in the context of the church, its theology and liturgy, we live in a premodern world. Christian theology, he states, no longer has an effective cosmology that enables believers to relate to the world in its physical character in a way that is consistent with their religious symbols. We need to reshape our religious understanding of the world, he claims, by engaging our faith with the best insights of science concerning the nature of the physical world.

Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, Chapter 1

As I’ve listened to Delio on a number of podcasts and read a couple of her books (with more on the pile to read), I’m amazed by how clearly she can embrace the Bible’s teaching about Jesus but interpret it in ways that embraces modern science — ways that are very different than the anti-scientific approach most churches I’ve been a part of have held to.

My heart and imagination come alive as I consider these possibilities. “There’s so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see,” wrote Rich Mullins. And with these new lenses through which to consider the cosmos, I echo his next line: “And everywhere I go, I’m looking”.

Playing the Jeremiah 17:9 Card

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV

I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)

Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!

In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!

There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.

Logical Coherence

First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?

Other Bible Verses

I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.

Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!

Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.

Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!

Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?

2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!

Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!

Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.

Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed.” - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!

I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?

Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse

Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:

  • “Do you really think I’d make that up?”

  • “I did that because I love you.”

  • “You’re too sensitive.”

  • “It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”

  • “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.

Finally

A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.

Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._

My own personal Philippians 3

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

–The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Philippians

I have many times read this passage and heard it taught with the message “your family history and good works don’t matter, only giving up everything and serving Jesus matters”. As I read it today, though, where I am in my Christian journey, it hits a little bit different.

My own personal Philippians 3

If anyone thinks they have confidence in their evangelical Christian credentials, I have more.

I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart when I was 3. I was baptized by immersion at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church after giving testimony to my faith when I was 7 or 8.

My church started AWANA clubs when I was in first grade. I completed 3 years worth of Sparks club in 2 years to get the associated trophy. I completed every year of AWANA after that, all the way through high school, memorizing hundreds of Bible verses. I was given the AWANA Citation Award at AWANA national Bible Quizzing and Olympics. My team didn’t win the Olympics, but won the sportsmanship award, which is probably even more meritorious.

I was homeschooled in a Christian homeschool grades 1 through 12. I learned from the best Christian curricula. I soaked up Ken Ham’s creation science videos in Sunday School and youth group. As a 7th grader I sent a letter to my best friend, aghast that he entertained the possibility of “long-day” creation. I quoted 2 Timothy 4 to him and said I would be one of the ones who stood up when others were going wobbly.

I attended an IBLP Basic Seminar when I was in high school. I bought and took home a cassette tape of their Gothard-blessed choir arrangements of hymns, excited to have Godly music to listen to. I attended a church with the authors of a Quiverfull book and the midwife who reported in Gothard’s newsletter that a Cabbage Patch Kids doll was being used by the devil to prevent a healthy home birth.

I was fully invested in the political implications of my evangelical faith. I speed-dialed Rush Limbaugh and tried to convince his call screener that I should talk to Rush about the dangers of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I bought a constitutional law overview book written by Michael Farris and was jittery with excitement when I got to hear him speak and shake his hand. I marched in a parade carrying a campaign sign for a Republican Senate candidate.

I sat in years of adult “precept by precept, line by line” Bible study. I went through Evangelism Explosion training, memorized all the cards, and went door-to-door asking people “if you died tonight, and God asked ‘why should I let you into my heaven?’, what would you say?”.

I passed up full-ride scholarship offers to public universities and instead took out loans to attend a Christian university. I lived in a dormitory that only allowed opposite-gender visits for 3 hours on Friday nights and 3 hours on Sunday afternoons under supervision. I took 15 credits of Bible and Christian ethics along with my engineering classes in order to graduate.

I started leading worship in church when I was in high school. I led worship at church and in college chapel during my college years. I joined a Baptist church within the first month of moving to Iowa and within the first year was leading worship there. I formed the team, led practices, led the music at multiple services every week for years. I met weekly with the church staff to evaluate the previous week’s services and plan for the upcoming week.

I became a deacon at that Baptist church before the age of 30. Then I became an elder. I attended the Emmaus Bible College pastor’s conference, the Moody Bible Institute pastor’s conference, and the Desiring God pastor’s conference. I led Bible studies, did in-home pastoral care visits, tracked giving and sent out yearly giving receipts.

I was part of an elder team that planted a new church in an under-churched neighborhood near downtown in our city. I did tech setup and tear-down and led worship there every week for two years.

I moved to a larger Evangelical Free church. I served on the worship team there and became the interim music ministry leader when the staff worship pastor left. For multiple years we did three-service weekends spanning Saturday night and Sunday morning with full band and tech team.

I read hundreds of books on theology and the church. I read John Piper, Tim Keller, Don Carson, Francis Schaeffer, Mark Driscoll, Russell Moore, and N. T. Wright. I led book discussions, wrote blog posts about them, and bought extra copies to give away to others.

I had three children and raised them in the church. I pushed for us to homeschool them. I dragged them to church every time we went. I did read-alouds of the Jesus Storybook Bible and all the Chronicles of Narnia with them. I drove them to youth group, encouraged them to volunteer, taught them instruments or got them lessons so they could join the worship team themselves.

But Jesus

Somewhere in all those years, Jesus stepped in.

Jesus opened my eyes to his love for every person. Even and especially for those who didn’t look like me or believe the way I did.

Jesus made it clear to me that all my book learning and ability to argue people into a corner was a harsh cacophony if I didn’t actually love those people and want their best.

Jesus showed me that God loves my loved ones even more than I do, and that God’s love is the same in kind, and infinitely greater in quality and quantity, as my own love for family is.

Jesus made it clear to me that so much of the memorization and learning and doctrine we were so proud of as evangelicals manifested as unloving, judgmental, manipulative gate-keeping to those who weren’t in our little club.

Jesus helped me see that God’s plan for the universe is so much greater and more redemptive than rescuing a small fraction of holy humans out of a burning earth into an ethereal heavenly plane.

Jesus made it clear to me that his desire is for followers who love God and love their neighbor rather than those who cling to power through politics, nationalism, racism, and misogyny.

Jesus showed me that loving my neighbor might actually mean directly caring for my literal next-door neighbors more than it means laboring to support church programs while I hold good intentions in my heart for others and invite them to those programs.

Whatever my accomplishments were to me, I now count them as nothing compared to knowing the freedom and confidence that Jesus has given me as I now know him as the true representation of God, a God who fully knows, loves, and embraces each one of us just as we are.

Amen.

Fast Car, or, why I'm crying at my desk this morning

“You’ve got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere…”

If you’ve been a pop music fan at some point in the last 35 years, you’re probably now hearing an acoustic guitar riff in your head. Tracy Chapman’s song Fast Car came out in 1988 and was a Top 10 hit. It’s a wonderful song.

I heard Fast Car for the first time about 3 months ago when a social media post linking to a YouTube of Chapman playing the song in front of a restless crowd at Wembley Stadium came across my feed.

I listened to it, mostly impressed at a 24-year-old enthralling a huge crowd with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a microphone. I was probably doing something else at my desk at the time, and didn’t really listen to the words.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when my wife and I were out for a weekend and had dinner on a bar patio listening to a guy play acoustic covers. He played Fast Car. I mentioned to my wife that I’d never really heard the song before a month or two ago. She was incredulous. “You don’t know this song?” It’s about that time in any such conversation that my insecurity and shame creeps in.

I grew up in a fundamentalist homeschooling household where we weren’t allowed to listen to “secular music”. Classical was OK, and the Christian radio station was fine when it played softer stuff (and tolerated when it played “rockier” stuff), but other than that, nope. By the time I was 17 or 18 and had my own car I could turn on whatever radio station I wanted, but by that time the legalism was pretty well engrained in my young soul and my only comfortable dalliance with “secular music” was the old-time country music I played on the piano as part of the impromptu band at Rinky Tink’s ice cream shop during open mic nights.

If you’re my age (mid-40s), all that music you grew up hearing in the late 80s and early 90s? I know none of it. Michael Jackson may as well not exist for me. I was scandalized by my cousin’s U2 Achtung Baby poster, both because it was a “secular” rock band (joke’s on me: they’re probably the most Christian rock band of the last 40 years) and because it had the word “baby” on the poster, which undoubtedly referred to some girl they were interested in, and being interested in girls was wrong until you were old enough to get married.

I was a lonely 12-year-old, and 13-year-old, and heck was just without friends and pretty lonely for a lot of my teenage years. I was 12 years old and desperate enough for help that I called in to donate my own hard-earned funds to the Christian radio pledge drive when the reward premium was Charles Stanley’s book How to Handle Adversity. I anxiously waited for the book to show up, convinced it’d have answers for me. When it finally did, I read what the good reverend from Atlanta suggested: 1) Pray. (Check, been doing that lots.) 2) Lean on friends for support. Well… shit.

I still looked to music to soothe my soul, but the music I listened to as that angsty just-barely-a-teen was music that told me everything would be OK and you shouldn’t really feel sad because God. (Glad’s song Be Ye Glad and Steve Camp’s Love That Will Not Let Me Go come to mind.) There was eventually some CCM music that hinted at it being OK to be angsty - Michael W Smith sang Emily (“on the wire/balancing your dreams/hoping ends will meet their means/but you feel alone/uninspired/but does it help you to/know that I believe in you?”) and then later on a duet with Amy Grant on Somewhere, Somehow (“somehow far beyond today/I will find a way to find you”) - but I felt ashamed to listen to them and feel that way. (They’re still guilty pleasures.)

I signed up for Columbia House Music Club when I was 17 and somehow snuck in a Bryan Adams best of CD. I presume I only knew his name because his Everything I Do (I Do It For You) song was a big enough hit it got played at my (apparently not quite so fundamentalist but still fundy enough we sang Christianized lyrics to Friends in Low Places in chapel) summer camp. Adams’ songs rocked (which I loved) but shocked me and had me feeling bad about listening to them. OK, a song like Kids Wanna Rock was ok because it was just about restless kids. But Run To You was about… sex. We can’t be talking about that, now. Nope. Skip the track.

It took me well into my 20s to finally let myself listen more broadly to “secular” music, my fundamentalist self surprised to find that Bono was a Christian and U2 was singing amazing stuff, that Win Butler was wrestling with his own spiritual ghosts in his songs for Arcade Fire, that it was OK to just enjoy music that wasn’t written about God because it was good music. And in some ways it was fun to have so much music backlog to discover, since aside from Simon and Garfunkel I didn’t really know much of anything of pop music.

But it also means that, for a music guy, I’ve got these big gaps of music knowledge that I’m ashamed of. I try to soak in as much information as I can so I don’t appear to be uninformed, but that façade only lasts so long.

Part of me doesn’t really want to hit publish on this post, because eventually my Dad will read it, and he’ll apologize again. As he’s realized the past couple years how much damage that fundamentalism did to all of us he’s been really broken by it, and apologized over and over. I’ve forgiven him. I’m a dad, too, and have already had to apologize to my kids for the damage that kind of Christianity did to them before I came to my own realization. (I am glad, though, that they’ve grown up with Coldplay and Adele and Arcade Fire and then felt the freedom to find their own music regardless of what genre label it falls under. We’re slowly undoing that mess.) But aside from guilt and forgiveness, I am finding that to start to heal I have to acknowledge the pain of that teenage boy. It was real. It shaped who I am today in a ton of ways.

You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way

So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

Lyrics from Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

13-year-old Chris would’ve felt every word of this song. Would’ve felt less alone, knowing that other people experienced the same ache. But Chris didn’t get to listen to that song when he was 13. And Chris didn’t stop and really listen to this song until this morning. Which is why 46-year-old grown man Chris is sitting at his desk this morning in tears, listening to Fast Car on repeat.

A Tale of Two TV Ministers

I’ve been thinking tonight about two ministers who spent a lot of the 20th century on TV, and the difference in reactions from the public when they died.

Fred Rogers was a minister who saw his calling to children and spent his life sharing messages of love, acceptance, and inclusion. He didn’t invoke God’s name on his program, but God’s love oozed out of him on every episode. When he passed away his loss was universally mourned by millions who knew somehow what love looked like because they had experienced Mr. Rogers on TV.

Pat Robertson was a minister who spent his life on TV leveraging his faith to try to accumulate power. He ran for President once, and spent his final decades on TV proclaiming a judgmental God who sends catastrophes to punish America for the “sins” that fundamentalist Republicans hate. He blamed pagans, feminists, and gays for bringing on the 9/11 attacks, and America’s abortion policy for Hurricane Katrina. He died yesterday and his death has been loudly celebrated across social media. The damage he did to Christianity and the name of Jesus is incalculable.

While I’m glad that Robertson is done wreaking damage on this earth, I don’t want to celebrate his (or anyone’s) death. I believe God’s love extends to all, and that eventually all will accept it. Some will just have a lot more reshaping, reforming, and repenting to do as they come to understand the real fullness and richness of God’s love. Given the choice, emulate Fred Rogers, not Pat Robertson.

Billionaire Hoarders and “Charity”

I re-posted a meme to Facebook the other day which suggested that billionaires are “hoarders”, likening them to a “human dragon sleeping on their piles of rubies and gold”. Someone popped up to dispute this characterization, making the following assertions:

  1. “Billionaires are quite philanthropic. Sure, this is a general statement, but check it out.”
  2. “The reason billionaires are billionaires is that, generally, they work extraordinarily hard to invest their capital using wisdom while calculating risks.”

Now, there were other assertions and comments, but these two were enough to not pass my smell test. My immediate inclination was that (a) most billionaires aren’t particularly charitable, and (b) most of them have gotten that rich by running exploitive companies - either exploiting natural resources or human beings, or both.

Rather than just go with the smell test, though, I decided to do a first-level investigation and summarize what I found. To do this, I took the Top 10 off the current Forbes 400 list. These guys (and they’re all guys) are all household names, each worth $60B or more. (Yes, that’s billion with a B.) To put $60B in context, if you got $80,000 per day, every day, since Jesus was born, neglecting any inflation or earnings on that money, you would just have gotten to $60B this year. That’s a staggering amount of money.

For each one of these guys I am summarizing their current net worth, reported charitable giving, and how they made their fortune. Spoiler alert: it’s not a pretty picture. Let’s go.

#1: Elon Musk

2022 net worth: $167.6B

Charitable giving: in 2022 he donated $160M, the most ever! Fortune also reports he gave $5.7B to a foundation, but it’s under his control and hasn’t actually been disbursed anywhere yet. That $160M is less than 0.01% of his net worth. Even the $5.7B is only 3% of his net worth… seems unimpressive.

How he made his money: mostly from Tesla. How much his own work and skills contributed to the company’s growth is up for debate, but Tesla and Musk have been sued for running a toxic, discriminatory, abusive workplace on multiple occasions.

#2: Jeff Bezos

2022 net worth: $120B

Bezos has in theory pledged to give his money away, but reports say it’s unclear whether he is actually doing that. The biggest documented donation I saw reported was $100M to Dolly Parton’s foundation. Which, to be fair, is a noble cause, but $100M is only 0.08% of Bezos’ net worth.

How he made his money: Amazon, of course. You don’t have to search far to find multitudes of reports of Amazon’s abusive practices to their employees. Maybe not such a good guy, either.

#3: Bill Gates

2022 net worth: $106B

Credit where credit is due: Gates has already given more than $50B of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, and that Foundation is doing significant work around the world in important causes. Bravo, sir.

How he made his money: Microsoft. As in, he wrote the original MS-DOS, and just managed to hit the wave of computers in an unprecedented and unrepeatable way.

#4: Larry Ellison

2022 net worth: $101B

Ellison reportedly is struggling to figure out how to give his money away. So far his reported donations are all in the $100 - $200M range (0.1% - 0.2% of his net worth). (He apparently found it easier to spend $300M to buy an entire Hawaiian island.)

How he made his money: Oracle databases. And then a lot of big finance and investing.

#5: Warren Buffett

2022 net worth: $97B

Here’s the other bright light on this list. Lifetime Buffett has given away almost $50B, largely to the Gates Foundation. However, his wealth is growing “faster than he can give it away”.

How he made his money: investments. If there’s one guy on this list who meets the “a lot of hard work and wise investing” criteria that my interlocutor set out, Buffett is probably that guy.

#6: Larry Page

2022 net worth: $93B

It is reported that he has funded his foundation to $6B, but most of it is in donor-advised funds for later donation, and while the tax breaks have kicked in now, the money hasn’t actually gone to any good use yet. That same article is touting donations to actual charities in the $100k (yes, that’s a K) range, which is, oh, 0.0001% of his net worth. Color me unimpressed.

How did he make his money: he co-founded a little company called Google. So some of that I’m willing to attribute to just hitting the right tech at the right time, similar to Gates and Ellison. But Google’s money-making methods continue to get nastier every time you look - the incessant ads, the deep user tracking, the toxic YouTube algorithms that are happy to feed you fascist content if it’s what keeps you watching… not particularly honorable.

#7: Sergey Brin

2022 net worth: $89B

Brin has given maybe $1B over the past 10 years to his own foundation (which is beneficial for tax purposes), and of that billion, the biggest chunk, almost $200M has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. A noble cause, yes… but only donating 1% of his net worth over the past 10 years? Peanuts.

How he made his money: He’s the other half of Google. (See #6.)

#8: Steve Ballmer

Net worth: $83B

Ballmer’s foundation breathlessly announced a $217M donation in 2022, which is to say they are going to offer grants on the topic of climate change. That appears to be the biggest chunk Steve has donated anywhere. That’s 0.25% of his net worth, which I guess is a little more than Sergey Brin gave to the Fox Foundation, but still… it ain’t much.

How he made his money: Ballmer was in early following Bill Gates into Microsoft. If only he were so quick to follow in Gates’ footsteps when it comes to giving his money away.

#9: Michael Bloomberg

2022 net worth: $78B

Bloomberg also deserves some credit here. He has donated as much as $14.4 B lifetime (18% of his current net worth) to his personal foundation, and that foundation has actually dispersed significant funds, including $1.7B in 2022. He has also given nearly $3B in donations to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

How he made his money: he started in investing, and then jumped on the integration of computers and investing in the early 1980s. He branched out into other areas of financial market reporting, but then has also taken detours into politics, serving as the mayor of New York City from 2002 - 2013.

#10: Jim Walton

2022 net worth: $58B

In 2019 Walton made his first significant donation to charity - $1.2B to (naturally) the Walton Family Foundation. That Foundation has done some good stuff in Arkansas, so credit where credit is due there. But $1.2B on a net worth of $58B is still only 2% as a donation, which feels paltry.

How he made his money: he inherited it. (As did his siblings, who are #12 and #15 on the Forbes 400 list.) And how does Walmart continue to turn profits? Well, among other things, by mistreating their employees. Wages below the poverty level. Poor working conditions. Unlawful termination. Union busting. Maybe $1B for art and education in Arkansas can assuage your conscience? Jim can only hope so.

Let’s sum up

So, the Top 10. “Quite philanthropic”. “Work very hard” and made admirable business decisions. Really?

“Quite philanthropic” - I think we can safely put that label on Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg. Many of the others have made pledges that their money will be given away before or at their death, but that isn’t doing anybody any good now. So, 3 out of 10. Not great, Bob!

“Work very hard and made wise business decisions” - I mean, at some level if you want to lionize people playing the capitalism game to come out ahead, by definition these guys have all done that. But if you want to put some sort of moral filter on it, asking whether their gains are well-gotten or not, I think we could safely chalk up Musk, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Walton in the exploitive category. I can’t say I’m very impressed with Ballmer, either, but Microsoft isn’t ugly and predatory in quite the same way that Walmart, Amazon, and Google are.

You do you, Facebook friend, but to my eyes, it’s not a stretch to see these guys as dragons sleeping on piles of gold and gems while 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty.

A little more back-of-the-envelope math

Just for fun, let’s imagine the top income tax bracket from the 1950s (by all accounts, a wonderful time that a lot of people want to go back to) was in place for these guys. That bracket was 91%. And let’s just do the math on their current net worth. All up the wealth of the Top 10 here and it comes out to $994B. Take that times 91% and you come up with $904.5B which would be in the US Treasury. Now, we can quibble about how wisely the US Government spends its money… that’s for another time. But the US budget deficit last year was $1.4T. So, a tax on just the top 10 wealthiest men in the country would take care of more than two-thirds of the deficit. Yes, that’s just for one year. Adjustments still need to be made. But the wealth of these privileged few, even in the scope of the national economy, is, to quote a famous cartoon moose, “antihistamine money”: not to be sneezed at.

Ten-Year Review

Seeing as I’ve got 4 months before I need to do any international travel, and 10 months before my passport expires, it’s time to get it renewed. Whether I’m well-organized or just consistent in my laziness, when I got a new passport picture taken and received 2 copies, the extra copy went into my desk drawer right on top of my two previous passport pictures. Ten years ago I presented the first two for comparison. Today I add the third. When presented together they comprise a triptych of an aging man.

In the left-most photo I’m probably 26. I have hair (which is thinning on top, but you can’t see that!), no beard, and still a baby face. I’m still a year away from having children and looking like what a friend once described as an East German android.

The center photo has me at age 36. The hair is gone, the goatee (technically a Van Dyke, but who’s counting?) in place, casually dressed with what is undoubtedly a Cubs t-shirt under my jacket.

The right-hand side is me yesterday, age 46. I can see the age starting to set in. Head still shaved, beard full and a lot greyer, back to a polo shirt. I have a pic somewhere on my phone from a few years ago where I was messing around with one of those artificial aging apps. I’m now inclined to think it was fairly accurate, because I can see myself getting there. Also, I resemble my dad more than I often think I do.

Who knows what the next decade will bring?