NPR + Jesus
Given the state of our politics these days…given our current political culture…given the state of the world…
NPR hosts are engaging in some verbal backbends these days. I hear it in the preface to their questions, when they are asking someone to tell the truth, or at the very least to actually answer the question that’s being asked.
I grew up on NPR, listened to it in both parent’s cars on the way to our daily lives. I would hum the All Things Considered song, hearing in my head the brass and piano that was as familiar to me as most hymns. As a child I grew bored during the interviews, especially during Marketplace, but would tune back in during the news reports at the top of each hour. I’m sure I asked my parents questions and that our shared listening prompted good conversations about the state of the world, the then-current political culture, the politics of those days, which were sordid and frustrating just like they are today.
Presidents lie. Congresspeople refuse to work together in meaningful ways. Americans presume the worst about each other.
Other news broadcasters might be drawing on similar euphemisms to describe the world, but like most Americans, I tend to get my news from a single source, so I don’t really know. I might go to websites like Fox or CNN on a day when it seems something big enough has happened that every news agency should be reporting it mostly the same way, and I want to know how my polarized fellow citizens are understanding the moment. Though I can stay there awhile to scan headlines, read a few stories, eventually I click away for the same reasons I refuse to watch their shows: they often start at fear and anger, as if these were natural states of being. And that I refuse.
I refuse to participate in a worldview that tells me I should be afraid of others because they live, look, pray, eat, believe, or act differently than what the very limited peephole of my own life has taught me is normal or good. If Fox panders in fear, CNN banks on my outrage. Both ask me to believe that others are terrible people.
I’m pretty sure Jesus would have called bullshit on presuming the worst about people. And if you’re anywhere in the spectrum from Jesus was kind of a cool dude to Jesus is my Lord and Savior, then perhaps you believe he was right about people: their inherent worth, that they aren’t the worst. But Lord, even Jesus didn’t always know this. He had to learn it too.
In Mark 7 he refuses a Syrophoenician woman’s request to cure her daughter. Why? I don’t know; what the very old and not-firsthand account records is that he talks about bread and dogs. To take a guess though: he’s xenophobic because xenophobia was as pervasive in the 1st century as it is in 21st. Fox and CNN are onto something when they start with stories about terrible people, but they do not feed our better angels by staying there. The Syrophoencian woman listened to Jesus’ bread/dog argument about why he could not or should not help her, and then she gave him a big NOPE, you’re better than that and that’s not how the world has to work. She asserts that she and her daughter are worthy of his care and protection, and when she tells Jesus this, he changes his mind.
In my parent’s home we still talk about NPR. Grandchildren now listen in as we swap news stories and compare our favorite shows. I’m currently in a love/hate relationship with 1A in part because it’s a platform that allows listeners to call in, and sometimes what they say ignores the evidence-based information just provided. And yet the host Joshua Johnson is patient and respectful to people whose political views make me scream. I’ll credit this to NPR: if you listen a lot, you’ll be asked to listen to others. And you’ll need to change your mind.
That’s not a lesson my churches were very good at delivering. I got the impression Jesus came out of the womb already being really good at all the things, certainly at loving people. But then in Mark apparently he met a woman he didn’t think he needed to love, and she pointed out what bullshit that was. And then he got his love right. Love that provided for a child’s health and well-being. Love that at other times fed people. Love that interrupted legal proceedings because the system was unjust. Love that disrupted economic systems that exploited people. Love that would sacrifice its own security for the sake of others.
Maybe my churches didn’t tell me often enough that, just like Jesus, I would need to be open to change, to be prepared to be very wrong about people and then to get it right. But they did teach me about the love part, I’ll give them that. That the world was made from and for love is one of my most deeply rooted beliefs, and it was in the cradle of my religion that I learned that.
I’m wondering now what that belief is worth? Unless it leads me to love anyone, probably not much.
And yet, and yet, and yet — love is in me enough to recoil when I sense its absence. I believe in that love enough to reject arguments that do not presume its reality. I don’t believe in much, y’all, (you can ask my fellow Divinity school students to confirm that) but sometime in the last year I decided to go all in on this being a Christian bit, and the only rational reason I’ve got is the love thing.
So Jesus-people: we’ve got to stop sucking at the love part. Stop pretending love isn’t a hallmark of the worldview we profess. Listen when people assert they are worthy of care, protection and LOVE. Change your mind, and then go make it right.