A Deplorable and an Elite...
A ONE Church Eastertide Devotional
ONE Church Devo friends, hello. I’m in the middle of three days at a brilliant Christian unity conference in Tulsa with the ONE America Movement. Right now I’m drinking from a firehose, but ou’ll hear about this when I’ve processed and synthesized. For now, I give you rerun of sorts — a previous brilliant unity conference experience that I chronicled two years ago after the Braver Angels summit in Gettysburg. It was one of the most powerful conversations I’ve ever heard, and here it is (again for some). Enjoy!
Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”
This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other brothers and sisters, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question.” (Acts 15.1-3)
Truck drivers and world-renowned geneticists don't very often grab a drink together to chat about science and politics. But at the Braver Angels Convention in Gettysburg, this is precisely what happened. The 75-minute on-stage conversation was titled, “A Deplorable and an Elite Walk into a Bar,” (click the title to view) and it was exquisite.
The topic was the U.S. Government's response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The “Deplorable” was Wilk Wilkinson, a family man and the owner of a small trucking company in Clearwater, Minnesota. The “Elite” was Dr. Francis Collins, a brilliant scientist who had been the presidentially-appointed head of the international Genome Project of the 1990s and then the Director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 through the mid-point of the pandemic in 2021.
The exchange was magnificent. In this summary, I will call the two interlocutors by their first names, because that's how they addressed each other. Wilk brought the voice of average, everyday people who lost work or jobs or money because of shutdowns. He talked about kids who lost ground on their education, families who had to scrimp and scramble just to make ends meet, and the loss of multi-generation family businesses; Francis brought the insight of a person who was in the room when major CDC and NIH decisions were being made. He let us in on the high stakes decisions he and his colleagues were called upon to make with no reliable road map or precedent.
Throughout the pandemic in the U.S. these two perspectives were heard often, but not in conversation with one another. Rather, the opposites fired live rhetorical ammo at one another from a distance, whether on social media or opposite-perspective news networks or other online fora. You surely recall (and may have experienced yourself) the vitriol, and how scathingly each side portrayed the other. You remember the tensions and battles between the masked and the unmasked, the vaxed and the unvaxed. You remember how church leaders wrung their hands about when to resume normal worship. Conversations like this one between Wilk and Francis simply did not occur.
On this Gettysburg stage, though, the Elite listened respectfully to the Deplorable, and the Deplorable listened respectfully to the Elite. They disagreed strongly on some interpretations of the facts, but each confessed to lacking knowledge that the other brought to the table. In fact, in a spectacular moment of honest humility, Dr. Collins portrayed the health experts (including himself) as somewhat myopic. in the segment below.
"Wilk, you taught me some really important things about how this kind of conversation played out in the real world. Living inside the beltway, feeling a sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House listening to people who had data that was incomplete, we weren't really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, thousands of miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard...If you're a public health person and trying to make a decision, you have a very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is ‘something that will save a life’...You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they may not recover from...That was really unfortunate. It was another mistake.”
The two then proceeded to a common-language discussion about the relative significance of extended life, on the one hand, and quality of life, on the other.
It's time to land this report on a biblical patch. This space is for daily devotionals, after all, and not for news reports or op ed pieces. I was tempted to choose a miracle story for our passage of the day, because the exchange between Wilk and Francis was exceedingly unlikely and defied the current “laws” of our 21st-century American version of human nature. Instead, though, I chose Acts 15, where people of opposite positions sat in a Jerusalem living room talking and listening to one another. I could have chosen the strange conversation between the learned Pharisee called Nicodemus and the country preacher called Jesus. (John 3) Or the strange exchange between the increasingly popular Jewish teacher called Jesus, and the lowly Canaanite woman whose daughter needed help. There are many others.
Friends, conversations like these are exceedingly unlikely, but Jesus and the early Christians had them, and you and I can have them. Then and now, such exchanges are not only unusual, and they are not only necessary. When they happen, I'm here to testify, they are beautiful — beautiful in the way that an Elite and a Deplorable walking into a bar is beautiful.
Your faithful opportunity on this wonder-ready Wednesday is either to listen to their brave and empathic conversation or to have one of your own. One way or the other, miraculous beauty will break into the world. So enjoy!
Prayer -- God, do such miracles among us, in Jesus. Amen.