Woe to you, pastors and evangelicals, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. 

Woe to you, pastors and evangelicals, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. 

Woe to you blind guides! You give a tenth of your paycheck and follow social propriety, but you have neglected the more important matters of scripture- justice, mercy, and faithfulness. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

 

 

{Mother lies down as in a deep deep slumber and we all her children suck at the nipple for nourishment - but a great and mighty spirit of greed and lust has overtaken us, we can’t pull ourselves away, we can’t stop feeding. Mother, still sleeping now bleeding, we put our mouths to her cuts as if to bless with a  kiss, except we have developed refined taste- like ticks we feast on the host. Meanwhile, Mother sleeps...}

 

Woe to you, pastors and evangelicals, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 

Blind pastors! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Woe to you, pastors and evangelicals. You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. 

 

{In Wyoming I met the Great White Buffalo woman of the Lakota tribe at the base of Devil’s Tower National Monument. “The actual name is Matȟó Thípila,” she tells me, “Bear den, our most holy site.” She takes me to the heavens and we look down upon the earth. “Do you see the black hills?”. I do, they are shaped like a human heart in the middle of the continent. “They found gold and begun mining.” she explains. There are holes now, comparable to the size of the hills. “For their sin, enveloping blindness has struck the land. But look, you can see the signs- blood moon, an eclipse, Mother begins her stir and a great judgment is coming.” I look down and I am covered in blood, not my own but of many others. I fall down on my knees before her, “I am unclean! I am guilty! Woe is me!” Her hand touches the top of my head, “dip twice in the river under moonlight, and purify yourself.” That night I bathe in the river, the silver moon enlightening the world. A comet with a tail extending half the sky passes overhead. 

 

Pastors and evangelicals sit in Moses’ seat, so you must be careful to do everything they tell you, but do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. 

Everything they do is done for people to see. They love wearing new clothes, they love being invited out to gatherings, they love to be greeted with respect downtown and called ‘Pastor’ by others- but you are not to be called ‘Pastor’, for you have one Teacher, and you are all children. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

 

In the Vanderbilt Barnes & Noble bookstore I try to find something on Perennial Philosophy. A man comes up to me, “ these are scary times we live in,” I assume he says it because of my tote bag, which reads ‘Books Not Bombs”, bought before it needed to be said. I agree and he continues, “even in the 60s it wasn’t like this man, something is different, something is wrong. Charlottesville was the first, something else will happen by the end of 2017. In a year martial law will be called across the country.” He is holding a bible, “the cheapest one here (in Nashville) is twenty dollars.” He slips it under his shirt and walks out. I grab another book by Derrida and another by Sartre, and I walk out the door. 

 

And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of Jesus, we would not have taken part with them in the shedding of Jesus’ blood.

So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the messiah.

Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!