New Mexico carved angel.
You said to love the lost
So I’m loving you now
You said to speak the truth
So I’m calling you out
Why don’t you live the words
That you put in my mouth
May love overcome and justice roll down
“A poignant, unexpected protest has also come from one Daniel Deitrich, an Indiana pastor who grew up in an evangelical community and farm town in Michigan, was “taught to take the words of Jesus seriously – Love God, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, fight against injustice…love, peace, kindness, gentleness,” and is “deeply saddened” by the loyalty of evangelicals to “a man who so clearly embodies the opposite of these values.” A longtime musician who started the South Bend City Church, where “spiritual exiles have found a home (and) you don’t have to check your brain at the door,” Deitrich argues “worship music should give us hope…not just praise and thank God, but help us lament, reflect, confess, celebrate, challenge and push us outside the walls of the church.”
“His recently released, now-viral “Hymn To The 81%” – referencing the 81% of Christian evangelicals who voted for Trump – is stirring and defiant, what one admirer calls “a cocktail of prophetic fire and Christ-like grace…both a love song to the church and a call to repentance.” Dietrich blasts those who have “weaponized religion..putting kids in cages/ripping mothers from their babies”; when he looks to them for moral guidance, “All I heard was silence/Or worse you justify it.” In lament and rebuke, Deitrich repeatedly calls on his elders to “come home.” His pained but fierce plaint: “You taught me better than this.””
— Abby Zimet, Just Desserts: Resistance By Wind, Cake, Shepherd, Tunnel and Hymn To The 81%
(Commoner Call photo by Mark L. Taylor, 2020. Open source and free for non-derivative use and link to www.rhecommonercall.org )