When they had brought the desciples,
they had them stand before the council.
The high priest questioned them, saying,
“We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,
yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching
and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on
us.”
But Peter and the apostles answered,
“We must obey God rather than any human authority.
The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus,
whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.
God exalted Jesus at God’s right hand as Leader and
Savior
that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of
sins.
And we are witnesses to these things,
and so is the Holy Spirit
whom God has given to those who obey God.”
…
A beloved colleague of my father’s isn’t hired for a
promotion at the University for which she has worked longer than I have been
alive. She posts a, “heartbroken,” note on Facebook to which dozens of students
write letters to the administration demanding, “justice for Dr. E.” While she is
endeared to her students, the university, and in effect the hired candidate,
are villanized. What is absent from the one-sided debate is why she was not the
right candidate and someone else was. It’s not a question the university can
publicly answer, nor one she or the students seem willing to pose. I watch the
posts and wonder for what is she hoping, what good can come of this? It’s like
telling the Council they are not the chosen leaders, and demanding the apostles
to stop spreading the news. In fact, when people take up sides, and
conversation ceases, it is a sure sign issues are entrenched.
Similarly, Trump makes one of his remarks, this time about
punishing women who choose to have an abortion and my normally more measured
pastor friend writes an article for the Huffington Post linking Trump’s comment
to everything from gun violence, to lack of healthcare, and poverty. My friend
makes remarks in a battery of unconnected unquantified* sentences that read
like the disciple’s list of complaints to the Council. The disciples say,
essentially, “you aren’t following God, you have gruesomely killed Jesus, you
are not the correct leaders, you need forgiveness, you must obey our God. It’s
not the type of disarming approach that convinces or endears one side to the
other. It’s not going to help the Council understand Christ, nor does it do
anything but deepen the chasm between belief systems.
It seems to me that even though the apostles are beginning
to understand Jesus’ message, they are still struggling to put it into
practice. That while the apostles feel compelled to spread the news about a
humble Savior who offers forgiveness, they don’t emulate that humility, or
extend that forgiveness to the Council in a way that continues Jesus’ witness.
The disciples are engaged in a power play when Jesus would have gone to a
garden for prayer. The disciples are putting up a fight when Jesus would have
put up a parable. Jesus attempted to make people think about their position
from outside their position, in a way that offered an alternative
unreconcilable with their original views. And this worked and still works
today.
There is a great ThisAmericanLife radio podcast entitled,
The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind where they explore when people do
an about face on issues to which they once felt strongly opposed. Here it
begins,
555:
Transcript
ORIGINALLY AIRED 04.24.2015
Note: This American Life is produced for the ear
and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio,
which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are
generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human
transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio
before quoting in print.
© 2015 Ira Glass
Prologue.
Ira Glass
OK. Take a second right now and just think about this. When
it comes to the big hot button issues-- I mean climate change, and gun control,
and abortion rights, and school vouchers, and affirmative action, and
Obamacare-- OK. Do you know anybody who has changed their minds? Who firmly was
on one side of the issue, and then they read a story in The New York
Times or they heard something on Rush Limbaugh, and now
they are firmly on the other side? I'm just going to guess. Probably not,
right?
In fact, the opposite happens. There's this thing called the
backfire effect. It's been documented in all kinds of studies. It shows that
when we're confronted with evidence disapproving what we believe, generally we
just dig in and we believe it more. And the rare times that people do change,
it's slow. You don't just have an argument with your uncle over the invasion of
Iraq over dinner, and then at the end of dinner, one of you goes, OK, I no
longer believe what I did, you're right. People just don't flip like that,
which is why this video is so incredible.
Voter
Hello.
Richard Joludow
Hello, sir.
Ira Glass
OK. So there are two men standing in a driveway. There's a
canvasser with a clipboard. And he's talking to a California voter about gay marriage and it's
2013. And the voter leans against his truck for a lot of the conversation. He
tells the canvasser that on a scale of zero to 10, where 10 is definitely vote
for gay marriage and zero is definitely vote against, he's a five.
Voter
You know-- you know what bothers me is gays that are
flaming. Flaming are the ones that are just so damn goofy and all that.
Ira Glass
He sort of flips his wrist as he says this.
Voter
I worked with one for probably like five or 10 years. He was
my father's wife's brother. And I didn't even know he was gay. But he was just
really-- he had five sisters. And I just thought he was feminine. And finally
he came out and he said he was gay. When they act like that-- to me, I don't
care if they do it to other people-- but don't do it to me. Because I don't--
you know.
Ira Glass
At the same time, this guy says, he thinks it's only fair
that gay people get the benefits of marriage, and they can get on their
partner's insurance. And he knows other people who are gay that are perfectly
nice, even that flaming guy. Perfectly nice. They're just regular people, he
says. They talk for 18 minutes.
And the guy with the clipboard-- he's not a pollster. He's
been sent out specifically to change people's minds on this issue. To try to
flip them into voting for gay marriage. And so part of the conversation is just
about the issue itself, like the pros and cons of gay marriage. Does the voter
think it'll have a bad effect on children? What are his concerns about it? The
voter explains.
Voter
The religious thing would hold me back a little bit. Just
because.
Richard Joludow
OK.
Voter
I believe in God strongly. And I believe in his ways.
Ira Glass
But a lot of the conversation is just them talking in this
totally honest way about themselves, and their attitudes about homosexuality,
and the voter's experiences with homosexuals. The canvasser-- his name is
Richard Joludow-- is gay himself. Not flamboyant gay, by the way. Silver hair,
goatee, a contractor in the construction business. And here's just how real and
free-floating this conversation is. At one point, the voter feels comfortable
enough to ask him--
Voter
At what point did you realize you were gay? How does a child
realize they're gay?
Richard Joludow
You know, that's a hard-- I could think back to third grade.
And I had a crush on a boy in the class. And it wasn't sexual. I didn't know
what that was. But I can still remember kind of what he looks like. I'm pretty
sure I remember his name still. And I remember being heartbroken when he left
early in the first part of the semester there.
And some people think that being gay is a choice. I was
talking with a voter and was telling me he thought it was a choice. And I said
my choice was to accept being gay. And of course, I tried to be straight. And
that just wasn't working.
Voter
Well, yeah. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. [LAUGHS]
Ira Glass
And then at that point, the canvasser, Richard, very
skillfully brings them back to the topic at hand.
Richard Joludow
So your vote has a lot of influence on how my life goes. I'm
with somebody now that I'm hoping to get engaged or go and have a full-out
marriage. So your vote would be very important to-- it would affect my life.
Voter
Your life and a lot of other people, too.
Richard Joludow
That's correct, that's correct.
Voter
That's a lot to think about, too. Cause after meeting you,
you're a hell of a nice guy.
Richard Joludow
Thanks.
Ira Glass
Then Richard asked the voter for a second time, OK, on a
scale of zero to 10, what's the chance that he would vote for gay marriage? His
answer the first time was five. Now it's eight. Barely 14 minutes have passed.
Voter
You make a really good presentation.
Richard Joludow
Thank you, sir.
These conversations happened in 2008 all over California after
Proposition 8. “At the time, gay marriage was officially legal in California-- had been
legal for half a year. Then opponents of gay marriage gathered signatures, put
the issue on the ballot. Not the gay organizers were worried-- in fact,
anything but. Polls had them solidly ahead but they ended up loosing.”
The podcast goes on, Ira Glass speaking to Dave
Fleischer.
“He's a political operative that the Los Angeles LGBT
Center flew in to figure
out what in the world they were going to do after this defeat. It was his idea
to go out and do something that apparently is just never done.
Dave Fleischer
Let's go to the neighborhoods where we got crushed and talk
to the people who voted against us and ask them why they did that. And when I
suggested the idea, Ira, to be totally honest, I didn't know if those voters
would talk with us. I'd never done anything like this.”
And as you saw in the podcast it did work. People changed
their minds because they talked to someone who shared their personal story. The
podcast goes on to explain those these changes were lasting, and worked for a
number of issues when the canvasser had a personal story to share, be they gay,
or had an abortion, etc. for not only liberal ideas but also conservative ones.
But this process is slow, the podcast points out it is far easier to fire up
those who will already vote for you and far cheaper to publish a massive smear
campaign against other candidates. But I just don’t slanderous press, or even
debates is how Christ would try to convince any of us. What he did during the
Easter season was show up to his disciples, like Thomas, or like those on the
road to Emmaus. He made believing personal.
We like to think that the success of Jesus was and is
measured by the number of followers. What if instead we measured, how people
have been touched by Christ, the ways our life has been touched and changed
because of his message, his healing, his serving, his humility. It is a slow
process, one those took Jesus and ourselves going door to door, town to town,
hearing about needs, hearing the stories of people’s lives, and sharing our
own. I wonder how differently the apostles tell the story of Jesus when they
are outside talking to the people. I doubt it sounds anything like how they
speak to the council. Instead, I have feeling it sounds a lot more like the
canvasser and the voter than the politician or the publications we hear and
read. And so, I remind us, even with convictions as strong as the apostles,
that Jesus would have done it differently. May we likewise. Perhaps like Gary
Yeoumans said, meeting with people and sharing our stories. May we in this day,
when we want to pick sides, when we want to fight hard for what we believe
remember the power of a parable, remember the power of our own personal story
of Christ among us.
