Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm, um, Zach Weirock, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, why do monsters inspire us? This is prompted by the New York Times coverage from recently of Cesar Chavez, a civil rights icon, especially in the migrant workers, uh, area, who is now accused of abusing girls for years. And, you know, this is gonna feel like you've heard this story before because you have. Um, multiple women have recently come forward alleging that Cesar Chavez, uh, sexually abused them when they were minors for a long period of time, basically the entire decade of the 70s. Now, uh, some of these girls noting that abuse be when they were as young as 12 or 13 years old. Uh, these women now, uh, are, of course, uh, older and in some prominent positions, including, uh, recently one person coming forward who helped found Chavez's United Field Workers union. So someone who played a prominent role in his organization, saying, hey, from the time I was a young child, he had been assaulting me. The New York Times corroborated these claims, by the way, with over 60 interviews, internal documents, personal letters, and union records. This is now resulting in what, again, has become a familiar refrain of Chavez being wiped from history books, statues being taken down, celebrations being canceled. As we are realizing yet another person that at least some people consider heroic is turning out not to have been a hero, but a monster. In fact, I think it's fair to ask if Chavez ever really cared about migrant workers or if he saw them as easy targets for his sexual appetites. Uh, so here's the question I want to ask, uh, an entire generation of leaders, really. I mean, I know that's an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like, right? An entire generation of leaders has now proven to have been not just not who we thought they were, but in some ways, the complete opposite of who we thought they were. And by the way, this is not just in politics. It's not just left or right. It's in the church that, as well as a generation of pastors and evangelists and writers and, uh, have now proven to be living, uh, lives that are completely and diametrically opposed to the message we thought they not only taught, but embodied and represented. How are we to think about that? Well, you know, the Bible does a pretty good job, honestly, of demythologizing its own heroes. Uh, you know, a lot of people in the Bible who accomplish great things often have pretty dark things going on in their life. And I don't say that to legitimize. That's a really sick way of reading that. Like saying, for example, well, King David had an affair and even murdered basically the husband of the woman he wanted and then married her. And then, therefore that means that other people who have done similar things can still be used by God. That is not at all a good reading of the Bible. As though God wanted David to have an affair because in generations moving forward, it would show what he could do with people with poor sexual histories. That is a crazy concept. Now, the Bible makes clear that David should have been obedient. In fact, the Bible often executes incredible judgment on its leaders who end up being corrupt. Read about David and Absalom. That's three never seems to come up. The bill comes due for the biblical heroes and the things that they do. But the reason the Bible is demythologizing its heroes is because it's reminding us time and time again there is only one hero. The rest of us are all reforming monsters. That hero is Jesus Christ. In Jeremiah 17, Jeremiah says this Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh. What Jeremiah is saying, by the way, in the same chapter, he will say the heart is desperately sick, right? I mean, he's making the point that if you put your confidence in a human being, they are going to crush you one way or the other. They're going to hurt your feelings when they're not caring enough. They're, uh, going to let you down when they didn't have enough integrity. And that's not an excuse. This is not an episode about not holding leaders to a higher standard. Leaders should be held to a higher standard. And leaders who don't embody the message they preach shouldn't be followed at all. But when they fall, and they will fall in every generation, especially in an era where we are looking to uncover every hidden thing via social media and the Internet, leaders will fall. But when they fall, for Christians, it should be a reminder that, hey, the ideas they were sharing and teaching might have been right and true. But they are mere flesh. They are a sinner. Their fall in some way was inevitable in one way or the other, because they are sinful human beings. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, the one leader who on his time on earth never fell, never let us down. The one who has ascended into heaven, seated at the right hand of God, and whose kingdom is right and true and good all the time. So as these leaders fall, let it be a reminder to you to not put your confidence and your hope in a man or a woman, a political leader or a church leader, and instead get your confidence from the finished work of Jesus Christ, the One who never lies, who never lacks integrity, and who is never not worth following. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. 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