From Royal Screw-ups to Royalty

It doesn’t take much reflection for those moments of bad judgement to surface in the silence of our thoughts.  Times when we could have, should have done better.  That little “white lie” that wasn’t so little.  That excuse not based on reality.  Evil thoughts against one’s political foes.  Only takes a second.

My friend Dick related the delightful story of a pastor who decided to skip church and head for the golf links.

That Sunday morning he loaded up his bag of clubs and prepared to head out to the course.  He told his wife that he had to visit a parishioner who was in the hospital, and then told his assistant from the car that he wasn’t feeling well. He drove to a golf course in another city, so nobody would know him. He teed off on the first hole. A huge gust of wind caught his ball, carried it an extra hundred yards and dropped it right in the hole, for a 450-yard hole-in- one. An angel looked at God and said, “What’d you do that for?” God smiled and replied, “Who’s he going to tell?”

The Bozo No-No move of a royal screw-up pastor.  And who’s he gonna tell.

My friend Susan at All Saints told this story of a screw-up as a young mother.

Her son’s kindergarten was having a tea for the parents.  All about the classroom were brightly decorated bulletin boards.  One of which was labeled “Easter.” 

On it were the children’s paintings of their ideas of Easter.  There were bunny rabbits, eggs, flowers and such.  In the lower right corner was a painting with a grey blob and a black blob.  And her son’s name, Jamie.

The first words out of her mouth to her son in dismay were, “I thought you were supposed to make a painting about Easter.”  “But it is, Mom!”  (This was before Susan was much wiser as a grandmother, when she might have said, “Tell me about your painting.”)

Jamie persisted, “the grey is the stone that was rolled away.  The black is the empty tomb.  See!”

A minor screw-up, hopefully not inflicting lasting psychological damage.  All of us parents have walked into the same sort of blunder.

But some screw-ups can be deadly.  Truly royal screw-ups.

As global warming moves towards an increase of 3.75 degrees Celsius at the end of the century – as we’re getting close to making our “island home” uninhabitable, this is what I read.

The headline in the L.A. Times pronounced, “U.S. pays wind developers to quit.”  I read that we were paying a wind farm company, Golden State Wind, $885 million to pack up and go home.  That after similar payment of $1 billion to Total Energies to pack up and go back to France.[1]

My latest reading details the folly of such thinking.  In her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe[2], the author of The Sixth Extinction[3], Elizabeth Kolbert, warns us that Global Warming is not something awaiting us in the far-off future.  It is happening now.  With a vengeance.

While we blithely go about burning more fossil fuels, she narrates incident after incident of the effects of our profligacy NOW.

She tells the story of a rather cold destination where tourists can watch the iceberg gently flow down the fjord in Greenland.  At Hotel Arctic in the town of Ilulissat, four degrees north of the Arctic Circle, tourists gather to watch huge, awe-inspiring icebergs slowly drift past their windows.[4] 

Only now, the glacier off which they calve, Jakobshaven Isbrae, has retreated several miles and thinned out considerably.  The icebergs still flow past that hotel, but they are considerably reduced in size.

Just one sign of how we have royally screwed up our home.

When Jai and I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, old timers used to tell us of how about the first weeks of January we’d get two or three weeks of minus 10 degrees weather.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  In fact, there’s usually not enough snow in Anchorage to begin the Iditarod, the snow-sled race to Nome.  Not enough snow unless it’s trucked in.

Another royal screw-up.  Unless we repent and change course, a major royal screw-up.

Remember that an increase in temperature of almost 4 degrees Centigrade, due to arrive by the end of this century, much of the U.S. will be an uninhabitable wasteland, a permanent dust bowl.  The Amazon will be dried out and burnt out.  The same of much of Southern California.[5] 

Did I mention glyphosate, the key ingredient in cancer-causing Roundup weed spray?  We now spray it in huge amounts in our national forests to kill off the deciduous trees which might choke out the valuable conifers the timber industry favors – but much more highly flammable than those deciduous species.[6]

The author, Nate Halverson, describes walking through a burn zone in Lassan National Forest that’s completely bare.  Then he sees something moving.  It’s a dust devil, carrying some of the 266,000 tons of pure glyphosate sprayed in our national forests into the air to who-knows-where.[7]  Carrying those toxic carcinogens to your city and mine.  But we don’t pay attention to the World Health Organization anymore.  What’s a little  non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma among friends anyway?

And the studies purporting to declare Roundup safe?  They were written by so-called scientists paid by Monsanto, whose work was in numerous places edited and changed by Monsanto – yes, there is a trail of emails to this effect.[8]  The main author?  A pseudo scientist whose work had previously been discredited.

Super, super royal screw-up.

The other day, one of our table-mates at Pilgrim Place lunch, a gentle Quaker lady, on hearing what I had been reading, turned to Jai and asked, “How do you live with him?”

Here’s my take.  Following Christ is the willingness to bear my cross.  It is to look into the darkness of human sin and folly and acknowledge it for what it is:  evil.  Destructive to all and to the planet itself.

In our reading from 1 Peter, we are presented with an alternative.

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”

It is the Spirit that tugs on our hearts and minds, urging and enabling us to accept that invitation to Life.  To be as living stones built into the whole stature of Christ.

The author of 1 Peter sums up the invitation:

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

We royal screw-ups are indeed meant for royalty.  A royal priesthood, bringing to life that which was formerly dead and hopeless.  Bringing to life new possibilities, yes, mighty acts, that all might thrive.  This is what it means to play our part in the Jesus Movement.  It’s action flowing out of faith.

One of those places of hope and new possibilities in Appalachia is a small college, Berea College.  It is committed to two key goals:  Enabling its students to graduate with little or no student debt and walking with them throughout their college career to ensure that they do graduate.  The record for these two objectives is spectacular.

Their work is Spirit-inspired, Spirit-activated.  A Christian college that actually lives the gospel mandate.

Many of their students are from impoverished homes, often riven by violence and substance abuse.  Students with potential yet who never dreamed of going to college – that is until a recruiter from Berea College showed up on their campus and lit the fire of hope.

Here’s one story:

Jake Miller, in an inspiring piece, “From the Shadows to the Statehouse,” tells the gospel promise.[9]

It’s the story of Linsey Hogg.  She knows injustice, she was raised into it, and yet now she is Kentucky’s assistant attorney general.

Raised in an unstable situation in Rock Spring, Georgia, she bounced around from women’s shelters to friends’ couches to her grandmother’s house where her teen aunt attempted to raise her.  “It was a kid raising a kid,” she remembered.

In her home of domestic violence the message, spoken and unspoken, was that she would never amount to anything.  Though she had been placed in remedial math, a perseptive teacher saw that she should have been placed in advanced math.

She was good at math.  It was a calculus teacher and guidance counselor who paid out of their own pockets for Linsey to visit Berea College.

Linsey knew nothing about college and what it might have offered.  She did know that she revered teachers.  In her small village, they were people of promise.  A royal priesthood if you will.

But, having taken an ethics course, she became a philosophy major, though she had originally thought of healthcare because she and her family never had any healthcare.

She worked in the medical field, saving funds for her new vision — law school.  In a few years she was admitted to law school at the University of Kentucky.  What had distressed her was people who gamed the system.  She called the state director of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and asked how to get there.  It was surprisingly easy.  The director told her that no one seeks out the Medicaid Fraud Unit.

When asked what she had taken from Berea College, it wasn’t grit or determination.  It was humility.  “It is,” she recounted, “a kind of humility with tinges of pride.”

“Sometimes I tell people, ‘You know that poor Appalachian hillbilly, you’re talking about?  That’s me.’”

Like Linsey, in ways great and insignificant, we are called to royalty.  Despite the royal screw-ups that we have caused or endured.  After majoring in poolhall with a GPA of 1.3, it was a campus minister who called me to royalty.  Despite my dysfunctional family violence, despite being an academic royal screw-up, I was destined in God’s story for something greater than just being a royal ne’er-do-well.  Besides, I was never that great at the pool table.  Always behind the eight-ball.

Speaking of royal screw-ups, have you any idea how many A’s one needs to earn in order to pull such a grade point average up to something close to a 3.0?  I burned a lot of midnight oil.  Norm Self’s call to me was God’s invitation to be part of that royal priesthood.  To realize that I was a person of worth and had much to offer if I simply worked for it.

In humility each is called to the royal priesthood in Christ Jesus.  Each with a precious gift to offer:  maybe in the statehouse, or maybe simply at a neighbor’s bedside, or working with Miguel to bring in Tuesday’s harvest from the Garden of Hope.

The Gospel Promise and Hope of 1 Peter is summed up in a poem by the Jesuit brother Peter Byrne that my friend Jim Strathdee put to music. It’s called, “We are Simply Asked:”

We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world,
To be compassionate of all, including oneself.
Then in the time left over to repeat the ancient tale,
And go the way of God’s foolish ones.[10]

And in the time left over, put that ancient tale to good purpose – as a royal priesthood.  For the good of neighbor and our butterfly friends.  All to the Glory of God.  Oh, yes, and in that time enjoy the butterflies.  Amen.

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[1] Hayley Smith, “U.S. pays wind developers to quit,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2025.

[2] Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006).

[3] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

[4] Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes, 1.

[5] Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008).

[6] Nate Halverson, “The Toxic Forest,” Mother Jones, April, 2026.

[7] Op cit., 41.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Jake Miller, “From the Shadows to the Statehouse, Berea College Magazine, Winter, 2026, 6-7.

[10] Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked” as set to music by Jim Strathdee, “Light of the World,” Caliche Records, Ridgecrest, CA, 1982. Words copyright 1976 by Peter Byrne, S.J. Music by Jim Strathdee, copyright 1981. 

Build it and they will come.  A monarch butterfly visiting our milkweed — Hope for the butterflies and for the some-500 folks we nourish each and every week with healthy vegetables and fruit.  We’re now providing for three food banks and a preschool out of our garden.

May 3, 2026
5 Easter

  “From Royal Screw-ups to Royalty”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14