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It’s an ever new story—the building of a great tower, quickly followed by a descent into babble. We citizens of the 21st millennium seem to be standing amid the bricks from our own Babel towers. It all began when Christians aligned themselves with Emperor Constantine and commenced an effort to build Christendom, to reach to the heavens by seamlessly joining Christian faith and earthly nations. Then came Western thought, and humans seeking to derive from disembodied intellect the universal truths to which the West then expected others to bow.

President Obama bared his soul before a cross section of Christian leaders at a White House Easter breakfast on April 6. He spoke publicly of his faith in redemption through Jesus in the most personal terms since becoming president.

Addressing his “brothers and sisters in Christ” among the nearly 90 pastors, bishops and community activists in attendance, Obama spoke of “our risen Savior” and the inspiration he takes from Christ’s resurrection.

At one time I volunteered at an annex to a church where we collected mail for the homeless, dispensed sandwiches and snacks, helped with health issues, job hunting and so on. Sometimes the work was heartbreaking: pregnant women seeking a cookie and juice for their famished toddlers; a formerly beautiful woman so filthy, reeking and insane that people backed away from her; an old, impoverished Asian couple who showed up every Thursday to get a grocery bag of food from us that could not possibly have been enough for a week.

An old insurance company term for natural disasters is “acts of God,” which unfortunately links the Holy One with everything awful and unforeseen that can befall humanity, as if God were not just capricious but wrathful and cruel. Jesus, of course, depicted his father in a completely different way, and in this passage from the Acts of the Apostles we see how Paul has learned from Christ how to discern rightly what is indebted to God and what is a counterfeit—an important lesson for all of us.