Tennessee Pastor calls on Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty to uphold the values of integrity and accountability during the Impeachment trial this week

“No matter who you vote for, most of us believe our elected leaders have a duty to uphold our democracy and govern in our interests. Any elected official who stokes violence and division and tells repeated lies to subvert our democracy is unfit to represent us. We deserve leaders who demonstrate the courage of real convictions and an allegiance to uphold our freedoms and our rights. Our Senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, must come together with their colleagues to complete the impeachment process, hold any elected leaders who have done us harm to account and address the challenges we face.

We are Pastors who represent a wide variety Christian faith denominations in the Great State of Tennessee. We call on each of our Senators, both Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, to uphold integrity and accountability. This accountability is not to your own self-interests, your political party, or your political “base.” We demand that you be accountable to the Constitution of the United States and to the vows each of you have taken. How can you do so when you refuse to speak out against representations of false witnesses like QANON? How can you do so even as you have taken the oath of jurors in the upcoming impeachment trial to be fair and impartial and have already stated that your mind is made up. 

We also call you to the integrity that is demanded of all who seek to be disciples of Christ. We are at a time when truth has been tattered, where trust is undermined at every turn, where the “what’s in it for me” has replaced the greater good. Christianity, something to which you all claim, demands virtue, honesty, compassion, acceptance, accountability, and service to all who are created in God’s image. James write in James 4:16-17,  “As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and does not do it, it is sin for them.”

This is how we move forward together. May you each  have the discernment to see the political games for the self-serving nonsense they are and replace them with true justice. so that we can be assured that our leaders govern in our name and deliver what our families need, from pandemic relief to vaccine distribution. May your hearts and eyes be opened to the opportunity that each of you have in representing not just the State of Tennessee, but the Great Kingdom of God in liberty and justice for all. “

-Reverend Dave Gerber
Hospice Chaplain
Brentwood, TN