Elizabeth Warren used to be a fifth-grade Sunday school teacher, and it’s the lessons in the Bible that guide her “every day.”
Yet despite Warren’s claims about “the importance of the lessons,” she apparently can’t remember where in the Bible those lessons actually come from.
My favorite Bible verse includes two lessons that guide me every day: There is value in every single human being, and every one of us is called to action. #WarrenTownHall pic.twitter.com/IIHB434nuN
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) March 19, 2019
Warren told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi for a CNN Town Hall Monday that she grew up Methodist, and described how her faith shapes her politics.
“I was a fifth-grade Sunday school teacher. .. And I raised my children in the Methodist church,” she said. “What it is for me is the importance of the lessons we learned when we remember our values, when we remember our faith.
“The story for me is Matthew 26,” Warren said.
Matthew 26 describes the plot against Jesus, when the Son of Man predicted his crucifixion and “the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest … and they schemed to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him,” according to the New International Version Bible.
The passage continues through the Apostle Peter disowning Jesus, fulfilling the Messiah’s prophecy.
But that’s not the verse Warren described. Instead, she laid out the scene depicted in Matthew 25.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,” according to the NIV Matthew 25. “He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”
Warren continued:
I’m sure some of you, a lot of you, know this story. This is the one when the shepherd is dividing the world into the sheep and the goats. And as we all know, the sheep are going to heaven, the goats, nah they’re not.
And the sheep ask him, why us? Why us, Lord? Why did you pick us, we look like those guys. And the shepherd, the Lord, answers back by saying I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me water, I was in prison and you visited me, naked and you clothed me. And as much as you have done it unto one of these the least of thy bretheren, you have done it unto me.
And what I hear in that is two things that guide me every day. The first is there is God, there is value, in every single human being. Every single human being. And the second is that we are called to action.
That passage is not about you had a good thought and held onto it. You sat back and thought about good things. It does not say you just didn’t hurt anybody and that’s good enough.
No, it says you saw something wrong, saw somebody who was thirsty, you saw somebody who was in prison, you saw their face. You saw somebody who was hungry and it moved you to act.
I believe we were called on to act.
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