Who gets to BE Jesus?

It is important to exegete the text that hate groups give us, for both strategic and educational purposes. I’ve seen a lot of hot takes on the “he gets us” commercial from Christians on both the right and the left. On the left, it focuses mostly on the identity of the hate groups and the theological/philosophical problems with the money spent. On the right, it mostly focuses on reinforcing justifications for hating various social groups perceived as sinners. All of this draws attention to the campaign (which delights its sponsors to no end, I’m sure.)

Apart from the VOX article I linked above, I haven’t seen much thoughtful examination of the theology or missiology of the implicit claims of the advertisement itself, though. And at the risk of taking up more airspace for an advertisement funded by hate groups, I’d like to offer a power analysis of the images and what they tell us about the theology of those funding the ads.

Willie James Jennings argues in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, that white theology since the 1400’s has always had a theology of the “Great Chain of Being” where whiteness and maleness are closer to godliness. He shows us how this was explicit in early Spanish and Portuguese colonial and missionary activity, and how it has become implicit in the American church today.

The series of images in the ad employs codes or tropes that involve specific power dynamics along that Great Chain of Being. Generally, the people doing the washing, those with power, are those who are most obviously “Christian” and closer to God from the perspective of the cis-gender straight white funders: a policeman, an abortion clinic protester, a sober friend, a priest. In all the images, both characters have their shoes off, implying that each is washing the feet of the other. But in interrogating these images, I think it’s important to point out that the person who gets to “be” Jesus for the other in this snapshot is usually the person with more social power.

No trans people get to “be” Jesus in the images. No women get to be Jesus for a man. No black person gets to be Jesus for a white person. If there is a white man in the frame, that man always gets to be Jesus (except for image 11, which is notable because neither man has to be the servant of the other).

Below is a break down of the images, and a short description about what I perceive the power dynamic is in each one. I also include a reference to the codes or tropes being deployed; at least, this is how I read the ambiguous story in each image. I think it’s important to note that while age, class, racial, and political differences are highlighted in the vignettes, there are none where any power dynamics are actually overturned. This is especially clear with binary cis-gender dynamics: there are no men washing women’s feet, or women washing men’s feet. All the women wash women’s feet, and all the men wash men’s feet.

1) Washer: Young white man with bleach-blond hair.
Washee: Older white man.
Setting: Dining room with retro decor.
Background characters: A woman serves dinner, and a younger woman watches.
Implied codes/tropes: Perhaps this is reconciliation over a generational conflict, or represents an an inter-family problem. Women are bystanders. Men are in the foreground. Whether the young or old man has more social power here is a bit ambiguous.

2) Washer: A brown policeman, possibly or Latino or PAI ethnicity.
Washee: A young black man.
Setting: A gritty urban street.
Background characters: none
Implied codes/tropes: Probably referencing recent police violence against black people and Black Lives Matter. The policeman clearly has more power.

3) Washer: A blonde teenage white girl with the word “perfect” printed on her tank top.
Washee: Another teenage white girl with red hair.
Setting: A high school hallway
Background characters: Other students of possible Asian, Black, and Latino ethnicity.
Implied codes/tropes: These girls may be generic stand-ins for cliques at school, like popular kids and misfits, or cheerleaders and punks or goths. The blonde girl has more power.

4) Washer: An older white rancher or cowboy.
Washee: An older Native American man.
Setting: A desert campsite with a truck and a campfire in the background.
Background characters: none.
Implied codes/tropes: Historical conflict over colonization. “Cowboys and Indians.” The cowboy has more power.

5) Washer: A white woman woman in her 30’s or 40’s wearing a blue sweater.
Washee: A young woman in brown overalls with a tattoo on her leg.
Setting: A family planning clinic with a motel in the background.
Background characters: Abortion clinic protesters, signs lowered, one of whom appears to be watching the foreground characters.
Implied codes/tropes: A protester is likely washing the feet of an abortion clinic visitor, (although it’s possible that the reverse may be true). The protester has more power.

6) Washer: A red-haired woman, smiling and leaning in.
Washee: A woman with an anguished expression.
Setting: A messy kitchen with alcohol bottles on the floor.
Implied codes/tropes: Alcoholism and recovery. The sober friend has more power.

7) Washer: White man with a hard hat, possibly an oil field worker
Washee: Young woman, possibly an Asian or Native American environmental protester, with a “clean air now” sign nearby.
Setting: An oil field
Background characters: None.
Codes/tropes: Environmentalism, climate change, and protests over pipelines by indigenous people. The oil field worker has more power.

8) Washer: A white middle-aged woman.
Washee: A brown woman, possibly Latina, holding a baby.
Setting: In front of a bus in a suburban neighborhood.
Background characters: Adults and children who appear to be passengers on the bus.
Codes/tropes: Immigration, anchor babies, and suburban moms. The white woman holds more power.

9) Washer: A middle-aged woman, possibly white or Latina.
Washee: A young woman in a hijab.
Setting: The front yard of a house in a neighborhood.
Background characters: Two men, likely the husbands or partners of the women in the foreground.
Codes/tropes: Immigration, anti-Muslim prejudice, hijabs as an indicator of Muslim identity. The non-Muslim woman has more power.

10) Washer: A young black woman
Washee: A young woman, possibly white or Latina
Setting: A protest and counter-protest conflict, the subject of which is unclear, but vaguely something related to “cancel culture.” Signs include “Shut him up” and “Silence hate” and a “No censorship” symbol.
Background characters: Diverse young people, at least three with megaphones.
Codes/tropes: Cancel culture, mass protests. (As someone who has been to many protests, it always amuses me how little media portrayals of protests actually look like real-life protests). The power here is ambiguous, but it could be the woman with lighter skin.

11) Washer/Washee: This one is unique among the others, in that it’s two older men, one white and one black, sharing foot-washing space in a tub.
Setting: A house porch in a rural setting.
Background characters: A woman can be seen through the open window in what appears to be a kitchen. Another character is dimly visible behind the post.
Codes/tropes: Racial reconciliation. Again, this one is unique in its portrayal, but it reveals something important about the way the funders think about power. A black man washing a white man’s feet would too clearly replicate slavery. But a white man washing the black man’s feet would too clearly reveal who gets to be Jesus in this dynamic, directly exposing the White Christian Nationalism of the funders. This image may also be a reference to the famous Fred Rogers story.

12) Washer: A white male priest.
Washee: Possibly a young black gay man or nonbinary person, roller skates near by.
Setting: A beach.
Background characters: None.
Codes/tropes: Homophobia and church trauma. I’m sure the designers of the advertisement saved the most poignant and obvious for last, because one of the strategies of the campaign is to salvage the reputation of churches that have inflicted harm on LGBTQIA+ persons.

I want to contrast these images with the image below, which is from the pilot of the cult-hit television series Firefly. Although Joss Whedon, the creator of the series, is problematic in his depiction and treatment of women, I felt this scene from the show is more reflective of my own theology about Jesus. In it, an upper-class prostitute blesses a priest who is having a vocational crisis after falling in with the crew of the ship. Inara gets to “be Jesus” for Shepherd Book.

In my own theology, Jesus is always flipping the script. Outsiders often understand Jesus better than the insiders. Jesus tells his followers that the best place to find him is in prison, among the poor, or among the sick and disabled. Christians often think of themselves in the role of Jesus as “servant-leader,” washing the feet of people who are marginalized and thus demonstrating their Christ-like-ness. But Jesus identified himself as those people, not just a servant to them.

This is the sticking point for conservative evangelical theology in general, and White Christian Nationalism in particular — Jesus identifies himself with the people powerful Christians often reject. This makes the whole “washing feet” metaphor problematic, because it puts low-status people in the role of servants; yet they, and not the righteous religious people, are the ones with whom Jesus most closely identifies.

As a progressive pastor who has spent a lot of time undoing the damage that “bait-and-switch” evangelical megachurches have done to LGBTQIA+ persons and other Christians with more inclusive theology, I’m particularly sensitive to multi-million dollar ad campaigns funded by hate groups that intend to make evangelical Christianity more cuddly. It also rankles when Christians who profess to be moderates use spiritual bypassing to give this kind of messaging their approval.

The way we evaluate whether or not a message “gets” the Jesus who really gets us is this: Does it flip the script?

A Trinitarian Creed

I reject God the Father All-Mighty,
Author of paternalism and patriarchy,
Abusive Head of the Household who beats his children,
and sends finite creatures to infinite misery 
for their failure to discern abstract theological ideas. 

But I believe in the Holy Parent, both Mother and Father,
Who births and raises creation,
Who teaches not with violence, but by telling stories and parables,
Who stands by the door waiting for exiled children to return home,
And who loves the whole cosmos so much
That God is willing to empty God’s self of all but love
To walk among us.  

I reject Jesus Christ as Lord,
As feudal liege who reifies hierarchies,
As tyrant emperor or king,
As eternally subordinate or standing at the top of any chain of being,
As a shibboleth used to discriminate 
who is in or out, saved or damned.

But I believe in Jesus, as Christ, 
Anointed as traveling preacher, healer, and exorcist in Galilee and Jerusalem,
Who bid us love immigrants, neighbors, and enemies as ourselves;
Who miraculously fed crowds,
Who taught an economics of grace instead of greed,
Who proclaimed that a new way of being was at hand,
Who called Students to learn and teach the Way of Love;
And who identified with those whom our systems impoverish,
Whom our governments leave unhoused,
Whom our legislators imprison.

I believe this Love is more powerful than both death
and those who use death to magnify their power. 
I believe this Love is eternally resurrecting
anyone we curse with death and damnation
until we learn that damning is futile
and until we repent
and choose restoration over retribution. 

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
who calls and equips communities of grace to carry on Jesus’s work
regardless of how humans label themselves or the systems that define their social power,
Who reveals God through God’s own creation 
and sacred texts and teachings of many diverse traditions
to any who are willing to seek,
Who moves and animates all life with God’s own breath. 

I believe that God creates communities of peace and justice
Who transgress the boundaries created by religious and political leaders,
Who disrupt and transform all systems that colonize and exploit
Who tear down barriers between all beings and Being,
Who respect the mystery of existence by walking humbly, doing justice, and loving kindness. 

And although our planet’s climate may have passed a tipping point, 
I believe we have also reached a tipping point for humanity,
and that although it is not yet apparent, 
The Reign of God is already among us.

A Good Friday Meditation

So, here we are. Good Friday. Honestly, this is a day I’m no fan of Christianity.

First, I find that little is more annoying about this season than bougie white boy preachers in thousand-dollar sneakers talking about Jesus and “revolutionary love.” Church is full of folks who are no friends of the revolution. “Revolutionary?” They ain’t even interested in abolishing prisons or reducing militarized police budgets, much less “revolution.” Their message isn’t revolutionary. It’s marketing.  

Second, Rome shows you what it does to revolutionaries: it crucifies them. “Crucifixion wasn’t just a form of execution; it was advertising,” says Amy-Jill Levine. A cross was a billboard. Crucifixions were staged near roads, so passersby could see clearly who was in charge and what happens to “revolutionaries.” As Max Weber put it: the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Crucifixion displays the state’s monopoly of violence literally: by splaying human limbs.

According to Josephus, after the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem in 70 CE, soldiers crucified so many people that they ran out of wood. They cut down every tree for miles to line the road with crosses, like flags. Today if you visit the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed to “let this cup pass from me,” when the guide says, “Some of these trees are so old that Jesus could have prayed under one of them,” you know it’s just stuff they tell tourists. The orchard where Jesus prayed was razed so Rome could have wood on which to nail revolutionaries.

Third, white Protestant support for torture, measured in 2008, was upwards of sixty percent. Six in ten are just fine with torturing folks. Waterboarding. Whipping. Stripping people naked and humiliating them. All the stuff that happened to Jesus? They’d give the green light for it to happen to any Middle Eastern guy with long hair and a beard.

While I’m talking statistics and cutting trees, only 40% of white Protestants believe in human-made climate change. I’m not just picking on Evangelicals, among whom that statistic is only 28%. I’m talking about mainstream “liberal” Protestants. When Roman soldiers cut down all the trees to make crosses, most church folks would be cheering them on in the name of law, order, and domination of the natural world.

So today, when Christians cry crocodile tears while singing how they would “cling to the old rugged cross,” it leaves me feeling a bit cynical. They may be having a genuine spiritual experience when they close their eyes, raise their hands, and sway gently to a Christian rock anthem, but it bears no relevance to Golgotha or the places Jesus is being crucified right now. It rubs me the wrong way when religious people pretend to care about the most famous victim of state violence ever, but don’t give give two figs for Patrick Lyoya or Sandra Bland. When they would cling to crosses, but disparage tree-huggers.

On days like today, I resonate much more with those who have rejected religion altogether, especially if it’s because they could not reconcile the prepackaged answers with today’s most salient questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow the state to have this monopoly on violence? How did the spiritual power of Jesus of Nazareth get hijacked so thoroughly by Christendom? Where is the “Good News” in the destruction of this world and the oppressed people who love it?  

“Good” Friday. The adjective leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The revolutionary I love and follow is still being executed by the state, which has yet to repent of its role in manufacturing suffering. The state, in collusion with the church, will resurrect in his place an agent of white settler colonialism, one who blesses Rome and the priesthood, who tells battered spouses to stay with their abusers in the name of long-suffering love, who persecutes queer kids and tells gay Christians to remain celibate, that it’s “their cross to bear,” an agent who sanctions bullying, who clear cuts forests and pumps oil from the ground to build sprawling highways so that Christians can park their cars at suburban churches on Easter morning and sing praises to an authoritarian king.

Honestly, the only thing that keeps me Christian is that my faith says, “it is God on that cross.” The only thing that keeps me Christian is that I keep seeing Jesus as an actual revolutionary who cares about the suffering of people at the hands of state power, a Jesus turning over the money tables on Wall Street. Jesus keeps showing up on the steps of churches telling preachers that they are whitewashed tombs whose words are full of death and decay. Jesus keeps standing up for queer kids and defending people whose wombs are treated like the property of the state or their husbands. Jesus keeps calling for actual prisoners in real prisons to be set free, and for the people with clubs and swords to put them away because they only lead to self-destruction. Jesus keeps telling people to observe that the birds and flowers—and humans—don’t have to earn a place in God’s economy, that their existence and life is enough to bring glory to God. The powers that be keep trying to silence God’s anointed and he, she, they keep showing up with all their pronouns and ethnicities and genders and refusing to be quiet or disappear from public view.

When I ask, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” she—God in human flesh—looks me squarely in the eye, shows me the wounds in her hands and side and answers, as she always does, with a question: “Are you asking me?” Then she gestures at the world as if to invite me to take up a cross and follow.

Where else can I go? She has the words of life.

How We Got Here

Veil Nebula, by Ken Crawford. From Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes when I start to feel hopeless about the world, about climate change, weaponized ignorance, and interlocking systems of injustice and petty cruelty that create white supremacy, male supremacy, and toxic religion, I have a vision of what happened before I was born.

And I’m not saying I believe this is actually the way God or consciousness works, but I have this image of God giving me—giving all of us—a choice about whether or not to be born in this age, out of all the ages of history. I imagine the sales pitch: “Going into this world will be, in many ways, like running into a house on fire.”

“I’m not asking you to be a hero,” God says. “But to be a human. You will be part of a team. And the whole thing may collapse on you. And you’ll probably fail. Will you love this world? To pour out your life because you love it so? Because that’s what we do, you know. That’s what love does.”

I feel this vision when I get to be in communion with prison abolitionists and local farmers and deconstructing clergy and scientists and therapists and freedom fighters and activists and scholar-reformers. On good days, I feel like maybe we chose this, to be here, doing this work in this house on fire, because it was the time that needed us.

I’m not saying we chose this mess or chose to suffer — I think. But I think for humanity to reach maturity, some of us understand that we have to take responsibility for shit, even if it isn’t our shit.

And on good days when I catch this vision, I also realize that there is so much to love in this house on fire: my amazing family and friends, of course, but also animals and plants and music and beauty. And on good days I feel like the luckiest son of bitch in the world, and I’m glad you chose this time to live, too.

An Open Letter to Christians

“Dear Christian friends:

I want you to know that I spend a lot of time with people who are not Christian, and with Christians of many political stripes. Some are fundamentalists and some are eco-warriors. Some are pro-gay and some are anti-gay. Some are conservative black preachers and some are liberal white preachers. I have had meaningful conversations and life lessons from tree-hugging pro-choice social justice warriors and from end-times-believing hellfire-and-brimstone Trump voters.

We know that secular culture is hostile to Christianity and to the notion of One True God. Secular culture has many gods: Hollywood celebrities, New Age gurus, nature spirits, and so on. And because people believe and follow these gods, that’s why their morality is all over the place—why they change lovers like they change their socks, why they pursue pleasure first and reap the consequences later.

But look: Can you say you Christians are any different? Look at the sex scandals and the abuse that have rocked religious institutions. Why should anyone trust the church? Why should anyone listen to you? Did you read the headlines this summer of the ways Christian boarding schools collaborated with the government to kidnap, kill, and forcibly reprogram indigenous children? Why should anyone trust organized religion? It’s just as the Bible says: “God’s name is blasphemed because of the people who claim to be God’s people.” (see Ezekiel 36:20-22)

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Does my faith in Jesus Christ change my behavior in such a way that people want to know more about him? Or does it make them turn from organized religion in disgust?”

Here’s the thing: *These are not my words. They are Paul’s. If you follow the argument of the above paragraphs, you’ve just read through the structure of Paul’s letter to the Romans, 1:14-2:24. Go and read it. Also, stop using two verses out of context from this letter as justification for anti-gay attitudes. If you do, then YOU are the reason people don’t want to hear anything you have to say about God (Romans 2:24).

Catharsis and its Alternatives

“Catharsis” is the word we use for the expression and release of a strong emotion. The catharsis of confession, for example, leads Christians to experience their repressed guilt and the relief that comes with forgiveness. For many “big E” Evangelicals, the catharsis of conversion is the most important spiritual experience of their lives. They want to tell others about it so they can have the same experience.

The unfortunate thing is that this confessional catharsis becomes the benchmark experience for white evangelicalism, and if you are trying to tell someone Good News about Jesus and they aren’t carrying a load of repressed guilt, the rhetorical strategy becomes to make them feel like crap so they can accept Jesus and then feel better.

I think lots of us progressive Christians see the problem with this. Many Christian folks have written about it. This approach leads to threats of hell and harping on favorite individual sins while ignoring systemic and corporate sins. What I think progressive Christians tend to lose sight of, though, is that this catharsis is still a legitimate spiritual experience. It may be that not everyone needs to experience salvation in the same way, but confessional catharsis is still an important part of human spiritual experience of a loving God.

Evangelicals don’t see this as abusive or cruel — they see it as loving. There are other forms of catharsis — recognizing and repenting from white privilege, for example. Leaving behind shame that others have heaped on you and accepting a God who loves you as you are. Recognizing that your implicit core belief that you have to earn your worth through work or performance is a lie (that would be me).

And catharsis is not the only kind of salvific spiritual experience. Awe, wonder, irony, mystery, humor, grief, silence — all can be responses to or part of a saving encounter with God. My hope is that a “small e” evangelical Christianity that sees the good news as GOOD and recognizes all these forms of saving encounters would emerge from this 500-year theological rummage sale*.

In saying this, I want to emphasize that Evangelical Methodists do not neglect the “experience” part of the quadrilateral at all. In fact, I think they implicitly make it MUCH more important than tradition.

(*The 500-year rummage sale is a concept Phyllis Tickle borrowed and wrote in The Great Emergence.)

Will the Church Care About Climate Change?

A few years ago, I was chauffeuring my teenage son and his friend to an event. They were in the back, telling stories and laughing about how annoying and hilarious young siblings and little children are. I was eavesdropping from the driver’s seat, but couldn’t help sharing an anecdote or two about my memories of my son as a toddler. We laughed and I concluded with, “What they say is that when you’re a grandparent, you’ll be able to enjoy toddlers for awhile, then give them back to their parents before they get annoying.” My son and his friend were silent for a moment. Then she said quietly:

Our generation isn’t going to have grandkids.

There was no sadness or despair in her statement. She said it patiently, as though she were having to explain to the adult in the car that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. There was something else in her voice—pity maybe? She had accepted it, but she was aware that I was still under the delusion that our human species has a future.

She did not have to say any of these other things out loud. It was all in that one statement: Our generation isn’t going to have grandkids. Don’t you know we are living in the middle of an extinction event? That older generations lit the fuse, handed us the climate bomb, and waltzed off into the short story we call human history? That they got to name themselves the Greatest Generation, and Boomers, and other snappy terms for the ones that followed; but that the generations after ours will remain nameless?

I’ve been in ministry for twenty years. I answered the call to ministry because I was convinced God had put a passion in my heart to reach folks the church wasn’t already reaching, and that God wanted me to be part of a Reformation or an Awakening or a Great Emergence that was on the horizon. The vision wasn’t so grandiose (usually) to think that I would lead such a change, but that it was coming whether I participated or not; and wouldn’t it be better to be part of it? I’ve always been partial to the notion that some of the most dynamic, important, world-changing movements of the church have been on the periphery and the margins, or even outside of it, so that’s where I wanted to be, so I’ve often seen myself as a reformer and outsider. Yet her statement made me realize how entrenched and institution-bound my vision remained. Though addressing climate change has always been important to me, I couldn’t feel the existential threat that the next generation takes for granted.

I wondered: as a pastor, what do I have to offer my son’s friend? Certainly not Bill Hybel’s notion that “the local church is the hope of the world.” Not a parental figure’s patronizing cliché that everything will work out. Not a scientific assurance from Jeff Goldblum that “life finds a way.” And if I offer her Jesus, she’s likely to hear the name as institutional Republican Jesus who believes in “beautiful, clean coal,” puts immigrant children in cages, and builds oil pipelines through sovereign indigenous territory and over drinking water.

Image from https://kristindumez.com/resources/jesus-and-john-wayne-an-afterword/

I retain this conviction that “God so loved the world, the cosmos, that God gave God’s only child.” The salvage project God has been working on since the beginning was never about humans only, but the whole created order. God’s movement both in creation and redemption is about self-giving embodiment, sharing with us the divine breath and walking beside us both in human and more-than-human form.

Madonna and Child by Haitian artist Ismael Saincilus, from https://hilaryanngolden.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/tifanmkreyol-madonna-and-child-by-haitian/

I’ve also taken to heart Gus Speth’s prophetic words: “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

So when I heard the voice from the back seat say Our generation isn’t going to have grandkids, I heard God say to me, this is on you, buddy. Your job is spiritual and cultural transformation.

But this affirmation and valuing of creation is not the theology I see proclaimed and lived out in the institutional church. And I’m not just pointing the finger at right-wing pastors like John MacArthur who claim the earth is disposable. Instead, my home denomination is about to split over how people should be allowed to have orgasms. 81% of white evangelicals and over half of white mainline Protestants have demonstrated they have no problem with white supremacy and fascism. And although there are wonderful churches full of good people who help the poor and offer vacation Bible schools and tell wonderful heartwarming stories, most of them are too timid to acknowledge that a substantial portion of people under 20 don’t expect human civilization to continue.

A still from Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

(For the record, I think my young friend’s view of human collapse is overly pessimistic, but not because I expect Christians to suddenly start loving the world the way God does. I think God’s plan for human survival has more to do with Jeff Goldblum’s quote than Bill Hybel’s. The Good Lord was crafty enough to make human beings tenacious about survival and sexuality, so I suspect “life will find a way.”)

Yet the institutional church is still too much enamored with the success of white male celebrity megachurch preachers like Hybels, who resigned under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations, or Chris Hodges, who recently had to walk back his affiliation with white supremacists and fascists, to address a difficult and politically divisive problem like climate change. In the face of declining membership and participation even before the pandemic, our denominational leaders decided increasing worship attendance should be our “wildly important goal,” language we borrowed from the corporate consultants and CEOs who have helped engineer the destruction of our ecosystems.

It has become increasingly clear to me that the church can either pursue its dream of Great Awakening or Reform or Renewal for itself, or it can join God’s project of passionately loving the world and salvaging what we can. It cannot be about both. If we are going to be in a different relationship with our planet, we cannot do so without the help of non-Christians, of people well outside what we normally think of as “church.” If we are to love the world with the self-giving love of God, we will have to submit to learning from indigenous people who have been practicing reciprocity with the more-than-human world far longer than we white Christians been practicing our various forms of extractive capitalism.

Yes, it may be possible that in losing our institutional life we will save it. That sounds a bit like our gospel, after all. But whenever progressive Christians speak hopefully about this Great Ecological Awakening, they sound the most Asleep.

Confronting climate change means confronting — well, everything. White supremacy. Patriarchy. The way capitalism doesn’t actually pay for the real costs of energy and resource extraction, but only shifts the burden of paying for them onto the shoulders of the poor and of future generations. For the American church, these taboo topics are more sacred than God. We Christians don’t mind saying “YHWH” out loud, but these other things must be only whispered in church, never spoken from the pulpit.

I’m still following the call of God, but a young prophet spoke the Word of God to me from the back of my car: Will the church care about climate change? Will you love the world so much that you will give yourself for it?

Our generation isn’t going to have grandchildren. I pray that we will hear this young Jonah and repent. Maybe God will spare us after all?

---

*(I am grateful to Susan Bond for the giving me a new metaphor for understanding “salvation” as “salvage” in her book Trouble with Jesus.

*I am grateful to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass for such a wonderful description of reciprocity, and to David Abram (whose work I have not yet read) for the notion of the “more-than-human world.”

*I am grateful to Leah Schade for her research and practical work on Creation-Crisis Preaching.)

The Christmas Mistake

People make a frequent mistake about Christianity, and it’s most often perpetuated by Christians themselves. It’s this idea that the notion of God is self-evident, and that we somehow deduce the divinity of Christ because he checks off the boxes on some pre-determined set of prophecies and characteristics. Works miracles? Check. Born in Bethlehem? Check. Obviously, you *should* believe once we’ve *proved* it to you.

This is baloney.

The biblical authors were not hanging around to see who matched all the checkboxes and who they could declare “The Chosen One.” What happened was that people with a set of religious and political expectations met this character named Jesus, and he stunned them with the way he loved people and moved through the world. And they realized, or rather it was revealed to them, that the character of God *must* be like this dude, or the whole concept of God and religion (among other things) is trash.

(They were *not* completely unique in this experience — there was already plenty of precedent in Jewish tradition that was critical of religion and practice.)

So when I meet folks who believe that the whole concept of God and religion is trash, or who have been convinced that Jesus is made up, my perspective is that *they* *actually* *get* *it* *better* *than* *most* *Christians*. That God is already present and God’s kingdom already active is hardly a self-evident truth. It is not obvious that all the struggle we experience, both as individuals and society, is the labor pain of something new being born in our midst, and when you learn these truths they come upon you not as an insight you’ve worked for and earned, something you’ve gritted your teeth to believe in, but something revealed to you, hidden from the beginning of time.

The forces of domination and oppression in this world—which includes many forms and instances of Christianity—reject this revelation of the character and personality of God, and their goal is to distract, delay, deny, or destroy. (But that’s the Good Friday story.)

This Christmas story is about the incarnation and the image of God. We tell it as if it is frozen, like a snapshot in time. But it is an ongoing revelation, echoed in the birth of every child in the midst of human struggle and in camps that cage refugees, an unfolding that tells us as much about who and what God is *not* as about who and what God is. The Ground of Being, God, our Source and Mother and Father, the Great Mystery which defies definition — has a character, a “personality,” and it has broken through to us in the life of Jesus.

That, from this preacher’s perspective, is the story of Christmas.

(Originally posted on Facebook, December 2019).

Maintaining Your Peace in an Election Cycle

Image by Villy Fink Isaksen, from Wikimedia Commons

I do not want to dismiss the importance of voting and our political activity AT ALL. But I also want to offer some perspective in light of all the political, social, and climate upheaval that exists right now:

Our ability to make it through this next critical period depends on how we build or find alternatives to business-as-usual. Our power structures make it VERY difficult for us to “opt out” of an economy built on fossil fuels, extractive economies, and oppression of Black, indigenous, people of color, queer folks, disabled folks, immigrants, and religious minorities.

The political and social imagination of the people in power is very limited, but the political and social imagination of THE REST OF US is expansive, creative, and generative. We are literally a force of nature, which is always growing dandelions through sidewalks and making mold grow on Twinkies. “Life finds a way,” as Jeff Goldblum’s character says in Jurassic Park. You are an expression of life itself. Remember that.

The next two weeks is going to be full of imagination-limiting rhetoric and the words of narrow monied interests. Again, without diminishing the importance of voting or doing harm reduction for a society hell-bent on wrecking itself, please hear the invitation to find meaning outside of this binary bullshit. Crazy emperors and petty tyrants have been denying science and believing they can defy gravity or shout at the tide not to come in for millennia.

But the earth and her relentless move toward more life and greater diversity are not cowed by our myopic stupidity or our death-dealing policies. Jesus told us to look at the birds, who do not speculate on stock markets, and at the lilies, who do not follow social media for likes, fashion advice, or social trends. Our value and our meaning are not derived from the dominant culture’s ways of deciding “winners” and “losers.”

Our political and social imagination is very much the realm of what we call “spiritual,” regardless of whether you are a romantic or a materialist, religious or non. There are those who would limit your imagination. But we are the ones who shape culture through our spiritual lives—not the folks who are on our screens. We give these loonies so much power, y’all, because we give them our attention. The first step to removing their power over us is to turn our attention to other things.

Again, I’m not echoing the right-wing blame-the-media-for-our-divisions machine. I’m saying we give power to whatever we give our attention. And if we collectively give more attention to what is immediately around us, the things that we truly value that give life meaning, we can resist the self- and other-destructive forces of this world that do not have our interest—or the interest of our planet—at heart.

In order to make it through the next few weeks, focus on loving yourself. Loving the planet. Loving your people. Practice those things that you know bring more love and light into the world, like prayer and meditation, growing living things, being tender toward what is stretching toward the sun or snuggling down to hibernate for the winter.

Consider the bird that lingers at the feeder on its way south, and think of the mass human migration that is already taking place. How much longer until climate change forces us to move? What can we learn from the birds?

We need the wisdom of the birds and the flowers. Letting go, acting without attachment to the results of our actions, may be the greatest political power we have. Focus on what’s most important and under your control. Don’t sweat the rest of it.

Undeserved

I know the news is terrible, and our political system is garbage, and the climate is changing, and our leaders are inept,

…but my GOD, it is a lovely cool morning. The last straggling hummingbird is drinking from the feeder. He just checked in by my ear to see what I was writing. (Actually, he didn’t care. He was just being polite).

I’d say we don’t deserve such beauty, but that’s kind of the point of it, right? “Deserving” is such a long con. The world is here to remind us of the truth: absolutely none of this beauty and terror is about deserving. Every last bit of it is a gift.