Undelivered Mail and the Image of God

USPS Mailbox, from Wikimedia Commons

Imagine that I went through the papers on your desk, found an old grocery list, and claimed that it was “undelivered mail.”  

If you had never placed the note in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, and posted it in a mailbox, it just doesn’t fit the definition. It is not a piece of mail that could ever BE delivered. It is not “undelivered mail” because those words do not describe this scrap of paper.

This is the logical absurdity of calling a frozen embryo an “unborn child.” It was never prepped and surgically placed in a uterus, and therefore can never be “unborn.” It would be like calling a frozen human embryo “flightless” or “unelected” – it just isn’t in a position to be those things.

And although your grocery list may have information on it that could BECOME a letter, just the way an embryo has information in it that could BECOME a child, it is not a child. A child is a growing human person to whom we owe care so that she becomes an adult. But a frozen embryo, in order to become a child, not only requires being surgically placed into a uterus by trained professionals, but also requires the willing participation of a person with a uterus who can provide the consensual energy, labor, and care to generate that child. Any of those missing elements or participants — postal carriers and medical professionals, letter-authors and mothers, consent and a human community — mean that neither mail nor babies get delivered. Outside of a human mother and a human community, a blastocyst is not and has never been a child, and we do not owe it the opportunity or labor to become one.

Blastocyst, from Wikimedia Commons

It is not enough that the Alabama Supreme Court twists words, but it also twists scripture and uses biblical language to justify its decision. It makes an appeal to “the Image of God” (Imago Dei) a theological term which the opinion’s author clearly never bothered to research. If he had, he might know and reference how theologians have used that term through history. John Wesley, for example, in his sermon “The New Birth,” described how “image of God” could be interpreted as the natural image, the political image, or the moral image of God. Most theologians have talked about the image as a particular quality of reason or spirit.

It is likely that the biblical authors of Genesis meant “image of God” more literally. They were descendants of escaped Egyptian slaves who had been surrounded by images of gods. Of course, most of these gods just happened to look a lot like Pharaoh. Naturally, Moses and his people rejected celebrity idol-worship and the theology that propped up Egyptian slaveholders. Why bother making a statue of God when you can just look at your neighbor? It was a radical idea.

Reconstructed statues of kushit pharaohs discovered in Dukki-Gel. Wikimedia Commons

But Alabama, a former slave-holding state, prefers the theology of Egypt to the theology of both Moses and Jesus.  It hasn’t expanded Medicaid for its poorest citizens and has some of the highest maternal mortality in the developed world. Alabama gives lip service to high-minded phrases like “the image of God” while ignoring not only the suffering of our neighbors, but also ignoring scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The Alabama Supreme Court opinion is not only bad law, it is bad theology and bad ethics. In appropriating the biblical language of the Imago Dei and weaponizing it against women, the Alabama Supreme Court is doing what right-wing theocrats have done for thousands of years: turn the law into a joke and the sacred into shit.

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?

Eden: A Parable

Once upon a time, John and Richard were strolling through a garden planted by God. They saw hummingbirds sipping from flowers. Bees and butterflies zipped to and fro. They marveled at shrubs, mushrooms, amphibians, and the rich loam of the soil itself. They contemplated the many ways all the growing beings around them interacted with human life.

“Which of these growing things,” asked John, “should we make illegal?”

“The ones used for healing,” Richard replied.

Takiwasi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Report: Aide says Nixon’s war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies (CNN, March 24, 2016):

Steer Less, Anticipate More

On a small sailing dinghy, like the one I learned to sail on when I was a teenager, you learn to feel the wind. With the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, you learn to balance the force of the wind against the resistance of the water. Adjust either the sheet or the tiller, and you can feel the pressure difference in the other. Your arms tell you when they are balanced. 

This is one of those major differences between what you can know with your mind and what you can know in your body. If I have to describe how sailing works with words, I say this: ”Boats can move against the wind because of the lift generated by the shape of the sail. Even though the wind may be in your face, you are pulled forward by the pressure differential.” Maybe you grasp this concept easily, but for me, it didn’t really make sense until I felt both the sail and the tiller pulling my hands, and I understood that in order to point the boat in the right direction, I had to balance those forces. 

I remember when it clicked. It was exhilarating. I was doing old-school magic, riding the boundary of these two elements, water and air. 

Not so with a big boat. The forces are too huge for you to manage them with your own strength. You cannot control the sails with your bare hands. It requires winches, a crew, and language. The idea here is not to balance the forces in your body, but to set the sails and rudder so that the boat steers itself.  

That’s why our instructor kept telling us, “steer less, anticipate more.” If you are the pilot, you cannot turn the wheel as if you are turning a car. If you move the wheel, it may take several seconds before you notice a change in direction — especially if the boat is bobbing and bouncing over the waves. I was also learning a different kind of body knowledge: the feel of the boat under my feet. How the boat slid down a wave could predict which way the bow would point several seconds later. I didn’t need to correct every change. I was learning to distinguish signal from noise. 

It’s good to have an engine on a big boat. Here, Angela participates in a lesson about diesel engines.

Our instructor doing maintenance on the rigging.

“Steer less, anticipate more”seems like good life advice, too. And good advice for the church. 

The early church often talked about the church as a sailboat and the Holy Spirit, the wind or “breath of God,” as the force that pushed the church forward. But I think She also pulls us forward. The waves of time, culture, and circumstance offer resistance, but somehow balancing these forces gives us a direction. Too often we are trying to steer the boat, fighting the waves while our sails flap in the breeze. 

Part of my rationale for taking this trip was to learn from history, to anticipate more of what’s coming for our culture and for the church. And, for myself, to steer less. After we earned our sailing certificate, we planned to go to Germany, to see where the Reformation kicked off and where, during World War 2, the world faced deep theological questions about the justice of God. 

Our last evening in San Carlos

Prayer: Help me to steer less and anticipate more, trusting in your Breath and the friction of the world to move me in the right direction.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

The Lie of the “Third Way”

I can’t help think about Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “On Bullshit” whenever I encounter white male pastors talking about a “third way” or being “centrist.” Frankfurt makes the point that humbug (a form of bullshit) is not a claim about reality; it’s a claim about the speaker.

Frankfurt quotes Max Black’s definition of “humbug” — “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.” I suspect this describes many 3rd-way pastors these days.

I want to add that I’m not unsympathetic toward pastors who misrepresent themselves during this rise of white Christian Nationalism. I think there are a lot of pastors suffering from Moral Injury, a form of PTSD.

https://twitter.com/preston_shipp/status/1580171014792617986?fbclid=IwAR08DmQBC5S_-rM-ozoBzNONqu7wy5bTd3_W2kggk3QsEtc4dR46zYs-ztg

“Third Way” and “centrist” rhetoric may be a form of self-preservation. It says, “I’m not your target” to angry congregants. For many, speaking truthfully about the rise of WCN puts their families and their careers at risk. Far easier to talk about “polarization” and put the blame “on both sides.” But this silence comes at the cost of moral injury.

“Centrism,” in the USian church at this historical moment is a way of positioning my whitedudeself at the center of two imaginary and equally-obejctionable extremes. It reinforces the norm of binary USian “left-right” politics even as it pretends to offer an alternative. But it’s really just status-quo preaching.

(I have to note that the word “centrist” is very descriptive: it really does *center* white male power in the area of public theology and public policy. In this way it perpetuates material harm for others and moral injury for pastors.)

“I defy classification” is a lie that many church leaders tell themselves about themselves. They lament polarization, demonization, and enemyfying, and praise nuance and perspective-taking. All good. But when it comes to specific policies and questions of power… silence.

A preacher w/out this insight may even identify himself (and it’s almost always a “him”) with Christ, “crucified by both left and right,” as I’ve heard one preacher say, vicariously placing himself in the center not only of American politics, but the f’n cosmos.

3rd-way/centrism is “bullshit” because it’s a claim about yourself, not about reality. The last thing pastors want to do is talk about specific policies or theological claims, preferring to gesture toward the extremes and make apophatic statements about their own (& Jesus’s) identity (i.e. “Jesus is not a Democrat or a Republican.”)

Again, I know this is *moral injury* for many pastors. It’s a trap that leads to burnout and demoralization when leaders are crushed between institutional evangelical-capitalist expectations for church growth and a vocational responsibility for truth-telling.

We need to name this bullshit self-centering rhetoric not only for the sake of the people being harmed by these crises, and not only for the sake of the church, and not only for the planet, but for the sake of the pastors who are complicit in it.

Church leaders cannot navigate the crises of climate change, fascism, & disaster capitalism by making nice with wealthy donors whose interests are in perpetuating those things at the expense of everyone else on the planet. If Jesus takes no side here, he’s not merely useless. He’s doing harm.

Pastoral Letter for Mother’s Day, 2022

The following is a message I shared in our our church newsletter:

Mother’s Day was originally a day to promote women’s equality, peace, and an end to war. It has become commercialized and sentimentalized and often is a painful reminder to those who have had complicated relationships with mothers or motherhood.  And this year, Mother’s Day ends what has been an exhausting week in terms of news and religion. The revelation that the U.S. Supreme Court will allow states to force birth is the culmination of a decades-long war on civil rights by religious and political extremists.  As a pastor without a uterus, I feel my own voice should take a backseat to those who are more directly impacted, and yet I also have a responsibility to deploy mine for the good of my friends and family. You may have seen that some of my words from a Facebook post in 2018 went viral again. I want to set those words in context with my baptismal vow to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves” and my ordination vow to uphold the Discipline of the United Methodist Church.  Below are excerpts from the United Methodist Social Principles, which have this to say about abortion:  The beginning of life and the ending of life are the God-given boundaries of human existence. While individuals have always had some degree of control over when they would die, they now have the awesome power to determine when and even whether new individuals will be born. Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child. We recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures by certified medical providers. While they have their flaws (especially with regard to LGBTQIA persons), the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church generally reflect a well-reasoned majority theological and social position on current issues. The UMC has historically viewed abortion as a “tragic choice,” but emphasized that it is still a choice between a woman and her doctor: Governmental laws and regulations do not provide all the guidance required by the informed Christian conscience. Therefore, a decision concerning abortion should be made only after thoughtful and prayerful consideration by the parties involved, with medical, family, pastoral, and other appropriate counsel. The section on abortion also points out some of the best ways to reduce the frequency of abortion:  We mourn and are committed to promoting the diminishment of high abortion rates. The Church shall encourage ministries to reduce unintended pregnancies such as comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality education, advocacy in regard to contraception, and support of initiatives that enhance the quality of life for all women and girls around the globe. It is important to note that while both abortions and unintended pregnancies have been declining for years, many of the United States and Alabama legislators who are restricting abortion access are simultaneously pulling the rug out from under people who get pregnant. In Alabama, for example, we still have abstinence-only education. We have not expanded Medicaid. We are a “right-to-work” state, which means people who get pregnant do not have labor protections, nor do they have parental leave to take care of newborns.  All of these factors combine to make people’s lives harder, to make unintended pregnancy more likely, and to complicate pregnancy and delivery. These policies are at odds with the United Methodist Social Principles. They are also at odds with God’s vision of justice and shalom in the world.  I am continuously awed by the process of new life. I spend hours building birdhouses so that mama birds have a safe place to raise their young. I delight in this time of year, watching fluffy fledglings take their first timid hops out of a nest. I believe all life is sacred, and I long for a world where all of God’s family is aided to flourish. I am “pro-family” for the human world and the more-than-human world.  But I also recognize that evil is a force that warps the most holy things in the world, including parenthood and the Gospel. When our society weaponizes pregnancy against populations of poor people, indigenous people, and people of color, or when religious groups weaponize the language of love and care to oppress others, it is a deep betrayal of the Good News.  All of which has made the last week — and the last six years — exhausting for many of us who identify as Christians who seek liberation and healing for ALL people. On this Mother’s Day, I hope you will take care of yourself and your own mental health. Rest and self-care are radical acts of resistance in a system that demands exploitive labor, which claims ownership of our bodies, and which tries to appropriate our spiritual and emotional energy for its own agenda of conquest and colonialism. We say that we will “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” I hope you will join me in sacred rest, sacred lament, and revolutionary, worshipful, self-care.

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).

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?

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*(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.)

A Changing Spiritual Ecosystem

I do not think most people in the majority-white institutional church have any idea what is coming. Things are going to be radically different post-COVID, and not just because Trumpism has exposed white evangelicalism for the sham it is. Climate change is going to force a reckoning with the toxic theology of creation promoted by Christian colonizers and crusaders. The role of clergy is going to change because both economic reality and the mission of the church will make our jobs increasingly tenuous. New research into the nature of consciousness and religious experience is revealing the wisdom of non-Christian traditions that church leaders have shunned and condemned as heresy. As in the Great Reformation, people are claiming their own spiritual power and authority and the validity of their own experience outside of the church. The Southern Baptist church rejects critical race theory the way certain church leaders rejected the heliocentric model of the solar system, but the message is the same: white Christian men ain’t the center of the universe.

I felt a call to ordained ministry nearly 30 years ago, and answered it with the understanding that part of my role would be to reach folks the church wasn’t already reaching, to provide alternatives to the dominant and dominating theology of the South, to help people meet Jesus in community and in their neighbors in new settings. In many ways, the change that is coming has been one that I have been advocating for my whole life.

And now that it is here, I greet it with fear and trembling. I’m having to rethink my own ministry and how to keep doing the things I feel God calls me to do. I do believe that what is being born will be a better version of “church” than the capitalist suburban Americana we’ve been taught to expect. But the spiritual ecosystem is changing, and what will emerge is anyone’s guess.

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.