Tag Archives: faith

On Pentecost.

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Art by Marni Maree

Sunday is Pentecost Sunday (note: some churches will celebrate next week based on their calendar). It’s a day the Church has marked for as long as there has been a Church. 

It remembers the followers of Jesus spilling out into public, empowered by the Spirit of God, proclaiming “the wonders of God.” It remembers people from different nations hearing these proclamations in their own tongue. It remembers the long-given promise that God is for all people, everywhere, regardless of gender, age, culture, status, or any other category humans divide around.

Pentecost is a foundational day and story in the life of the Church. It will be celebrated in Haiti and Uganda and China and Australia and Iran and every space in between, in every language and possible worship expression, in large cathedrals, small living rooms, and cold jail houses.

And Sunday large swaths of the North American Church will instead order their gathering around the praise of a nation. Because it’s also Memorial Day weekend.

Hear me: my contention is not that we shouldn’t honor those who have died in service to a country, it’s that too many branches of the family tree have gotten the stories out of order.

They will gather and pledge allegiance to flags and declare “God Bless America” while forgetting our allegiance is to the borderless Kingdom of God and God’s dream is that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Sunday is meant to be a celebration of what God did and does to draw all people together. Monday can be a day for honoring our fallen. Sunday should be the day we tell the story about a line-erasing God who empowers people to cross border and boundary and bias in order that all can belong. 

Maybe you’d argue we can do both at the same time, but from what I see in our current moment, we cannot. 

I watch as people who claim to follow Jesus cheer, champion, or dismiss cruelty and hardship against neighbors because they lack the right paperwork. As suspicion and disdain grows of anyone who doesn’t look, act, talk, vote, believe like they do. As people meant to spend their life in service to others grasp at every possible (and often vile) means to cling to privilege and power. And then fool themselves by baptizing it with prayer and a loud “Amen.”

I’m not anti-Memorial Day. Or anti-American. I’m anti-idolatry. I’m anti confusing the story of the nation with the story of our faith. I’m anti trading what is most true for a lesser truth.

I myself am often tempted to stay from the path. I need reminded what is most important. I need shaped into the person I’m meant to be rather than person I default to. I need religious formation and practice and expressions that stretch my attitudes and ethics to look more like Jesus. I need the Church to be the Church so I can be more faithful.

And by Church I absolutely mean the capital C, big and broad and messy and beautiful and ancient and new and too often getting it wrong people who have found life and meaning on the way of Jesus. I need us to remember who and Whose we are, long before any republic or president or treaty or bank statement or political platform or citizenship. 

This is the most true story. And we need to tell it. We need reminded. We need re-formed. We need the Spirit of God to once again push us out and beyond our comfort and complacency and culture to a world hungry for belonging and joy and peace and grace. 

We cannot settle for a patriotic Christianity when we’ve been called to a Pentecostal one.

There is a better way. And if we can be the Church we are called to be and be formed in the ways we are meant to, then it won’t matter what country we find ourselves in or what leaders have power: we will be better citizens and neighbors because we’ve been shaped by the God who calls people from “every tribe, tongue, and nation.”

So this weekend gather and remember the story of our untamable, shows-up-in-wind-and-fire God. Remember you belong to a story truer and richer than the one that started in 1776. Remember you belong to a people more real than even the ones you share DNA with and certainly more than those you share political views or legal status with. Remember that you are called to something wider and higher and deeper and more transformational and eternal.

May this weekend bring you into further alignment with the God who will not be possessed. May you find yourself stretched and pushed and reminded about the most true story. May your religious expressions form you into the image of Christ more than any other. And may you and all people everywhere know you are beloved, desired, and welcome at the local church, around the table, and in the world God dreams of. 

On Herod(s).

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Herod the Great

In the Gospel of Matthew, magi, or wisemen, travel to find one they call “the newborn king.” They show up at the palace, where you might expect to find such a person, and their words trouble Herod the Great. He already holds that particular title.

The sitting monarch says, “When you’ve found him, report back to me so that I too may go and worship him.”

Of course he intends no such thing. In fact, he will go on to command the slaughter of every Jewish male two and under in Bethlehem, just in case.

Which is a story as old as time – people using feigned devotion for their own ends. Herods ancient and modern who seek only their own enrichment and a tighter grip on power. Who will lie to your face and trample any and every one in their way. Who use religious lip service and symbols in hopes of placating the faithful. Who think sprinkling in “God bless America (or Judea or Rome or Babylon or Britain)” sanctifies their ill intent.

Herod was a liar. He still is. He still shows up in places of power: podiums and pulpits and profit centers in particular. He shows up when people need you to believe one story while they live something very different. He shows up in people who need you to not ask too many questions or peak behind too many curtains.

But Herod’s falsehoods are only as effective as we let them be. We can, like the magi, go a different way. We can refuse to settle for hollow platitudes. We can draw lines around our values and not trade them for trinkets and empty promises or access to power. We can refuse to comply or pretend or look the other way.

We can look instead at the body of evidence. At the values being lived out, not just the sound bites. We can insist that our senses must line up together. We can, and should, demand better of every person who has authority in our world.

And we can and should always reject Herod and his ways, wherever they might show up, pretend to care, or say all the right words while smiling their fake smiles. 

Heord’s false piety was meant to cover up the stench of death. It still is today. 

May we have the insight, courage, and audacity to know better.

The Cross On Wheels Religion

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PHOTO BY PATRICK T. FALLON/GETTY IMAGES

This photo is a perfect illustration of the civil religion that masquerades as Christianity in North America.

It uses Christian imagery and language.

It sings the songs and feels the feels. 

It makes converts to its cause.

It prays the prayers, it quotes the Bible. 

It draws crowds and calls it revival.

But it sacrifices little and makes it easier to follow Jesus by replacing his way with something much more palatable and practical. Like wheels on an instrument of torture and death. 

It will wear the cross as jewelry, but it cannot, will not, bear the burden of the cross in its totality.

The burden of loving enemies. Or neighbors, if they are too inconvenient.

It will seldom turn the other check. Likely never turn a sword into a plow and will, in fact, call you names for suggesting we do so.

It will not be critiqued and will call any pushback “persecution.”

It employs fear and scarcity to drive conformity.

It will not repent of bias and bigotry because it trades deep self-examination for shallow self-improvement.

It dismisses systemic change because it thrives in the system as is.

It will not tear down its idols because the idols all parrot the right words and promise power and privilege and position.

It has built itself in such a way that talking points and statements of belief matter more than flesh and blood humanity.

It offers wealth and upward mobility, 3 quick steps to breakthrough, and all the assurance that you’re one of the good guys.

And it confuses this nation (and the partisanship that comes with it) for the upside down, nationless Kingdom of God. 

The cross on wheels religion is a sham. Whether fully embraced or sprinkled in here and there, it distorts the Gospel and hinders the work of the Church. It has shown up time and again throughout history (and Scripture), but despite how often it invokes the name, it is a stranger to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. 

There is another way. A better way. It’s much less glamorous and the crowds are often smaller.

This way will require all of you. A change of mind and heart and allegiance. It will ask for more than a simple prayer or attendance at worship gatherings or social media posts like this one. It will ask you to lay down your life and embrace the stranger and insist that the last go first. It is not terribly pragmatic. 

But it is good. It is grace-filled and spacious and life giving. It is the way that follows after Jesus and bears fruit like kindness and gentleness and self-control. And joy and peace and love and patience. It is the way of mercy and justice and line erasing and deep, meaningful faithfulness in the face of all that has gone wrong.

There are many different ways to be a Christian in this world, but they don’t all look like Jesus of Nazareth. He is not a mascot or a means to an end. He isn’t a prop or commodity. He asks more than lip service and certainly more than faith interwoven with something as fallible as a nation state.

He is not seeking to hand us the American dream or whisk us away to some far-off afterlife. He is redeeming all creation. Making all things new. He invites us to stumble along the way with him as he repairs all that is broken in the us and the world. And as his cross – the one without the training wheels – testifies, there are no shortcuts to a better world.