This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Since most of you will be hearing this either on Ash Wednesday or sometime near the start of Lent, let’s talk about one of the most common myths surrounding this day. The myth is this: Ash Wednesday and Lent are about God wanting you to feel bad about yourself.

I want to speak personally for a moment. Growing up in an evangelical context, I often felt like I never quite measured up. No matter how sincere my faith was, no matter how hard I tried, there was always this quiet sense that I was falling short—that real Christians were somehow stronger, purer, more certain than I was. Faith sometimes felt less like grace and more like a test I kept failing.

And yet, strangely, when I encountered The Episcopal Church, Ash Wednesday became the day I first began to feel like I belonged.

Because on Ash Wednesday, nobody is pretending. Nobody is polished. Nobody is performing spiritual success. We all come forward the same way—marked with ashes, named as dust, honest about our limits. Beat up, broken, and bedraggled… and still here. Still loved. Still called. Still held in grace.

It was in the Season of Lent that I think I first began to understand what Brennan Manning called the Ragamuffin Gospel—the stunning truth that God’s love is not for the shiny and successful, but for ragamuffins: the bedraggled, the inconsistent, the ones who know they don’t have it all together.

Manning wrote that “God loves you as you are, not as you should be, because none of us are as we should be.” That is the heart of Ash Wednesday. The ashes are not God saying, You are a failure. The ashes are God saying, You are human—and I am not done loving you yet

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And if you grew up, like I did, with Rich Mullins somewhere in the background of your faith, you may remember how often he circled this same mystery. Mullins once said he wasn’t a good Christian—just a beggar showing other beggars where to find bread. That’s Ash Wednesday. Not the gathering of the spiritually impressive, but the gathering of beggars who know they need grace.

In Scripture, ashes are never about worthlessness. They are about turning—repentance, reorientation, coming home. When people put on ashes in the Bible, they were not declaring, “I am nothing.” They were saying, “I want to live in what is real again. I want to return to God.” Ashes are not the mark of failure. They are the mark of hope—the sign that transformation is still possible.

And notice this: everyone comes forward. The faithful and the doubting. The strong and the struggling. The certain and the searching. Ash Wednesday and Lent do not divide the worthy from the unworthy. They reveals something we all share—we are dust, we are fragile, we are unfinished… and we are loved anyway.

Because “you are dust” is not the end of the sentence. In Genesis, God forms humanity from dust and breathes divine life into it. Dust, in the Christian imagination, is not trash. It is sacred material touched by God. To remember that we are dust is also to remember that we are beloved—created, sustained, and redeemed not by our performance, but by grace..

So if you have ever felt like you didn’t measure up—spiritually, morally, or personally—Ash Wednesday and Lent speak a different word. You do not have to pretend. You do not have to perform. You do not have to be impressive to belong. God meets us right here—in the ashes, in the honesty, in the ragamuffin truth of being human.

And strangely, that is where freedom begins.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

One of the most common myths about Christianity is that conversion is always sudden, dramatic, and once-and-for-all. Many people picture the blinding light, the voice from heaven, the instant turnaround of Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus. It’s a powerful story, and for many Christians—myself included growing up in an evangelical context—it becomes the model of what “real” conversion is supposed to look like. If you didn’t have a lightning-bolt moment, you might wonder whether your faith story somehow counts less.

But the deeper truth of the Christian tradition is far richer and far more human. Yes, some people do experience dramatic, life-changing moments that feel like a Damascus Road. But most of us are converted not once, but many times. Conversion, in the Christian sense, is not merely a single event—it is a lifelong process of being reshaped by God’s love  .

Consider St. Peter. His story is not one of a single, decisive turning point, but of repeated conversions. First, he leaves his nets and follows Jesus. Then, in fear, he denies Jesus three times. Later, he is restored and entrusted with the care of the flock, as Jesus tells him: “Feed my sheep.” But even that is not the end of his transformation. In the Book of Acts, Peter must undergo another conversion when he realizes, through the vision of the sheet filled with unclean animals and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that Gentiles are fully welcomed into God’s people without preconditions. Everything in his religious upbringing, everything he thought Scripture said, had taught him otherwise, yet the Spirit made the old certainty impossible to hold.

And still, Peter’s story continues. In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, we hear that Peter later stopped eating with Gentile believers out of fear of criticism from more traditional Jewish Christians. Paul confronted him publicly. Even an apostle, even a leader of the Church, was still learning, still growing, still being converted.

An ancient Christian tradition tells us that near the end of his life, during the persecution under Nero, Peter fled Rome in fear. On the road, he encountered the risen Christ and asked, “Lord, where are you going?”—Domine, quo vadis? Christ replied, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” In that moment, Peter experienced yet another conversion. He turned around, returned to the city, and faced martyrdom with courage. Even at the end, Peter was still becoming who God called him to be.

This is the pattern many of us recognize in our own lives—not a single, perfect turning, but a journey marked by growth, failure, repentance, and renewal. The Benedictine tradition has a name for this: conversatio morum, often translated as “conversion of life.” It means an ongoing transformation, a daily turning toward God, a willingness to keep being changed.

And that requires humility. It requires the courage to admit we might not yet fully understand God, Scripture, or even ourselves. It requires openness to discover that what we once thought certain may need to grow, deepen, or even be re-imagined in light of the Holy Spirit’s work. Above all, it requires attentiveness—to notice where God is moving in our lives, where love is calling us forward, where grace is inviting us to rise again after we fall.

So if your faith has not been one dramatic moment but a series of small awakenings, setbacks, and new beginnings, take heart. You are not failing at Christianity—you are living it. The Christian life is not about arriving once and for all; it is about continuing to be converted, again and again, into the likeness of Christ through God’s love.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Earlier this week I was watching the Grammys, and one of the moments that really stayed with me was the memorial tribute honoring Ozzy Osbourne and his work with Black Sabbath. I know that might surprise some of you—either because I’m a Christian priest, or perhaps because you think I’m too young for his music (which, honestly, would be very kind of you to say). But that moment got me thinking about a myth I had to unlearn when I was younger: the fear I was taught to have of certain kinds of rock and roll.

When I was growing up, especially in evangelical Christian circles, there was a deep anxiety about Satanism lurking in popular culture. In the late Cold War era, with rapid social change, declining trust in institutions, and genuine moral panic about drugs, violence, and youth culture, many Christians were told that the safest response was suspicion. Music became a convenient scapegoat. Bands like KISS or Black Sabbath weren’t just loud or strange; they were portrayed as spiritually dangerous, gateways to corruption, or even tools of the devil.

But here’s the myth: that heavy metal, especially early metal, was primarily about glorifying evil. In reality, much of it was doing exactly the opposite. Black Sabbath’s dark imagery wasn’t an endorsement of violence or Satanism; it was a critique of evil. Their sound reflected the industrial grit, economic anxiety, and moral exhaustion of postwar Britain. They were naming the darkness of the world, not celebrating it. And that’s a deeply biblical move.

Take the song highlighted in the tribute, War Pigs. Written during the Vietnam War, the song is a blistering condemnation of political leaders who send the poor and powerless to die while they themselves remain safe. “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”—that’s not praise. That’s accusation. The song imagines those responsible for war eventually facing judgment for their actions. When it was released in 1970, it became an anthem not just of rock and roll, but of the broader anti-war movement, giving voice to moral outrage many people felt but struggled to articulate.

That’s prophecy. And prophecy doesn’t always come wrapped in polite language or religious packaging.

One of the central Christian convictions I hold is that all truth is God’s truth, no matter where it comes from. Scripture itself is full of unlikely prophets: shepherds, foreigners, women whose voices were ignored, even a talking donkey. God has never limited truth-telling to officially sanctioned religious spaces. Music often takes on that prophetic role. You can hear it in folk artists like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, in soul and gospel-infused protest songs by Nina Simone, in hip-hop, and yes, even in heavy metal. You can hear it today in artists like Jesse Welles, a folk troubadour who’s been compared to the great social commentators of the past; in his song United Health he criticizes the commodification of care with lines like, “There ain’t no you in United Health, there ain’t no me in the company, there ain’t no us in the private trust.” In Jesse’s music, just like the music of so many who came before him, artists in sist that music can and should challenge the powerful.

So here’s the myth to bust: that God only speaks through “safe” or explicitly religious art. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that God’s Spirit has always been more adventurous than that. Sometimes the clearest moral vision comes from the margins, amplified through distorted guitars and uncomfortable truths.

Rest in power, Ozzy, and rise in glory.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

One of the quiet myths I hear all the time—especially right now—is this: “If I’m exhausted by the news, my faith must be weak.” If you’re feeling that way, let me say this as clearly as I can: that myth is false. And believing it does real spiritual damage.

Exhaustion is not a failure of faith. In fact, exhaustion is often a sign that your heart is still open—that you are still paying attention in a world that gives us endless reasons to shut down, harden up, or go numb. The truly dangerous spiritual posture isn’t weariness; it’s indifference. 

The mystics of the church have known this for centuries—the pain and ache you feel in your heart is not because you are losing your connection with God. Rather, it is usually the Holy Spirit moving within you, pricking your heart, cultivating tenderness, compassion, and an impetus to action. 

The Bible is also remarkably honest about this. The prophet Jeremiah—sometimes called the “weeping prophet”—doesn’t offer tidy spiritual slogans. He cries out. He accuses. He says, in effect, “God, this is too much, and I don’t understand why you’re letting it happen.” That’s not weak faith. That’s covenantal faith—the kind that trusts God enough to tell the truth.

And of course, we see this most clearly in Jesus himself. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus laments over Jerusalem. Jesus prays in Gethsemane with such anguish that the gospel writers struggle to put it into words. At no point does Jesus treat grief, fear, or exhaustion as a spiritual defect. He treats them as part of loving a broken world without turning away from it.

Christian faith is not about being endlessly resilient. It’s about being honest before God and one another. Lament is not a detour from faith; it’s one of faith’s deepest expressions. To lament is to refuse to pretend that injustice is normal, that violence is acceptable, or that suffering doesn’t matter.

And here’s where this becomes especially important for how we live in the public square.

Honest faith—faith that can name exhaustion and grief—actually makes deeper solidarity possible. When we stop pretending that we “have all the answers,” we can stand shoulder to shoulder with people of different faiths, or no faith at all, who are also grieving, angry, and yearning for a more just world. Lament becomes a shared language.

When Christians lead with certainty alone, we often end up isolated. But when we lead with truth—when we say, “Yes, this is devastating, and yes, it hurts, and no, we don’t have a neat explanation”—we discover common ground. Not theological agreement, necessarily, but moral clarity and human connection.

This kind of honesty doesn’t weaken resistance; it strengthens it. It keeps resistance from becoming performative or cruel. It reminds us that justice work is not about winning arguments, but about protecting human dignity. Lament keeps our resistance rooted in compassion rather than contempt, in love rather than despair.

Christian hope, at its best, is not optimism. It’s not denial. It’s the stubborn refusal to believe that suffering gets the last word. And that kind of hope can coexist with tears, fatigue, and righteous anger. In fact, it usually does.

So if the news has you worn down, don’t assume your faith is failing. It may be telling you something true: that the world is broken, that love is costly, and that God is still calling us—not to carry everything, but to show up honestly, together.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a real knot of anxiety as I watch the news—especially rhetoric and posturing that seem to treat long-standing allies as expendable or weak. When powerful nations start speaking about smaller ones as though they are merely pieces on a chessboard, Christians should feel uneasy. And that uneasiness isn’t about partisanship; it’s about memory. It’s about what Christians learned, often painfully, in the aftermath of World War II.

One common myth is that Christianity’s role in politics is limited to private morality—what individuals do in their personal lives. But after the devastation of the Second World War, many Christian leaders believed something much more expansive: that faith had something to say about how nations relate to one another. Churches across Europe and North America were deeply involved in rebuilding not only cities, but trust. Christian ethicists and statesmen argued that peace required structures strong enough to restrain aggression and relationships deep enough to prevent fear from metastasizing into violence. Alliances were not seen as signs of weakness, but as moral commitments—promises that human life mattered more than national ego.

At the heart of that postwar vision were two convictions that Christianity holds together and that our age keeps trying to tear apart. The first is the dignity of every human life. Christians insist that people are not valuable because they are useful, powerful, or strategically convenient, but because they are made in the image of God. That belief has political consequences. It means that nations, like individuals, are not mere means to someone else’s ends. Respecting the dignity of human life leads naturally to respecting the dignity of peoples—their right to self-determination, their culture, their security, and their voice in shaping their own future.

The second conviction is that peace is built through relationship, not domination. Christianity does not imagine peace as something imposed by the strongest actor getting its way. The Christian story is one in which reconciliation happens through costly commitment—through covenants, promises, and mutual responsibility. After World War II, many Christians believed that binding nations together in shared responsibility, even when it was inconvenient, was one way of taking sin seriously while still hoping for something better than endless cycles of revenge and fear.

That’s why bullying rhetoric should trouble Christians so deeply. When nations are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than partners to be engaged, the logic of the cross is replaced by the logic of coercion. Christianity does not deny that power exists or that threats are real. But it insists that power untethered from moral restraint becomes destructive, and that fear-based politics corrodes the very peace it claims to defend.

Recovering a Christian vision of peace today does not mean pretending the world is simple or safe. It means remembering that strong relationships—patiently built, consistently honored, and mutually accountable—are not naïve ideals but hard-won lessons written in the ruins of the twentieth century. It means insisting that dignity and solidarity belong together: that honoring the worth of every person and every people requires us to resist both isolationism and imperial arrogance.

Christians are called to be witnesses to that alternative vision, even when it makes us uncomfortable or anxious. Especially then. Because the peace of Christ was never secured by threats, and it has never been preserved by humiliation. It is carried forward by people and communities willing to choose covenant over convenience, and faithfulness over fear.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

In a moment when our society seems increasingly fractured—when fear, violence, and the abuse of power dominate political discourse—many Christians are asking a deeper question: What is the role of the Church when political authority itself becomes a threat to human dignity?

Today I want to be very clear: the Church cannot remain silent, neutral, or “above it all” when actions and ideologies take on the shape of authoritarianism or fascism. This is not about partisan politics. This is about faithful Christian witness. And in moments like these, neutrality is not a moral option.

So let’s start with the basics: what is fascism?

Fascism is a political ideology marked by authoritarian control, suppression of dissent, hyper-nationalism, and the elevation of state power over human rights and human dignity. It thrives on fear and depends on dehumanizing “others”—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—portraying them as threats that must be controlled, removed, or eliminated. Violence is not a tragic failure of fascism; it is one of its tools. And that alone should tell Christians everything we need to know.

This is not merely a policy disagreement. Fascism directly contradicts the Gospel’s insistence that every human being bears the image of God and that no authority stands above God’s justice. When the state claims ultimate loyalty, demands silence, or treats some lives as disposable, Christians are no longer dealing with politics as usual—we are dealing with idolatry.

Many, myself included, see echoes of these dynamics today in how government power is exercised against vulnerable communities—at the border, in our cities, and in the language used to justify force. The recent killing of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has sparked national outrage precisely because it reveals how easily state violence can be normalized. And the fact that we are outraged now, despite the over 30 people who have already been killed by ICE agents demonstrates how we have become numb to this problem.

Video evidence from multiple angles made it clear that this woman posed no threat. The last thing she said to the agent was “That’s fine, dude, I’m not made at you.” Then she turned her wheel to leave and the agent shot her in the head and called her words I will not say out loud.

Government officials rushed to justify lethal force, insisting we had not seen what we all clearly saw. As George Orwell wrote in the novel 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Make no mistake, this is how authoritarian and fascist systems train societies to accept the unacceptable.

In response, some church leaders have refused to stay silent. An Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire recently told clergy that statements alone are no longer enough—that this is a time for bodily presence, moral risk, and real sacrifice. He urged them to be prepared not just spiritually, but practically, to stand with those most at risk, telling the it was time to make their wills. That is not extremism. That is Christian realism.

Why does this matter theologically? Because silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality—it is complicity. Throughout Scripture, God consistently sides with the oppressed, the stranger, and the vulnerable. The prophets did not politely “disagree” with unjust rulers; they confronted them. Jesus did not accommodate violent systems; he exposed them, disrupted them, and ultimately he was executed by one of them.

When Jesus overturned the tables in the Temple, he wasn’t making a partisan statement—he was declaring that worship divorced from justice is a lie. Likewise, a Church that refuses to oppose systems that dehumanize is no longer bearing witness to Christ; it is protecting its own comfort.

History confirms this truth. From the early Christians who defied imperial worship, to figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisting Nazis Germany, the Church has repeatedly faced the same question: Will you follow Christ—or will you accommodate power? Every time the Church has chosen safety over faithfulness, the results have been disastrous.

So what does faithful action look like now? It begins with prayer and formation—but it cannot end there. It requires public witness, moral clarity, and courageous nonviolent resistance. It means showing up, naming injustice, protecting the vulnerable, and refusing to allow fear to dictate our faith. It also means loving our enemies—not by enabling harm, but by refusing to let hatred have the final word… and by working as hard as we can to rescue them from the fascist ideologies that have taken them captive.

Too often, Christians confuse moral witness with political disagreement. But the Gospel does not ask us to be neutral observers of injustice. It commands us to act when human dignity is at stake. And make no mistake: that is what is at stake now.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been deeply concerned with our country’s recent military intervention in Venezuela. Many have written and spoken about how problematic that action was from the standpoint of international law, foreign policy, and a host of other concerns. Today, I’d like to talk about why the whole situation (and the perspective and moral worldview it represents) is problematic from the standpoint of Christianity. 

Though many assume Christian resistance to any war is largely due to the inherent violence of armed conflict, that’s a myth worth breaking. Because there are many more reasons Christians should be at least skeptical, if not outright opposed, to this most recent military action. 

Don’t get me wrong, nonviolence absolutely matters. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the witness of saints and martyrs across the centuries, Christianity has consistently lifted up the sanctity of human life and the call to resist cycles of violence. But the Christian concern about war goes deeper than that—and if we reduce it only to a debate about violence versus nonviolence, we miss something essential.

After our country’s actions in Venezuela, my own denomination, The Episcopal Church, issued a statement expressing deep concern about the operation, its legality, and its consequences for civilians and for the Episcopal Diocese of Venezuela 

The statement names real human costs: Venezuelans killed, some of them civilians; increased instability; and fear for local church communities caught in the middle of geopolitical power struggles. All of those facts should give Christians pause.

But here’s the deeper theological issue.

Christian opposition to war is not only about the harm done in war. It is also about what war does to our moral imagination—about how quickly it trains us to believe that my safety, my prosperity, and my national interest matter more than the lives and dignity of others. That mindset is fundamentally at odds with the heart of Christian faith.

In Christ, God is not reconciling some people, or my people, or the people who look like me or vote like me. Scripture tells us that in Christ, God is reconciling all people, breaking down the walls that divide us and creating a new humanity. The Letter to the Ephesians speaks of Christ tearing down the dividing wall of hostility and making peace—not peace through domination, but peace through self-giving love.

War, especially when framed as preventive or preemptive action, does the opposite. It reinforces the belief that the lives on the other side of the border are expendable, that instability elsewhere is acceptable if it secures advantage here, and that power gives moral permission.

This is why Christianity developed what we call Just War theory. And it’s important to say: Just War theory is not a loophole that makes war morally comfortable. It is a moral restraint, designed to make war harder to justify, not easier.

For a war to be considered just, it must meet demanding criteria: a just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, and a reasonable chance of success, among others. The Episcopal Church has repeatedly affirmed these principles while also condemning the first use of armed force for non-imminent threats and warning against abusing humanitarian language to justify political or strategic goals 

Measured against those standards, there are numerous reasons for Christians to be deeply troubled by U.S. intervention in Venezuela. The reported deaths of roughly 80 Venezuelans, including civilians, raise serious questions about proportionality and discrimination. The lack of congressional authorization challenges legitimate authority. And the broader pattern of escalation suggests something far short of last resort.

But beyond those criteria lies the deeper moral danger: the temptation to believe that American interests automatically outweigh Venezuelan lives. That is precisely the temptation Christians are called to resist.

Christian faith insists that there is no such thing as a disposable people. The Venezuelan mother grieving a child killed in political violence bears the image of God just as surely as any American parent. When national policy treats that suffering as collateral damage, Christians are obligated to speak.

So yes—Christians may oppose war because we take seriously Jesus’ call to peace. But we also oppose war because we believe God is reconciling the whole world, not just one nation at a time. We oppose war because it trains us to love selectively, to grieve unevenly, and to excuse injustice when it benefits us.

There are many reasons for Christians to be concerned about U.S. intervention in Venezuela: the violence, the civilian deaths, the failure to meet just-war standards. But just as importantly, there is the moral cost of acting as though our good matters more than the good of others. That is not the way of Christ—and it is something Christians must resist.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Some of you are hearing this on Christmas Eve itself. Others might be listening a few days later, on the Sunday after Christmas, or sometime else in the long glow of the holiday season. But whenever you’re hearing this, the myth I want to bust right now—and the truth I want to speak—remain the same.

The myth is this: you may be feeling that the church is simply not a place for you. Not tonight. Not this season. Maybe not ever.

And before anyone rushes to argue with that feeling, let’s be honest about where it comes from. The church has, at times, done a truly bad job of making room for people. Sometimes that’s happened because theology was drawn too narrowly—leaving no space for doubt, struggle, or people who aren’t sure what they believe yet. 

Sometimes it’s happened because culture quietly infected the church with its own prejudices.

Take gender, for example. The early Christian movement was remarkably egalitarian for its time. Women preached, prophesied, led house churches, and were the first witnesses to the resurrection. And yet, over time, Greco-Roman patriarchy won out, and women were pushed aside—not because of the gospel, but in spite of it.

Other times, the church has confused faithfulness with fear. When the beauty and diversity of creation challenged old assumptions, the church sometimes reacted defensively. Galileo was condemned. Many Christians fought against evolutionary science. And in our own day, many Christians still exclude LGBTQ people because they mistake a narrow reading of a few biblical texts—or inherited cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality—for the fullness of the gospel. That exclusion is wrong because it treats difference itself as sin, rather than asking the deeper, biblical question of whether people’s lives bear the fruits of love, faithfulness, and self-giving that Scripture consistently names as signs of God’s work in a person’s life.

If any of that’s part of your story—if you’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that there’s no room for you—then it makes perfect sense if church feels unsafe, exhausting, or irrelevant. That wound is real.

But here’s what the myth gets wrong: that broken version of the church is not what the church was ever meant to be.

The letter to the Ephesians gives us a radically different vision. There, the church isn’t a fortress for the righteous or a club for the spiritually certain. It is described as a new humanity. Paul says that in Christ, God is tearing down dividing walls—walls of hostility, fear, and exclusion—and creating something new in their place.

In Ephesians, people who were once “far off” are brought near. Former enemies are made members of the same household. The church is called the Body of Christ—not a body made of identical parts, but one where difference is not erased, and where every member matters. Growth, Paul says, doesn’t come through control or conformity, but through being “built up in love.”

Even more striking, the church is called a dwelling place for God. Not because it has everything figured out, but precisely because it is being built together—slowly, imperfectly, and humbly. Paul insists that God’s wisdom is revealed not through uniformity, but through reconciliation: a diverse community learning how to live in peace without denying difference. This reconciled life together, he says, is part of God’s plan to gather all things—in heaven and on earth—into wholeness 

That means the church was never meant to be a place reserved for people who are already whole. It’s meant to be a place where healing can happen. Not a place where you’re required to have perfect faith, but a place where faith can grow. Not a gatekeeping institution, but a living sign of God’s refusal to abandon the world.

And that’s why this message matters whether it’s Christmas Eve or the days that follow. Christmas proclaims that God does not wait for ideal conditions. God comes anyway. God is born into vulnerability, uncertainty, and the margins of society. Emmanuel—God with us—means with us, right where we are, not where we think we’re supposed to be.

So if you’re tired of church, wary of Christianity, or unsure whether there’s space for you in any of it, hear this clearly: Christmas is not about proving your worthiness. It’s about God’s stubborn, reckless love breaking into the world and saying, “There is room.”

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

This week I want to talk about something that’s been in the news again this Advent season: churches setting up Nativity scenes that depict the Holy Family as refugees, sometimes even showing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus behind bars or with imagery associated with immigration detention and ICE enforcement. As you might expect, these displays have sparked strong reactions. Some people find them deeply faithful. Others say they’re inappropriate, offensive, or “too political.”

So let’s bust a myth. The myth is this: using the Nativity to raise questions about immigration, refugees, or state power is a modern political stunt that distorts the Christian story.

Here’s the problem with that claim: the Nativity itself is already a story about displacement, state violence, and people on the margins.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is born under an occupying empire. Shortly after his birth, King Herod—terrified of losing power—orders the massacre of children in Bethlehem. To survive, Mary and Joseph flee with their child to Egypt. That is not metaphorical. It is not symbolic. It is a family crossing borders to escape state-sponsored violence. By any honest definition, Jesus begins his life as a refugee.

So when churches depict the Holy Family as people on the run, or even in detention, they are not importing politics into the Gospel. They are allowing the Gospel to speak honestly about the realities it already names.

I can already hear the response some people will say: “Jesus didn’t come to make political statements. He came to save souls.” But that too misunderstands both salvation and politics in the ancient world. In the Roman Empire, to say “Jesus is Lord” was already a political claim, because it meant Caesar was not. Jesus consistently confronted systems that crushed the poor, excluded the vulnerable, and justified violence in the name of order. He didn’t align himself with power. He aligned himself with people whose lives were made precarious by power.

That doesn’t mean every Christian must agree on immigration policy. Faithful people can disagree about laws, borders, and enforcement. But the Christian faith does not allow us to ignore the humanity of those caught in the system—or to pretend that God is neutral when families are separated, children are traumatized, or fear becomes a governing tool. After all, it is abundantly clear that the biblical tradition insists that how societies treat the vulnerable is a theological question.

Nativity scenes like these are not saying, “Here is the one correct policy.” They may be saying that no matter the difference on possible immigration policies, what our country is doing today is clearly and deeply immoral. 

But even more than that, these nativity scenes are asking a far more biblical question: Where is Christ found today? And the Christian answer has always been unsettling. Christ is found among those without power, without security, without a safe place to lay their heads. And that means that’s where Christians should be as well. 

If a Nativity scene makes us uncomfortable, that may say less about the scene and more about how thoroughly we’ve domesticated Christmas. We prefer a quiet, sentimental manger that doesn’t challenge us. But the real Nativity disrupts. It confronts fear, injustice, and violence with God’s radical choice to be born into vulnerability.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

With the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe coming up this Friday, I want to talk about a part of the Christian tradition that makes a lot of people—especially non-Catholics—a little uncomfortable: visions of Mary. For some, these stories feel strange at best, manipulative at worst. The myth I want to take on today is the idea that these kinds of visions mainly exist to prop up church authority and control people through fear or superstition.

Now, you don’t have to believe in Marian apparitions at all to notice something fascinating about the pattern they follow. Even if you take a completely historical or symbolic view of them, one thing is remarkably consistent: when Mary shows up in these stories, she almost never appears to powerful religious leaders. She appears to ordinary people with no status, no influence, and often no protection.

Take Guadalupe as an example. In 1531, in what is now Mexico, a poor Indigenous farmer named Juan Diego claims that Mary appeared to him and asked that a church be built. The colonial and church authorities didn’t immediately jump on board. They were skeptical, slow to act, and frankly dismissive of him at first. That alone tells you something important: this wasn’t a vision that conveniently originated from those already in charge.

But when, through the miracle of roses and the image of Mary that appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak, the bishop could no longer deny something was happening, the vision was affirmed. And by affirming that vision, the indigenous and mestizaje people were also affirmed and ennobled by a church that had been—until then—very colonial. 

The same thing happens in other well-known stories. At Lourdes in France, Mary appears to a sick, impoverished teenage girl collecting firewood. At Fatima in Portugal, she appears to children watching sheep. In Ireland at Knock, it’s ordinary villagers who claim the vision during a time of deep suffering and political oppression. Again and again, the pattern is the same: God’s presence—symbolized by the mother of God, Mary, appearing, whether you interpret it literally or symbolically—shows up among the poor and the overlooked… not the powerful.

Several years ago, I stumbled into this pattern myself when I was preparing an Advent Quiet Day on visions of Mary. I expected to be dealing mostly with devotion, art, and tradition. What surprised me was how consistently these stories carried a prophetic edge. Over and over again, the message attached to these visions wasn’t “protect your privilege” or “bless the status quo.” It was repentance. Justice. Conversion. Solidarity with suffering people. And just as consistently, the authorities were slow to affirm what was happening.

What finally clicked for me was how closely this matches the Mary we meet in the Bible. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary sings the Magnificat—a radically political prayer that says God lifts up the lowly, brings down the powerful, feeds the hungry, and exposes the illusion of wealth and control. Whether you believe in later visions or not, that biblical Mary is already a voice of disruption, not of institutional comfort.

So here’s the deeper Mythbusters point: you don’t have to be Roman Catholic, and you don’t have to accept Marian apparitions as literal events, to recognize the theological truth they all keep circling around. God consistently sides with the powerless. God consistently chooses messengers the world would ignore. And God consistently speaks words that make the powerful uncomfortable.

That’s true at Guadalupe. It’s true in the Gospels. And it’s still true today.

So as the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe approaches this week—even if you usually scroll right past things like that—maybe the real invitation isn’t to debate visions, but to wrestle with this deeper question: If God still chooses to speak from the margins, are we actually listening?

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.