Christian Mythbusters

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 realities of being a priest, similar to being a teacher or in other professions where you are constantly planning ahead, is that you live your life in two different times. On one side, it is the middle of October. The leaves are beginning to fall and the concerns of the end of the year are still far away. However, I’m also always living about a month in advance when it comes to church calendars, communications, and bulletins, so my mind and heart are already turning to those holy days at the beginning of November: All Hallow’s Eve (or Halloween, if you must), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day (or Día de los Muertos for my Spanish-speaking friends).

And so, I’d like to talk about the Christian perspective on death for a few minutes this week, perhaps breaking some myths about what Christians do and do not actually believe about this universal shared experience.

Each morning, a little before 9am, I walk down the darkened church aisle to our chapel near the front of the church, on the left. Originally it was the entrance to the historic church when it was constructed some 150 years ago. However, we have repurposed it into a small chapel we can use for Daily Morning Prayer during the week and our small service of Holy Eucharist and Healing at Noon on Wednesdays.

Once I get everything set up, I turn on Facebook Live on my phone and begin the daily morning prayers of our church. They take about fifteen minutes to say, when you include the daily Scripture readings and psalms, and usually it’s just me there in the chapel. There are also often two to four people on Facebook Live, praying with me, which is nice. But I am always aware of someone else.

We call our chapel the “All Souls’ Chapel” because the 150-year-old wall opposite the altar in that chapel houses a Columbarium: a place where people’s ashes can be deposited, along with a name plate marking the spot. We just put ours in a few years ago and there is currently just one occupant: Fr. Kenneth Michnay. Father Kenneth was an ELCA pastor who, because of our church’s ecumenical agreements with the Lutherans, was able to serve as a priest associate in our church. He died in the winter, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, from the virus. I miss him dearly, not only as a colleague but as a friend as well.

But his niche in the Columbarium happens to be right behind my head, when I am seated saying the prayers, and so I have a concrete sense that he is praying with me as well, wherever he is in the nearer presence of God.

I lost another friend this year, Chuck Wibert, the verger emeritus at our church. A verger is kind of like a Master of Ceremonies and Chuck made it a point, since he was retired and more available than other vergers, to serve and help me lead funerals. He died of heart failure several weeks ago and we buried him outside in our Parish Memorial Garden, another place where people can have their ashes interred. His ashes are actually buried in the grass, at the right side of the altar, exactly where the verger would stand if we were celebrating mass out there. And every time I stand at the outside altar, I’ll think of him and remember that he is right there, worshipping with me.

In the Eucharistic Prayer that I say whenever we have communion at funerals, there is a line that always stands out to me, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.” For Christians, we do not believe death is the end of life, only that life is changed by death. The person still exists somehow, somewhere, held by the love of God until the time when God heals and restores all creation in God’s love. 

One of the great questions I often get when new people join our church is why we pray for the dead. Most of them likely assume it’s because of something like the Roman Catholic understanding of purgatory. I always tell them that we pray for the dead because we believe they still exist. In the same way that I pray for those who I love who are living, after someone dies my love, my concern for them doesn’t evaporate. And so, I pray… I pray that whatever that journey into God looks like after death, they find strength. I pray that they feel my love and how much I miss them. And I pray that God will bring us all home together in the end. 

At our church, these prayers all come together at the end of this month and the beginning of the next. On Sunday, October 30, our Latin American members are hosting coffee hour after the 10am liturgy and then, together, we will prepare the Día de los Muertos Ofrenda, setting up pictures of our loved ones in that All Souls’ Chapel. Then, on Tuesday, November 1, we will celebrate the great Communion of Saints at 6pm with a festive service of Holy Eucharist, complete with chanting and incense and joy. And on Wednesday, November 2, at 6pm, we will come together for a Requiem Eucharist to say aloud the names of those we miss, those we pray for during this holy and sacred time.

Because they are not gone. Their life has been changed, but their love for us, and ours for them, can never be ended by the power of death.

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. 

We are at challenging point in the life of our country, in the experience of the church in America, and in many local communities, including mine here in Grand Haven, Michigan. It seems as though for the past several years we've been caught in an endless downward spiral of divisive rhetoric and polemic, increasingly unable to hear the perspective of those who disagree with us and increasingly willing to paint the opposition with a broad brush.

I want to be honest with you that I'm not sure at times how best to handle that reality. 

I mean, I look around me and I see the erosion of women's rights, the continued marginalization of the LGBTQIA+ community, people who use the phrase “parents’ rights” as code for the attempts some parents to control the schooling of all other children, the conversion of the immigrant and refugee community into pawns that are moved around the country for political ends… I see all of this and it’s hard not to speak up, to try to say something against this kind of corruption and injustice.

And it's hard, it's so hard, not to appear strident when human rights seem to be at stake. I know don't always do a good job, but I hope you know I'm trying.

Earlier this week someone sent me a message in response to some of the criticisms I have publicly levied against current school board candidates in our own community who are trying to unseat our good and faithful incumbents. One member of the community told me that I'm a bully for the things I've said and the criticisms I have raised.

As much passion as I have for these questions of human rights and dignity, I don’t want to come off as a bully. And so, I thought about it. I thought about it really hard. And I thought this week I might try to parse some of the difference between disagreeing with passion and disagreeing as a bully. 

At the basic textbook definition, a bully is someone who seeks to harm, intimidate, or otherwise coerce someone who is vulnerable (or someone who is perceived as vulnerable). And that is the first and key point I want to make right there. Bullies are those who seek to intimidate and coerce the vulnerable.

What is unfortunate is that some people in our society, people who are actually trying to intimidate vulnerable populations like queer kids or refugees, these people call those who disagree with them bullies. It is an excellent example of some kind of cognitive dissonance, of doing something bad but then turning and saying it’s really your opponent that is doing the bad thing.

To call out marginalization, to point out the harm of policies that are being advocated for in our schools and our country, to make it clear the ways that these policies and approaches will have a devastating impact upon vulnerable communities, this is not to be a bully. 

To say it another way, for one person to stand up and tell a bully to stop punching a vulnerable person, to tell them they are doing damage, that is not bullying. You can tell it is not bullying because the person being called out is someone with power and the person being impacted and hurt is someone who is vulnerable. 

The history of the Hebrew Scriptures is filled with the condemnation of false prophets who proclaimed everything was okay in society, despite rampant sin and corruption, despite the marginalization of those who did not have a voice. These were prophets who only sought to make the comfortable and powerful more content with the status quo, knowing that upsetting the status quo might threaten their own comfort.

Everything is not okay in our country right now. Everything is not okay in our communities. Everything is not okay in the church. And I know, I swear to you I know, there are times when I could phrase things more gently, when I could perhaps have more kindness and curiosity toward those who disagree with me. And I promise, I will try to do better with that.

But the people of God cannot be silent in the face of injustice. Christianity has a really bad history of supporting the status quo at the expense of vulnerable communities, of telling the bullies it will be okay while the vulnerable are being squeezed and pushed aside.

So, I will try harder with the words that I use, absolutely. But I will not be silent. I will not be silent at the ongoing attacks upon the vulnerable right now. And I hope you won’t be quiet either. Because it is when good people stay quiet that the real bullies win.

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. 

The mourning and funeral for Queen Elizabeth II last month was watched around the globe. The longest-serving monarch that England has ever known, the preparations for marking her death and committing her to God were carefully done  far in advance and likely touched even those more skeptical about the essentiality of the monarch to twenty-first century England. 

Of the many roles the Queen had, one of them is actually connected to my own denomination, The Episcopal Church. For the past five hundred years or so, the monarch has been known as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. That means that Elizabeth II was also the highest-ranking lay person in the Anglican Communion, choosing the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, who serves as the spiritual leader of our Communion. 

As I watched the carefully orchestrated funeral last Monday morning, I was reminded of something my friend Chuck Wibert used to say when it came to funerals. Chuck was what is known as a verger in our congregation, basically a Master of Ceremonies. And Chuck would tell everyone before a funeral that the approach we take—one with careful liturgy and music, and with a pall covering the casket so you cannot see the wealth or importance of the person being buried—we do all of this to make it clear that at death we are honored for what is truly most important: that we are a beloved baptized child of God. 

“When the Queen of England dies,” Chuck used to say, “She’ll get the same treatment you do as a Christian because we are all equal before God.”

Now, of course, the queen clearly did not get exactly same treatment as your average Episcopalian funeral, but the underlying principle and point Chuck was trying to make holds. And so, this week I’d like to break the myth that pomp and circumstance is just for the death of a queen. It is available for you as well, because you matter that much.

Part of the difficulty with funerals is that our culture—and our various religious traditions—have jumbled together all sorts of customs and services done when somebody dies. Traditionally, there would be a time for preparation of the body and visitation with the family. Then, at the funeral liturgy, the deceased would be commended to God. Finally, at a wake, memories would be shared and the person’s life toasted.

These days, however, the ubiquitous “Celebration of Life” tries to accomplish all three at the same time—time with the family, prayers and religious customs, and remembering the person who died. And, by trying to cram so much into one service, none of it can be done terribly well.

But if we tease the central part out of that gordian knot of customs and look only at the heart of what the funeral liturgy is meant to do, we will discover that holding that piece well can be profoundly more meaningful than a smushed-together cultural cluster.

At its heart, the funeral is the gathering of the faith community to commend someone to God. What matters, at the end, is not how successful they were, whether they were a saint or a scoundrel. In the end, what matters is that God’s love, through baptism, has claimed you. 

And so, as I said, the casket or urn is covered with pall, a piece of heavy and embroidered fabric that is a symbol of baptism. And everyone, no matter how loved or how hated, how rich or how poor, gets that same baptismal pall. For God loves and embraces us all equally out of God’s mercy.

In our tradition, we also don’t have numerous arrangements of flowers, photos, or other memorabilia. Those can be comforting to the family before at a visitation or afterwards at a wake or reception, but the funeral isn’t about a multiplicity of flower arrangements. Instead, for every funeral, there are two arrangements of flowers near the altar, a gift marking that holy space in honor of the one who has died.

In fact, our liturgy doesn’t even have a place for a eulogy. Once again, remembering is something best done as a community, when we can talk to each other and share multiple stories. Instead, a sermon seeks to blend together the life of the person who died with the Gospel of God’s love and forgiveness which holds us all, in life and in death. 

Of course, there are parts that are different with each funeral. The choices of hymns and music, whether or not the service is chanted, if there is incense… but truth be told, with so much of it done so carefully, with pomp and circumstance for every person who died, you get a sense of the importance with which our faith community holds each and every person… a manifestation of our belief that God’s love also holds each and every person.

My friend Chuck actually died not that long ago and we’re getting ready for his funeral in a couple weeks. It won’t be what we saw on TV for the queen… but it also won’t be that far off, when it comes to the service itself. Because what Chuck would tell you is that what matters most is that God loves him, God saved him, and it is God who will welcome him home—imperfections and all. 

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 potent images in Scripture and the church for our relationship with God is the metaphor of a parent and a child. It lies at the heart of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, as we address God in that prayer as Our Father. 

At the same time, no metaphor is perfect… and there are ways in which thinking of God as Father can be not only unhelpful but also damaging. So, this week, I’d like to do a strange task and break the myth that God’s like your dad. 

I want to start out by saying I have been blessed with an amazing father. My dad was the best man at my wedding and, though he’s certainly not perfect, he has been a great father throughout my life. So, for me, the image of God as father resonates with my experience of my own dad—someone who loves me no matter what, who will always be there for me, a person I can always come home to.

However, I’m keenly aware that not everyone has such a positive experience with their own father. And that can mean that this metaphor of God as Father can begin to undermine your own relationship with God.

For example, there are those whose father was abusive—either verbally or physically or even sexually. Not only is there profound trauma from being raised in an abusive household, but it can become the lens through which you view your relationship with God. And so, the words of God’s judgment in the prophetic books of Scripture, or Jesus flipping over the tables in the temple, all of this can bring back frightening memories of a dad who was out of control, pouring salt in those wounds.

For others, perhaps their father was distant. It could be an estranged relationship that has grown cold over the years or something much simpler than that. Perhaps your father was not someone who showed emotion, who told you regularly that he loved you. With that lens, God the father becomes a distant figure, far away in heaven, one who probably doesn’t know or care that much about you personally. 

For still others, it could be that your father outright rejected you at some point in your life. Maybe you didn’t choose the right job or live up to your dad’s expectations in school or other aspects of your life. This is particularly difficult for those in the LGBTQIA+ community, who may have experienced this kind of rejection when they told their parents who they truly were or who they truly loved. And so, having experienced this rejection from your own parents it becomes difficult to imagine how God could even tolerate you… much less love and delight in you as you are. 

It could be any kind of weakness, any kind of breakdown in your relationship with your own father that can undo your ability to resonate in a positive way with the image of God as Father. 

The great evangelical preacher, Haddon Robinson, spoke powerfully in a sermon on the prophet Hosea once, saying (and this is a long quote, so bear with me):

I believe that [God’s love] is the hardest single thing for Christians to understand. I do certain things and I can get God to love me more. Some of you grew up in homes where you never heard your dad say he loved you. Some of you grew up in homes that were very perfectionist. You came home with three A’s and one B and your father would say, ‘How come you didn’t get four A’s?’ And so you worked hard, you got four A’s, you brought home four A’s and your parents would say, ‘Must be something wrong with the school system, you get A’s that easily.’ Never once did they commend you. Never once did they approve you. Some of you have daddies who have been dead fifteen years or more and you're still trying to earn their favor. Well, hear me: God is not your daddy. God does not play that game. God just loves you. And when you come to understand that God’s love is unconditional, that he does not love you because of what you are… that grips you, then you respond with worship and service and praise and love.

That’s the end of the quote.

I don’t know what your relationship with your own dad looks like. But if there are cracks in that relationship, if there are wounds you still carry… then perhaps its time to let that go, to be willing to hope, to trust, that God’s love is more than that. As Rich Mullins was fond of saying, there’s nothing you can do to make God love you less… but there’s also nothing you can do to make God love you more.

You are already entirely and absolutely beloved, adored, and cherished. And if you have trouble believing that, please come see me here at St. John’s Episcopal in Grand Have, so that this father, Father Jared, can wrap you in a hug and tell you that God’s love for you is indeed true, unconditional, and very real. 

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. 

I know many of you, similar to me, likely enjoyed the traditional three-day weekend which ends summer each year. I’m always struck, though, that despite the common (and important!) refrain to “remember the reason” for the Memorial Day holiday each year, there is rarely a similar call for Labor Day.

I also know that it may be strange, to sum, for a priest to have much of an opinion on Labor Day, given that labor relations are largely seen these days as a purely secular concern. But I think the reason and origins behind Labor Day actually touch on deeply theological concerns, concerns that are particularly pressing given the decline of labor unions in our own time. 

Many of the roots of the labor movement can be found in Christianity itself. Beginning in the late 18th century and running to the mid 19th century, the Clapham sect in the Church of England (the mother church of my own denomination) was active in calls for social reform. The best-known member of the group was the evangelical Anglican, William Wilberforce. Their denunciations against the slave trade were one of the strongest forces that led to its end.  

With the rise of industrialization in the 19th century, there was a corresponding rise of a formal Labor Movement which advocated for workers in the new industrialized world. Whether their politics were conservative or liberal, many Christian theologians and pastors found themselves aligned with the concerns of the labor movement. 

In an early twentieth-century edition of Biblical World (one of the earlier names of the Journal of Religion, which is still published today by the University of Chicago Press), a theologian wrote, “The ‘workingman’ is first of all just a man, and his power to produce commodities is not the object of his existence.” A person’s value cannot be determined by the goods they produce, their existence has much deeper meaning than this. Christian virtues, like the importance of the Sabbath in Judaism, began to be brought to bear on an increasingly industrialized world, with Christians insisting that every person should have a day of rest. 

Around the same time, in the early twentieth century, the Federal Council of Churches, which included the Anglican, Baptist, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, Moravian, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Reformed traditions of Christianity, adopted something called the Social Creed of the Churches, giving their own support and commitment to responding to these issues. The Social Creed they adopted expressed these convictions:

• For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life.
• For the principles of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions.
• For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational diseases, injuries, and mortality.
• For the abolition of child labor.
• For such regulation of the conditions of labor for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community.
• For the suppression of the “sweating system.”
• For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all; and for that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.
• For a release from employment one day in seven.
• For a living wage in every industry.
• For the highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.
• For the recognition of the Golden Rule and the mind of Christ as the supreme law of society and the sure remedy for all social ills.

In our own time, including right here in our community of Grand Haven, we are seeing once more the need for strong advocates for labor. While corporations and executives take in significant profits, they also complain about the difficulty in hiring workers. Something about the experience of the past two years has made many people unwilling to work for wages that cannot produce a reasonable standard of living. It’s not that there is a shortage of labor—it is that companies and businesses have not caught up to the fact that workers will no longer put up with inadequate pay nor the constant demands for work created by technology, where your office is always hidden right there in your mobile device, twenty-four seven.

We can set partisan politics aside, I hope, and agree as Christians that the inherent dignity of every human being means we should be concerned with the wages people are being asked to live with, even as corporate funding continues to go up to those at the top. 

In our church’s nighttime office of prayers called Compline, there is one prayer that particularly highlights this concern to me and is a meaningful end to the day. It says, “O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Indeed, our common life does depend upon each other’s toil. May we learn, not just on Labor Day but always, to respect and honor that more fully. 

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. 

My first position as a priest was at historic Christ Church Episcopal in Alexandria, Virginia. Our nation's first president, George Washington, served on the vestry of this church and his family had their own box pew that they would sit in during worship. And so, over the years it became customary for every president, at some time during their tenure, to attend worship at Christ Church and to sit in George Washington's family pew.

And while I knew that this was a possibility at some point during my tenure at Christ Church, I certainly did not expect to arrive at church the first Sunday morning after my ordination to the priesthood only to discover that I would be celebrating my first Sunday mass with President George W. Bush in attendance.

And that experience broke some myths in my own heart, impacting me to this day. So, this week I'd like to try to break the myth about what it means to be a Christian when there are the people in the church with whom you deeply disagree.

To be clear, I was not the rector of this church, I was simply a lowly assistant, and the rector easily could have taken the prerogative and celebrated mass himself for that early Sunday morning worship service. But he kindly gave me the opportunity and so I went to my office and worked on ensuring I could wrap my mouth around the Elizabethan language we used at that early service.

One of the things that's interesting as a priest is that people come to the communion rail very differently. Some people kneel and keep their head down with their hands outstretched, focused on the reverent experience with God they’re having. Other people stand up the whole time and look right at you with a smile on their face, full of gratitude and joy.

President Bush knelt at the rail, but he was also someone who looked right at you when you were giving him communion.  I pressed to the bread into his hands and said those old traditional words, “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which is given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” He said, “Amen,” and consumed the bread. 

And in that moment, like I said, something broke open inside of me.

I knew that I disagreed strongly with several of the policies and practices of his administration. I had concerns that were deep and based upon fundamental moral convictions I have is a Christian that there were things happening in the Bush administration that were fundamentally unjust, which were threatening the very peace of our world.

But in that moment, at the altar rail, I was reminded that someday, many, many decades ago,

an Episcopal priest poured water on the little baby George W. Bush. I was reminded that no matter our differences, no matter how faithful or how inadequate either of us are, in that moment George was simply a baptized Christian, coming to receive the sacrament that Christ had ordained for the church for all generations. He needed the grace of that sacrament… and I did too.

I keep a picture on my wall in my office of that day, one that he signed after he and his wife met my wife, and we exchanged pleasantries outside the church. I keep it there to remind myself that there will always be people in the church, people in the world, with whom I disagree… but that my baptismal calling is to treat every person I meet with faithfulness, because every person bears the image of God on their soul. In particular, even when I strongly disagree with another Christian, I am called to remember that they remain my sibling in Christ by virtue of baptism, not by virtue of matching up to my standards… Or me matching up to their standards. 

Because in the end, it is God's love and grace that will heal us all, that will draw us altogether in the divine embrace. Don't get me wrong, you know I still have no problem speaking up when I disagree… But I do need constantly to be reminded of the importance of that love, constantly reminded of the need the practice humility, to be curious instead of condemnatory.

I don't always do a good job, but I'm trying. I'm glad President Bush, simply by being in that church with me so long ago, reminded me that day to try a little harder.

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. 

I’m aware, sometimes, that I give the impression that my own church, The Episcopal Church, is a place of perfect peace, love, and joy—celebrating the full inclusion of all the baptized, including our LGBTQIA+ members as we live in beautiful unity. And while it is true that the Episcopal Church, as a whole, is fully affirming, there are still some bishops and parishes and members disagree with that stance. Division is just as real in our church as it is in any church.

Indeed, some days division in Christianity seems to be getting worse, the polemic more strident. Right here in Grand Haven, some of our Reformed Churches have felt the need to exit their denomination over views on human sexuality. 

So, this week, I’d like to break some myths I think that exist about division in the Body of Christ, and I’d like to use the painful history (and current reality) of my own church as an example. 

As a member of The Episcopal Church, that means I am a part of the global Anglican Communion. We are actually the third largest Christian communion (after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches), with roughly 85 million members spread across a fellowship of 38 independent provinces. Our roots come from the Church of England, with many of our independent national churches (including the Episcopal Church in the United States) being formerly colonies of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual leader of the Communion, but since each province is independent and autonomous, that means he doesn’t tell us what to do. We listen to him, but in the end, we make the decisions we believe the Holy Spirit is calling us to.

I give you this brief historical background because right now almost all of the bishops of the Anglican Communion are gathered at Lambeth Palace in England for the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. I say “almost all” because though our Communion has 880 some bishops, only about 650 are attending the Conference this year. Some are not there due to COVID concerns or difficulty getting a VISA to travel, but most who are not there are making that decision because of divisions in our Communion that still persist over issues of human sexuality.

The provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, and Rwanda are all boycotting the Conference in objection to the decisions my church in the United States has made by consecrating partnered gay bishops and embracing sacramental marriage equality. They are particularly opposed to the fact that four of our bishops who are married and gay or lesbian were invited to attend. 

On the other side, however, the invitation to our married gay and lesbian bishops, came with restrictions because their spouses were specifically not invited to come, something that caused significant frustration among many of our bishops—to the point that some of our bishops, including my own bishop, the Rt. Rev. Prince Singh here in Western Michigan, refused to attend the Conference as well in protest to the discriminatory invitations issued to our married gay or lesbian bishops. 

But even among those gathered, the divisions are playing out as many bishops are now refusing to receive communion since there are openly gay bishops in the worship service… And round and round the objections and boycotts and refusals to attend go. The Body of Christ becoming more and more wounded with each inflicted division. 

Each generation has their own “church-dividing issues,” controversies or questions about theology or discipline which people believe are so significant you cannot be in relationship with those who disagree. 

When I was growing up, it was questions like marriage after divorce. Interestingly enough, most Christian churches today permit marriage after divorce (despite what Jesus’ explicit prohibition). I agree with that permission, of course, believing that grace should give people a second chance at love and life after the pain of divorce, certain that if you read Jesus’ words in their historical context, the more traditional view cannot stand.

But back then churches split over the issue, confident that those who disagreed, who argued for something new, were deviating from a core teaching of the church.

One of the first things I learned when I was active in the ecumenical movement, serving in the National Council of Churches, is that our unity in Christ is a gift—it’s never something we can bring about on our own. It is a gift, a unity that is hidden with God in Christ. And that we, as Christians, should be seeking to make that unity a more manifest reality in the world. 

And I hope that on the questions of our own time, particularly questions of sexuality and gender, churches can get to a place where those who have embraced a more progressive view can have room. I particularly hope for this because I know so many Christians whose minds on this question were changed from their experience with gay and lesbian Christians. Until you’ve had the experience of real relationships with LGBTQIA+ Christians, it’s hard to see that there might be a different perspective.

In the meantime, while we work and wait (and pray) for greater unity in the church, I hope you can find room to be curious in your own life, to resist the impulse to separate and divide. And above all, I hope we all remember that none of us are saved by our perfect beliefs, but by the grace of a God who loves us all and welcomes all of us home. 

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 strangest and, unfortunately, most common ways of trying to convert someone to the Christian faith is telling them that unless they convert to Christianity, they are going to go to hell. 

If we can bracket for just a moment whether or not that sort of an idea is an accurate articulation of Christian theology, just take a step back and imagine what it sounds like. You are saying that the God you worship is going to send everyone else in the world to an eternity of damnation except for those who decide they like this God and want to spend eternity with this God in heaven. It makes your deity sound like some kind of cosmic supernatural being with a profound ego complex. It certainly does not sound like a loving creator of the universe, at least to me.

So, this week on Christian Mythbusters I’d like to break the myth that Christians know who is and who is not going to heaven.

The reason I phrase it like that is because the first thing we need to acknowledge is that none of us really know who is and who is not going to heaven. Jesus was clear in the gospels that at the end of time a lot of people who thought they were worshiping God will discover they didn’t actually do a good job taking care of their neighbor and so they are goats, not sheep, they are sent to the “other place.” Similarly, a lot of people who didn’t think they were religious but took good care of their neighbors are told that at the end they were actually sheep all along, even though they didn’t know it, and so they are invited into eternal joy and rest. Point being, we apparently don’t do a good job knowing whether or not we are actually faithfully following God—and if you are religious, the odds are even stacked against you!

But,, the deeper problem with the idea that you know who is going to heaven and who is is going to hell, is that this supposition usually falls into one of two different ways of sorting it out. 

The first approach is the idea that everyone who is basically good goes to heaven and that everyone who is basically bad goes to hell. This idea has some merit, it’s kind of what Jesus says in the parable of the sheep and the goats I just mentioned. Indeed, this is an idea that’s common for people who aren’t even that religious, but who think they are pretty good people. “I’m not, like, Hitler,” they might say, “Surely I would go to heaven.” 

The difficulty with this view is that it’s hard to know where the line would be drawn. What is the difference between basically good and good enough to get eternal salvation versus eternal damnation. No matter how you draw the line, it starts looking rather arbitrary. And, of course,  though most people are probably basically good, none of us are perfect. In the end, we will all need forgiveness, mercy, and grace from God to get into heaven. 

Which brings me to the other approach people use when they trying to figure out who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. We are not saved by works, none of us is perfect, we all need God’s forgiveness. Yes. But, where this gets squirrely is when people start setting the standards by which God will forgive you for what you do wrong and welcome you home. The most common view in American Christianity is that to go to heaven you have to believe in Jesus. Everyone who believes in Jesus is saved.

The problem with this view, however, is that it means whether or not you go to heaven depends primarily on where you were born and into what family. After all, the vast majority of Christians are members of the church because they happened to be born into a pre-dominantly Christian geographical area or an already Christian family. Very few Christians went on a spiritual quest or entered into an exploration of all religions and then chose the church. Once more, this being the standard makes God seem rather… capricious. 

I prefer the approach in the early church called “apokatastasis.” That fancy word is a Greek word used in Acts 3, when Peter preaches, saying that what Jesus was doing as the Messiah was leading us to “the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.” Paul talks about it in Ephesians 1, where he says that the mystery of God’s will revealed in Christ is “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

That’s why, for me at least, I think it’s best not to guess who gets to go to heaven and who gets to go to hell. Heck, maybe even, given eternity and God’s love, hell itself will be redeemed and all in it made whole and welcomed home. In the end, I believe that God’s goal, God’s desire, is to draw all things together in God’s love… the only question is whether or not I want to be a part of that. 

That means I’m not a Christian so God will let me go to heaven. I'm a Christian because I believe Jesus is the manifestation of God’s love for this world, that his resurrection is the triumph of love over hatred and violence and discrimination. I’m a Christian because I want to be a part of what God’s love is doing in this world. I want to welcome what God’s love is doing in my own life.

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. 

Sometimes people come to me as a priest, telling me that they are having trouble finding God in their life. One of the best pathways I have for them is to start spending time around the poor. Help out in our church’s Loving Spoonfuls Meal Ministry. Try spending time with and listening to marginalized people. Either way, you’ll soon discover God is up to far more than you thought. And you’ll likely start to get fired up about the broken systems of this world… and your sense of God’s demands upon your life and ours. 

That's the direction I want to take with Christian Mythbusters this week. I want to push against this idea that religion is about your own happy relationship with God and suggest that Biblical religion has a whole lot more to do with your relationship with your neighbor. 

One of my favorite biblical figures who makes this argument is Amos. If you don’t know who Amos is, let me start off by being clear that you probably won’t like him. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I agree with Amos whole heartedly when he shakes his angry prophetic finger at other people… just not when I find myself on the receiving end.

But more than that… After all, Amos wasn’t a local. He wasn’t from Israel. He was what would today be called an “outside agitator.” Amos was a sheepherder from the southern nation of Judah who found his way north to Israel to tell them all the things they were doing wrong. 

He is also not a religious figure, someone who is properly trained and schooled. Think of it this way: Amos is like a blue-collar agricultural worker from another country, somewhere like Mexico perhaps, who has traveled north to give that northern country a message about their corruption.

Now you can see why Amos wasn’t very popular. 

When Amos talks about the corruption of the nation, maybe some people, people like you and me, might feel like we have heard this schtick before. We’ve heard people lament the decline of our country, the moral decay that is festering all around us. We’ve heard that message for over thirty years: about the erosion of family values, the increasing liberality with sexual relationships, the loss of God in the public square. 

But listen, beloved of God, because that is not the complaint that Amos levies against his northern neighbors. Instead, Amos points to the marketplace, to those who, in his words, trample on the needy, those who bring the poor to ruin. He tells us that those who control the market in his time can’t wait for religious observances to end so that they can return to fleecing people, who are putting their fingers on the scales so that more wealth flows to the wealthy at the expense of those who are struggling to make ends meet. 

Now you may be thinking, “I don’t know what eighth-century Israel looked like, but that sounds a lot like our own contemporary situation.” 

Amos talks about those who are willing to sell the poor for a pair of sandals and my mind immediately goes to how we will look the other way for a pair of inexpensive shoes, no matter the labor practices that created them. But there are all kinds of ways the concerns of the poor, in our own time, are pushed to the side for convenience and affordability. 

And it’s legal. It’s the way the system is designed, everyone assures people like Amos. But Amos isn’t interested in whether or not the current system is legal. Amos wants to know whether or not it is moral…. And Amos has more than a hunch that no, the system is not moral. Rather, the system is one that uses religion to distract the masses while people with no power are ground up by injustice, oppression, and systems in which there is no fighting chance for a better life. And, at times, even today, religion is twisted into just that: something to distract you by getting you to look only at your own salvation, your personal relationship with Jesus… and you get so focused on that you miss that your neighbor is drowning right next to you. 

Jesus told us that all of the law and the prophets, all of the words of people as diverse as Amos and Moses, can a be summed up in the precepts of “Love of God” and “Love of neighbor.” And, as my daughter taught me when she finished her Vacation Bible School just a few weeks ago, “A neighbor, Daddy,” she said, “Is not just someone who lives near you.” 

“Did you know, Daddy,” she said “A neighbor is anyone in need?”

This means that those who are being crushed today by unjust systems, whether they be broken systems of immigration or broken systems that support misogyny and heterosexism, or just broken systems that will grind up the poor to make someone else’s lifea little better… those who are crushed by these systems are your neighbor. They are your responsibility. They are my responsibility.

And if you run to and fro looking for God in your life while you are ignoring your neighbor crushed by the systems of this world… you simply will not find God, Amos says. 

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 past week, on Sunday, June 26, my congregation hosted our second annual Pride worship service, held the last Sunday in Pride month to celebrate all God’s beloved children, no matter their sexuality or gender identity.

I spoke at that service about what freedom means for the Christian, drawing from the Epistle reading appointed that day in our church’s lectionary, from Galatians 5, where St. Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” 

This week, on Christian Mythbusters, given everything going on in our country, I’d like to try once more to break some of the myths regarding what freedom does and should look like for the Christian… and what it shouldn’t look like. 

If you live where I do, here in Ottawa County, Michigan, you may have noticed lately an increase in banners and yard signs promoting a set of political candidates who believe in “freedom and family.” “Who can disagree with that?,” you might say. Well, if you go to the website of the group running these signs and candidates, you will see what sort of freedom they believe in: their freedom to tell other people how to live their lives. This group, known as Ottawa Impact, believes in their freedom to insist that their religious views control what sorts of books children have access to in the library. They believe in the freedom to dismantle the county department of diversity, equity, and inclusion, because it runs counter to their personal beliefs. 

Groups like this, people who believe in “Christian Freedom” (so-called) like this also believe in their freedom to tell women what to do with their bodies, a freedom that found its fulfillment last week in the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now a woman cannot make her own conscious decision, but the government has taken that freedom from her. This is the opposite of freedom. This is the tyranny of a far-right religious view, and it has no place in our country. It has no place in the church. 

The candidate running county commissioner in Grand Haven Township, where I live, has on his flyers his commitment to his freedom to insist that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl, his freedom to declare the gender identity of children, to erase the biological reality of intersex people whose gender cannot be clearly identified, his freedom to erase the reality of children who do not yet know, who have not yet claimed their own gender identity. This is the opposite of freedom. This is the tyranny of a far-right religious view, and it has no place in our country. It has no place in the church.

In Galatians 5, Paul is clear that Christian freedom is not biting and devouring one another, not using Scripture to bind up and dehumanize others. Paul is clear, right here in this text, that the whole of the law can be summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the heart of Christian freedom: love of neighbor.

And that means, freedom is willing to be constrained by the good of the other, to seek the best of your neighbor ahead of your own personal privilege, or views or opinion. Freedom for the Christian produces the fruits of the Spirit, Paul says in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-control. 

Sadly, though, as so many Americans work to push their own particular understanding of Scripture into the law of our country, we are seeing American Christians celebrate the way they have robbed women the right of making decisions for their own bodies. And Justice Thomas was clear, he wants to rob gay people of the right to marry. You see, Christian freedom, for far too many people today is, in actuality, religious tyranny. 

But it is for freedom that Christ has set us free and far too many people today live under a yoke of slavery. And make no mistake, any form of Christianity which enslaves another human being is false. That was true when Christianity supported the freedom of white landowners to enslave black people, not much more than a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s true when Christians want to enslave an undocumented immigrant to a system that doesn’t recognize their humanity. It’s true when it’s Christians wanting to enslave a woman so that a small group of religious men can control her body. And it’s true when Christians want to enslave the queer person by telling them that they need to be celibate or they need to hide, they need to be anything else than who God created them to be. All of these systems of slavery have nothing to do with the Gospel of freedom in Jesus Christ. And Christianity today must repent of them. 

It is for freedom Christ has set us free. And I long for the day that is what Christians are known for. 

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.