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. 

We’ve all had around a week to process it, but I know many of you are still reeling from the horror of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Two dead teachers. Nineteen dead elementary school children. As I read of how the gunman locked himself in a classroom with those kids and that this was how they all died, I felt my spirit tear inside of me. I could not wait to get home and hug my own child a little more closely. 

I’ve been trying to think about what to say, what to write, about this tragedy and how we, as a society, should respond to it. I’ve written and spoken so many times about gun control by now, that it feels hollow to pull all that out yet again. But I’ll try. I’ll try this week, as I try to break the myths—or perhaps, more accurately, the systemic sin—about Christianity and its relationship to the gun lobby in our nation.

I mean, we know. We know that 92% of Americans favor mandatory background checks for all gun sales. We know that 75% of Americans support a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales and 70% of Americans support mandatory registration of all privately-owned guns with the police. We know that 77% of Americans support laws that would allow a family member to seek a court order to temporarily take away guns if they feel a gun owner might harm themselves or others. We know that 70% of Americans support police filing that same order. We know that 68% of Americans support raising the legal age at which a person can purchase certain firearms from 18 to 21. We know that 56%, still well over half of Americans, support banning the sale of semi-automatic weapons such as the AR-15 which have no purpose other than being a weapon of war and death.

And we know that the majority of Republicans support almost all of these measures.

We know all of these things… and yet we do nothing. We do nothing because our legislative system is broken, particularly when it comes to gun reform. And we know that a good deal of that legislative system is owned by the National Rifle Association, meaning almost no Republicans would vote for the very sensible and bipartisan measures we know people support, measures that would absolutely save lives. 

And the fact that pastors and faith leaders don’t call out this broken system, the fact that churches don’t take to the street to protest the failure of legislators to make our country safer for her residents… to make schools safer for our kids… it boggles the mind. It breaks my heart. And it makes me very angry.

On Thursday, June 9, my parish, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, will be holding a Requiem Vigil and Mass of Advocacy for Victims of Gun Violence. The service will be at 6pm and anyone who is interested is welcome to attend. 

We chose that date because it is the feast day of the great St. Columba. Columba was a monk in the sixth century who was active in both Ireland and Scotland. He had a strong personality and preached forcefully in ways that often stirred up opposition. He wound up exiled to Scotland, but remained active in Irish politics and Scottish politics, always working for peace in his land. In fact, his name is derived from the Latin word for dove, as we worked for a peace that was just and holy, a peace that was inherently political.

Jesus told us in Matthew, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” And it is time. It is long past time for all Christians, no matter your political persuasion, to stand up and work to bring peace because our country is being torn apart by gun violence. Children, minorities, and all sorts of people are victims every day. 

We don’t even hear reports on all school shootings because they happen too often. There have been seventy-seven school shootings on campuses just this year. In addition to Uvalde, there have been two others where more than four people were shot. And I bet most of us couldn’t even name those schools.

We must make peace. Each and every one of us. The church must stop being known as one of the biggest supporters of gun rights in our country, bought, sold, and paid for. Instead, the body of Christ needs to get to work making peace. 

Because the cost of this fantasy of an unrestricted right for every person to own firearms, no matter their lethal capacity… this fantasy must be challenged. It must end. And it won’t, until the church stands up and says, enough.

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. 

As we head toward the Memorial Day holiday, for many people it means the unofficial start of summer. Grills get uncovered, pools opened up, and many of us prepare for another beautiful summer by the gorgeous Lake Michigan shoreline.

I will admit that I’m not always grateful for social media, but one thing I do think social media has done over the years is increase the awareness that Memorial Day is not really about the start of summer. Instead, this is a holiday set aside to honor those who gave their all in service of our country. And its observance comes from a place of felt pain and grief at the death of loved ones who served in the armed forces. 

So, this week, I thought it might be a good week to break the myth that those who have died are gone and entirely separated from us… because I don’t think they are. 

Memorial Day began in the nineteenth century as a way of remembering those who perished in the civil war. Lost to the shrouds of time, it would be easy to underestimate the impact of that war upon our country. But truth be told, 750,000 people died from the Civil War. That would be 2.5% of our country’s population at the time. By comparison, if a similar conflict happened today, it would be like losing 7 million American lives. 

In both the north and south, it became the custom in the late spring or early summer to decorate the graves of soldiers who died in that terrible war, with the day often being called “Decoration Day.” And it was after the horrors of two world wars in the twentieth century that the holiday most fully took on its present form as Memorial Day.

There was a similar movement that happened in my own denomination, the Episcopal Church, after the first World War. At that time, the Episcopal Church was one of the larger denominations in the country, but, like many other denominations, our members were crushed by the deaths of the first World War. 

When we authorized a new prayer book in 1928, the prayer book included an innovation that had not been in Anglican liturgy since the days of the Reformation: prayers for the departed. While some rejected prayers for the departed as a Roman Catholic innovation that should not be part of properly Anglican liturgy, the truth is that these prayers were tremendously popular with the laity who were still grieving from lives lost in the Great War.

And these days, if you go to almost any Episcopal Church, whether high in the catholic tradition or more in the lower protestant tradition, you will almost certainly hear prayers for those who have died. While our church does not have the same very specific understanding of purgatory that the Roman Catholic church does, we have fully restored the practice and idea of praying for the departed. And the catechism of our church gives a good reason for why we pray for the dead. It says, “We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.”

And I know for me, when there is a brief pause in Sunday worship to pray for those who have died, I feel that connection. I pray for my grandparents, for my aunt who died of cancer just before her eighteenth birthday, and for a few other people’s whose absence I feel so acutely. As I pray for them, I am reminded that death does not win, that through Christ’s love I’m still connected to those who have gone before. 

I don’t know what kind of a religious tradition you come from (or even if you have a religious tradition), but I would encourage to give it a shot, try praying for those who have died. You might find it a meaningful devotion in your daily life or Sunday worship. For me, I pray that God continues to hold them in God’s. I pray that whatever the afterlife looks like, whatever the journey into the foothills of heaven (as CS Lewis describes it) might be like, I pray that they will feel my love surrounding them… and I pray that their love will surround me. 

I pray particularly that the words of the author of Hebrews will be manifest in my own consciousness, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” Because make no mistake, we are not left alone. For those who trust in God’s love, life is not ended by death, it is merely transformed into something else. And their love for us, and our shared love in God, still holds.  

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. 

For the first couple weeks of May, our church, St. John’s Episcopal here in Grand Haven, ran a targeted Facebook ad with a survey aimed at people who are not connected to a faith community. We wanted to know what things would be important to them, were they to want to be a part of a faith community. We also wanted to know what kept them away from church and also what they might say to a church trying to do a better job of listening.

The responses were excellent, giving us some helpful insight into people who don’t find a home in church right now. But one thread ran through several responses: the experience of spiritual abuse or religious trauma. So, this week I’d like to break the myth that church is always a safe space… because sometimes it is not.

The Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service (CCPAS), which is a safeguarding charity in the United Kingdom, defines spiritual abuse as “coercion and control, manipulation and pressuring of individuals, control through the misuse of religious texts and scripture and providing a ‘divine’ rationale for behavior.” In a study that CCPAS did, they found that two-thirds of those who responded had been spiritually abused at some point in their life. 

Religious trauma is a term which increasing numbers of psychotherapists and counselors use to describe the experience of someone who has been to a church, or religious community, that weaponized Scripture and religion in such a way that it damaged the person’s psyche and emotional well-being. An article in the New York Times on the issue noted that scientific research has indicated some people can “suffer for decades from post-traumatic stress disorder-type symptoms, including anxiety, self-doubt and feelings of social inadequacy.”

If you’re listening to me right now and you are thinking that either of those terms describes your own experience, I want you to know how sorry I am for the pain you have experienced… and the pain you still carry. I hope you’ll know that there are pastors and priests like me, and congregations I hope like mine, that would repudiate that sort of twisted experience of religion that has hurt you so badly.

And I’d also want you know there is hope for moving past it. That same New York Times article shares how Duke University did a study in 2014 on something they called “religious cognitive therapy.” This is an approach that focused on Scriptures about forgiveness, God’s love, and mercy, and used those Scriptures to challenge the dysfunctional thoughts that maintain and perpetuate trauma. Clinical trials run by Duke showed that people who experience this sort of therapy had lower rates of depression and were more likely to feel positive emotions like gratitude or optimism. 

In short, Dr. Harold Koenig, the psychotherapist who ran the study at Duke said, “The best cure for religious trauma may be a deeper dive into the spiritual core of religious teachings.”

So, a few things. If you are a faith leader or just someone who is active in your church, be attentive. If the message of your church is leaving people feeling wounded and inadequate, I have a hunch it’s not really the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If religious language is used in your community to coerce or manipulate people, if it’s being used to justify behavior or actions you would otherwise reject, these are all red flags of possible religious trauma inflicting behavior. Raise concerns, if you can. And leave any toxic faith community you’re in, if you must. 

If you’re someone who still struggles with the wounds and aftereffects of religious trauma and spiritual abuse, I’d encourage you to find ways to explore more fully the real mercy and goodness of God. Sometimes that means finding a therapist who can help you undo and let go of some of the dysfunctional thinking that was drilled into your mind by misguided faith leaders. Sometimes it means finding a faith community that can offer a different perspective, one that nourishes and empowers you to be the person you know God created you to be instead of pushing you to fit into some pre-defined mold. 

And if you just cannot bring yourself to do it, to be vulnerable and risk further trauma in another faith community, please know that it’s OK. God’s love holds you whether you are in church or out of church. God’s love holds you. And that love can eventually bring you the healing God so deeply desires for you. God can find a way… and I pray God will find a way.

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. 

Last week I talked about some of the Scriptural and theological reasons why there is room for a nuanced view of abortion in Christianity. Having been raised with strict views on this question, I know I was surprised to learn in graduate school that there was room to think differently, to honor a woman’s right to make this difficult choice on her own, and that honoring a women’s right to choose could be based in both a careful reading of the Biblical text and in the theology of the church.

But this week in Christian Mythbusters, I’d like to do something different. I’d like to talk about the way Christians so often talk about abortion, the words they use and the arguments they make. Because they think they are speaking in favor of life, but so often their words and rhetoric bring pain, death, and suffering to countless women. 

I know I didn’t understand much of this myself until my wife and I struggled to conceive. After the long journey of work with fertility doctors, we were able to have one child, our daughter… but we were unable to have any more after that. We both still carry that pain to this day.

And so, when I know when I am driving down the road and I see an anti-abortion billboard that claims that an embryo is the equivalent of a human being, my heart sinks into my stomach. Because, like many couples who struggled with infertility, we lost embryos in the process. And to be told that those were my children, the equivalent of my own daughter running around in our back yard… to be told that the embryo is the same as that, that the embryo was my child… this is not only scientifically false, it’s not only lacking any basis in Scripture or theology… it is painful and it’s cruel. It piles unnecessary sorrow and guilt on top of already-existing pain. 

And, you see, that’s the key that is so often missed in these debates: how the language you use will impact women who have been touched by questions surrounding not just abortion, but fertility, miscarriage, and stillbirth. Because all of those women carry deep pain and the language Christians use doesn’t heal that pain; it pours salt upon the wounds.

The day that the news of the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade came out, I sat in my truck listening to a story on the radio, an interview with an elected state representative. The reporter was asking about laws in Oklahoma, laws that would go into effect if Roe v. Wade is indeed overturned, laws that would not only criminalize abortion but would not even make an exception for cases of rape or incest. After hemming and hawing a bit, the representative said that, well, these laws were important because as horrible as rape and incest is, it doesn’t justify murder.

I immediately thought of any woman who was impregnated by her rapist, or a girl who was impregnated by a family member, and who was listening to the radio right now. And if that woman had an abortion because of the horror forced upon her by a man, I wondered about how massively wounding it must be to be told that after being raped, or being the victim of incest, that they should have carried that embryo to full-term birth, that an abortion was making her a murderer. 

Shame. Shame on Christians for equating abortion with murder. Make no mistake, abortion always has tragic dimensions, but nowhere in Scripture is abortion treated the same as murder. In fact, quite the opposite. As I said last week, Exodus 21 is very clear that if violence causes a miscarriage, the penalty is different than it would be for murder. 

And I hope you will listen to me, if you are a religious leader or just a passionate advocate for the so-called Pro-Life movement, I hope you will listen to me when I tell you that your language is what is killing life. By calling women who were faced with the tragic and difficult decisions surround abortion murderers, you are plunging a dagger deep in their soul. 

You are the reason that women in your churches who have had abortions, or who have struggled with issues of pregnancy, you are the reason they don’t talk about it. You are the reason they make the journey to the abortion clinic alone, while so-called Christian protestors hurl insults and sometimes physical objects at them as they walk that lonely sidewalk. You are the reason they make that journey alone and then they hold shame that is not theirs to bear the rest of their lives. You are the ones who have done that.

In Matthew 23, Jesus had this to say to the religious leaders of his own time, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” That is what is happening today, right now, in much of Christianity. Christians are tying heavy burdens on the backs of women and are unwilling to actually lift a finger to move them.

So, stop. Stop. Stop with the bad theology and a false reading of Scripture. Stop calling people murderers and saying that a clump of cells, though valuable, is the same as a child. And stop telling women who are in the impossible experience of contemplating what to do with a pregnancy they did not choose to have… or a pregnancy they wanted but which has gone horribly wrong… stop using your words and rhetoric to traumatize them all over again. It has nothing to do with the way of Jesus. Because the way of Jesus is to lift burdens and to heal with compassion.

And if you’re listening, and you’re a woman facing these questions, or one who has faced them in the past, feel free contact me at [email protected] or call me at the church, St. John’s Episcopal, Grand Haven, Michigan. I’ll walk this road with you, no matter what you choose and no matter what you have chosen. I’ll walk this road with you as a priest and as a follower of Jesus that believes that compassion is what is key. 

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 was shocked to read the draft decision from the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade and transforming this fundamental question of women’s healthcare, the very right of a woman to control what happens to her body, away from a constitutionally protected reality into one that would be at the whim of state legislatures. 

So, I’d like to try, once more, to break some of the myths this week about abortion and Christianity. 

As I said the last time this topic came up; abortion is a massively tragic choice that many women face. Every decision about abortion has difficult and challenging contexts. I don’t know anyone that is pro-abortion. What people like me, though, who oppose the criminalizing of abortion, believe is that this difficult decision is one that should be made by the woman who is pregnant… not by legislatures.

My own denomination, The Episcopal Church, has spoken clearly for decades that “all human life is sacred from its inception until death.” At the same time, we’ve been clear over and over again that legislation will not address the root cause of abortions. Our church has expressed “its unequivocal opposition to any legislative, executive or judicial action on the part of local, state or national governments that abridges the right of a woman to reach an informed decision about the termination of pregnancy or that would limit the access of a woman to safe means of acting on her decision.”

And the position of my church rests upon an acknowledgement that the biblical witness on the questions of abortion contain important nuances when it comes to issues of personhood and the sanctity of life. 

Those who claim that a fetus is the equivalent to a human being from a moral and ethical standpoint cannot make that claim based on Scripture. Exodus 21, for example, is clear that if violence causes a miscarriage, the penalty is different than if you murder someone. Numbers 5 describes a ritual a woman must go through if she is accused of adultery, where the priest gives her something called “the water of bitterness.” And if she has committed adultery, the text believes  that the water will make her uterus drop, her womb discharge.

Both of these texts absolutely reflect the patriarchy of their time. In the Exodus text, for example, the husband determines the punishment for the loss of the fetus and there is not any corresponding violent ritual a for a man accused of adultery in the book of Numbers. Thankfully, given the fulfillment of the law through Jesus Christ, we are no longer bound by these commandments. Instead, Jesus told us that love of God and love of neighbor is the principle upon which all the law and the commandments rest. 

So, the question for the Christian is what does love of God and love of neighbor require of us? What does a true respect for the sanctity of life look like? 

First, it requires respecting the sanctity and personhood of every woman. That means that when a woman is faced with tragic and difficult circumstances, the church should support her , help her make her own informed decision about what is best. And then, after she makes that decision, the church should walk alongside of her. 

The second thing a Christian should do is advocate for policies that reduce the number of abortions in our country—which actually means advocating for policies that increase access to healthcare, particularly to marginalized communities that would be most adversely affected if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

I mean, the data is clear that countries with the most restrictive laws on abortion also actually have the highest rates of abortion. Instead it is policies like increased access to healthcare and birth control that actually results in far fewer abortions. That is why the number of abortions usually decreases under Democratic administrations and increases under Republican ones, ironically enough.

If this court does strike down Roe v. Wade, the lives of women in our country will be put at risk. Abortions laws will immediately take effect that will restrict access, which will increase the danger to women. And those Christians who have fought for this to take place will be complicit in the lives lost… they will be complicit in the emotional, spiritual, and mental anguish that women will be put through.

Make no mistake, a true value of the sanctity of all life—including the lives of women—means that if the Supreme Court makes this decision, we must all work together to create legislative protections for women in our country. The lives of countless women are at stake.   

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. 

Today, as the church moves through Holy Week and approaches Easter Sunday, there is a tendency sometimes for Christianity to turn inward. And so, whether you are hearing this on Wednesday in Holy Week or on Easter Sunday, I want to take a moment to talk about how I think the story of Christ’s death and resurrection should not be one that turns us inward. I want to break that myth and explore how this story should expand our views and tear down the barriers we build. 

The Gospel of John shades the story of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection rather differently than the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John doesn’t have a Last Supper narrative with the institution of Communion, instead he has the story of foot washing in the upper room. Whereas in the synoptics, the last meal in the upper room is a Passover dinner, in John’s Gospel the last meal is the night before the Passover. Because in John’s Gospel, Jesus is killed at the same time as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, drawing a unity between the lamb and Christ who is our Passover lamb sacrificed for us. 

Before the passion and resurrection narratives in John, Jesus is at the Passover festival, and we are told some Greeks came to Philip and wanted to see Jesus. These would have been Jewish Greeks, since they are at the Passover festival, so they are probably Hellenistic Jews, those who had been a part of a tradition in Judaism exemplified by Philo and others that blended Judaism with Greek philosophy.

But oddly enough, Philip doesn’t just take them to see Jesus. Instead, Philip goes and talks to Andrew and then both of them go and talk to Jesus. And rather than Jesus saying anything about the request of the Greeks who Philip and Andrew say want to see him, Jesus answers them by saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

What a bizarre answer. Right? You wonder, what happened to the Greeks? Why does Jesus answer the disciples with this theological explanation, this foreshadowing his coming death on the cross? 

I think a hint of the answer, though, can be found near the end of Jesus theological explanation, where he says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

I wonder if the reason that Andrew and Philip don’t immediately bring these Greeks, these Hellenistic Jews, to see Jesus is because in their eyes these Greeks aren’t the right sort of Jews. These are fancy Greeks who enjoy philosophy and whose Aramaic was likely broken, not good Palestinian Jews like Philip and Andrew and Jesus and the rest of the disciples. 

So, instead of bringing them to Jesus, they hear their request, leave the Greeks were they are, and then go to Jesus to tell him, “Just so you know, Jesus, some of those Jews are here, those strange Hellenistic Jews. And, we don’t know what to do with them.” Because surely, Andrew and Philip think, surely Jesus wouldn’t want to talk with those people.

Jesus gives this theological explanation, this emphasis on his dying like a grain of wheat, to the disciples, to make it clear to them that his choice to do this, his choice to die on the cross, is so that he can draw the whole world to himself… including those people that Andrew and Philip might find suspect. 

The idea of God’s all-encompassing love is threatening to the narrow views of the religious of his time, so threatening that he is going to let the religious kill him, so that he can make it clear that his love for all people—including his love for those people the religious might not like, those people you may not like—his love for those people is what will triumph in the end. 

And all this pushes us, as Christians today, to ask who those people are to us? Who are the people that, if they came up to you, you would not really want to invite them to your church? Who are the people you tend to “other,” to set aside, to want to avoid? Maybe it’s their politics, or their piety. Maybe it’s their documentation status or their social class or even the color of their skin. Who are those people to you? 

Do you know that God is trying to draw those people to himself as well? He is trying to catch you and them in the grip of his love. After all, you know your conception of God is wrong if you’re pretty sure God and Jesus likes the same people you like and hate the people you hate. 

So maybe die to that today, just a little today. Let God’s love rise in you and create in you an expansive love, a love even for those people you would rather avoid. 

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. 

You and I live in an age and in a time when bodies of water are admired and enjoyed. Very rarely are they feared or seen as uncrossable boundaries. Of course, this does not apply for those of us who live in the Grand Haven area and have tried to cross the bridge from the north, with all that construction traffic. At times this has made the Grand River seem like an uncrossable boundary.

This week, in the last Christian Mythbusters before we begin Holy Week, I’d like to talk about things that seem impossible and how God is often inviting us to see new ways forward.  

In the Hebrew Bible reading our church read this past Sunday, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

For the Israelite people, when they hear a prophet remind them that their God is a God who makes a way in the seas and a path in the mighty waters, they know from a very visceral place what that means. 

Their minds go back, back to the stories their ancestors had told them about when the Hebrew people fled slavery in Egypt and arrived at the beaches of the Red Sea. There was no way to turn, no other path of escape from Egypt, and the armies of Pharaoh were advancing rapidly. But then the power of God pushed to the waters aside and made a pathway through the sea so that the children of Israel could walk to their freedom on dry land. 

They remembered as well, the stories how, decades later, when the descendants of those escaped slaves arrived at the Jordan River, on the eastern boundary of the Promised Land, their priests carried the Ark of the Covenant into the water and the waters parted once more, creating a pathway into the land of promise, the land of God’s long-awaited blessing for God’s people. 

The prophet speaking in the 43rd chapter of Isaiah is trying to invoke those powerful memories for God's people. For decades they have lived in exile, with no sense of how they could ever break free of Babylonian imperial power and return to the land God had given their ancestors so long ago. They were afraid, afraid that their sin, their failure to be the just society God had called them to be, that all of this had forever broken the covenant. 

But Isaiah is trying to remind them in this reading that every time it seems like the end for God's people, God has always made a way. Their God is the God who can make a path in the Red Sea, who can turn the waves of the sea into a chariot and horse to protect God’s people.

Isaiah is telling the exiles that the God who had made paths through uncrossable water was going to bring them home, it was just that God was bringing them home by a new and different way. So, they needed to remember those past memories of God’s salvation, but also needed to let go of them just a bit so they would be able to see the new liberation God was bringing about in their own time. 

This time they wouldn’t be coming home through water. Instead, God was going to sustain them through the middle-easter desert. God was going to create a new path, a new way home.

I wonder, at the end of Lent, with Holy Week and Easter almost here… I wonder what new things God is trying to do in your life, in our church, in the world. 

The prophet is right, if you only ever look for God where you have found God in the past, you will miss the new things, the new salvation God wants to bring you. And sometimes, like those ancient exiles, you need to pull your eyes from the place where God has always saved you and look instead to what might seem like a desert. Because it could be that your salvation now lies in an entirely different direction. 

Know this, beloved child of God, throughout all of the paths behind you, all of the things that shaped you—for good or for ill—God’s hand has been at work, redeeming that which was wrong and never should have happened and giving strength to that which was good. 

So wherever you find yourself at this end of Lent, don’t give up. Remember the past, but turn into the new thing God is bringing about in your life. Let it be OK that you don’t have it all figured out, that you don’t know the answers, that you still struggle with sin and doubt. Don’t let that weigh you down. Because the goodness God has for you is there, just ahead in the distance, if you can but make room in your life to accept and receive it. 

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. 

It has been beautiful, absolutely beautiful, to see the worldwide outpouring of support for the Ukrainian people, particularly those who are fleeing Putin’s war into other Eastern European countries. 

Over the past few weeks, though, I’ve also seen a handful of posts on social media noting that welcoming those fleeing violence is not really something our world has done a great job at recently. Indeed, our country has gotten really bad at it, truth be told. As I asked in my sermon this past Sunday, when are Americans wanting to welcome the Ukrainians fleeing violence going to start having that same embrace to refugees who might have a different skin color?

One of the founding ideals of our country was the inalienable right to life, liberty, and happiness. What many people don’t realize, though, is that this is not a uniquely American ideal. It actually has a basis in Scripture. So, this week I’d like to break the myth of what each human being should have as a right, on the sole basis of their humanity. 

In the book of the eighth-century prophet Micah, there is a powerful depiction of what the final healing of the world will look like when God finally sets all things right. This is Micah’s vision of what the world should look like and what, by God’s grace, it will look like in the end.

All the nations will come together, Micah believes, and God will finally be the God of all people. In this vision, Micah says that nations will finally beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks—no more weapons, just instruments for growth. He promises that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. And then, in verse four, the prophet writes, “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”

This same image was taken up in revolutionary times in the writings of George Washington, with Washington using this phrase in correspondence throughout his life, “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.” The dream of the prophet Micah exemplified, for Washington, the dream of the peasant farmer freed from military oppression and tyranny. 

It was a part of Washington’s farewell address, his wish for the citizens of the country to find freedom in their own patch of land, not to need to fight any longer for the freedom that should be theirs by right. The phrase was even picked up by Lin Manuel-Miranda in his musical, Hamilton, where Washington sings, “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I'm gone. Like the scripture says, ‘Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.’ They'll be safe in the nation we've made. I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree. A moment alone in the shade. At home in this nation we've made, one last time.”

This ideal is what you see reflected in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents of our country. The founders of our country had an idea that every human being should have a right to an unmolested life on their own piece of land. 

Now, they clearly didn’t actually mean every human being back then, given the other laws surrounding slavery and women and out treatment of native people… but the ideal has persisted, and each generation has sought to put to that ideal a little more into reality, to make our country more reflective of that hope. 

And make no mistake, there are so many people in our world today who still long to see the dream of the prophet Micah realized. Not just Ukrainians who are fighting with all they have against a war they didn’t invite, Ukrainians who would love to sit once more in their homes undisturbed, but so many more than that.

I think of African Americans, whose bodies and whose slavery and oppression built the wealth so many of us enjoy, people who would very much like to enjoy the fruit of the labor of their ancestors, fruit that is still kept from them through systems racism and injustice in our country. 

I think of the Palestinian people, many of them Muslim but many Christians as well, who were forced from their homes and who long to return to vines and fig trees their ancestors planted, which were stolen from them by Zionism and an Israeli government that increasingly thrives on fear and eschews justice. 

I think of immigrants in our own country who are unable to get any documents because our system is broken and immoral, because it asks them to spend decades waiting while they watch their children suffer from war and violence, simply because of the country they happen to be born in—because people in other countries can get those documents much more quickly in this current system. 

Could you imagine… Could you imagine if the church used the force of Christianity to argue that it is the inalienable right for every person to live a life free from poverty and violence, that every human has the right to sit in the shade of their own tree and enjoy the fruits of their work? I can imagine it… and the prophet Micah could imagine it. I hope you can imagine it, too. 

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 mentioned last week how during Lent, members of my parish are reading the book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus by Fleming Rutledge. The discussion from earlier this week, on her chapter on Apocalyptic War, underscored for me how very misunderstood the concept of the apocalyptic is, particularly among Christians. 

So, this week I’d like to break some myths around the idea of the apocalypse, while also suggesting that an apocalyptic perspective can inspire us to live differently as Christians in our own time.

Though we often think of apocalyptic as any sort of story or concept involving profound war, catastrophe, destruction, violence, or the end of the world, that’s not actually what the word means. The word “apocalypse” comes from Greek word apokalypsis, which simply means revealing or disclosing something that had been hidden. 

Apocalypse was used to describe a specific genre of literature that arose in the second century before Christ and persisted into around the second century after the time of Christ. Several pieces of apocalyptic literature found their way into the canon of Scripture, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the Greek New Testament, but others were simply literature that circulated among Jews or Christians in those centuries. 

This literature often was written in times of crisis for God’s people as a way for them to understand the crisis they were in and how it might relate to what God is doing in the world. And so, during the 2nd century persecution of the Jewish people, the apocalyptic sections of the book of Daniel gave hope that God was ultimately in control of the world. In the 1st century persecution of Christians, the Revelation to John was written to give hope to Christians that God would, in the end, conquer evil and heal their broken world. 

One of my favorite apocalyptic texts is actually not from Revelation—though that is a powerful book, when properly read. Instead, it is from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church. In the third chapter he writes that he is currently a prisoner for the sake of the Gentiles and that this imprisonment is related to “the mystery [that] was made known to me by revelation.” That word translated as “revelation” is the Greek word apokalpysis.

As the chapter continues, Paul explains that the former generations had not known what God was seeking to do for creation, a plan that was not made known to humanity until the incarnation of Christ and the inspiration of apostles and prophets. What is that plan, you might ask? Paul writes, “That is, the Gentiles have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

You have to remember, that for a first-century Jewish person, the idea that a Gentile could be a part of the people of God without first becoming Jewish was contrary to everything they had understood in the Hebrew Bible. It was contrary to everything their religion had told them. 

Jesus Christ, however, insisted that his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, was the fulfillment of the hopes of the Hebrew Scriptures… and it was also a reinterpretation of them. Because now, through the lens of Christ, the hopes of the post-exilic prophets that all nations would be a part of the people of God could finally be realized. 

The post-exilic prophets of Judaism had long believed that this hope would be realized through the conversion of the nations to Judaism. They had never imagined that God would become human in someone like Jesus Christ and create an entirely new form of the people of God, one that did not rest upon the promises of the Old Covenant, but one that rested entirely on the grace of God in reconciling humanity to one another and to God himself. 

This mystery that Paul talks about, the mystery of God reconciling all people to himself, a mystery that challenged how Jewish people read Scripture… That mystery is still at work in the church today. In the Episcopal Church, we have insisted that this is the basis for our own insistence on the full place of LGBTQIA+ Christians in the church. 

We understand that it is contrary to how people used to read the Bible, how many people still read the Bible today. But we believe the Holy Spirit has moved among the church—and particularly through our LGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ—and the Holy Spirit has shown us that our old reading was flawed, it was distorted by discrimination and the systems of this world which seek to oppress and marginalize. 

The Spirit showed us that our LGBTQIA+ siblings have all the fruits of the Spirit. Their relationships are holy and life-giving. They should not be told to somehow different than how God created them. They should not be told to live celibate lives or deny their created identity. Instead, they can teach us, in the words of St. Paul, “the wisdom of God in its rich variety.” 

Just like how the Spirit revealed the church was wrong on engaging in religious wars, or slavery, or the role of women… God is always working to unveil and reveal the truth of God’s plan of love and reconciliation. You and I just need to have faith to see it. 

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. 

During Lent, members of my parish are reading the book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus by Fleming Rutledge. It’s a very good book, hefty at around six hundred pages, but well worth the time. We’re doing selections from the book each week, knowing that not everyone finds six hundred pages of reading to be a meaningful Lenten discipline, and the selections so far have been very thought provoking.

In particular, the readings from the past week have been rolling around in my mind. So, I thought this might be a good week to share some of the insights of what I’ve been reading with you and perhaps break some of the myths myths surrounding what Christianity believes about sacrifice and power. 

Sacrifice is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our time, but often not in ways that resemble actual sacrifices. As Rutledge defines the word, a sacrifice is you giving up something of value for the greater good. Many times in our society, people talk about the sacrifice of military personnel, for example. It’s important to be clear, though, that the burden of that sacrifice rarely rests upon the shoulders of leaders who send young people into battle. Indeed, that sacrifice in our country often rests on the shoulders of those who aren’t in the ruling classes. For those in power to send those with little power off to battle isn’t Christian sacrifice, it's instead far too often sending people into harm’s way without having much cost to yourself. 

I think we see that right now with Ukraine. We are seeing Ukrainian citizens rising up and seeking to defend their country against Russian invaders. We all honor those sacrifices. But we are also are seeing young Russians sent into battle by an autocrat with no discernable end in sight, a sacrifice of young Russians that costs little to Putin and is heart breaking to watch.

In our own country, we’ve seen gas prices rise due to several factors, not the least of which is the impact of Russian aggression and global attempts to sanction Russia and get that country to turn from this violent path. Rising gas prices absolutely always hit the poor and working class harder, and that’s a difficult sacrifice to be asked to make. At the same time, when we see the cost of gas at the pump as a sacrifice we are invited to make to enable these economic sanctions to hit Russia hard, to help and support the Ukrainian people, I hope we see it as a sacrifice well-worth making for the common good. 

I also hope that the government, churches, and nonprofit organizations find ways to help the poor and working class who are struggling right now, to help them with resources to make up for the loss of funds they are experiencing due to pressure at the pump. Those of us who don’t feel that pain as acutely need to help those who find it overwhelming. We need to find our own ways to sacrifice for them.

Indeed, with all of this the sacrifice of Christ can be instructive to us as people of faith. After all, our culture tends to view self-sacrifice as weakness. Or we tend to experience forced sacrifice as an exercise of power over those with no power. But the sacrifice of Christ challenges those preconceptions, experiences, and ideals.

Fleming talks about this in her book, about how the sacrifice of Christ on the cross displayed an alternative mode of Power. As she says in chapter six, the Apostle “Paul did not understand the crucifixion of Christ primarily as a sacrifice in the cultic sense; he understood it as the definitive apocalyptic engagement with the forces of the enemy, at the frontier of the ages where Jesus’ self-abandonment was the ultimate weapon. It was the ultimate form of the ‘passive resistance’ that overwhelms and routs the enemy.”

For the Christian, Fleming points out, true power is best seen in a life willingly offered as sacrifice for the sake of others. 

This means that when Christians see people subjugated, we choose to do what Christ did. We stand alongside of and advocate for them. We don’t tell women to stay with abusive husbands. We don’t tell immigrants to follow unjust laws that dehumanize and exploit them. We don’t tell LGBTQIA+ individuals that the must consign themselves to a life of celibacy we would never force on cis-gender heterosexual Christians. 

No, instead if we have power, we ask how we can lay that power aside, how we can sacrifice our power and privilege to be an ally to those with none. We lay aside our own comfort in order to seek the healing of creation, to seek justice that can beat swords into ploughshares.

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.