The Joy of Being Wrong

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 Sunday, one of the appointed Scripture readings in the lectionary cycle of our church was from the book of Nehemiah. The Hebrew Bible has been a love of mine since my undergraduate major of Biblical Studies. It currently fuels my Monday Night Introduction to the Hebrew Bible class that I teach at the church and on Zoom (you can join us at 6pm on most Mondays at sjegh.com/zoom). So, I took the opportunity this past Sunday to tell some of the story of Nehemiah. And one of the key points of the story of Nehemiah is something I’d like to share with you this week, a myth I’d like to break. And it’s this: it’s OK to find out you are wrong. In the time of Nehemiah, the Jewish people had been spending decades trying to rebuild their nation, their capital city of Jerusalem, and their temple following their return from exile in Babylon. Nehemiah was sent by the king of Persia to be the governor of Judah and he was massively successful. One of my favorite parts of Nehemiah’s story is that when he discovered the Jewish nobility were oppressing the poor, he forced the cancellation of all debts and mortgages. Thankfully, Nehemiah didn’t have to get a legislature of the rich to agree with him on that one. In the readings from this past Sunday, from Nehemiah 8, the people of Judah gather, and the priest Ezra reads them the entire law once more. When the people hear the law, the weep and mourn because they realize how far they have strayed from God’s intentions for them. But Nehemiah tells them not to weep, he tells them to rejoice, to go on their way, to eat the fat and drink sweet wine, because the joy of the Lord is their strength. I think the experience of the people in Nehemiah’s time is something many of us can resonate with. It’s hard for anyone to realize you are wrong, but it seems particularly hard for religious people to acknowledge they had been wrong about something. It’s probably because your faith is so close to your heart, that it feels vulnerable and threatening to watch a piece of it change… but we have to remember what Nehemiah said, our strength can never be found in how perfectly we believe or how tightly we cling to our opinions. Our strength should be in the joy of a God who is always inviting us to ask if God’s love and justice are pushing us to think and act differently today. I think back to when I changed my mind about the role of women in the church. In my upbringing, the evangelical church I went to divided over whether or not a woman could lead prayers out loud in a home when men were present. I was deeply opposed to the arguments of those in the other side. I was raised in a house of just my mom and my sisters for much of my life, I knew the importance of the voice of women and requiring their silence just seemed fundamentally un-Christian. But at the same time, when I was in college, I was kind of a moderate. I was in favor of expanded roles for women but anxious about division in the church. Then I read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” where he says the white moderate is the actual true obstacle in the fight for freedom, because the moderate prefers order to justice. I felt horrible. I felt like the people in Nehemiah’s time. Dr. King had helped me hear the law of God’s love and justice, and it was like I heard it for the first time and discovered that I was on the wrong side of God’s goodness in this world. I repented. I changed. And now I can say that the most powerful clergy in my own life have almost always been those who are women—their gifts have blessed me profoundly. The church tends to drag its feet when God calls it to reform… and there is a cost to this refusal to admit we are wrong and change. The church continues to drag its feet in bringing about a truly anti-racist society, and so Sunday remains the most segregated hour of the year and systemic racism still plagues our nation, claiming the bodies of people of color to hate and fear. The church continues to drag its feet on ensuring women have a full and equal place in the church and the world. And so, the Equal Rights Amendment that was first proposed in 1923, that was sent to states for ratification nearly fifty years later in 1972, that amendment has still not been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the constitution. I mean, heck, there are still states in our country where a wife does not legally have to consent to sex with her husband. And the church continues to drag its feet on LGBTQIA+ Christians, resulting in a whole generation which has rejected the church as clearly immoral on basic grounds of the way you treat a fellow human being, a dragging of feet which has claimed the lives of countless young people who have died by suicide after the hate they heard in their church. A Christian should never be afraid of being wrong. Indeed, Christians should always be asking if God is calling them to repent, to change, if God’s calling for their church to reform closer to God’s love and justice in this world. After all, the path to true joy in this world is the path of trust in God’s call to you to make that joy manifest in the lives of every human being. 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.