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.Today I want to talk about rest. And why so many Christians are terrible at it.The myth I want to bust is one that runs so deep in American Christianity that most of us don't even recognize it as a theological claim. It's this: that your worth is determined by what you produce. What you accomplish. What you create, what you say, what you do. That busyness is next to godliness.This is often called the Protestant Work Ethic, and its roots go back to the Reformation — particularly to Calvinist theology, which tied disciplined, productive labor to signs of divine election. If you worked hard and prospered, it meant God was with you. Over time, especially in America, that theological framework got absorbed into the culture so thoroughly that it no longer needs a church to sustain it. It just is the water we swim in. Hustle culture. Productivity optimization. The glorification of busy.But here's what the Bible actually says: on the seventh day, God rested.Not because God was tired. Not because there was nothing left to do. God rested because rest is built into the fabric of creation itself. Sabbath isn't an afterthought. It's the crown of the creation story. The whole week points toward it.The Hebrew word is shabbat — to cease, to stop, to let be. And in the Torah, sabbath rest was not optional or aspirational. It was commanded. It was liberation theology in calendar form — a weekly reminder that the Israelites were no longer slaves in Egypt, no longer defined by their output, no longer subject to Pharaoh's endless demand for more bricks.And precisely because they were once slaves, God insisted that not only should they rest but that they must build a society in which everyone, down to the lowest and most vulnerable, was given a day to rest… a day simply… to be. Which means that when we refuse to rest, when we feel guilty about stopping, when our identity collapses without our to-do lists, we are acting like people who have forgotten they've been set free.And this touches my own life. Starting tomorrow, I begin a sabbatical — what our church is calling a “Renewal Leave” — that will carry me through mid-September. (That means there won’t be any more productions of Christian Mythbusters for the next four months.) This sabbatical is a genuine gift, and I don't take it for granted for a single moment. I know that most people listening don't get sabbaticals. The rhythms of sabbath rest are not equally available to everyone, and that itself is a justice issue worth naming. When rest becomes a luxury only some can afford, something has gone badly wrong.But sabbath was always meant to be more than a perk for the privileged. The Torah extended it to servants, to animals, to the land itself. It was a social practice, not just a personal one. Which means the church should be asking hard questions about a society that makes rest impossible for so many — and should be working to change it.In the meantime, here is what I know from theology and from my own life: you can build sabbath into your days even without a sabbatical. Not by escaping your responsibilities, but by regularly, intentionally, ceasing. One evening a week away from the screen. One morning that belongs to something life-giving rather than productive. A walk where you are not also listening to a podcast or wor. A meal where you are just eating. Small sabbaths, practiced faithfully, can begin to loosen the grip of the myth that you are only as valuable as what you produce.Because here is the truth: God is saving the world. Not you. Not me. We each have our part to play — and those parts matter deeply. But the weight of making things right does not rest on our shoulders alone. That is God's work, and God will see it through. Which means it is not just permissible for us to rest. It is essential. It is an act of faith.I’ll try to live in that trust, to rest in that grace and love, until I talk to you again in September.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.This week I came across a video of retired Anglican Bishop and renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, and he was making a point that I think is worth sitting with: that Christianity is not primarily about your soul escaping this world and going to heaven when you die.Now, I know that might sound strange. For a lot of people, your soul going to heaven is Christianity. The whole point. Get saved, go to heaven. And that assumption runs so deep that most of us never think to question it. It's like being a fish in water. You don't notice the water. That means it’s definitely a myth worth breaking.I was reminded of just how deep that assumption runs when I was watching an old episode of Lost the other night. The subject of baptism came up, and John Locke explained to Claire that baptism was basically eternal insurance. A way to make sure the baby got to heaven if something happened to him. And when Claire later talked to Mr. Eko, the character who, theoretically, had the most Christian formation of anyone on the island, he didn't push back on that understanding at all. When she worried about being separated from Aaron, he essentially offered to baptize them both. An insurance double plan, apparently.Now, I don't want to be too hard on a television show. But that scene captures something real. It's the version of Christianity that enormous numbers of people have actually received. Baptism as a ticket. Salvation as an exit strategy. The point of faith is to get your soul safely out of this world and into the next one.But here's the thing: that's not what Scripture actually teaches.Wright points to the Lord's Prayer as a window into the heart of what Jesus was actually about. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, "Our Father, may our souls ascend to you in heaven." He says, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The direction of movement, if you want to put it that way, is not souls leaving earth for heaven. It's God's reign arriving here in our broken, beloved world. The healing of creation. The renewal of all things.This is why the resurrection matters so much. Jesus did not rise as a disembodied spirit finally freed from the physical world. He rose bodily, as the first fruits of a new creation. The great promise of Scripture is not that God will eventually discard the physical world and take faithful souls somewhere else. It's that God will renew, restore, and redeem this world.And that changes everything about what the Christian life is for. If salvation is an exit strategy, then your job is just to get yourself and maybe a few others safely through the door before things get worse. But if salvation is about God's kingdom coming, then you are called to be part of that renewal right now. To practice justice. To love your neighbor. To work for the healing of what is broken. Not because it earns you anything, but because that is what it looks like to live in the reality Jesus announced.Baptism, in this fuller picture, is not insurance. It's initiation into a people who are learning to live as if the kingdom is already breaking in. Because it is.So the next time someone asks what Christianity is really about, you might resist the urge to reach for the heaven-and-hell framework. Instead, try this: it's about a God who loves this world so much that he entered into it, and who is committed to setting it right and healing all things—a God who invites us to be part of that work.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.This week, we're in the middle of the Holy Week and Easter observances, the most sacred time of the year. Some of you are hearing this closer to Easter, but the day I’m recording this (and the day the first version is being aired) is Wednesday itself, a day the church has long called "Spy Wednesday." This is the day we remember how Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. And whenever Spy Wednesday comes around, so do the myths about Judas.The biggest myth is this: Judas was uniquely evil, the worst of all sinners, the one man beyond redemption. Dante put Judas in the lowest circle of hell, frozen in the mouth of Satan himself. For centuries, Christian preachers have used Judas as a symbol of ultimate betrayal, of irredeemable wickedness. But let's slow down and take a harder look at the story.First, the Gospels don't actually agree on why Judas did what he did. Mark gives no reason for the betrayal. Matthew focuses on the money. In Luke and John, we are told that Satan entered Judas, rendering his actions not his own entirely. There's no single, tidy explanation, which should make us cautious about building a whole theology of damnation on one man we barely understand. And yet, across all four Gospels, Jesus shares the Last Supper with Judas, breaks bread with him, does not exclude him from the table. In John's Gospel specifically, Jesus even washes the feet of Judas. Jesus meets Judas with the same love and care he offers every other disciple, even knowing what is coming. The betrayer is also the beloved.Second, it's worth noting what Jesus himself says. In John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that none of them has been lost except "the one destined to be lost, so that scripture might be fulfilled." That phrase, destined to be lost, has troubled theologians for centuries. But the dominant interpretation among the early church fathers is that though Jesus foresaw the free choice of Judas to betray Jesus, even that freedom is harder to assess than we might think.Third, and maybe most importantly, we often forget that Judas felt genuine remorse. Matthew tells us he threw the thirty pieces of silver back at the priests, declared that he had betrayed innocent blood, and then went out and died by suicide. Whatever drove him to betray Jesus, he could not live with what he had done. That's not the portrait of a man who had fully rejected Christ.And here's where the Christian tradition, at its best, has something remarkable to offer: the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, the idea (expressed in the Apostles’ Creed) that Christ descended to the dead on Holy Saturday. A poet named Ruth Etchells imagined what that might be in a poem she wrote called "The Ballad of the Judas Tree." In Hell there grew a Judas Tree / Where Judas hanged and died / Because he could not bear to see / His master crucified / Our Lord descended into Hell / And found his Judas there / For ever hanging on the tree / Grown from his own despair / So Jesus cut his Judas down / And took him in his arms / "It was for this I came" he said / "And not to do you harm / My Father gave me twelve good men / And all of them I kept / Though one betrayed and one denied / Some fled and others slept / In three days' time I must return / To make the others glad / But first I had to come to Hell / And share the death you had / My tree will grow in place of yours / Its roots lie here as well / There is no final victory / Without this soul from Hell"/ So when we all condemned him / As of every traitor worst / Remember that of all his men / Our Lord forgave him first.That last line is the theological punch: our Lord forgave him first.The myth says Judas is the exception, the one person even God's love couldn't reach. The gospel says there are no exceptions. We profess in the creeds that Christ descended into hell. We believe that the love of God pursues us into the very darkest places we can go, including the darkness we make for ourselves.Judas is a warning, yes, about the corrosive power of betrayal and despair, even more so about what happens when you so form Christ in your own image and expectations that you turn away from the real goodness God holds out to you. But if Etchells is right, Judas can also be a testimony to the relentless, pursuing love of Jesus Christ. 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.Recently, a lot of our conversations together have been about questions where people have confused what is common or dominant (cisgender identity, male dominance in culture) with the depth of the divine life. The results is that anyone who falls outside the boundaries of what is deemed “normal” is seen as an outlier to God’s intent for the world we live in.Today, I want to tackle one particular way that narrative plays out in an area of which we are only recently more aware—the concept of neurodiversity. Many people assume that there is one kind of normal brain, and that people who don't have it are somehow less than fully who they should be. This is a myth definitely worth breaking. I want to talk about what the neurodivergent—or neurospicy, which is my own favorite term—can teach the rest of us.The term was "neurodiversity" was coined in 1998 by autistic Australian sociologist Judy Singer — and she was very clear that it wasn't a medical term. It was a political one. Her idea was simple: no two human minds are exactly alike, and that variation is not a defect. It is a fact about our species. Autism activists took that idea and ran with it, pushing back against what they call the "pathology model" — the assumption that there is one correct way for a brain to develop, and that every deviation from it is a disorder to be cured.Daniel Bowman Jr., a poet and English professor who is also autistic, puts it plainly: autism is his operating system, not a bug. He is not broken. He is different. And the neurotypical insistence that their way of being human is the standard makes the lives of neurodivergent people unnecessarily hard — not because their brains don't work, but because the world keeps telling them they don't fit.Now here's where the theology gets interesting.Christians have long wrestled with what it means to be made in the image of God — the imago Dei. Over the last century, a dominant answer has been: relationality. To be fully human, in the image of God, is to be in relationship — the I-Thou of Martin Buber, taken up by Barth and Bonhoeffer and half the systematic theologians of the twentieth century. The problem, as scholar Joanna Leidenhag has shown, is that when you define personhood primarily through the capacity for certain kinds of social and emotional relationship, you have — almost by accident — defined autistic people as less than fully human. Some churches have even used this framework to suggest that people with autism are incapable of genuine sanctification. That is a theological catastrophe, and it needs to be named as one.Here is what I think is closer to the truth: God, in Scripture, reveals a mind that is both deeply systematic and profoundly empathic. The orderliness of creation, the precision of the tabernacle instructions, Paul's declaration that God is not a God of disorder but of peace — these point to a divine mind that finds beauty and meaning in pattern and structure. But God also weeps. God notices Jonah's sulking over a withered plant. God is moved. Both modes of knowing and being belong to God, which means both modes of knowing and being belong to the image of God we carry.And here is what our neurospicy siblings can teach us: they often experience one or both of these modes with astonishing intensity. Bowman writes that his autistic friends are every bit as feeling, compassionate, and caring as his neurotypical ones — sometimes more so. What looks like emotional flatness from the outside is frequently a nervous system overwhelmed by the depth of what it is taking in. That is not a deficit. That is a different kind of depth.Scholar Lauren Calvin Cooke makes a related point about how the church has mistakenly equated deep faith with cognitive articulation — the ability to explain sanctification, to recite the creed, to answer the right questions in confirmation class. But the Word did not become a proposition. The Word became flesh. Embodied, sensory, particular human experience, that is what God entered. Which means knowledge of God lives in the body… in the bread on the tongue, in the knees that learn to kneel, in the hands that learn to receive. Our neurodivergent siblings, who often experience the world through their senses with extraordinary vividness, may have access to embodied, incarnational knowing that those of us who live mostly in our heads have been trained to overlook.To be clear: the neurospicy don't need to be fixed so they can participate in our church. Those of us who are neruotypical need to expand what we think participation looks like. We need to build communities where the fidgeter and the avoider of eye contact and the person who needs the same seat every week is not seen as a problem to manage, but as a bearer of the divine image — offering us a facet of God we might never otherwise encounter.The myth is that normal is the goal. The truth is that the image of God is far larger than any one of us — or any one kind of brain — can contain.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 the myth that God is a man—and why Christian theology has always known that God transcends gender entirely. Today I want to go deeper, because some listeners pushed back with an obvious question: “But Jesus was a man, wasn't he?” And yes—historically, he was. So, what do we do with that?This brings us to today's myth: the myth that because Jesus was male, maleness must be closer to God, some key part of the divine inner life, or more capable of representing the divine.To untangle this, I want to introduce you to one of the most important theological principles in all of Christian history. It comes from St. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing around 382 AD: “That which he did not assume, he cannot save.” In other words, for Christ to redeem humanity, he had to take on full human nature—not just a body, but a mind, a will, emotions, and all the complexity of what it means to be a person. Gregory was arguing against those who thought Jesus only seemed human, or was human in only a partial way. No, Gregory insisted: the redemption of the whole person requires the incarnation of the whole person.Now here's where it gets interesting. If the saving power of the incarnation flows from Christ's humanity—from his taking on the full depth of human experience—then what follows? It follows that his maleness was a feature of his historical particularity, not the theological engine of salvation.Feminist theologians have been making this exact point for decades. While Jesus' male sex was as intrinsic to his historical particularity as were his Jewish race, his Galilean village roots, his class, and his ethnic heritage, it reveals nothing about the nature or gender of God, nor about the appropriateness of male images for the divine. Jesus was also a first-century Palestinian Jew who wore sandals and spoke Aramaic. We don't conclude from that that God is Aramaic-speaking—or that Galileans are somehow closer to the divine. As Elizabeth Johnson put it, “The heart of the problem is not that Jesus was male, but that more males have not been like Jesus.”The point is this: the incarnation saves because God entered fully into human life—into vulnerability, suffering, love, and death. The redemptive power is in the depth of that union, not in the gender of the vessel.And if that's true, then Gregory's maxim cuts in an unexpected direction. If the unassumed is the unhealed, then a Christ who only assumed male humanity would leave the rest of humanity—women, nonbinary people, anyone who doesn't fit the narrow category of male—somehow outside the full reach of salvation. Christian theology has sometimes dignified maleness as the only genuine way of being human, making Jesus' embodiment as male an ontological necessity rather than a historical option. But that's not the Gospel. That's a distortion of it.The good news—and it really is good news—is that what Christ assumed was humanity itself, in its full breadth and depth. And that means the healing of the incarnation extends to every human being: women, men, and people of every gender identity. All of it was assumed. All of it is being redeemed.This is why the diversity of human gender and identity is not a threat to Christian faith. It is, if anything, a reminder of the vastness of what God entered into—and the vastness of what God is saving. The mystery of human embodiment in all its variety doesn't shrink the Gospel. It reveals how wide the incarnation truly is.Gregory of Nazianzus wanted us to take the incarnation seriously. So let's do that—all the way to its most expansive, most healing conclusion.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.Over the past few days, there’s been a good amount of controversy swirling around a comment from Texas politician and Presbyterian seminary student James Talarico. During a speech several years ago, Talarico said something that quickly went viral again this week: “God is nonbinary.”Critics pounced. Commentators circulated the clip as evidence that progressive Christians have abandoned traditional faith. But Talarico later said he was making a theological point that shouldn’t really be controversial—the idea that God is beyond human gender categories.Which brings us to today’s myth: the myth that God is a man… because apparently some people think that’s true. And if you think about it for even a moment, that idea doesn’t make much sense. Christians believe God created the entire universe—space, time, matter, life itself. God is the source and ground of all being, the ultimate divine reality that exists beyond the limits of human biology. If God is the creator of gender, then God cannot be confined to a single gender.But here’s the thing: many people really do imagine God as literally male.I remember leading a Bible study early in my ministry, when I was still a brand-new priest. At one point in the discussion, an older woman in the group said something that genuinely surprised me. She told us that she believed God really was an old man with a long white beard—basically the same image you see in Renaissance paintings. And she didn’t mean that symbolically. She meant it quite literally.Now, to be clear, scripture often uses masculine language for God. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” But the reality is the Bible also uses feminine imagery for God—comparing God to a mother eagle protecting her young, a woman searching for a lost coin, or a mother comforting her child. The point is not that God is male or female. The point is that every human metaphor eventually falls short.In fact, the very first chapter of the Bible pushes us in this direction. In Genesis we are told that human beings are created in the image of God: “male and female he created them.” Notice what that implies. The fullness of humanity reflects the divine image. No single gender contains it all.And that insight has something important to say for how Christians think about gender today.If all people bear the image of God, then transgender and nonbinary people are not mistakes. They are not outside of God’s creative intention. They, too, reflect the divine image in the world.In fact, that might be a particular gift the trans community offers the rest of us. Because their lives challenge the assumption that gender must fit neatly into simple binary categories, they remind us of something theology has always known: God transcends the boxes we try to place around reality. And so why would we be surprised when humans do the same? In that way, the existence and witness of trans and nonbinary people can help reveal something profound about the mystery of God, about the reality of gender not being one or the other but a multitude of diversity. When Genesis described God looking at creation, Genesis said God declared it “very good.” That blessing extends to the full diversity of humanity—including those whose lives challenge categories we once assumed were fixed.And this is something the great mystics of the Christian tradition understood very well. They taught that the deepest path into the heart of God is what theologians call the apophatic way—the path of realizing that God ultimately surpasses every concept, every category, every image we try to use.The closer we get to God, the more we discover that the divine mystery is always larger than our assumptions.And when we learn to live in that mystery, something beautiful happens: our theology becomes humbler, our compassion becomes wider, and we begin to recognize the image of God shining in people we might once have overlooked.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 biggest myths many of us carry about faith is this: that if your beliefs change, your faith must be failing. For a lot of people—especially those of us who grew up in evangelical environments—faith was often presented as a kind of finished product. The right doctrines. The right interpretations. The right answers. Once you “arrived,” the expectation was that you would simply defend those answers for the rest of your life. But life and the Holy Spirit have a way of complicating tidy answers.You encounter new ideas. You meet people whose experiences challenge what you were taught. You discover parts of scripture you had never really wrestled with before. The Holy Spirit moves in your heart, asking you to reconsider something you’ve always believed. And suddenly the faith that once felt certain begins to shift.For many people, that moment can be terrifying. Because if faith is supposed to be a fixed set of beliefs, then questioning those beliefs can feel like the beginning of the end.But the deeper Christian tradition offers a very different picture of faith.In the Rule of St. Benedict—the sixth-century guide for monastic life—monks take three vows: stability, obedience, and something called conversatio morum. That Latin phrase is famously hard to translate, but it’s often rendered as “conversion of life.” Not conversion as a one-time event. Conversion as a lifelong process.Conversatio morum assumes something many modern Christians forget: following Christ means continually being changed. Your understanding deepens. Your assumptions are challenged. Your life slowly reshapes itself around the way of Jesus. In other words, change is not a failure of faith… change is faith.That idea was enormously important for me personally. I grew up in an evangelical world where certainty was often treated as the highest virtue. But as I encountered the wider Christian tradition—scripture, history, theology, and the sacramental life of the church—I found myself asking questions that my earlier faith didn’t always know how to answer. For a while, that felt like everything was unraveling.But discovering this older Christian wisdom from St. Benedict reframed the entire experience. What I thought was “deconstruction” w something far older: conversion of life.Conversatio morum.It reminded me that the goal of Christianity is not intellectual rigidity. The goal is transformation after the mind of Christ.And in many ways, that realization is what eventually drew me into the Anglican tradition. Anglicanism holds deeply to the ancient faith of the church—its creeds, its scriptures, its sacramental life—but it also carries a humility about our understanding. It recognizes that the Holy Spirit is still at work reforming the church ever closer to God’s intent.That means we hold tradition seriously, but we also remain open to asking whether some of the church’s long-held assumptions were shaped more by culture than by the heart of God.Questions about the roles of women in the church, or about LGBTQ people and their place in the life of faith, have forced Christians to wrestle deeply with scripture, tradition, and lived experience. And in many parts of the Anglican world, including my own, that wrestling has led to the recognition that what once seemed like the “traditional” position may actually have been culturally conditioned by forces of patriarchy, discrimination, or marginalization… that the Spirit may be leading the church toward a fuller understanding of God’s love and justice than we previously held.That too is conversatio morum.The apostle Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Notice that word: renewing. Not once but again and again and again.A Benedictine writer once captured the spirit of this beautifully with a simple phrase: “always we begin again.”That’s what the Christian life looks like. We learn. We grow. We repent. We reconsider. And through it all, the Spirit keeps shaping us more and more into the likeness of Christ. Always we begin again—a truth of discipleship that sometimes might feel scary but that is actually a profound gift.The myth is that faith means never changing. The truth is that following Jesus means being willing to be changed—again and again—as we grow ever closer to God’s intent for us to be a people of love, justice, humility, grace, and mercy—particularly for ourselves.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.Since most of you will be hearing this either on Ash Wednesday or sometime near the start of Lent, let’s talk about one of the most common myths surrounding this day. The myth is this: Ash Wednesday and Lent are about God wanting you to feel bad about yourself.I want to speak personally for a moment. Growing up in an evangelical context, I often felt like I never quite measured up. No matter how sincere my faith was, no matter how hard I tried, there was always this quiet sense that I was falling short—that real Christians were somehow stronger, purer, more certain than I was. Faith sometimes felt less like grace and more like a test I kept failing.And yet, strangely, when I encountered The Episcopal Church, Ash Wednesday became the day I first began to feel like I belonged.Because on Ash Wednesday, nobody is pretending. Nobody is polished. Nobody is performing spiritual success. We all come forward the same way—marked with ashes, named as dust, honest about our limits. Beat up, broken, and bedraggled… and still here. Still loved. Still called. Still held in grace.It was in the Season of Lent that I think I first began to understand what Brennan Manning called the Ragamuffin Gospel—the stunning truth that God’s love is not for the shiny and successful, but for ragamuffins: the bedraggled, the inconsistent, the ones who know they don’t have it all together.Manning wrote that “God loves you as you are, not as you should be, because none of us are as we should be.” That is the heart of Ash Wednesday. The ashes are not God saying, You are a failure. The ashes are God saying, You are human—and I am not done loving you yet.And if you grew up, like I did, with Rich Mullins somewhere in the background of your faith, you may remember how often he circled this same mystery. Mullins once said he wasn’t a good Christian—just a beggar showing other beggars where to find bread. That’s Ash Wednesday. Not the gathering of the spiritually impressive, but the gathering of beggars who know they need grace.In Scripture, ashes are never about worthlessness. They are about turning—repentance, reorientation, coming home. When people put on ashes in the Bible, they were not declaring, “I am nothing.” They were saying, “I want to live in what is real again. I want to return to God.” Ashes are not the mark of failure. They are the mark of hope—the sign that transformation is still possible.And notice this: everyone comes forward. The faithful and the doubting. The strong and the struggling. The certain and the searching. Ash Wednesday and Lent do not divide the worthy from the unworthy. They reveals something we all share—we are dust, we are fragile, we are unfinished… and we are loved anyway.Because “you are dust” is not the end of the sentence. In Genesis, God forms humanity from dust and breathes divine life into it. Dust, in the Christian imagination, is not trash. It is sacred material touched by God. To remember that we are dust is also to remember that we are beloved—created, sustained, and redeemed not by our performance, but by grace..So if you have ever felt like you didn’t measure up—spiritually, morally, or personally—Ash Wednesday and Lent speak a different word. You do not have to pretend. You do not have to perform. You do not have to be impressive to belong. God meets us right here—in the ashes, in the honesty, in the ragamuffin truth of being human.And strangely, that is where freedom begins.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most common myths about Christianity is that conversion is always sudden, dramatic, and once-and-for-all. Many people picture the blinding light, the voice from heaven, the instant turnaround of Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus. It’s a powerful story, and for many Christians—myself included growing up in an evangelical context—it becomes the model of what “real” conversion is supposed to look like. If you didn’t have a lightning-bolt moment, you might wonder whether your faith story somehow counts less.But the deeper truth of the Christian tradition is far richer and far more human. Yes, some people do experience dramatic, life-changing moments that feel like a Damascus Road. But most of us are converted not once, but many times. Conversion, in the Christian sense, is not merely a single event—it is a lifelong process of being reshaped by God’s love  .Consider St. Peter. His story is not one of a single, decisive turning point, but of repeated conversions. First, he leaves his nets and follows Jesus. Then, in fear, he denies Jesus three times. Later, he is restored and entrusted with the care of the flock, as Jesus tells him: “Feed my sheep.” But even that is not the end of his transformation. In the Book of Acts, Peter must undergo another conversion when he realizes, through the vision of the sheet filled with unclean animals and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that Gentiles are fully welcomed into God’s people without preconditions. Everything in his religious upbringing, everything he thought Scripture said, had taught him otherwise, yet the Spirit made the old certainty impossible to hold.And still, Peter’s story continues. In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, we hear that Peter later stopped eating with Gentile believers out of fear of criticism from more traditional Jewish Christians. Paul confronted him publicly. Even an apostle, even a leader of the Church, was still learning, still growing, still being converted.An ancient Christian tradition tells us that near the end of his life, during the persecution under Nero, Peter fled Rome in fear. On the road, he encountered the risen Christ and asked, “Lord, where are you going?”—Domine, quo vadis? Christ replied, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” In that moment, Peter experienced yet another conversion. He turned around, returned to the city, and faced martyrdom with courage. Even at the end, Peter was still becoming who God called him to be.This is the pattern many of us recognize in our own lives—not a single, perfect turning, but a journey marked by growth, failure, repentance, and renewal. The Benedictine tradition has a name for this: conversatio morum, often translated as “conversion of life.” It means an ongoing transformation, a daily turning toward God, a willingness to keep being changed.And that requires humility. It requires the courage to admit we might not yet fully understand God, Scripture, or even ourselves. It requires openness to discover that what we once thought certain may need to grow, deepen, or even be re-imagined in light of the Holy Spirit’s work. Above all, it requires attentiveness—to notice where God is moving in our lives, where love is calling us forward, where grace is inviting us to rise again after we fall.So if your faith has not been one dramatic moment but a series of small awakenings, setbacks, and new beginnings, take heart. You are not failing at Christianity—you are living it. The Christian life is not about arriving once and for all; it is about continuing to be converted, again and again, into the likeness of Christ through God’s love.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Earlier this week I was watching the Grammys, and one of the moments that really stayed with me was the memorial tribute honoring Ozzy Osbourne and his work with Black Sabbath. I know that might surprise some of you—either because I’m a Christian priest, or perhaps because you think I’m too young for his music (which, honestly, would be very kind of you to say). But that moment got me thinking about a myth I had to unlearn when I was younger: the fear I was taught to have of certain kinds of rock and roll.When I was growing up, especially in evangelical Christian circles, there was a deep anxiety about Satanism lurking in popular culture. In the late Cold War era, with rapid social change, declining trust in institutions, and genuine moral panic about drugs, violence, and youth culture, many Christians were told that the safest response was suspicion. Music became a convenient scapegoat. Bands like KISS or Black Sabbath weren’t just loud or strange; they were portrayed as spiritually dangerous, gateways to corruption, or even tools of the devil.But here’s the myth: that heavy metal, especially early metal, was primarily about glorifying evil. In reality, much of it was doing exactly the opposite. Black Sabbath’s dark imagery wasn’t an endorsement of violence or Satanism; it was a critique of evil. Their sound reflected the industrial grit, economic anxiety, and moral exhaustion of postwar Britain. They were naming the darkness of the world, not celebrating it. And that’s a deeply biblical move.Take the song highlighted in the tribute, War Pigs. Written during the Vietnam War, the song is a blistering condemnation of political leaders who send the poor and powerless to die while they themselves remain safe. “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”—that’s not praise. That’s accusation. The song imagines those responsible for war eventually facing judgment for their actions. When it was released in 1970, it became an anthem not just of rock and roll, but of the broader anti-war movement, giving voice to moral outrage many people felt but struggled to articulate.That’s prophecy. And prophecy doesn’t always come wrapped in polite language or religious packaging.One of the central Christian convictions I hold is that all truth is God’s truth, no matter where it comes from. Scripture itself is full of unlikely prophets: shepherds, foreigners, women whose voices were ignored, even a talking donkey. God has never limited truth-telling to officially sanctioned religious spaces. Music often takes on that prophetic role. You can hear it in folk artists like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, in soul and gospel-infused protest songs by Nina Simone, in hip-hop, and yes, even in heavy metal. You can hear it today in artists like Jesse Welles, a folk troubadour who’s been compared to the great social commentators of the past; in his song United Health he criticizes the commodification of care with lines like, “There ain’t no you in United Health, there ain’t no me in the company, there ain’t no us in the private trust.” In Jesse’s music, just like the music of so many who came before him, artists in sist that music can and should challenge the powerful.So here’s the myth to bust: that God only speaks through “safe” or explicitly religious art. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that God’s Spirit has always been more adventurous than that. Sometimes the clearest moral vision comes from the margins, amplified through distorted guitars and uncomfortable truths.Rest in power, Ozzy, and rise in glory.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the quiet myths I hear all the time—especially right now—is this: “If I’m exhausted by the news, my faith must be weak.” If you’re feeling that way, let me say this as clearly as I can: that myth is false. And believing it does real spiritual damage.Exhaustion is not a failure of faith. In fact, exhaustion is often a sign that your heart is still open—that you are still paying attention in a world that gives us endless reasons to shut down, harden up, or go numb. The truly dangerous spiritual posture isn’t weariness; it’s indifference. The mystics of the church have known this for centuries—the pain and ache you feel in your heart is not because you are losing your connection with God. Rather, it is usually the Holy Spirit moving within you, pricking your heart, cultivating tenderness, compassion, and an impetus to action. The Bible is also remarkably honest about this. The prophet Jeremiah—sometimes called the “weeping prophet”—doesn’t offer tidy spiritual slogans. He cries out. He accuses. He says, in effect, “God, this is too much, and I don’t understand why you’re letting it happen.” That’s not weak faith. That’s covenantal faith—the kind that trusts God enough to tell the truth.And of course, we see this most clearly in Jesus himself. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus laments over Jerusalem. Jesus prays in Gethsemane with such anguish that the gospel writers struggle to put it into words. At no point does Jesus treat grief, fear, or exhaustion as a spiritual defect. He treats them as part of loving a broken world without turning away from it.Christian faith is not about being endlessly resilient. It’s about being honest before God and one another. Lament is not a detour from faith; it’s one of faith’s deepest expressions. To lament is to refuse to pretend that injustice is normal, that violence is acceptable, or that suffering doesn’t matter.And here’s where this becomes especially important for how we live in the public square.Honest faith—faith that can name exhaustion and grief—actually makes deeper solidarity possible. When we stop pretending that we “have all the answers,” we can stand shoulder to shoulder with people of different faiths, or no faith at all, who are also grieving, angry, and yearning for a more just world. Lament becomes a shared language.When Christians lead with certainty alone, we often end up isolated. But when we lead with truth—when we say, “Yes, this is devastating, and yes, it hurts, and no, we don’t have a neat explanation”—we discover common ground. Not theological agreement, necessarily, but moral clarity and human connection.This kind of honesty doesn’t weaken resistance; it strengthens it. It keeps resistance from becoming performative or cruel. It reminds us that justice work is not about winning arguments, but about protecting human dignity. Lament keeps our resistance rooted in compassion rather than contempt, in love rather than despair.Christian hope, at its best, is not optimism. It’s not denial. It’s the stubborn refusal to believe that suffering gets the last word. And that kind of hope can coexist with tears, fatigue, and righteous anger. In fact, it usually does.So if the news has you worn down, don’t assume your faith is failing. It may be telling you something true: that the world is broken, that love is costly, and that God is still calling us—not to carry everything, but to show up honestly, together.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Lately, I’ve been feeling a real knot of anxiety as I watch the news—especially rhetoric and posturing that seem to treat long-standing allies as expendable or weak. When powerful nations start speaking about smaller ones as though they are merely pieces on a chessboard, Christians should feel uneasy. And that uneasiness isn’t about partisanship; it’s about memory. It’s about what Christians learned, often painfully, in the aftermath of World War II.One common myth is that Christianity’s role in politics is limited to private morality—what individuals do in their personal lives. But after the devastation of the Second World War, many Christian leaders believed something much more expansive: that faith had something to say about how nations relate to one another. Churches across Europe and North America were deeply involved in rebuilding not only cities, but trust. Christian ethicists and statesmen argued that peace required structures strong enough to restrain aggression and relationships deep enough to prevent fear from metastasizing into violence. Alliances were not seen as signs of weakness, but as moral commitments—promises that human life mattered more than national ego.At the heart of that postwar vision were two convictions that Christianity holds together and that our age keeps trying to tear apart. The first is the dignity of every human life. Christians insist that people are not valuable because they are useful, powerful, or strategically convenient, but because they are made in the image of God. That belief has political consequences. It means that nations, like individuals, are not mere means to someone else’s ends. Respecting the dignity of human life leads naturally to respecting the dignity of peoples—their right to self-determination, their culture, their security, and their voice in shaping their own future.The second conviction is that peace is built through relationship, not domination. Christianity does not imagine peace as something imposed by the strongest actor getting its way. The Christian story is one in which reconciliation happens through costly commitment—through covenants, promises, and mutual responsibility. After World War II, many Christians believed that binding nations together in shared responsibility, even when it was inconvenient, was one way of taking sin seriously while still hoping for something better than endless cycles of revenge and fear.That’s why bullying rhetoric should trouble Christians so deeply. When nations are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than partners to be engaged, the logic of the cross is replaced by the logic of coercion. Christianity does not deny that power exists or that threats are real. But it insists that power untethered from moral restraint becomes destructive, and that fear-based politics corrodes the very peace it claims to defend.Recovering a Christian vision of peace today does not mean pretending the world is simple or safe. It means remembering that strong relationships—patiently built, consistently honored, and mutually accountable—are not naïve ideals but hard-won lessons written in the ruins of the twentieth century. It means insisting that dignity and solidarity belong together: that honoring the worth of every person and every people requires us to resist both isolationism and imperial arrogance.Christians are called to be witnesses to that alternative vision, even when it makes us uncomfortable or anxious. Especially then. Because the peace of Christ was never secured by threats, and it has never been preserved by humiliation. It is carried forward by people and communities willing to choose covenant over convenience, and faithfulness over fear.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.In a moment when our society seems increasingly fractured—when fear, violence, and the abuse of power dominate political discourse—many Christians are asking a deeper question: What is the role of the Church when political authority itself becomes a threat to human dignity?Today I want to be very clear: the Church cannot remain silent, neutral, or “above it all” when actions and ideologies take on the shape of authoritarianism or fascism. This is not about partisan politics. This is about faithful Christian witness. And in moments like these, neutrality is not a moral option.So let’s start with the basics: what is fascism?Fascism is a political ideology marked by authoritarian control, suppression of dissent, hyper-nationalism, and the elevation of state power over human rights and human dignity. It thrives on fear and depends on dehumanizing “others”—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—portraying them as threats that must be controlled, removed, or eliminated. Violence is not a tragic failure of fascism; it is one of its tools. And that alone should tell Christians everything we need to know.This is not merely a policy disagreement. Fascism directly contradicts the Gospel’s insistence that every human being bears the image of God and that no authority stands above God’s justice. When the state claims ultimate loyalty, demands silence, or treats some lives as disposable, Christians are no longer dealing with politics as usual—we are dealing with idolatry.Many, myself included, see echoes of these dynamics today in how government power is exercised against vulnerable communities—at the border, in our cities, and in the language used to justify force. The recent killing of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has sparked national outrage precisely because it reveals how easily state violence can be normalized. And the fact that we are outraged now, despite the over 30 people who have already been killed by ICE agents demonstrates how we have become numb to this problem.Video evidence from multiple angles made it clear that this woman posed no threat. The last thing she said to the agent was “That’s fine, dude, I’m not made at you.” Then she turned her wheel to leave and the agent shot her in the head and called her words I will not say out loud.Government officials rushed to justify lethal force, insisting we had not seen what we all clearly saw. As George Orwell wrote in the novel 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Make no mistake, this is how authoritarian and fascist systems train societies to accept the unacceptable.In response, some church leaders have refused to stay silent. An Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire recently told clergy that statements alone are no longer enough—that this is a time for bodily presence, moral risk, and real sacrifice. He urged them to be prepared not just spiritually, but practically, to stand with those most at risk, telling the it was time to make their wills. That is not extremism. That is Christian realism.Why does this matter theologically? Because silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality—it is complicity. Throughout Scripture, God consistently sides with the oppressed, the stranger, and the vulnerable. The prophets did not politely “disagree” with unjust rulers; they confronted them. Jesus did not accommodate violent systems; he exposed them, disrupted them, and ultimately he was executed by one of them.When Jesus overturned the tables in the Temple, he wasn’t making a partisan statement—he was declaring that worship divorced from justice is a lie. Likewise, a Church that refuses to oppose systems that dehumanize is no longer bearing witness to Christ; it is protecting its own comfort.History confirms this truth. From the early Christians who defied imperial worship, to figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisting Nazis Germany, the Church has repeatedly faced the same question: Will you follow Christ—or will you accommodate power? Every time the Church has chosen safety over faithfulness, the results have been disastrous.So what does faithful action look like now? It begins with prayer and formation—but it cannot end there. It requires public witness, moral clarity, and courageous nonviolent resistance. It means showing up, naming injustice, protecting the vulnerable, and refusing to allow fear to dictate our faith. It also means loving our enemies—not by enabling harm, but by refusing to let hatred have the final word… and by working as hard as we can to rescue them from the fascist ideologies that have taken them captive.Too often, Christians confuse moral witness with political disagreement. But the Gospel does not ask us to be neutral observers of injustice. It commands us to act when human dignity is at stake. And make no mistake: that is what is at stake now.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been deeply concerned with our country’s recent military intervention in Venezuela. Many have written and spoken about how problematic that action was from the standpoint of international law, foreign policy, and a host of other concerns. Today, I’d like to talk about why the whole situation (and the perspective and moral worldview it represents) is problematic from the standpoint of Christianity. Though many assume Christian resistance to any war is largely due to the inherent violence of armed conflict, that’s a myth worth breaking. Because there are many more reasons Christians should be at least skeptical, if not outright opposed, to this most recent military action. Don’t get me wrong, nonviolence absolutely matters. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the witness of saints and martyrs across the centuries, Christianity has consistently lifted up the sanctity of human life and the call to resist cycles of violence. But the Christian concern about war goes deeper than that—and if we reduce it only to a debate about violence versus nonviolence, we miss something essential.After our country’s actions in Venezuela, my own denomination, The Episcopal Church, issued a statement expressing deep concern about the operation, its legality, and its consequences for civilians and for the Episcopal Diocese of Venezuela The statement names real human costs: Venezuelans killed, some of them civilians; increased instability; and fear for local church communities caught in the middle of geopolitical power struggles. All of those facts should give Christians pause.But here’s the deeper theological issue.Christian opposition to war is not only about the harm done in war. It is also about what war does to our moral imagination—about how quickly it trains us to believe that my safety, my prosperity, and my national interest matter more than the lives and dignity of others. That mindset is fundamentally at odds with the heart of Christian faith.In Christ, God is not reconciling some people, or my people, or the people who look like me or vote like me. Scripture tells us that in Christ, God is reconciling all people, breaking down the walls that divide us and creating a new humanity. The Letter to the Ephesians speaks of Christ tearing down the dividing wall of hostility and making peace—not peace through domination, but peace through self-giving love.War, especially when framed as preventive or preemptive action, does the opposite. It reinforces the belief that the lives on the other side of the border are expendable, that instability elsewhere is acceptable if it secures advantage here, and that power gives moral permission.This is why Christianity developed what we call Just War theory. And it’s important to say: Just War theory is not a loophole that makes war morally comfortable. It is a moral restraint, designed to make war harder to justify, not easier.For a war to be considered just, it must meet demanding criteria: a just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, and a reasonable chance of success, among others. The Episcopal Church has repeatedly affirmed these principles while also condemning the first use of armed force for non-imminent threats and warning against abusing humanitarian language to justify political or strategic goals Measured against those standards, there are numerous reasons for Christians to be deeply troubled by U.S. intervention in Venezuela. The reported deaths of roughly 80 Venezuelans, including civilians, raise serious questions about proportionality and discrimination. The lack of congressional authorization challenges legitimate authority. And the broader pattern of escalation suggests something far short of last resort.But beyond those criteria lies the deeper moral danger: the temptation to believe that American interests automatically outweigh Venezuelan lives. That is precisely the temptation Christians are called to resist.Christian faith insists that there is no such thing as a disposable people. The Venezuelan mother grieving a child killed in political violence bears the image of God just as surely as any American parent. When national policy treats that suffering as collateral damage, Christians are obligated to speak.So yes—Christians may oppose war because we take seriously Jesus’ call to peace. But we also oppose war because we believe God is reconciling the whole world, not just one nation at a time. We oppose war because it trains us to love selectively, to grieve unevenly, and to excuse injustice when it benefits us.There are many reasons for Christians to be concerned about U.S. intervention in Venezuela: the violence, the civilian deaths, the failure to meet just-war standards. But just as importantly, there is the moral cost of acting as though our good matters more than the good of others. That is not the way of Christ—and it is something Christians must resist.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Some of you are hearing this on Christmas Eve itself. Others might be listening a few days later, on the Sunday after Christmas, or sometime else in the long glow of the holiday season. But whenever you’re hearing this, the myth I want to bust right now—and the truth I want to speak—remain the same.The myth is this: you may be feeling that the church is simply not a place for you. Not tonight. Not this season. Maybe not ever.And before anyone rushes to argue with that feeling, let’s be honest about where it comes from. The church has, at times, done a truly bad job of making room for people. Sometimes that’s happened because theology was drawn too narrowly—leaving no space for doubt, struggle, or people who aren’t sure what they believe yet. Sometimes it’s happened because culture quietly infected the church with its own prejudices.Take gender, for example. The early Christian movement was remarkably egalitarian for its time. Women preached, prophesied, led house churches, and were the first witnesses to the resurrection. And yet, over time, Greco-Roman patriarchy won out, and women were pushed aside—not because of the gospel, but in spite of it.Other times, the church has confused faithfulness with fear. When the beauty and diversity of creation challenged old assumptions, the church sometimes reacted defensively. Galileo was condemned. Many Christians fought against evolutionary science. And in our own day, many Christians still exclude LGBTQ people because they mistake a narrow reading of a few biblical texts—or inherited cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality—for the fullness of the gospel. That exclusion is wrong because it treats difference itself as sin, rather than asking the deeper, biblical question of whether people’s lives bear the fruits of love, faithfulness, and self-giving that Scripture consistently names as signs of God’s work in a person’s life.If any of that’s part of your story—if you’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that there’s no room for you—then it makes perfect sense if church feels unsafe, exhausting, or irrelevant. That wound is real.But here’s what the myth gets wrong: that broken version of the church is not what the church was ever meant to be.The letter to the Ephesians gives us a radically different vision. There, the church isn’t a fortress for the righteous or a club for the spiritually certain. It is described as a new humanity. Paul says that in Christ, God is tearing down dividing walls—walls of hostility, fear, and exclusion—and creating something new in their place.In Ephesians, people who were once “far off” are brought near. Former enemies are made members of the same household. The church is called the Body of Christ—not a body made of identical parts, but one where difference is not erased, and where every member matters. Growth, Paul says, doesn’t come through control or conformity, but through being “built up in love.”Even more striking, the church is called a dwelling place for God. Not because it has everything figured out, but precisely because it is being built together—slowly, imperfectly, and humbly. Paul insists that God’s wisdom is revealed not through uniformity, but through reconciliation: a diverse community learning how to live in peace without denying difference. This reconciled life together, he says, is part of God’s plan to gather all things—in heaven and on earth—into wholeness That means the church was never meant to be a place reserved for people who are already whole. It’s meant to be a place where healing can happen. Not a place where you’re required to have perfect faith, but a place where faith can grow. Not a gatekeeping institution, but a living sign of God’s refusal to abandon the world.And that’s why this message matters whether it’s Christmas Eve or the days that follow. Christmas proclaims that God does not wait for ideal conditions. God comes anyway. God is born into vulnerability, uncertainty, and the margins of society. Emmanuel—God with us—means with us, right where we are, not where we think we’re supposed to be.So if you’re tired of church, wary of Christianity, or unsure whether there’s space for you in any of it, hear this clearly: Christmas is not about proving your worthiness. It’s about God’s stubborn, reckless love breaking into the world and saying, “There is room.”Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.This week I want to talk about something that’s been in the news again this Advent season: churches setting up Nativity scenes that depict the Holy Family as refugees, sometimes even showing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus behind bars or with imagery associated with immigration detention and ICE enforcement. As you might expect, these displays have sparked strong reactions. Some people find them deeply faithful. Others say they’re inappropriate, offensive, or “too political.”So let’s bust a myth. The myth is this: using the Nativity to raise questions about immigration, refugees, or state power is a modern political stunt that distorts the Christian story.Here’s the problem with that claim: the Nativity itself is already a story about displacement, state violence, and people on the margins.According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is born under an occupying empire. Shortly after his birth, King Herod—terrified of losing power—orders the massacre of children in Bethlehem. To survive, Mary and Joseph flee with their child to Egypt. That is not metaphorical. It is not symbolic. It is a family crossing borders to escape state-sponsored violence. By any honest definition, Jesus begins his life as a refugee.So when churches depict the Holy Family as people on the run, or even in detention, they are not importing politics into the Gospel. They are allowing the Gospel to speak honestly about the realities it already names.I can already hear the response some people will say: “Jesus didn’t come to make political statements. He came to save souls.” But that too misunderstands both salvation and politics in the ancient world. In the Roman Empire, to say “Jesus is Lord” was already a political claim, because it meant Caesar was not. Jesus consistently confronted systems that crushed the poor, excluded the vulnerable, and justified violence in the name of order. He didn’t align himself with power. He aligned himself with people whose lives were made precarious by power.That doesn’t mean every Christian must agree on immigration policy. Faithful people can disagree about laws, borders, and enforcement. But the Christian faith does not allow us to ignore the humanity of those caught in the system—or to pretend that God is neutral when families are separated, children are traumatized, or fear becomes a governing tool. After all, it is abundantly clear that the biblical tradition insists that how societies treat the vulnerable is a theological question.Nativity scenes like these are not saying, “Here is the one correct policy.” They may be saying that no matter the difference on possible immigration policies, what our country is doing today is clearly and deeply immoral. But even more than that, these nativity scenes are asking a far more biblical question: Where is Christ found today? And the Christian answer has always been unsettling. Christ is found among those without power, without security, without a safe place to lay their heads. And that means that’s where Christians should be as well. If a Nativity scene makes us uncomfortable, that may say less about the scene and more about how thoroughly we’ve domesticated Christmas. We prefer a quiet, sentimental manger that doesn’t challenge us. But the real Nativity disrupts. It confronts fear, injustice, and violence with God’s radical choice to be born into vulnerability.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.With the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe coming up this Friday, I want to talk about a part of the Christian tradition that makes a lot of people—especially non-Catholics—a little uncomfortable: visions of Mary. For some, these stories feel strange at best, manipulative at worst. The myth I want to take on today is the idea that these kinds of visions mainly exist to prop up church authority and control people through fear or superstition.Now, you don’t have to believe in Marian apparitions at all to notice something fascinating about the pattern they follow. Even if you take a completely historical or symbolic view of them, one thing is remarkably consistent: when Mary shows up in these stories, she almost never appears to powerful religious leaders. She appears to ordinary people with no status, no influence, and often no protection.Take Guadalupe as an example. In 1531, in what is now Mexico, a poor Indigenous farmer named Juan Diego claims that Mary appeared to him and asked that a church be built. The colonial and church authorities didn’t immediately jump on board. They were skeptical, slow to act, and frankly dismissive of him at first. That alone tells you something important: this wasn’t a vision that conveniently originated from those already in charge.But when, through the miracle of roses and the image of Mary that appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak, the bishop could no longer deny something was happening, the vision was affirmed. And by affirming that vision, the indigenous and mestizaje people were also affirmed and ennobled by a church that had been—until then—very colonial. The same thing happens in other well-known stories. At Lourdes in France, Mary appears to a sick, impoverished teenage girl collecting firewood. At Fatima in Portugal, she appears to children watching sheep. In Ireland at Knock, it’s ordinary villagers who claim the vision during a time of deep suffering and political oppression. Again and again, the pattern is the same: God’s presence—symbolized by the mother of God, Mary, appearing, whether you interpret it literally or symbolically—shows up among the poor and the overlooked… not the powerful.Several years ago, I stumbled into this pattern myself when I was preparing an Advent Quiet Day on visions of Mary. I expected to be dealing mostly with devotion, art, and tradition. What surprised me was how consistently these stories carried a prophetic edge. Over and over again, the message attached to these visions wasn’t “protect your privilege” or “bless the status quo.” It was repentance. Justice. Conversion. Solidarity with suffering people. And just as consistently, the authorities were slow to affirm what was happening.What finally clicked for me was how closely this matches the Mary we meet in the Bible. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary sings the Magnificat—a radically political prayer that says God lifts up the lowly, brings down the powerful, feeds the hungry, and exposes the illusion of wealth and control. Whether you believe in later visions or not, that biblical Mary is already a voice of disruption, not of institutional comfort.So here’s the deeper Mythbusters point: you don’t have to be Roman Catholic, and you don’t have to accept Marian apparitions as literal events, to recognize the theological truth they all keep circling around. God consistently sides with the powerless. God consistently chooses messengers the world would ignore. And God consistently speaks words that make the powerful uncomfortable.That’s true at Guadalupe. It’s true in the Gospels. And it’s still true today.So as the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe approaches this week—even if you usually scroll right past things like that—maybe the real invitation isn’t to debate visions, but to wrestle with this deeper question: If God still chooses to speak from the margins, are we actually listening?Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

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 big myths this time of year is that Advent is basically “Christmas, but for a whole month.” We crank up the carols, deck the halls, schedule the parties, and treat these four Sundays as a long on-ramp to December 25—a kind of extended holiday season with a light religious glaze on top. But in the older, deeper tradition of the Church, Advent is something very different. Advent is not Christmas stretched out. Advent is preparation stretched deep.Even those little Advent wreaths many of us use have shifted meaning over time. A lot of modern churches talk about the candles of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. Those are all beautiful virtues, and they certainly have a place in Christian life. But traditionally, Advent wasn’t focused on those four themes. It was focused on what the Church has long called the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.Now that might sound a bit intense, especially when the rest of the world is piping “Jingle Bells” into every store and pushing us to be relentlessly cheerful. But the wisdom of this older pattern is that it takes the real world seriously. It acknowledges that the world is dark—and that sometimes we are complicit in that darkness.Advent in this traditional key says: don’t rush past that. Don’t put shiny wrapping paper over a creation that is still groaning. Don’t cover your own grief, or anxiety, or guilt with another layer of tinsel and pretend you’re fine. Instead, let God meet you in the truth.When we meditate on the Four Last Things, we’re not meant to sink into fear; we’re meant to wake up. Death reminds us that our time is limited and precious—that every act of love or cruelty really matters. Judgment reminds us that God cares about justice, that what we do to “the least of these” is not forgotten. Heaven keeps before us the promise that God’s final word is restoration of all things… and joy. And yes, hell—however we understand it—forces us to confront the reality of choices that destroy us and others, the ways we can stubbornly cling to selfishness instead of surrendering to love.Taken together, that’s not morbid. It’s clarifying. It keeps us from using Christmas as a distraction and instead invites us into a holy longing for something more—for a world actually healed, for lives actually transformed, for a love that doesn’t just decorate the darkness but drives it away.At my parish, St. John’s Episcopal, we lean into that Advent depth in a few particular ways. One of them is liturgical: at our regular Sunday worship during Advent—the 8:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. services—we use Rite One from the Book of Common Prayer. The language in Rite One is more formal, a little older, and yes, a bit more penitential. It talks frankly about sin, about our unworthiness apart from God’s mercy, and about our need for grace.We don’t do that to be nostalgic or fussy. We do it because Advent is about feeling that distance between the world as it is and the world as God has promised it will be—and then crying out, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and come.” Rite One helps us feel that ache. It slows us down, sobers us, and makes space for repentance and hope.We also offer a quieter, more contemplative way to walk this Advent road: Compline by Candlelight each Sunday night at 8:00 p.m. Compline is the Church’s traditional bedtime prayer, a short service of scripture, confession, quiet, and blessing. In the soft light of candles, with gentle music and silence, you’re given permission to exhale—to admit where you’re tired, where you’re worried, where the world feels too heavy.That’s very Advent. In a culture that shouts over our pain with canned cheerfulness, Compline by Candlelight says: bring your fatigue, your grief, your questions. Sit in the dark with other people who are also waiting. And together, we watch for the Light that the darkness cannot overcome.So instead of treating Advent as a month-long Christmas party, I want to invite you into its older, tougher, and more beautiful truth: a season that refuses to deny the world’s brokenness or your own, and that teaches you to long—really long—for Christ’s coming, in judgment and mercy, in justice and joy.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.With the Thanksgiving celebrations of this week, I want to take on a myth many Christians assume without thinking: the idea that Thanksgiving is, in its origins, a Christian holiday—something the Church established, shaped, and handed down the way we did Christmas or Easter. Growing up, many of us were taught a simple story: that the Pilgrims came to America searching for “religious freedom” and that their peaceful feast with their Indigenous neighbors set the pattern for a harmonious and God-favored nation.But when we look closely, that story quickly unravels—starting with the Pilgrims (or should I say the Puritans) themselves. These were not people seeking the kind of broad religious liberty we value today. They were separatists who believed the Church of England—my own Anglican tradition—was, in their view, far too broad, allowing for too much diversity of belief and practice, and making room for people with more catholic or more protestant perspectives to live and worship together.In contrast, the Pilgrim’s version of “religious freedom” was not the freedom for all to worship according to conscience. It was their own freedom to build a society governed strictly by their own religious convictions, in which dissent was not only discouraged but punished. They left England because they faced persecution, yes—but that was because they wanted a Christianity that was much more narrow. And then they proceeded to create communities in the New World where those who disagreed with their theology could be fined, banished, or worse. Our contemporary vision of a pluralistic society would have been entirely foreign to them.And then there is the story of their relationship with Indigenous peoples. The myth we often tell—of Pilgrims and Wampanoag neighbors joyfully sharing a peaceful feast—allows us to feel warm and morally tidy. But the real history includes forced alliances, land theft, broken treaties, massacres, and the devastation of entire nations through disease and warfare. By the mid-1600s, Puritan militias were engaged in military campaigns that today we would rightly describe as genocidal. Entire villages were destroyed. Indigenous people were enslaved, displaced, or coerced into conversion. The so-called “peace” represented in the First Thanksgiving was brief, fraught, and overshadowed by a much larger pattern of violence and domination. The myth smooths out that violence and tells us a story of innocence that does not belong to us.And yet, here is where Christian faith can offer something different—not by baptizing the myth, but by grounding our thanksgiving in truth. In the Episcopal Church, Thanksgiving is indeed a Major Feast in our Prayer Book. But the feast we keep is not a celebration of national mythology. It is a moment to practice gratitude rooted in honesty: to give thanks for God’s providence while also acknowledging the sins of our ancestors, the suffering of Indigenous peoples, and the long shadow of religious authoritarianism and racial injustice that still shapes our world.So perhaps this year, part of our thanksgiving should be gratitude for the historians and Indigenous voices who have insisted on telling the real story, even when it disrupts our comfort. Gratitude for those who have called us away from our darker impulses—our religious rigidity, our fear of the other, our willingness to marginalize people who do not share our background or beliefs. And gratitude for the opportunity, in our own generation, to ask a better question than the myth ever asked: What would it look like to actually build the kind of society the First Thanksgiving story pretended to describe—a society marked by mutual respect, shared abundance, justice, and genuine peace?That, I think, would be a thanksgiving worthy of the Gospel.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.And as someone who comes from what many would call a more “progressive” expression of Christianity, I know the assumption that sometimes gets made: “Oh, he must think all religions are basically interchangeable.” But that’s just not true. I cherish interreligious dialogue. I value the deep wisdom found in many traditions. I believe we need partnerships across faith lines to meet the challenges of our world. Yet I am a Christian by choice. I’ve chosen this particular path of following Jesus because it is the story, the way of understanding God, that to me makes the most sense and, when followed faithfully, I believe connects me most deeply to the divine and my neighbor.So, this week switch things up a bit by breaking the progressive myth that all religions are basically the same. The idea that all religions are “basically the same” usually comes from the outside, from people who haven’t actually lived inside these traditions. From afar, you can see some common moral themes—compassion, justice, humility, generosity—and those similarities matter. They point to the ways human beings across cultures have intuited the sacred, sought connection with the divine, and tried to shape a meaningful life. But once you step into the interior logic of each religion, you realize they are not interchangeable. They have profoundly different understandings of God, the human person, salvation, liberation, suffering, the meaning of history—just to name a few.One of the best resources for thinking about this is the theologian S. Mark Heim, particularly his book The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Heim argues something far more interesting than the simple “all religions are one” or the harsh “only one religion has truth.” He says religions actually aim at different spiritual ends—not different paths up the same mountain, but different mountains altogether. What I appreciate about Heim is that he takes other religions seriously. He doesn’t flatten them into carbon copies of Christianity. He listens to them long enough to understand that they have their own goals, their own visions of fulfillment, and their own experiences of the divine.For example, the Christian understanding of salvation is not merely enlightenment or moral improvement or escape from suffering. It’s participation in the life of the Triune God—what the Eastern Orthodox call theosis, the Roman Catholics all the Beatific Vision, and most other Christian traditions simply call heaven. This is our full our union with God in Christ through the Spirit and it is inseparable from entering into perfect love of neighbor. That is a unique claim. Likewise, Buddhism’s aim of liberation from suffering by overcoming attachment is not the same thing as Christian salvation. Christianity doesn’t seek the elimination of desire or attachment, but their transformation—inviting us to attach ourselves ever more deeply and faithfully to God and neighbor, and to discover in suffering not quite a problem to be escaped but a place where God, in Christ, has chosen to dwell with us.The truth is, when we say, “All religions are the same,” we’re not actually honoring these traditions. We’re erasing them. We’re implicitly silencing their distinct voices, their unique treasures, their hard-won wisdom.A better approach—and the one I try to take as a Christian—is to say: All religions are not the same, but many religions contain truth, goodness, and beauty. And Christians are called to listen and learn without surrendering the particularity of our own story.For me, following Jesus is not about believing my religion is the only container that holds truth. I can find echoes of Christian truth in the insights of other religions just as much as their distinctive approaches to God and the world can help me be curious about my own faith commitments. To be a Christian is about affirming that Christianity is the story I trust with my life—the story of a God who enters human vulnerability, who refuses to meet violence with violence, who rises from death not with vengeance but with peace, and who draws all creation toward reconciliation and renewal. That is the story that claims me even as I claim it. That’s why I’m a Christian—not by inertia or accident, but by discernment, because this is the path where I have found God.Interfaith partnership does not require pretending that deep differences don’t exist. And it doesn’t require us to collapse everything into one bland universalism. Genuine dialogue happens when we’re honest about who we are, when we can admire the gifts of another tradition while still affirming our own convictions, and when we recognize that God is bigger than any single religion’s imagination—even our own.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’ve probably heard someone say, “My faith is personal. I don’t need organized religion.” I know I’ve heard it—and sometimes even wanted to say it myself. But the idea that the life of faith can be a solo journey is, in the end, a myth for most people. It just doesn’t line up with how spiritual growth usually happens. So, let’s break it.Let’s be clear, I completely understand the impulse. Many people have had painful experiences in the church—communities that judged instead of welcomed, leaders who failed to live what they preached, or systems that seemed more interested in maintaining control than nurturing souls. After enough disappointment, it’s no wonder some decide to walk away and focus on their “own” relationship with God.But that phrase at the beginning—“personal relationship with Jesus”—is part of the problem. For decades, much of American Christianity has emphasized the individual side of faith: Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior? Do you know where you’ll go when you die? Those questions assume an individualized faith and have overshadowed something essential: Christianity was never meant to be a solo act.Of course, a personal relationship with God matters deeply. Your prayer life, your moments of grace and doubt—all of that is sacred. But faith was always meant to be lived in community. From the very beginning, followers of Jesus gathered together—breaking bread, praying, serving, and learning as one body. The New Testament doesn’t tell the story of isolated believers; it tells the story of the Church.Many of my friends who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” haven’t actually abandoned community. They’ve built circles of connection—friends who support one another and live out compassion and justice. And that’s beautiful. If that’s you, maybe don’t say you’ve given up on church, but be intentional about claiming the alternative church you’ve built—the people who walk with you in love and accountability. That’s still community.But it’s also worth asking what might be missing. Because a robust church community offers something deeper. In church, you gather with people who are different—different ages, backgrounds, and perspectives. You pray, eat, and wrestle with Scripture together. That kind of community—rooted in worship and shaped by a tradition older and wiser than any one of us—stretches your soul and keeps your faith honest.Church, at its best, offers more than friendship. It offers formation. You get to draw on two thousand years of people figuring out how to follow Jesus—through the wisdom of Scripture, the rhythm of prayer, and the grace found in sacraments, where God meets us in bread and wine, in water and oil, in the ordinary stuff of life.Now, I’m not saying you have to go to church to get into heaven. That whole “go to church or go to hell” framing misses the heart of the gospel entirely. Heaven isn’t a prize for good attendance—it’s the fullness of God’s love that will, in the end, I believe heal and restore all things… and all people.But if you want to grow closer to God—to become more loving, courageous, and Christlike—a healthy, authentic Christian community can take you farther than a solo faith ever will.And if you’re thinking, “That doesn’t sound like my church,” maybe that’s the Holy Spirit nudging you. Because if your current community isn’t helping you love God and your neighbor more deeply, it might be time to find one that does. None of us can do this alone. We need people—and the wisdom of faith—to help us grow into the person God created us to be.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.A few years ago, a parent stopped into my study to talk to me, feeling a bit anxious.“Father Jared,” she said, “my child told me they’re not sure they believe in God. I don’t know what to do.”I smiled and said, “You know what? Sometimes, I don’t know if I believe in God either.”She laughed nervously. “Father Jared, you cannot tell me that!” But I explained that this is simply part of the life of faith. Every one of us—including clergy—sometimes struggles with doubt. Because doubt isn’t a defect in the Christian life; it’s built into it.We’ve sometimes been taught to treat doubt like a disease to cure, but maybe it’s more like a companion on the journey—one that keeps faith from growing rigid or self-satisfied. Any faith that can’t survive questioning probably isn’t faith at all—its fear dressed up in religious clothes.So, when someone tells me they’re not sure what they believe, I don’t hear a problem to solve. I hear an invitation—to conversation, to honesty, to relationship. That’s why atheists and agnostics are welcome at my church. Because what matters most isn’t whether you can recite the Creed without crossing your fingers; it’s whether you’re willing to wrestle with the divine, to be open to wonder, to build community around love and truth.John’s Gospel gives us two of my favorite examples of this: Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.Some scholars divide John’s Gospel into believers and unbelievers—and say only the believers are invited into the kingdom. But that’s not what the story shows. Nicodemus, who first came to Jesus under cover of night, and Joseph, who followed in secret for fear of the crowds, are the only disciples who appear when Jesus dies. When all the “faithful” have fled, it’s the half-believers who come. They carry his body, wash it, anoint it, wrap it lovingly in cloth, and place it in the tomb.They don’t proclaim the resurrection. They don’t yet understand it. It is beyond what they can hope for in this world, given their experience of it perhaps. But they love. And that love, John seems to say, is enough for now—because love is the ground in which faith and hope can grow again.That’s what I find so moving about these stories. They remind us that God doesn’t wait for perfect belief before showing up. The honesty of the doubter, the humility of the half-believer, the persistence of the one who loves even when they don’t understand—these are all holy things. Sometimes the most faithful act isn’t confident preaching, but quiet care for what feels lost.So, if your faith feels thin, if your prayers come out more as questions than answers, don’t give up. Keep showing up. Keep tending to love. Because when we dare to love, even through our uncertainty, God has a way of turning that fragile love into resurrection life.And if you need a place to practice that kind of love (no matter what or if you believe), find a community that makes room for folks like you. I’d naturally suggest the nearest Episcopal Church, but there are certainly other open communities and traditions around you. Here at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, we don’t ask for perfect belief—we invite open hearts and curious faith. We pray together, sing together, wrestle together, and try—however imperfectly at times—to love God and to love our neighbor. Some weeks your faith may feel like fire; other weeks, like smoke. Either way, you still belong and you always belong. Because in the end, the Church isn’t a club for the certain—it’s a home for the searching.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 persistent myths I hear in my office—especially from those walking through deep pain—is the idea that God sends suffering to teach us lessons. I’ve sat across from people who have lost a child, whose bodies are failing, whose relationships have shattered. They ask me through tears, Why is God doing this? What is God trying to teach me? And sometimes, in that sacred and sorrowful moment, the only honest thing I can say is, I don’t know.Because the truth is, Scripture never presents God as a cosmic teacher who assigns suffering like homework to shape us into better students. That image may give us a sense of control, a reason for the pain, but it also risks turning God into an abuser—someone who wounds us for our (supposed) own good. I don’t believe that’s the God revealed in Jesus Christ.When Job’s world fell apart—his children dead, his wealth gone, his body covered in sores—his friends tried to tell him his suffering must have a reason. They insisted he must have done something wrong or that God was trying to teach him something. But Job refused that narrative. He demanded an audience with God, not a tidy theological answer. And when God finally spoke, the divine response wasn’t an explanation but an invitation—to see the vastness of creation, to recognize that human understanding will never be enough to hold the mystery of suffering.The writer of Ecclesiastes echoes that humility: “Time and chance happen to them all.” The rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike. Life under the sun, he says, often makes no sense. But rather than despair, he urges us to eat, drink, and find joy in the simple gifts of existence—to live gratefully, even in the midst of what we cannot explain.The New Testament takes that mystery a step further. It tells us that God does not send suffering but enters into it. In Jesus, the Word made flesh, God takes on our pain, our loneliness, our grief. On the cross, Christ cries out the same question so many of us have whispered: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet even there, in that abandonment, God is present. The crucifixion does not explain suffering; it redeems it. It proclaims that nothing—not even death—can separate us from the love of God.The mystics of the Church understood this well. St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul,” not as punishment, but as the stripping away of everything that is not God. It is not that God causes the darkness but that God meets us in it, guiding us toward a love deeper than comfort, a faith that trusts even when it cannot see. Teresa of Ávila once quipped to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”—but she still kept walking with Christ through the shadows.So perhaps the lesson isn’t that God sends suffering, but that no suffering is wasted. The lessons, if they come, emerge not because God imposed pain, but because God refuses to abandon us in it. The wounds we bear may become, in time, the places where grace seeps through—where compassion grows, where we learn to walk with others in their darkness.I cannot tell you why you are suffering. But I can tell you that you are not alone. The God who hung on a cross walks beside you still, carrying your pain into the heart of divine love until the day when every tear is wiped away and all things are made new.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Earlier this week, I joined a Rapid Response to ICE training in Grand Haven. We began by reviewing the principles that guide those who organize immigrant solidarity efforts. One statement especially caught the room’s attention: We reject the legality of ICE and the current immigration enforcement system.A few participants raised their eyebrows. One person said, “Wait—isn’t the problem that ICE violates the law and people’s constitutional rights? Shouldn’t we be saying ICE should obey existing laws?” The trainers acknowledged that concern but explained their stance goes deeper. They believe the entire legal framework—how we criminalize migration, how ICE operates with minimal accountability—is itself unjust and must be rejected on moral grounds.That conversation has stayed with me, especially as I read about protests in Chicago last week, where clergy and community members stood in the street to demand justice. One pastor was struck by a pepper ball as police moved in on demonstrators. The image of a pastor—collar on, hands raised in nonviolent protest and prayer, hit by a projectile fired by the state—reminded me how far we’ve strayed from understanding what faithful citizenship really looks like.Many people assume Christians are supposed to be law-abiding citizens. Romans 13 gets quoted a lot: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” Some use that verse to suggest obedience to civil law is a Christian virtue. But that interpretation ignores both context and history. Paul wrote those words to a tiny, vulnerable community in the Roman Empire that had no vote, no legal recourse, and no safety. His point was about survival, not blind obedience.If we read the Bible as a whole, it’s full of holy lawbreakers. Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh’s order to kill newborn Hebrew boys. The prophets routinely disobeyed kings. Daniel prayed when it was illegal. The apostles said to their rulers, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” And Jesus himself? He broke Sabbath restrictions to heal, challenged temple systems that exploited the poor, and was executed as a political criminal by the state.Faithful Christians have always wrestled with unjust laws. During the civil-rights movement, clergy and laypeople filled jails because they believed segregation was immoral even if it was “legal.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from his Birmingham jail cell, wrote that one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, defining justice by whether a law uplifts or degrades human personality.That’s why the training’s rejection of ICE’s “legality” struck me not as problematic but as profoundly Christian. Our immigration system didn’t always treat border crossing as a crime; it was once a civil matter. It wasn’t even that 100 years ago. ICE itself was created only in 2003, after 9/11. The idea that families fleeing violence and poverty should be detained, deported, or separated isn’t ancient law—it’s recent policy. Christians committed to the Gospel of welcome have every reason to resist it.Nonviolent resistance is not chaos; it is disciplined love in action. It refuses to mirror the violence of the oppressor yet also refuses to comply with evil. It’s the ethic Jesus modeled on the cross and the ethic that has powered movements for justice ever since.So the next time someone tells you “good Christians follow the law,” remember: our highest allegiance isn’t to Caesar or to a flag—it’s to the kingdom of God, where strangers are welcomed, captives are freed, and love is the only law that truly matters.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 centuries, if you walked into a church in the West, you’d likely see stained glass or paintings of Jesus with pale skin, flowing light-brown or even blond hair, and blue or hazel eyes. He might look more like a Renaissance prince than a peasant from the Galilee. Those images have shaped the imagination of countless Christians, sometimes so deeply that people even get defensive if you suggest Jesus might have looked different. But here’s the truth: Jesus was a first-century, Middle Eastern Jewish man. He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, in the rugged land of Palestine under Roman occupation. His skin would not have been pale. His eyes and hair would not have been light. He looked like a Galilean Jew of his time: brown-skinned, dark-haired, Semitic features.So this week we’re breaking the myth that Jesus was a white, European-looking man.Why does this matter? Isn’t it just about art and symbolism? Well, it matters because how we picture Jesus shapes how we understand God. If we only ever see Jesus as white and European, we are subtly—sometimes not so subtly—encouraged to equate God with whiteness and Europeanness. And that has real consequences. It has reinforced systems of colonialism, racism, and exclusion. It has allowed Christians to imagine themselves in the image of God while marginalizing those who look different.This isn’t just about history; it’s about justice. Think about what is happening right now in our world. The war between Israel and Gaza continues to devastate lives, with brown-skinned men, women, and children paying the heaviest price. Here in our own nation, racial profiling continues to plague people of color. For a while now, it has been those who look Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim. Most recently it’s been explicitly allowed for people who are Latinx—even though Jesus himself would likely be mistaken for any of those by modern security officers. To insist on a white Jesus in this context isn’t just inaccurate; it is spiritually dangerous. It erases the real human identity of the God who became flesh and aligns him instead with systems of power he came to overturn.Scripture itself reminds us that God’s choice to become incarnate was not arbitrary. Jesus came into the world as part of a marginalized people, subject to the suspicion of empire and the oppression of the powerful. He lived under Roman occupation. He and his family fled as refugees to Egypt to escape violence. The one we follow knew the vulnerability of being brown and Jewish in a world dominated by whitened imperial ideals.Representation matters because it opens our eyes to where God is at work today. When we picture Jesus only as white, we risk overlooking him in the very places he promised to be found—in the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, the oppressed. But when we remember Jesus’ true Middle Eastern Jewish identity, it becomes harder to separate our love for Christ from our solidarity with those who suffer under racism, war, and exclusion today.Breaking the myth of a white Jesus does not mean rejecting the art of past centuries. But it does mean being honest about its limitations and refusing to let it shape our theology uncritically. We can still value those cultural depictions while also lifting up new images—icons, art, stained glass—that show Jesus as the Middle Eastern Jew he truly was. Doing so is not about political correctness. It’s about theological faithfulness. It’s about remembering that God’s incarnation was not in the image of empire, but in the body of a people pushed to the margins.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most common claims I hear in our polarized culture is that religion and politics should never mix. “Faith,” people insist, “is a private matter. Believe what you want in church on Sunday, but leave it out of the public square.” On the surface, this sounds appealing—it promises a kind of peace where religion doesn’t intrude on politics, and politics doesn’t divide churches. But when you look at Jesus and the early Christian movement, the myth that faith is purely private quickly falls apart—so let’s try to break that myth today.Think first about Jesus himself. His teachings were profoundly spiritual, yes—but they were never only spiritual. When Jesus stood in his hometown synagogue and declared the words of Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed,” no one heard that as just a private, inward promise. Those words had radical social and political implications. They challenged the unjust economic and political systems of his day. And that’s why, at the end of that very sermon, the congregation drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff!Jesus consistently proclaimed a kingdom—not just an inward feeling of peace, but a new order where the last are first, the hungry are fed, the grieving are comforted, and the powerful are brought low. When he overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple, that was not a polite sermon illustration—it was a direct, public protest against corruption and exploitation and marginalization. He was executed, not for encouraging people to be more spiritual, but because he was seen as a threat to the political and religious establishment.The early church carried this same vision forward. When Christians declared, “Jesus is Lord,” they were making a political statement every bit as much as a spiritual one. In the Roman Empire, the expected declaration was, “Caesar is Lord.” To say Jesus is Lord meant Caesar was not. That conviction led Christians to resist unjust practices, to care for the poor, to adopt abandoned infants, to refuse to worship the emperor, and to stand against systems of domination—even when it cost them their lives.Now, does this mean Christianity tells you to join one political party or another? Absolutely not. Faith is political in the sense that it shapes how we live together in society. It gives us a vision of justice, peace, and human dignity that transcends partisan labels. The party you choose is more about the methods to get to the ends your faith envisions—and people can certainly have different convictions about what political party is best at getting to those ends. But your faith cannot be reduced to private opinions or personal morality alone.This is why the prophets of the Old Testament spoke so forcefully against kings and rulers who oppressed the poor. It’s why Jesus told parables about unjust judges, corrupt stewards, and rich men who ignored beggars at their gates. It’s why the Book of Revelation dares to picture the empire itself as a beast that must be resisted by those who follow the Lamb.In every age, Christians are called to ask: How does my faith shape the way I treat my neighbor, especially the poor, the marginalized, the stranger, the sick, and the oppressed? What does my commitment to Christ mean for how I use my voice, my money, and my vote? To pretend that faith is purely private is to domesticate the Gospel, to turn it into a self-help program instead of a movement that seeks to transform the world with God’s justice, love, mercy, and peace.So the next time someone tells you, “Faith is private, not political,” remember that Jesus didn’t get crucified for minding his own business. He got crucified because he proclaimed a kingdom that disrupted the unjust powers of his day—and because he invited his followers to live as though that kingdom was already breaking into the world. That’s not a private matter. That’s a public calling.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 when I was growing up as an evangelical Christian, I never really considered where the Bible I carried around with me came from. I knew that I was taught that it was the Word of God, divinely inspired, and I got a sense that the Holy Spirit whispered in the ear of the authors.  It was almost as though it fell from heaven, leather-bound and printed, with chapters, verses, and even gold gilding on the pages. But here’s the truth: that neat image doesn’t reflect the messy, human, Spirit-filled process through which the Bible actually came to be.The Scriptures weren’t handed down all at once as a miraculous gift. Instead, the Bible is the product of centuries of life with God, woven together from the testimonies, prayers, and experiences of God’s people.So this week I thought I might try to break the myth of how we got the Bible in the first place. The Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, grew out of Israel’s worship, history, and struggles. Some books are poems, others recount wars or defeats, still others thunder with prophetic calls to justice. The books often don’t even agree with one another, reflecting how Israel’s understanding of God and faithfulness evolved.The Torah—the first five books of Moses that tell the stories of the creation of the world and the most ancient history of Israel—was established by the 5th century BCE, likely during or just after the Babylonian Exile, when Ezra and other scribes emphasized its role in worship and community. The Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, were recognized by the 2nd century BCE. But the Writings—Psalms, Proverbs, Esther, Daniel, and others—remained fluid for centuries. By the late 1st century CE, Jewish teachers debated which texts carried scriptural authority. Some point to Jamnia around 90 CE, though modern scholars note that no single council “set the canon” of Jewish Scripture.  It was gradual, shaped by worship and teaching. So, when Christianity emerged, Jewish communities were not yet unanimous about their Scriptures, and that diversity shaped how the first Christians read them.Early Christians, in turn, produced new writings. Four gospels eventually rose to the center—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—but other gospels circulated. Some read the Letters of Clement (the fourth bishop of Rome, who served in the late first century. Others valued the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache. Letters attributed to Paul were copied, shared, and debated. It took centuries before consensus began to take shape. Leaders asked: Which writings bore witness to the apostolic faith? Which were used across the Church? Which aligned with the rule of faith, that early summary of Christian belief?Even then, agreement was never complete. In the East, Revelation was distrusted; in the West, it was affirmed. Hebrews took time to gain acceptance. To this day, Christians don’t all read the same Bible. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians include Tobit and Sirach, which many Protestants label “Apocrypha.” The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes still more. So the Bible you hold depends, in part, on which Christian tradition handed it to you.Some people find that unsettling. They want a book that is clean, simple, and certain. But the truth is better. Scripture grew through a very human process—and that’s part of its beauty.Because the Bible is not a flat, uniform text. It’s a library of voices, each with its own style and context. That diversity is a gift. It allows Scripture to speak across cultures and centuries. It invites us to wrestle with God, to hear voices that comfort and voices that challenge, to enter into a faith that is not static but alive. When we open the Bible, we encounter not just divine inspiration but also the human response to God—people trying to make sense of what it means to live faithfully. And in that space between divine word and human struggle, the Spirit still speaks to us today.That’s why the Bible is not less trustworthy because it came through human hands—it is more trustworthy, because it bears witness to the God who has always chosen to work through human lives.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most common modern misconceptions I hear is the idea that the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God.” That is, every word on the page is without error, historically accurate in every detail, and factually true in a literal sense. This view might feel like it’s always been part of Christianity, but in fact it is a relatively recent development in the history of the church. So, this week, let’s take a crack at that myth.If you go back to the earliest Christians and to the church fathers who laid the foundations of theology, you don’t find them treating the Bible in this rigidly literal way. Take Origen in the third century, for example. He believed that Scripture had multiple levels of meaning—literal, moral, and spiritual. And sometimes, he suggested, the literal sense wasn’t even the most important. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians of the Western Church, was very clear that when the Bible seemed to conflict with reason or with established knowledge about the natural world, then perhaps the text should be read metaphorically rather than literally. These early leaders of the faith understood that God’s truth could shine through human words in ways deeper than flat inerrancy.The very idea of inerrancy as we know it today is actually a modern invention. In fact, the technical doctrine of inerrancy only took shape in the late nineteenth century, at Princeton Theological Seminary, when theologians like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield argued that because God is perfect, Scripture must also be perfect and without error in every respect. That claim was new—and it was a human invention, their own attempt to defend the Bible against the challenges of modern science and biblical criticism. But for the vast majority of the church’s history, Scripture was received instead as a Spirit-filled witness through human authors, shaped by their cultures and contexts, to communicate divine truth.And here’s where the real problem comes in: it’s actually impossible to read the Bible as inerrant if you are being honest with the text. The Bible contains four Gospels, not one. Each tells the story of Jesus in a slightly different way. Sometimes details don’t line up—like whether Jesus cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry or at the end, or exactly how Judas died. In the Old Testament, the books of Kings and Chronicles sometimes give different versions of the same events. The book of Proverbs tells us to “answer a fool according to his folly” in one verse, and the very next verse says “do not answer a fool according to his folly.” These are not mistakes—they’re signs that Scripture is a conversation, a library of voices wrestling with God and with what it means to be faithful.When you force the Bible into the mold of inerrancy, you actually lose the beauty and depth of that conversation. You treat it like a rulebook dropped from heaven, instead of a Spirit-inspired record of human beings struggling, failing, repenting, and growing. You miss the texture of poetry, the power of lament, the wrestling of prophets who dared to argue with God, and the Gospel writers who tried in their own voices to capture the wonder of Jesus Christ.At its best, Scripture is not an answer key to every question. It is a witness to God’s ongoing relationship with humanity. It shows us how God’s people have sought to walk in faithfulness, and how God has continued to love and forgive them when they fall short. Reading the Bible this way—honestly, reverently, and with openness—frees us to encounter the living God, not just defend brittle doctrine.So no, the Bible is not an inerrant book of facts. It is something much better: it is inspired, Spirit-breathed, and life-giving, calling us deeper into the mystery of God and the adventure of faith.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.A couple weeks ago, before I went on vacation, we dug into the idea of belief—and whether faith is really about getting all the ideas in our head perfectly arranged. We looked at how fragile and complicated belief can be, and how faith is better understood as trust (in fact, that’s what the Greek word for faith is more accurately translated). Today, I want to explore what might actually lie at the heart of Christianity once we loosen our grip on belief-as-certainty and instead open ourselves to a faith that is curious and growing.Because yes, the idea that the heart of Christianity is belief in certain ideas is a myth. Many Christians assume that the center of our religion is a set of doctrines. If you can recite the Nicene Creed without crossing your fingers, then you’ve got the heart of it. And yes, creeds have their place—they safeguard important truths and keep us grounded in the story of God. In fact, one of the gifts of the creeds is that they keep us from believing too little. Most heresies through history haven’t been wild inventions, but narrow partial truths. So, some early heresies insisted Jesus was so divine he only seemed to be a human in flesh. Or others believed he was a human who was adopted by God at baptism, but not fully divine. The truly orthodox and catholic belief is to hold together too competing truths—that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine—even though that might be challenging to conceive!And there are numerous other examples of where the creeds (and good robust theology) push us beyond simplistic belief in one part of the faith to embracing tensions that baffle the mind even as they nurture the spirit: the idea that God is one being in a trinity or persons, or the idea that the bread that is pressed into your hands on Sunday is also the body of Christ, given for you. Far from being small checklists, the creeds widen the horizon of what we dare to believe.But when Jesus himself was asked what mattered most, he didn’t list doctrines. He gave a double commandment: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.That’s why theologians through the centuries have insisted that love is the interpretive key to the Christian faith. Augustine famously put it this way: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them” It’s love—not intellectual assent—that sits at the heart.And that’s why Christianity is best described not as a system of ideas, but as a way of life. In Acts, the earliest followers of Jesus weren’t called Christians yet—they were called people of “the Way.” A way is something you walk. Sometimes you walk with clarity, sometimes with questions, sometimes stumbling. But the point is not having perfect answers—the point is the journey of love.So if we move belief as intellectual assent off of the center stage, what remains is this: trust in God, practiced through love. Worship that turns our hearts toward God. Compassion that meets our neighbor’s needs. Justice that repairs what is broken in our world. Humility that leaves us open to growth. The heart of Christianity isn’t belief—it’s love.And maybe that’s the best news of all: you don’t have to have every question answered or every doctrine nailed down before you can live faithfully. You simply have to begin walking the way of love—trusting that God will meet you there.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.Are you familiar with the metaphor that a worldview is kind of like a fish in the water? The water is so constant, so all-encompassing, that it becomes invisible to the fish. Our worldview works the same way. We swim in assumptions we rarely stop to question. A good deal of Christian Mythbusters is trying to get at those assumptions… and then asking if they are actually faithful to the best understanding of Scripture and theology.One of those assumptions I’d like to try to break in today’s episode of Christian Mythbusters is the very idea of belief itself. We often treat belief like it’s the essence of faith—almost as though Christianity is a checklist of intellectual statements we either accept or reject. But the more time I’ve spent with scripture, with theology, and with actual lived experience, the more I’ve come to see that “belief” is a complex and often shaky thing. Faith, if it is real, has to be more than simply arranging the right ideas in our heads.The idea that the goal of faith was to “believe all the right things” really started to unravel for me when I studied epistemology in graduate school. Epistemology is the study of how we form our beliefs. Talk about a fish in the water—I had never explicitly thought about how I form my beliefs! Beliefs are just what happen when you study the Bible, I thought… but it’s actually more complex than that. Philosophers, when they study epistemology, often describe several different ways people form and justify their beliefs. Empiricism is the idea that we primarily form beliefs from our experiences. Rationalists affirm experience but also believe we form belief through reason (using mathematics and logic, for example). Foundationalists believe that you build knowledge like a house, with basic, self-evident truths at the bottom and everything else resting on top of them. Coherentism is the view that a belief is justified not by resting on a single foundation, but by how well it fits together within a consistent web of other beliefs… and so and so forth. Fundamentalist Christians, like myself, on the other hand, tend to approach knowledge through the foundationalist approach to belief. They begin with a bedrock claim—usually that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God—and then build every other belief on top of that foundation. The danger is that if one brick is questioned, the whole structure feels threatened. Progressive Christians, on the other hand, often lean toward a coherentist or even pragmatic way of knowing, where truth is measured by how well beliefs fit together with scripture, tradition, reason, and lived experience. In my own experience, this approach makes space for humility and growth: beliefs can be revised as our understanding of God deepens, while the central thread of faith—love, justice, and worship—holds the web together.So if Christianity isn’t mainly about belief, then what is it about? I’d suggest it’s about trust in God—with trust being what the Greek word for belief more accurately means. It’s about that and a willingness to give yourself to a way of life shaped by worship, compassion, and justice. Belief has its place, but it’s not the center. The center is love—love of God, love of neighbor, love that transforms the world. Next week I want to dig more deeply into where the heart of Christianity might lie, once we let go of the need for perfect belief and instead open ourselves to a sense of faith that is curious and growing. 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’s been an interesting several days at my parish this week. At 1am early Saturday morning (or late Friday night, depending on how you think of these things) two young women stopped at the bottom of the stairs to the front door of our church. While one of them held up a phone to shoot a video, the other made her way up the stairs, unscrewed the wingnut holding the flagpole in place, and then removed the flagpole upon which hangs our parish pride flag. She carried it down the stairs and off the two women went.As this is not the first time this has happened to us, we do have security cameras all around our church. So, we reached out to the police and also posted the security camera footage to social media. Then, some local news networks picked up the story and also ran it. The end result was that word got back to the young woman, who apparently lives somewhere on the east side of the state. Her father brought the flag back, along with a card from her that included an apology and a gift to the church. I don’t want to get more into the details of the flag theft itself or the experience trying to get it back, but there is one part of the experience that was almost more disheartening than someone stealing the pride flag from our church—and that is the response of some Christians on social media to the whole situation. So, today, I’d like to break the myth about how Christians can and should disagree with one another and try to articulate a better way.While there were numerous Christians (and non-Christians) who reached out in support, and there were a small amount of more conservative Christians who acknowledged that they didn’t agree with our church’s theology but also said theft was not an appropriate answer, there was also a good chunk of Christians who cheered on the young women involved with the theft of our pride flag. They said things like:Good for them, now I hope they burn it.Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!!Beers on me. Doing the lords workThat's no church anyway, that's a sanctuary for the lost and confusedAlways made me sick to see that flag. And those are just the comments I’ll read on air. Another commentator responded to the whole social media uproar by writing, “The blatant hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ here is staggering. The loudest hate often comes from those who claim to follow Jesus.” As I read the comments, I kept thinking of a few different groups. I kept thinking of LGBTQIA+ people reading those comments, how the wounds they had already experienced from Christians were just being torn open again and again. I thought of those who have given up on the church reading those comments and feeling sure they had made the right decision. And I thought of non-Christians reading the comments and likely thinking that there was no good reason here to look into Christianity. I’m well aware that the stance my own church has taken with regard to our LGBTQIA+ siblings is not one the majority of Christians agree with… but I wish we could disagree differently. It certainly feels like many conservative Christians are hyper-fixated on their belief that homosexuality is a sin—so much so that apparently, they are comfortable with the sins of theft and destruction of property. I also want to be super clear about one part of our own response. Someone came against me for saying this young woman was hate-filled. That’s not something I ever said. What I said on WOOD TV8 for instance was, “even if this was a prank or joke, stuff like that contributes to a culture where LGBTQ people aren’t safe.”I don’t think there was any intentional hate in the theft of our flag. It’s not even about hate. It’s about respect, including respect for those with whom you disagree. It’s about love, being able to see something differently but to express it in a way that still exhibits the love of Jesus for the other. And it’s about safety and, sadly enough, LGBTQIA+ people hear Christians talk about them and simply do not feel safe. And that’s not OK. Christians, we must do better.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 is an odd and somewhat unsettling confluence of events. It is the 80th Anniversary of the day our country dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, bringing World War II to an end. At the same time, August 6 is also one of the major feasts of the church—the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ upon the mountain.As I’ve been preparing for a service my church is doing tonight at 6pm to commemorate both events, I keep returning to the disturbing juxtaposition of these two days. And so, today I’d like to step back from Mythbusting and instead just reflect a bit on the mountain and the mushroom cloud.The Feast of the Transfiguration commemorates the day when Christ ascended Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John and was transfigured before them, his face shining like the sun and his clothes becoming dazzling white. The ancient lawgiver Moses appeared with Jesus, along with the great prophet Elijah. They discussed Jesus’ impending departure in Jerusalem—his suffering and death. A voice came from the cloud, commanding the disciples to listen to Jesus. Then, just as suddenly, it was over, and the disciples were left alone with him.I can’t shake the curious similarities between the two events. In both the bombing of Hiroshima and the Transfiguration, blinding light blazed forth. The light of the bomb was profoundly destructive—immediately killing between 70,000–80,000 people, and eventually claiming up to 166,000 lives through radiation and injuries. Almost all of them were civilians, including an estimated 38,000 children.The light of Christ’s Transfiguration, in contrast, was meant to reveal the divine glory. But those who unleashed the horrors of nuclear warfare were Christians, those who follow the Jesus from whom divine light poured forth. President Truman was a devout Baptist. Secretary of War Henry Stimson came from a family of clergymen.Truman believed dropping the bomb was the only way to end the war and avoid even greater loss of life through a land invasion. Still, it haunted him. In a speech after the war, he said, “You know the most terrible decision a man ever had to make was made by me at Potsdam... to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings.”Many believed the bombing was necessary. But I don’t know how to weigh the lives of soldiers fighting in a war against those of innocent civilians. I don’t know how to measure the lives of those trapped in the machinery of war against the children who were vaporized in a flash.So even as I celebrate Christ’s Transfiguration, I must acknowledge that followers of Christ have often twisted divine light into a justification for destruction. The light meant to illuminate God’s love becomes consumed by the fires of war, hate, and violence.At Hiroshima, humanity revealed its capacity for unimaginable violence. On Mount Tabor, God revealed the Son—who chose the path of suffering love. Perhaps this is part of the divine mystery: that to save a violent and broken humanity, God descended into the depths of human violence. And as Christ carried the violence of our human race deep into the heart of God, somehow God’s love can perhaps heal our violent ways… if we will let him.Maybe what we’re left with is the voice—the voice from the cloud that said, “Listen to him.” The disciples didn’t understand it at the time. They expected glory and triumph (to Make Israel Great Again), not suffering and death. But eventually they came to understand. And when they did, they took up their own crosses and walked the same path.If you’re a follower of Jesus, I hope you’ll spend some time listening to the voice of Christ today, asking what Jesus is calling you to do. Maybe it’s to support nuclear disarmament. Maybe it’s to learn more about the suffering caused by war… and then act. Or maybe it’s simply to see your enemies more clearly—not as villains but as fellow broken children of God. Maybe that’s where the light starts: in our ability to see each other with mercy, dignity, and grace.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 told you a bit about the book my parish read last month as a part of our summer book group: The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God by Anglican priest and renowned theologian Sarah Coakley. As I told you, Dr. Coakley’s goal in the book is to reach past the traditional divides between “conservatives” and “liberals,” to suggest that the approach of neither is truly satisfactory and to encourage a different way of engaging some of the most pressing theological issues of our time.After she noted the impossibility of the conservative approach of applying the Bible literally (because no matter what, everyone has some verses they contextualize and interpret and some they do not) and then likewise pointing out the problem of the liberal approach of simply unmooring entirely from Scripture and tradition, she suggested a new third way. In that third way, she suggested that both liberals and conservatives would do well to dive deeply into the ascetical tradition of the church to find a better way to wrestle with and engage contemporary questions about sexuality. The ascetical tradition of the church is the ancient Christian practice of spiritual training—much like how an athlete trains their body. It’s about intentionally shaping your habits, thoughts, and desires so they line up more closely with God’s will. And when that lens is applied to questions surrounding sexuality, interesting points rise to the fore. When we approach sexuality through the lens of ascetical theology, we move beyond debates about rules or libertinism and instead begin to ask, “What kind of person am I becoming through my desires? Are my longings drawing me into deeper union with God—or away from that union?” Coakley insists that Christian maturity requires patience, prayer, and humility—what she calls the “long obedience” of contemplative waiting. It's not about quick moral answers or rigid categories, but rather about becoming attuned, over time, to how God might be shaping us through even our most intimate experiences.In this sense, sexuality is neither a problem to be fixed nor a freedom to be celebrated uncritically. It is, instead, part of the larger spiritual terrain through which we journey toward God. And that means we need prayerful discernment, not just policy positions; vulnerability before God, not just identity labels. Desire must be held in the crucible of divine contemplation, not resolved too quickly.So, the myth that Christians must either prudishly repressive or liberally unmoored misses the point. The truth is more demanding and more beautiful: God desires to transform our whole selves—body, mind, and heart—into vessels of love and holiness. And that transformation happens not through ideology, but through the slow, sacred work of spiritual practice.And that means everyone has work to do. The liberal answer of insisting upon complete freedom for sexuality is inadequate because it doesn’t invite theological reflection upon the way that desire can at times be destructive and at other times salvific. And the conservative answer of rigidly excluding LGBTQ people means that conservative Christians are missing out. They are missing in seeing how the holy and self-giving love in queer relationships can teach them more about what Godly love looks like. Rowan Williams points this out in an essay called The Body’s Grace, where he acknowledges the traditional understanding of opposite-sex relationships (where marriage exists primarily to provide an appropriate setting for sex and the procreation of children). As Williams notes, the problem with that imagined ideal is that “the facts of the situation are that an enormous number of ‘sanctioned’ unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on adisturbing scale: sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity bysatisfying a formal socio-religious criterion.”Thus, Williams notes that queer relationships “poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world).” To put it another way, queer relationships experience sex without the same assumed instrumentality of straight relationships and, thus, can help straight people better understand what a graced and embodied desire might look like, particularly one that is healed by God’s grace and focused on the flourishing of the other. 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’ve talked before about the summer book group I lead at my church, with us taking a different book each month that has been on my “to read” list and diving into it. The book we read for this month’s book study was a theological doozy: The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God by Anglican priest and theologian Sarah Coakley.Dr. Coakley is an absolutely brilliant theologian. She studied at both Harvad and Cambridge and, in her career as a professor, has taught at Lancaster University, Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton. She was the first woman appointed to the prestigious post of the Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, the position she retired from in 2018. As you might expect, the book was not exactly light reading. However, it was stunningly good. Her goal in the book was to reach past the traditional divides between “conservatives” and “liberals,” to suggest that the approach of neither is truly satisfactory and to encourage a different way of engaging some of the most pressing theological issues of our time.With that book fresh on the mind, this week I’d like to try to see if Dr. Coakley can help me break the myth of the divide between conservative and liberal Christians. In general, she notes that conservative Christians tend to take recourse either to literal interpretations of biblical injunctions or, in the case of Roman Catholics, to the teaching of the church. The difficulty is that those supposed biblical injunctions (whether with regard to sex, sexuality, divorce, or any other question) are rarely as simple as they appear.I would suggest that this is abundantly clear in the willingness of most evangelicals to engage in careful interpretation with Jesus’ apparent forbidding of divorce after marriage, suggesting that context helps us understand what he said differently for our own tie. However, that same interpretive work is rarely done with regard to Biblical texts that condemn the things they want to condemn or support the things they like to support. And so, those who are outside the church see Christians as a bunch of hypocrites who clearly pick and choose what verses to follow literally and which ones to interpret differently. So far, none of this is likely surprising for most of you to hear coming from my mouth as a progressive Episcopal priest.However, Dr. Coakley also suggests that mainstream literal Christianity often provides insufficient responses to the pressing questions of our time. In her words, “Liberals tend to suggest, overbearingly, that they know better (in light of modern psychological theory) than anything that the Bible or tradition or authority could disclose to them.” The difficulty with this common liberal approach, in my view, is that it simply unroots the work of theology from any authority beyond modern sciences. It not only entirely unmoors it from a sustained reading of Scripture but also sets theology adrift in culture with no attention to the insights of two thousand years of Christian tradition…. And wrestling… and questioning. There must be a better way. Next week, I’ll talk more about the suggestion that Dr. Coakley offers. But for now, let me give you a preview. In her book she suggests that both sides should look afresh at the ascetical tradition of the church. This is the ancient Christian practice of spiritual training—much like how an athlete trains their body. It’s about intentionally shaping your habits, thoughts, and desires so they line up more closely with God’s will. And this is something both conservatives and liberals should believe in.She suggests that traditional Christian askesis actually might be able to bring conservatives and liberals together in a sustained conversation about what it means to have the love and teachings of Jesus shape and mold the desires within us towards holy ends.We’ll talk about that next week. Until then…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 thought last week was my last Pride-themed edition of Christian Mythbusters. Not so much. Last week the local county Republican party published an article denouncing our local Pride festival, calling it adult-entertainment, suggesting it was dangerous to children, and saying it should be held indoors and behind an 18+ doorway. Which is just ridiculous and offensive. So here I am, apparently with a few more myths to break.As much as the Ottawa GOP apparently wants to believe that a drag show is always adult entertainment, just saying it is over and over again in your newsletter doesn’t make it so. Perhaps some help from the dictionary can assist here. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines drag as “entertainment in which performers caricature or challenge gender stereotypes (as by dressing in clothing that is stereotypical of another gender, by using exaggeratedly gendered mannerisms, or by combining elements of stereotypically male and female dress) and often wear elaborate or outrageous costumes.” The article included pictures of some of the drag performers, with an expression of alarm that children are there. However, the performers are not nude. They are not even scantily clad. The drag queen’s rear end in the photo they highlight is actually covered with tights in addition to her glittery costume. One wonders if they have walked the boardwalk in Grand Haven recently, because there is far more skin on display on the boardwalk than was ever displayed by performers at the pride festival.They seem unable to draw the distinction between medium and content. Drag is a medium of performance that can have a variety of content suitable to different ages. In the same way that all movies are not R-rated, not all drag performances are inherently adult-themed in content. The medium is simply performance art that bends gender expressions and expectations. One does not have to read that far behind the lines to discern what their actual objection is: the fact that the performers are dressed in clothes from a gender other than the one they were presumably born into… and those performers are dancing. Not pole dancing. Just… dancing.  It is precisely this kind of language—particularly raising claims of danger to children—that continues to put not only drag performers at risk but also trans and other gender non-conforming individuals. By portraying people who are not gender conforming as dangerous to children they dehumanize and vilify anyone who is not gender conforming, insisting that this sort of thing simply has no place in the public square.And when an official political party in our community takes up these attacks, they embolden other forms of transphobic hate. I wish the leadership of the Ottawa GOP would spend some time listening to the experience of trans and gender non-conforming people. I can show you screenshots of the vile, hateful, and violent attacks on our festival on social media. And what breaks my heart is that so many of these people claim to be followers of Jesus. I consider myself friends with several pastors in the area and I cannot imagine they would be encouraging their congregants to treat LGBGTQIA+ people this way. Because kids are in danger, absolutely. Kids are in danger from hateful rhetoric that says it’s dangerous to break gender norms or have a different sexual orientation. That’s why 43% of LGBTQIA youth considered attempting suicide. It’s why one in five attempted it in the past year. Kids are in danger, but it’s not from the Grand Haven Pride Festival and our drag shows. It’s from a culture that marginalizes, excludes, and attacks those who are different. And kids deserve to be protected from that. 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.Well, it’s the last Wednesday in Pride Month, so I have one more edition of Christian Mythbusters during which I’d like to break the myths surrounding the far-too-often hostile relationship between those who claim to follow Jesus and the LGBTQIA+ community.The Grand Haven Pride festival earlier this month was a fantastic event. It was the third festival and I’m grateful that the festival organizers let my own church, St. John’s Episcopal in Grand Haven, begin that day by hosting a Pride-themed community worship service. We were joined in financial support by our siblings at the United Methodist Church of the Dunes in Grand Haven and even had the blessing of having the Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Grand Haven, the Rev. Kristine Aragon-Bruce, as the preacher for the day. The love and joy of the day will feed be for quite a while. But I will also be haunted by some of the ugliness in what led up to the day. As with any other festival or event, we posted details and invitation on social media, including our own local city’s Facebook Group: Grand Haven Informed. And while many people expressed enthusiasm, even sharing how proud they were to see an event like this in Grand Haven, others responded with… different emotions. People didn’t just disagree with the festival or the values surrounding Pride month. They attacked it, they attacked the organizers, they even attacked me personally for my role in it, saying some pretty hateful things about all of us. We saved screenshots of the most vicious comments, so we would have information to give to the police if any violence occurred, but thankfully the day went off largely without a hitch. A few people showed up with signs to protest, but everyone pretty much ignored them until they gave up and went away.It will never cease to amaze me how people can claim to follow Jesus, the Lord who taught us that all the law and prophets hang on love of God and love of neighbor, and then call other people who disagree with them vile, scum, and an abomination. Truth be told, if I hadn’t found The Episcopal Church and escaped the death-dealing heterosexist and transphobic interpretation of Scripture I was raised with, I doubt I’d even be a Christian anymore.But I’ll tell you why I am still a Christian—a big part of it is the numerous faithful gay, trans, and queer Christians I know. All of these people who are surrounded by so much hate and yet respond over and over again by living their life according to the teachings of Jesus and the way of love.I think of Dan and Paul, who were the first couple to welcome my wife and I to the Cathedral community in Nashville when we lived in Tennessee. I think of Paul patting me on the hand, telling me he didn’t need me to welcome him into church—he’d been here forty years, he was the one welcoming me. I think of Greg, who is the single greatest evangelist for Jesus Christ my parish has ever known, who even though he is a single gay man in his sixties has adopted numerous people into his life, being a mentor to so many. And I think of Sadie, dear Sadie, the trans woman at my parish who has suffered so much abuse every time she tries just to get a job and earn a living, but who shows up on Sunday full of smiles and hugs for everyone.If these people (and many more) can continue to show up and be in the church, and follow Jesus, who am I to get discouraged? Because together, arm in arm, joined in advocacy and fellowship, we will continue to fight until the entire church is a safe place for all of God’s children. 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.Welcome to week two of Pride Month! Each year June is dedicated to celebrating the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) individuals who make up our society and their long fight for equality, respect, and freedom. As I continue last week’s work of breaking the myths surrounding how Christians can (and should) view Pride month, this week I want to talk about a specific community: transgender people. In particular, I want to talk about what the Bible says about transgender people.First, let me tell you why. Though we have made significant strides as a society and even as Christians when it comes to the welcome of gay and lesbian people, the transgender community still experiences profound discrimination, marginalization, and risk of violence. When my church hosted the first Pride-themed worship service in Grand Haven, I met several trans members of the community who came out to be with us. Many told me it was the first time they had felt safe being in downtown Grand Haven and presenting in their actual gender identity. Some even told me that while literally trembling with anxiety. No one should have to live like that. And if Christians read the Bible a bit more carefully on these questions, they would keep creating the death-dealing transphobic culture we have right now. I talked a while ago about how the creation story isn’t the binary narrative we often think of, how in between night and day there is dawn and dusk and twilight. I talked about how the same God who made fish for the sea and birds for the air, also created animals that break those norms: penguins that can swim but not fly and dolphins that can soar through the air. And, given the presence of a variety of genders in creation (including animals that can have both genders and animals that can literally transition their biological sex), it’s unsurprising that God creates humanity with that same gender diversity. That’s not something to be scared of, it’s not even a symbol of the fall: it’s a manifestation of a God who delights in diversity, who called a diverse creation good, a God who is neither male nor female but holds all genders within God’s self. As I love to say, God is the original they/them. One of the most important parts of the reality of transgender people is the experience of being assigned one sex and name at birth and, as you grow up, feeling like that’s not really who you are. This is actually a recurrent theme in Scripture. Over and over again we encounter people with one name and identity who later are given a new name and identity by God. And so Jacob, the swindler and trickster who steals his brother’s birthright, wrestles with God and comes out with a limp, a new blessing, and a new name: Israel. Simon the fisherman, who runs hot and is always speaking up (not always in the best way) becomes Peter, the rock and the one upon whose confession the whole church is built. And Saul, the well-trained rabbi who persecutes that new sect of Jesus followers who are violating his understanding of Scripture, becomes Paul, the greatest advocate for the inclusion of the Gentiles in the church and the author of much of the New Testament. And lest you think this just about names, there are other historical corollaries to the experience of trans people. Eunuchs, for instance, were usually people assigned male at birth who had their reproductive organs changed or removed. The term also referred to those we would now call intersex. In the older texts of Scripture, like Deuteronomy 23, eunuchs are forbidden from being a part of the community. However, after the exile (and after God’s people were exposed to eunuchs who functioned quite regularly in Babylonian and Persian society), that began to change. In Isaiah 56, God even promises that eunuchs will have a special place in the new Israel: “I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”And, of course, one of the first conversions early in the Book of Acts is that of the Ethiopian Eunuch who, after hearing the story of Jesus, asks Philip what prevents him from being baptized. He asks that because he likely think that in the same way he was turned away from the temple in Jerusalem, he would be turned away from this new community of Christians. Philip looks at him with love in his eyes and says, “Nothing at all,” and immediately baptizes him: making it clear that at the start of the church that those who had been historically excluded would be included in God’s kingdom.Psalm 139 says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that means that trans people are also a wonderful creation of God, that they should be celebrated and lifted up—especially for their courage in claiming their true identity in a far too often hostile world. 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.Welcome to Pride Month! Each year June is dedicated to celebrating the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) individuals who make up our society and their long fight for equality, respect, and freedom. And though, give the unfortunate language of some Christians, you might think followers of Jesus are opposed to pride month—this priest is here to tell you that’s not accurate. There are literally millions of Christians who are either members of the LGBTQIA community or who are allies, including me. To help break the myth of the way Christians view Pride Month, this week I’d like to take my time to tell you the history behind this month and why celebrating it is important for all people—especially those who came to follow Jesus Christ. The observance of Pride Month dates back to events over half a century ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, many forces in our country were trying to return the United States to a version of America that they believed existed before World War II. A national paranoia about communism, fueled by figures like Joseph McCarthy, had infected out country, leading to the U.S. Army and other government institutions labelling various groups as un-American and subversive security risks—including gay men and lesbians. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the police, and even the United States Postal Service kept records on known homosexuals, their friends, and the establishments they frequented. States soon followed suit, and eventually even local cities were performing sweeps to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and restaurants of gay people. Every state in our country criminalized same-sex acts during this time, with penalties ranging from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years in prison—or even life. In 1971, twenty states even had what are known as “sex psychopath” laws which permitted detaining suspected gay or lesbian people for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California, they could be committed to a psychiatric institution for life and in seven states they could be castrated. On June 28 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York. Owned by the Mafia, with an agreed-upon payout to the police to leave it alone, the bar catered to many of the most marginalized people in the LGBTQIA community, including drag queens, transgender people, and homeless youth. It was the only bar for gay men in New York where dancing was allowed. When a raid occurred, identification cards were checked but generally only trans women and drag queens were the ones arrested. During that raid in 1969, some of those detained refused to go into bathrooms and let the police check their genitalia to confirm their sex. Some of the lesbians reported the police were feeling them up instead of professionally frisking them. A crowd began to grow outside ethe door and within minutes over one hundred people were gathered outside of the club. As the police began loading people into patrol wagons, a bystander shouted “Gay power! And someone else started to sing the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An officer pushed someone in drag who then hit the officer with her purse. The cop then clubbed the suspect over the head, raising the anger and frustration of those in the crowd. A lesbian complained that her handcuffs were too tight and was beaten over the head with a police baton by an officer. She looked at the crowd of bystanders and shouted, “Why don't you guys do something?”That’s when the riot began. They lasted for six days as people stood up, claimed the streets as their own, and refused to continue to be subject to inhumane abuse and discrimination. A year later, to mark the first anniversary of the riots, Gay Pride marches were staged in New York as well as Los Angeles and Chicago. From there they spread to other cities, and the modern gay rights movement was born. In 1999 the U.S. Department of the Interior included several parts of Christopher Street and Greenwich Village as a part of the National Register of Historic Places—the first time this was done for a place meaningful specifically to the LGBTQIA community. At the ceremony, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior John Berry said, “Let it forever be remembered that here—on this spot—men and women stood proud, they stood fast, so that we may be who we are, we may work where we will, live where we choose, and love whom our hearts desire.”That’s something worth being proud of. 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.Each summer, I pick a different book each month to read with members of my parish. It’s a great way for me to get through some texts I’ve been meaning to pick up and I enjoy it each year. This year’s first book is The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story by Old Testament scholar Christopher Hays and his father, the world-renowned New Testament Scholar Richard Hays. I’m about one hundred pages into it and it is absolutely excellent, a brilliant synthesis of the best of Biblical scholarship, tracing the overarching narrative of the witness of Scripture, making it clear that love and mercy is what lies at the core. If you’re curious, you can join our parish’s discussion of it at 5:30pm on Monday, June 9—details are on our website at http://sjegh.com. But what struck me particularly was right at the beginning of the book, before the authors dive deeply into the witness of Scripture. They begin by plumbing the depths of American Christianity and find some darkness at its core. So, today I want to take a swing at the myth that American Christianity is exceptional and suggest that it may even have brokenness at its heart. The authors go back in time to Jonathan Edwards, and 18th century preacher and theologian who was active before the Revolutionary war. Edwards was the third president of what became Princeton University and is generally seen as one of the most important and leading theologians in early colonial America.One of his most famous works was a sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Here is a brief excerpt, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire, he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.”Historians often use this sermon as an example of the sort of preaching that was common during the First Great Awakening in colonial America.None of this was new to me, but what they next shared was something I had never known. I’ll quote the authors of the book directly here, “Notably, Edwards preached it in 1741, half a decade after his preaching sparked a rash of suicides and suicidal ideations among his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts.” They go on to note that one of those who died by suicide was even his own uncle. What the authors have done is pinpoint with scholarly precision the sickness that is at the heart of American Christianity, a sickness that has been with us since the beginning and has been killing people for nearly 300 years. This sickness is a theology that teaches people that God hates who they are, and then tells them that they are supposed to see this as a form of love.So, let’s make one very clear categorical theological statement: God does not hate you. God does not hate any part of you. And any preacher who tells you differently is not a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather, they are a preacher who has been infected with a diseased theology that has plagued Christianity in America from the start. And that sort of preaching kills people. No sinner is in the hands of an angry God. Rather, each and every one of us can look at the pierced hands of Christ, the Son of God, and know that it is God’s love for you that is the actual real deepest truth. 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’ve been gone the past couple weeks enjoying some Eastertide rest, relaxation, and travel, but it’s a delight to be back with you this week for another edition of Christan Mythbusters. I’m particularly excited because I get to tell you about yet ANOTHER way Christians have historically understood what God in Christ did to effect the salvation of all people. And so, let’s continue breaking the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven because, as I’ve said a few times now, it’s about so much more than that.Just to remind you, I started this short series with an acknowledgment that the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement is the one with which most Christians are familiar. This is often described as the idea that Jesus died to satisfy the wrath of an angry God upon our sins. (And, yes, I suggested that’s not really the best way to understand the satisfaction theory, that it’s more about God in Christ choosing to suffer alongside of us, to make right in God’s own being the horrors and injustices humanity has wrought.)Then, in my last episode I talked about the Christus Victor theory of the atonement, the one that was dominant in the early church and whose central theme is “the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ – Christus Victor – fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which humanity is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.”This week, though, I want to talk about the third of the classic theories of the atonement (aren’t you excited?). This is the one perhaps articulated best by someone named twelfth-century French philosopher, Peter Abelard. Abelard worried that the satisfaction theory made God seem more harsh and judgmental than a truly loving divine being. So, he focused on what became known as the “Moral Example” theory of the atonement. Abelard rejected the idea that the death of Christ was a ransom paid either to the devil or even to satisfy the honor and justice of God. Rather, Abelard argued that "Jesus died as the demonstration of God's love", a demonstration which can change the hearts and minds of the sinners, turning back to God.Eventually, Abelard’s view was condemned by the Council of Sens and he himself was excommunicated, but his perspectives on the atonement have captivated succeeding generations of theologians and philosophers. They gained new steam under philosophers like Immanuel Kant. In my own tradition, the Anglican theologian Hastings Rashdall said that Christ's life was a demonstration of God's love so profound that Christ was willing to die rather than compromise his character. This in turn inspires believers to emulate his character and his intimacy with the Father.”In the end, no one view of the atonement is probably perfectly adequate. And rather than seeing them as a buffet from which we choose the one we like best, I think we should see them as different facets of the mystery of God’s salvation. Because in a world where there are real victims, there must be real justice that satisfies the wrong that was done. In a world where evil seems so powerful, love must even more powerfully overcome it. And, in the end, if Jesus’ salvation of the world doesn’t change how we live, doesn’t change our hearts and minds… then what good could it be?Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.In my last episode we were in the midst of Holy Week and I talked about all the various ways we can understand the meaning of what Christians believe Christ did on the cross, something called the theory of the atonement. I talked about what’s known as the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement, and suggested that rather than believing that Jesus died to satisfy the wrath of an angry God, we should instead see that theory as God in Christ choosing to suffer alongside of us, to make right in God’s own being the horrors and injustices humanity has wrought.I also promised that I’d share some other ways Christians can understand what Christ did on the cross. So, this week, I’m going to continue my work breaking the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven because, as I said last time, it’s about so much more than that. In 1931 a Lutheran bishop and theologian named Gustaf Aulén published a book titled Christus Victor which set out the three historical theories of the atonement. One of those is the “satisfaction” theory that I talked about last week. But neither Aulén (nor many theologians since then) have believed that the “satisfaction” theory is the best explanation (it’s certainly not the only explanation), particularly given the witness of Scripture and the early church.Instead, Aulén encouraged a recovery of what he called the “classic” view of the atonement, the one that was dominant in the early church. That view is the Christus Victor understanding of the atonement (hence the title of the book). He characterized this view as follows: “Its central theme is the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ – Christus Victor – fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which humanity is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.”I love the way this view is articulated in the Paschal Homily, a sermon written in the late fourth century by John Chrysostom. It’s a tradition in Orthodoxy to preach this homily at the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday night before Sunday each year, and my own parish keeps the tradition as well. In the sermon, Chrysostom writes, “Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it. He destroyed Hades when he descended into it.He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh… Hell is in an uproar because it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and it discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.”This theory has been particularly potent among Liberation theologians because it sees salvation as the rescue of humanity from the powers of this world. And given the state of the world today, and the struggles of minorities and marginalized communities, I think the idea of divine rescue is one I can get behind… particularly because it also makes clear that Christ triumphed over death, hatred, and the powers of this world and so those who follow him must walk the same path and undo injustice and the power of evil in our own time until every person is set free. 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 many Christians, we are currently in the midst of Holy Week, a sacred period of time from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday where we walk the way of the cross and meditate on Jesus’ final days before his passion, death, and resurrection.There are a lot of ways to understand the meaning of this sacred time and what Christians believe about what Jesus did on the cross. The most common is the idea that on the cross Jesus died to pay the debt for our sins so that we could go to heaven. But, once you start digging into Scripture and theology, you discover that this concept is only one small part of the meaning of the death of Christ on the cross.So, this week on Christian Mythbusters, I’d like to try to break the myth that Jesus died so you can go to heaven, because it’s about so much more than that. The fancy theological term for what God in Christ did on the cross is called the theory of atonement. And what I described above is one way of understanding it, something known as the satisfaction theory of atonement. The problem, though, is that Western society has understood this primarily through a legal and juridical lens, which obscures the more ancient understanding of the work of Christ.Think about it this way, if God is good and has created a good creation, then when there is wrong and injustice, something must be done to make that right. It’s one thing to think Jesus died so God will forgive you for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but isn’t that rather anemic when it comes to the work of the creator of the universe?Instead, because of something that is broken within us since our earliest existence, humanity has wounded God’s creation, we have wounded one another. And just waving a hand and saying all is forgiven in the legal court doesn’t work… in particular, it isn’t fair when you consider some of the atrocities and horrors humanity has wrought. When Jesus died, it wasn’t to satisfy the wrath of an angry God (remember, Jesus is God!), it was to begin to heal what you and I broke through sin and violence and injustice. And it was to begin that healing not by waving a hand and saying we all get a “Get out of jail free, card”, but instead choosing to experience the worst of what we as humans could do. Christ carried all the brokenness of the human condition into the heart of God to begin healing it. So, in a few days, when we get to Good Friday, we will see the result of our own complicity in sin and violence in this world, either through our action or our inaction. And we will see that God doesn’t abandon us, but chooses to suffer the results of our sins, chooses to suffer with the marginalized and oppressed and wounded, thereby reconnecting them with the very heart of God.If it’s just about you and me going to heaven, there is a whole broken world and creation that will be lost. But if it’s about God healing all of humanity and all of creation, then this is about you and I being a foretaste of that healing, of being an amuse-bouche, if you will, of the love of God… and letting that love change us, so that, through God’s power, we begin to make right the things that are broken. Stick with me because next week, I’ve got a couple other ways of looking at this I’ll share with you. 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.If your household is anything like mine, there is a song that inevitably seems to be playing at some point during the day: Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan. Given that her songs often explore themes of same-sex relationships and queer identity, along with her openness about leaving her Christian upbringing, she is not exactly the favorite artist of many Christians in America… which is a shame. Because not only is her music banging, it explores themes that deeply resonate with the heart of Jesus’s teachings.Well, some of it does.So, this week, I’d like to break the myth that Chappell Roan is not for Christians and even try to explore what the Gospel according to Pink Pony Club might look like. At the heart of the opening of Pink Pony Club is Chappell Roan’s struggle between her inner sense of identity and the repressive nature of her Southern Christian upbringing. She hears about cities like Los Angeles and Santa Monica and the idea that there are places where you can be who you truly are every single day seems almost magical.  The Pink Pony Club is emblematic of that place where, in her words, “boys and girls can all be queens every single day.” Even the sexuality of the song, the line about “lovers in the bathroom” is not truly just about unbridled sexuality, but is referring to the way that bathrooms and other public spaces became the only way queer people could connect and find community because it simply was not safe to find sexual relationships anywhere else. So, what does all of this have to do with Christianity and the Gospel? Well, one of the several fundamental claims of Jesus was that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Sin is what binds you, it is related to choices and behaviors that twist and warp your true identity. Sin is inherently isolating because it breaks down love of God and love of neighbor. When Christianity builds repressive cultures and systems that keep people from being who God created them to be, it builds systems of sin that hurt, demean, and destroy. It builds places where the only safe love can be found in a secret tryst in a bathroom stall—instead love that is out in the open, bold, proud, committed and free. The Pink Pony Club this place where “boys and girls can all be queens every single day” is perhaps what the church actually should be like. In fact, this was what made the church so distasteful to first-century Greco-Roman Society. In early Christian congregations, men and women, slave and free, Jew and Greek, all were equal and had a full place and claim in the life of the church. This was contrary to everything about the highly stratified nature of society at the time.And if the church could recover that sense of safety and home, a place where queer people could be who God created them to be without shame or fear, then the church would once more be the emblem of freedom that it was for so many marginalized communities in the first century. Then people wouldn’t be forced into secretive places to find furtive experiences of love and connection because their love would be honored and celebrated as revealing God’s unbridled love for us. And then, I think, we would all dance and our dance would join the constant self-giving dance of love that is the Holy Trinity, a constant giving of love between the three persons of the godhead that is so intense we confess that they are simultaneously three persons and one being of complete love. Pink Pony Club… God… the Church… a place where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.That’s the church I want to build. Perhaps you’ll come and help me. 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.Welcome to the one hundredth episode of Christian Mythbusters! We have tackled a lot of topics in our time together—everything from gender to sexuality to immigration and divorce and the proper application of concepts like the “Order of Love” in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.Thanks for sticking with me.As I saw this hundredth episode approaching, I’ve been pondering what to talk about. And what I keep coming back to is a small line on the prayer book of my church.When I began attending The Episcopal Church, I was a campus minister at an evangelical church in West Texas. But early on Sunday mornings I would sneak into the local Episcopal Church and attend their early morning service of Holy Eucharist. After the opening words of greeting and prayer, the priest would almost always recite the following: “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandmentshang all the Law and the Prophets.”Over and over again, week after week, I would hear those words spoken at the beginning of worship and they began to work at my heart and my spirit.So, with them as a starting point, this week I want to break the myth of what really matters in Christianity. Because, truth be told, much of what we hear from Christians doesn’t meet the test that Jesus himself set out.Those words are known in our church as “The Summary of the Law” and they are a quotation of Jesus from Matthew 22:37–40 in the old King James Version. In these verses, Jesus himself is quoting two different commandments in the Hebrew Bible, one from Deuteronomy 6 and one from Leviticus 19. While they had been linked at times in pre-Christian Judaism, Jesus was the first to link them this precisely and concretely.“On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus is telling his disciples (and us) what the interpretive key to all of Scripture, all of religion, really is. And the interpretive key is simple: love of God and love of neighbor. Everything hangs on those two loves.And the two must be held together. Because there are times in Scripture (and in the Church) when the people of God have let their love and zeal for God lead them to do hateful and violent things to their neighbors. And there are times when a focus only on the neighbor has led humanity to lose sight of our connection to the divine reality that is the ground of all being. This is what really matters in Christianity: growing in love of God and love of neighbor. And that means being willing to be curious about what you may not actually know about God, what you may have wrong. It means loving not just the neighbor close to you, but the one who drives you bonkers. It means always asking what will advance this love of God and love of neighbor.And anytime any follower of Jesus says or does something that violates that dual love, that cuts people off from God or that harms their neighbor, that person has missed the plot, they have lost sight of what is at the heart of this whole spiritual journey we are all on. Love God. Love your neighbor. It all comes down to that. 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 how I don’t think anyone who says they believe in what’s known as the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy truly holds that belief. I shared my experience of a fundamentalist Christian who, when presented with two texts from Scripture that treat the death of a fetus differently than a born child, said that he didn’t care what the Bible said because he knew he was right… clearly not a believer in the literal inerrancy of the text.And I promised last week that I’d try this week to offer a more robust way of reading Scripture than the one so often presented by the Christians. So this week I’m taking a few more swings of breaking the myth that just because the Bible says it you have to believe it. First, just a very basic reading of the Bible makes it clear that you cannot believe every literal word of the Bible to be perfect command for all times and places and perfect history. I mean, from the very beginning that’s impossible. In Genesis one, humanity (male and female) is created on the sixth day of creation after the animals and the rest of creation. However, in Genesis two the man is created first and then the animals and then the woman. If you believe in verbal inerrancy, you are in trouble.If, however, you believe that the Bible consists of many genres and those genres can sometimes be history, sometimes be myth, sometimes be parable and poetry, then what you are given is two different stories of creation written in two different styles, each to communicate divine truth. The fact that each story is different (and even contradictory) isn’t a problem, in fact it becomes a beautiful way of engaging with the tensions present in creation itself, in our own experience of the world. Then you see how in Genesis one the story of creation is told through a beautiful ritual song, one that moves with rhythm and pacing through each day of the world coming together until it reaches a crescendo as humanity is created in the very image of God, male and female, all genders and sexualities flowing out of God’s very being. It’s poetry. And it’s true. In Genesis two, then, you are given a beautiful story rich with myth and imagery and parable. God walks through a garden, creating some of humanity… but not all of humanity. God comes to a realization (what a wonderful thing for God to do in this story!) that a person cannot live alone and so creates another person. Then there is a sneaky serpent, and sin, and fall… but a God who continues to love, to forgive, to care for humanity no matter their choices. It’s a beautiful story and it’s true. The point of Genesis isn’t about the exact specific and historical timing of the first moments of humanity’s existence and the existence of the world. Even ancient readers clearly didn’t take it that way. The point of these chapters is how we, as created beings relate to God and the world around us. By being attentive to the genre of the literature you are freed from a bizarre modern fascination with literalism and instead can plumb the depths of our reflection on own relationship to the divine.St. Augustine actually touches on this in book twelve of his Confessions, where he says, “The poverty of human understanding so often makes for an abundance of speech, for seeking says more than finding, asking takes longer than obtaining, and the hand that knocks has more to do than the hand that is open to receive.” As a friend of mine (who actually did that translation of the Confessions that I’m quoting from points out, “We would like for there to be a single, correct reading of the world, a single, correct reading of the Book of Genesis. But there is no such thing; multiple interpretations are not merely possible but even desirable.”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’ve had some conversations over the last couple of weeks that have led to this week’s episode, where I’m going to try to break some of the myths about how Christians do (and should) read the Bible.Last week I was talking with someone who was questioning the more affirming stance that my own Anglican tradition has taken on the role of LGBTQIA plus Christians in the church. I was trying to explain how the Bible verses that this person thought supported their more conservative were in actuality just six verses in the entire Bible, and that none of them are actually talking about faithful same-sex relationship relationships between two people who have no choice over their sexual orientation. I explained how no biblical author had any conceptualization about gender or sexual orientation that we now have given the insights of modern science. I suggested that the insights of modern science should play a role in our interpreting ancient text, acknowledging at the original authors, wrote a specific time with this specific perspective that was at times imperfect in its understanding of the world.Of course, the response was something along the lines of the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. But then, interestingly, enough, the conversation turned to the question of abortion. I pointed out too specific tax in the Hebrew Bible, one from Exodus 21 and one from Numbers 5, that acknowledge the moral complexity of this question. In fact, the text from Exodus 21 explicitly says that the consequence for the death of a fetus, as is different than the consequence for the death of a fully born child or human would be.In response, the person I was chatting with told me that they didn’t care what the Bible said, they believed that a fetus was full person.That rather bizarre end to the conversation underscored a reality to me that I’ve noticed several times over the years. Even people who claim to be fundamentalists and believe in the inerrancy of the scripture, very rarely are. Every single person has some Bible verses that they will want to contextual lies or explain a way differently. And to read the Bible, it doesn’t really help to pretend that just cause the Bible says something you think that’s the only answer to a question. Instead, we all need to dig deeply into the biblical text, the original languages, the original context, to discern what God’s word would be to us today in the current situation.So, not only would I suggest that no one, in practice, truly believes in what’s known as the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, I would also point out that Christians didn’t even read the Bible that way for 80% of the church’s existence. What most fundamentalists and many evangelicals believe in is what’s known as the doctrine of verbal inerrancy, an idea that just came about in the 19th century, and idea that every single word of the Bible came directly from God and, therefore, can contain no factual errors. That's a new way of looking at things. Churches like mine, that don’t believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, still believe God inspired the Bible. In fact, at every ordination of a priest in my church, that priest solemnly declares that “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” That is not to say, of course, that all things in Scripture are necessary for salvation. I’ll get into that next week, as well as explore what a more robust understanding of Scripture might actually look like. 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. There’s been a lot of talk about Sanctuary Cities, both nationally and right here in Grand Haven lately. A lot of that talk is filled with fear, anxiety, and a desire to close doors and build walls. So, I thought I’d use this week’s Christian Mythbusters to unpack some of the myths about sanctuary, breaking the law, and the connection all of this has to Christianity. First, the idea of sanctuary cities comes from the Bible. In ancient Israel, there were six “Cities of Refuge” established by God himself in Numbers 35. The Hebrew word is “miklat” and it can be translated as refuge or asylum. If someone killed another person unintentionally, they could flee to those cities and be kept safe until there could be a just trial to determine guilt. Starting in the 5th century after Christ, churches became places of refuge and sanctuary under canon law, meaning that if someone was accused of a crime but was able to reach a church, they could claim sanctuary and avoid being arrested immediately. (Fun fact, this is the reason why many churches—including my own—have their doors painted red; it’s a symbol of sanctuary.) During the time of the reformation, as the Roman empire gave way to the rise of the nation-state, sanctuary laws were gradually abolished and modern protections like the right to due process were instead put into place. In the early 1980s, the idea of churches as sanctuary was revived because of the many Central American refugees who were fleeing civil conflict. Obtaining asylum (a recognized right for refugees under international law) was increasingly difficult and so churches offered to provide safe haven for refugees until they could receive legal status and safety. This sort of sanctuary is an act of civil disobedience, a choice someone or a group make because of their deeply held religious belief and because they believe that handing refugees over to immigration officials would violate their duty as Christians to care for the least of these. It was this same form of civil disobedience that inspired Christians who worked on the Underground Railroad, breaking the laws of cities, states, and even our own country to protect slaves seeking freedom because people matter as people. Currently, when a city chooses to become a sanctuary city, though, they aren’t actually breaking any laws or engaging in civil disobedience. Rather it simply means that simply be the local police and civil servants don’t work with immigration officials in enforcing immigration law. City employees and officials don’t inquire into or take action based on someone’s immigration status. Basically, it leaves immigration enforcement to ICE and says that the municipality won’t involve ourselves in this question. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that cities aren’t even required by law to do immigration enforcement. The courts have been clear that that is a federal responsibility.Even though the immediate warning people throw out there at this idea is that it would lead to a rise in crime, studies show that’s not the case. In fact, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics found that sanctuary policies had no statistically significant impact on crime rates. In fact , in the same year, a report by the Center for American Progress indicated that “Statistical analysis illustrates that across a range of social and economic indicators, sanctuary counties perform better than comparable nonsanctuary counties.”And I will say that, as a Christian, I support the sanctuary movement. I support local governments focusing on caring for their residents instead of doing immigration enforcement.  Our current immigration laws and system are broken and based upon the history of racism in our country. And I do believe that we need both civil disobedience on the part of Christians alongside of the refusal of municipalities to cooperate with this unjust system. 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 the proposed SAVE Act, legislation being proposed in the House of Representatives that purports to safeguard our elections but, in actuality, increase significantly the burden to register to vote for women, minorities, and the poor. I talked last week about how this bill is a perfect example of the blindness of patriarchy and the burdens of not having wealth and privilege… Christianity has far too often been a pillar of patriarchy instead of the tool used to dismantle it.So, let’s break the myth of patriarchy being synonymous with Christianity, because even though that has sadly so often been the case in practice, it is far from the biblical and theological reality of what God accomplished in Jesus Christ. A good place to start is with Jesus himself. Or, backing up a little, with his mother. Because the teaching of the church is that the only reason Jesus had a human nature and was able to save humanity was because Mary said yes to God’s invitation. It was Mary who lent humanity to the divine in giving birth to Christ. And as Jesus went through his ministry, he constantly lifted up women. While there were no women among the Twelve Apostles, he did have women among his closest disciples. He constantly crossed boundaries and cultural expectations in the first century Jewish world, treating women with dignity, respect, and care. And the gospel record is clear that the twelve male apostles absolutely failed at Christ’s passion and death, running away in fear. But the women stayed with him. And after his resurrection, his first appearance was to a woman, Mary Magdalene, who he tasked with proclaiming the resurrection to the other apostles. This is why the Orthodox Church, for instance, calls her the Apostle to the Apostles.  In the early church, Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” That certainly seemed to be the case in the first century. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he brings greetings to several members of the church who had contributed mightily to the congregation Of those he mentions, seven were women and only five were men. And, of those women, Pheobe is named as a deacon and, even more importantly, Junia is named as an apostle. Yes, apparently, women were even apostles in the early church. And even within the early church, Christianity did not accept the patriarchal nature of marriage, insisting in Ephesians 5 that a Christian marriage involves mutual submission to each other.As Christianity became more structured in the third to fourth century, the patriarchy of the Greco-Roman world won out and instead of challenging patriarchal norms, the church began to embrace them, with leaders arguing against women in leadership. All of this continued to the church as it exists today, where women continue to be sidelined and marginalized along with other groups. Because the church has so often forgot that in Christ God came to make a new humanity, one in which every person could lay full claim to the kingdom and could pursue God’s call in their life… no matter where it come. And if the church is going to be faithful, she must rise up as a force to dismantle the patriarchy of our religion, of our society, and of our world. Like with Mary, the salvation of this world cannot happen while women are systematically excluded and ignored. 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. Speaking of playing whackamole with attacks on marginalized groups, we got a new one out of left field this past week. Republicans in the House of Representatives have reintroduced the SAVE Act, legislation originally drafted last year that purports to “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,” hence the acronym “SAVE.” What it actually does is mandate that Americans show proof of citizenship when they are registering to vote. While that might seem reasonable, the way in which the act requires this proof to be demonstrated is through providing either a passport or a birth certificate with matching photo ID. If you still haven’t caught the difficulty here, let’s drill in a bit further. About a half of all Americans do not have a passports, so they will have to use the alternative option. The problem there is that anyone who has changed their name since birth (say, for example, a woman who got married) would not be able to provide sufficient documentation because their birth certificate name does not match the name on their photo ID. The bill does not mention a marriage certificate or name change document. While the law does require states to establish a process for additional documentation, but that would now vary state to state and who knows what would be determined to be acceptable. About one in ten Americans do not have ready access to documents to prove their citizenship. What do you think they will do under this bill? They probably just won’t bother registering to vote.Repeated studies have shown that cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare and that laws like this tend to disproportionately impact minorities—not to mention that now every time a married woman wants to register to vote, she will have to dig out her birth certificate and her marriage license (and that’s assuming that would even be enough). And do you want to guess how this will be used in some states to keep trans people from voting, because their names also won’t match their birth certificate? This is not about safeguarding elections. This is about keeping women, minorities, the poor, and marginalized groups away from the polls by any means necessary.So, why, you may ask, am I going on and on about this act in an episode of Christian Mythbusters. After all, this series is about countering some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. I’m glad you asked. This bill is a perfect example of the blindness of patriarchy and the burdens of not having wealth and privilege. And, much to my dismay, Christianity has far too often been a pillar of patriarchy instead of the tool used to dismantle it. Christianity has far too often been used to protect those with wealth and privilege instead of being a driving force of Good News for the poor and suffering.I’m not surprised that a bunch of wealthy men with privilege, all of whom probably have passports, don’t think this sort of legislation is a burden. They don’t know what it’s like to live in a world were you have to change your name or where you barely have resources to put food on the table much less keep a lock box to organize things like a birth certificate and marriage license.And so it is essential that Christians are the first to speak up on issues like this. Followers of Jesus should be the voice of the voiceless, the first to respond when systems seek to push whole groups of people to the side. Stay tuned, next week I’ll tell you why. 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 feels a little bit like we’re all playing whack-a-mole right now, what with all the attacks on marginalized groups along with the promotion of hateful and harmful rhetoric. In this week’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, I’d like to take a hot moment to stand with my trans siblings and break the myth of the gender binary nature of God’s creation.One of the first things many Christians do when you get into conversations of gender and sexuality is they go back to the start of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, to insist that the structure of male and female in marriage was part of the way God ordained creation itself to exist. There are so many errors to unpack here. Let’s get started.First, what you have in Genesis one is what’s known as a series of merisms. This is a rhetorical device where you use two contrasting parts to refer to the whole. So, for example, instead of saying you searched everywhere for something, you might say you searched “high and low.” If you said you searched “high and low” no one would think you didn’t search in the middle or assume only high and low existed. It’s a figure of speech. So, God in Genesis one, we hear about water and land, light and darkness, morning and evening, sea creatures and wingèd birds in the sky, and so on and so forth. So, when it comes to the creation of humanity, we read that “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”But that doesn’t mean that only male and female exist within humanity any more than Genesis one might mean that there is only light and darkness and nothing in between.  The brilliant poet David Gate articulated this beautifully in a poem he wrote after the tragic death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student who died by suicide after a year of bullying at school. The poem goes like this:If God created he night & the day& the dawn, of course& the dusk& the tangerine rosepink sunset& in the infant bright of morning& the deep amethyst of twilightThen to perceive the world in binary is to forego knowledge of the divineI couldn’t say it better myself. And, if both male and female were created from God and in God’s image, then we are reminded, of course, that God is neither male nor female. God is a non-binary entity, the divine source of all who holds all genders within God’s being. God is the original they/them. And when God created humanity, God made male and female and everything in between, God made people cisgender and transgender, nonbinary and genderfluid, agender and genderqueeer and intersex and bigender… God made all of these realities and expressions of gender, and just like when you look at the rich variety of daylight blending into evening, God looked at all those genders that came out of God’s own image… and God said they were very good.God said you were very good. And never let anyone tell you otherwise. 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.