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,

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,

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.

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,

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.

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,

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.

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,

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,

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.

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 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.

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,

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.

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,

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?

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 (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,

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.