The Catechetic Converter

When it comes to the parable known as “the Good Samaritan,” we tend to do some weird things. First, we call it “the Good Samaritan” oblivious to the implication that we’re basically calling this “the parable about ‘one of the good ones’” (change “Samaritan” to any other ethnic designation and you’ll see what I mean). Secondly, we conflate the care shown to the unnamed victim with the Samaritan as though Jesus is telling us to extend care even to people we find “unclean.”

The story begins with a lawyer doing a very lawyer-y thing: attempting to clarify terms. This lawyer (in this case, a person dedicated to the study and interpretation of Jewish religious law, perhaps with a focus on its social dimensions rather than its ritual/religious ones) is said to “tempt” or test Jesus by asking Him how he can attain eternal life. Jesus replies with the summary of the Torah that He elsewhere calls “the greatest commandment”: love God with everything and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.

To which the lawyer asks: “who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then gives a parable about a guy traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho (there’s nothing in the gospel to tell us where Jesus is when He delivers this parable, so I’d like to believe He’s in Jericho and is making a sly reference to the likely-from-Jerusalem lawyer who traveled just to pester Jesus with these questions). The guy gets robbed, beat-up, left for dead. We’re told that a Jewish priest crosses to the other side of the road and ignores the guy. This is followed by a “Levite” (from the historical priestly caste themselves, given prominent roles in the temple) who does the same. Then comes a Samaritan.

Now, I’m not going to assume that you know what a Samaritan is (and I say “is” here because Samaritans are still around). It’s a bit complicated, but they trace their roots to pre-kingdom Israel. They rejected the establishment of worship outside of Mount Gerizim as illegitimate, following developments began by the high priest Eli (the one who adopted Samuel). As a result, they reject many religious and cultural developments during the Kingdom period—including any “scriptures” written beyond the Torah (the “legal” books, the first five books of the Old Testament). This fostered centuries of animosity, made all the more pronounced by the fact that Samaritans never faced the exiles that the two kingdoms of Jews experienced. This led to them being treated as akin to “Gentiles” in many cases. But the two groups share the Torah and many cultural traditions. They also have their own priesthood and interpreters of the Law. Which means that it’s possible Jesus’ fictional Samaritan is a member of the Samaritan clergy, being held alongside his “peers” in the Jewish religion.

What this means is that all three figures who encounter the victim are subscribers to the same legal injunctions. They all would agree that “love God; love neighbor” is the most important commandment. They would also all likely agree that caring for an injured person takes precedent over other ritual/legal issues.

See, the common interpretation of this story is that the priest and Levite are ignoring their obligations to help a person in need because it risks rendering them ritually impure by exposure to blood, etc. And I think that this is where we see the conflation with the victim and the Samaritan because we are conditioned to focus on the “uncleanness” aspects of the story. The Samaritan helps the “unclean” bloodied person because he is already “unclean” himself—he has nothing to lose! But the Samaritan holds to the exact same ritual purity codes as the other priest and Levite. Though those two see him as unclean, he does not. Rather, he’s the one who’s doing a better job of following the Torah’s teachings about mitzvot.

We can only speculate about the reasons for the other two guys’ refusal to help the victim. They could be concerned about ritual purity, but Jesus depicts them as leaving Jerusalem, implying that their ritual duties are over. Martin Luther King, Jr. notes in one of his speeches that this road was a dangerous road and it would not be out of the ordinary for robbers to leave a bloodied victim in order to lure more people into a trap to be robbed. If this is the case, then the priest and Levite are (perhaps justifiably?) concerned for their safety and following a sort of conventional wisdom. Regardless, both views underscore that the Samaritan assumes a degree of risk to help this guy—either ritual purity or personal safety.

He cleans and dresses the guy’s wounds, loads him on his own animal, and takes him to an inn (risking derision by entering a Jewish city to do so). He pays and then offers to pay more until the guy is completely well.

This is when Jesus puts a question back to the lawyer: which of the three was a neighbor?

Notice that Jesus isn’t asking “can you stomach caring for an unclean person?” He’s instead getting the guy to see an example of neighborliness that goes beyond the artificial categories of “priest” and “Levite” and “Samaritan.”

Notice also that Jesus never once uses the word “good.” This isn’t about how to be a good neighbor. This is a story about how to just be a neighbor. There are no degrees when it comes to neighborliness.

Jesus adds the layer of “Samaritan” to the story in order to challenge the guy who claims to know “the rules” but these “rules” have a tendency to bias him toward certain people. And this challenges us because we tend to slap descriptors and adjectives on people in some bullshit quest to define them as deserving of our love and care. Jesus exposes that labels are just labels; actions are what define a person.

The priest and the Levite are guys who are supposed to know the rules better than anyone else. The Samaritan? He plays fast and loose with the rules—to the mind of the priest and Levite and even the lawyer himself, if he took the rules seriously he’d not be a Samaritan. But the priest and Levite, using some unknown excuse, abdicate their responsibility to help a person in need whereas the Samaritan actually takes the rules seriously—he is the one who manages to see himself in the victim and thus fulfill the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Who was a neighbor to the victim? “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him,” says the lawyer.

***

I’m writing about this parable because it’s been on my mind since reading about the number of supposedly “Christian” educational institutions expelling kids for various LGBTQ-related things. Either refusing them diplomas days before graduation because they came out or brought a trans-person with them to prom. So many “Christian” individuals and institutions fail to follow Jesus’ simple command about neighborliness. I mean, according to the linked story about the girl expelled for bringing a trans boy to prom, the Georgia Baptist school she attends “claims its core values are “love for God, neighbor, and self” and “respect for people, property, and ideas.” But these are presented as simply a pile of words. Like the lawyer, they seek to define “neighbor” in ways that fit their preconceived notions rather than hear Jesus’ challenge to our arbitrary definitions.

Seriously, swap “Trans-person” in for “Samaritan” and re-read the story. Hell, make it a story about a pastor and a Christian school principle as well. The meaning still stands: who is the neighbor?

The one who demonstrated mercy.

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.

#Christian #Theology #Bible #Episcopal #Church #trans #faithfulness #LGBTQ

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

In the song “Hard To Be” off his revelatory album Curse Your Branches, David Bazan re-envisions the Western view of the Fall narrative. He sings:

You've heard the story you know how it goes Once upon a garden we were lovers with no clothes Fresh from the soil we were beautiful and true In control of our emotions to till we ate the poison fruit And now its Hard to be Hard to be Hard to be A decent human being

Curse Your Branches was touted as a sort of “break-up letter to God” from one of the most uneasy voices of Christian rock music. Bazan, who served as the creative lead of the seminal band Pedro the Lion, eventually got fed-up with the Evangelical Christian world and became a sort of artistic torch-bearer for those (of us) who “deconstructed” their faith-background. He would wind up leaving his Christian faith altogether, this album being the monument to that event—chronicling all the complex thoughts and emotions that come with it. In the third verse of “Hard to Be” he articulates his leave-of-faith in terms of a graduation:

Childbirth is painful, toil to grow our food Ignorance made us hungry Information made us no good Every burden misunderstood I swung my tassel to the left side of my cap Knowing after graduation there would be no going back and no congratulations from my faithful family some of whom are already fasting to intercede for me Because it's... Hard to be Hard to be Hard to be A decent human being

I thought of this song when reading about the recent news regarding the “kicked-around” idea of the Department of Homeland Security producing a sort of game-show where immigrants compete to become citizens of the United States. This immediately brings to mind the sort of thing envisioned in The Hunger Games and Squid Game and is of course deeply dehumanizing. I’m reminded also of the infamous early 2000s video series Bum Fights where people filmed homeless people fight for food and money.

Bazan’s song notes the two-fold issue with the conventional interpretation of the Fall narrative: it serves as a (mythological) explanation for why we humans do really really bad things, while also reinforcing a notion of “total depravity” (to use a Reformed theology term) that suggests goodness is out of reach unless we subscribe to particular dogmatic ideas. Bazan, perhaps, suggests that being a decent human being really isn’t that hard—we’ve just made it so.

Maybe decency isn’t all that out of reach?

---

In the Episcopal Church we speak a lot about human dignity. We have a line in our Baptismal Covenant where we vow to “respect the dignity of every human person.” This line sometimes gets treated like it’s the only line of the Baptismal Covenant—which only further demonstrates how seriously we take this vow (even if we’d do well to remember that the others are just as important). When Bishop Mariann Budde spoke at that now famous service during the 2025 inauguration proceedings, she was speaking from this vow in the convenant (and even though Trump referred to her words as “nasty,” these are words spoken on Barron’s behalf when he was baptized at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in 2006—I know, because I was there, but this is a story for another time…). Human dignity, for us, is seen as deeply entwined in our Baptismal theology.

---

Disrespecting human dignity is at the heart of the MAGA movement—and its attendant ideologies. Which is part of all totalitarian political philosophies. Just like the Nazis before it, MAGA holds to a notion that human dignity exists on a continuum—and that there are some humans who do not deserve dignity or they need to find ways of earning it, which is rooted in the pagan philosophies of the Roman Empire (still held up by the West as the pinnacle of civilization for some reason), where dignity could be taken and applied at will through economic practices like slavery.

Human dignity is of course connected to humanization. Stripping away one’s humanity diminishes human dignity. But it strikes me that this is a two-way street: not only does “dehumanization” happen when we “diminish” dignity, but it also happens when we “elevate” humans. In other words, making desperate people compete for basic needs and treating a public figure as a kind of God-anointed ruler who is chosen to stand over the rest of us are both examples of dehumanizing actions. This is because both refuse to see a human being as a human being.

I’ve mentioned this recently, but I garner a lot of meaning from the TV show The Dog Whisperer. What I appreciate about Cesar in that show is how he reminds us that dogs are happiest when they are allowed to be dogs. “Bad” dog behavior results from humans trying to make dogs behave like humans. This creates anxiety on the part of the dog because they do not know how to act like a human.

Similarly, several years back I led a sort of mission trip with parish youth to a Heifer International farm outside of Boston. While on that trip they talked to us about chickens and how, apparently, some scientists decided to hook a chicken up to a brain scanner to see what makes them happy. According to the farmer, the hippocampus of the chicken’s brain lit up when it was able to peck and scratch. That’s what made the chicken happy—chickens live to peck and scratch. Take them away from that and they get depressed.

I often think of these two stories when I prepare sermons dealing with the Fall narrative in Genesis. Eve and Adam’s sin is not actually in the eating of the fruit, but in the choosing of the serpent’s words over God’s. They heard in those words a chance to become something that they were not—to become “like God”—thus attempting to dehumanize themselves.

The rabbinical (and Orthodox Christian, I believe) take on the story of Eve and Adam is that God did actually intend for them to eat the fruit of the tree-of-the-knowledge-of good-and-evil (always a mouthful to say that), but only after God felt that they were ready. And so the serpent, in effect, presents them with a chance to bypass the process of growth that God had in store for us humans—which Adam and Eve choose; convenience over patience, an eternal struggle for us.

So the original sin of humanity is us seeking to be something that we’re not—which fosters in us anxiety and fear. We’re not God. But we try so often to be Him—or even “better” than Him.

---

What stands Christianity apart from all other religions is that we claim that our central religious figure is God. The doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims that God was born to us as a human being named Jesus. The Incarnation was at the heart of the earliest controversies affecting the Christian religion. Gnostics and Docetists and Arians all denied, to some degree, that Jesus was God. This is partly due to a belief that they could not imagine anything as unbefitting of God as to be human. For them, humanity was a thing to be escaped, a sort of curse or even (in the case of the gnostics) an illusion pulled on us by a scheming “demi-urge” (who just so happened to be a Jewish form of God… lest we ever forget the deeply antisemitic roots of gnostic Christianity). The idea that God would be born as a human is a scandalous idea—but only scandalous if we assume that humanity is a repulsive thing.

When I was in my latter days as a Baptist, my church was embroiled in a controversy over “Calvinism” (that would wind up shaking the entire denomination to its core in a few years). This “Calvinism” was an extreme form of Reformed Christian theology that was summarized with the acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Perseverance of the Saints

To put it very basic terms: this theology holds that humans are wholly wicked and undeserving of salvation, completely destined for hellfire and damnation; however, God chooses some humans to be saved from this destiny; as a result, Jesus died on the cross only for those who God knew from the beginning of time would be saved; those who God chooses are unable to resist God’s salvation (also implying that those God chose for damnation have no say in the matter either); and that salvation is irrevocable, persevering even to the end of days.

I find the whole thing deeply heretical, to be honest. The idea that God would create people for eternal damnation is a truly abhorrent theology that also believes that there are some things beyond God’s ability to control (thus undercutting the foundational theology of God’s sovereignty that such theologians go on about) and effectively says that Jesus’ work on the cross is insufficient.

The whole shit-show of this theology falls out of the key idea of “total depravity.” Now, I want to be clear here: I hold that humans are incapable of saving ourselves and that salvation comes only from Christ Jesus alone. But I’m not convinced that this is due to some concept of us humans being deeply depraved. I think it’s more that we’re mis-guided.

Depravity suggests a sort of filthiness to being human. It also suggests that God deigned Himself to become human so that we can become something more. In fact, this idea is reflected in the lyrics of a song by The OC Supertones, a (I kid you not) Calvinist ska band from the mid-90s to mid-2000s:

God look at me, I'm just a man But you tell me I'm not just a man You're so hard to understand After all I'm just a man (from “Who Can Be Against Me” off their debut album Adventures of the OC Supertones)

To me, this sounds like an admission that God expects us to be more than human.

Much evangelicalism is rooted in Reformed Christian theology. And evangelicalism has also managed to become the ecclesiology of MAGA (though, to be fair, not exclusively—the folks at Christianity Today and figures like Dr. Russell Moore are doing their level best to call out the hypocrisy and idolatry at root in the MAGA movement). Having come from that world myself, I’d argue that it is an inherently dehumanizing ecclesiology because it sees being human in heretical terms. Like the gnostics and Docetists of yore, such Reformed theology sees humanity as a thing to be escaped. I mean, just consider “Rapture” theology (Millennial Dispensationalism, if you’re a nerd), which longs for the day that Jesus calls Christians out of the earth and their earthly bodies so that He can destroy the world while they all look on from an elevated spiritual plane. And since this world and our bodies are meant to done away with, we see the world in disposable terms—including our fellow humans (who are likely not destined for the same eternal reward as the predestined elect and thus are less deserving of dignity).

This all flies in the face of the long arc of traditional Christian theology. Not only do we have verses like John 3:16 that declare God’s love for humanity being the catalyst for His incarnation, but we have hymns like “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” that declare:

Christ, by highest heaven adored; Christ, the everlasting Lord; late in time behold him come, offspring of a virgin’s womb. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail th’ incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel. Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the new born King!

“Pleased as Man with Man to dwell.” God was pleased with humanity and so He chose to dwell among us. Charles Wesley, who wrote the above, also penned the words of hymn that brought me to tears many times this past Advent season:

Lo! he comes with clouds descending, Once for favored sinners slain! Thousand, thousand saints attending, Swell the triumph of his train. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! God appears on Earth to reign.

“Favored sinners.” Wow.

What God wants for us is to be human. Sin leads us to follow the path of temptation to be something other. And once we see ourselves as something other than human, we dehumanize.

The Incarnation of God in Jesus is, in part, to show us how to be human—not to exceed our humanity.

One of the definitive works on the subject is On the Incarnation by Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. Perhaps the most well-known quote from that work is:

“Christ was made man that we might be made God.”

The implication here is that humanity and God are brought together—not that humanity be expected to escape itself in exchange for something else. The Bible testifies that God loves everything He has made. This includes us humans. He doesn’t love us in spite of us. He loves us as us.

If we want to stem the tide of dehumanizing practices we first have to accept being human—nothing more and nothing less. For this is what God made us to be.

If God didn’t love humanity He wouldn’t have made humanity. Rather than expecting us to escape our humanity, He wants us to embrace it—in the same way He Himself embraced humanity in the Incarnation (see Philippians 2:5-11 ). We’ve only gone wrong by denying our humanity.

Maybe it’s not actually that hard to be a decent human being?

Maybe all we need is to just simply be human?

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Kids are great. You really cannot predict what’s going to interest them. My toddler? He hates “kid” music. The only thing that gets him to calm down is metal (which is a development from the few months that the only thing that calmed him was watching Nirvana’s Unplugged concert on repeat—the riff to “The Man Who Sold The World” is burned deep into my brain). Since we’ve exhausted Babymetal’s catalog, and he’s still iffy about Van Halen (likes “Jump,” cries at “Panama”), I decided to dig into some of my musical past and brought up “Something Must Break” by Ninety Pound Wuss—a shockingly raucous Christian punk band that I wasn’t really into in my youth, but have since come to appreciate a bit more recently (alongside the truly excellent Blenderhead). I mostly chose this because for my toddler, the louder and faster, the better.

Pulling up videos for Ninety Pound Wuss, I happened to catch a clip of them from a couple years back. I was surprised that they were still playing—Jeff Suffering, the creative lead of the band, had gone on to serve as a pastor at Mars Hill in Seattle, the church of controversial pastor and known jerk, Mark Driscoll. Because of this, I had assumed that Jeff Suffering had become a right-winger (basically there’s three paths for the Christian punk bands of my youth: disbandment, leaving Christianity altogether, or becoming a right-winger). But I noticed that one of the songs featured in the band’s reunion concert was “DeSantis Must Break”—a reworking of the aforementioned “Something Must Break.” So l looked into this.

I discovered a Facebook post (which I will not link here, because I refuse to help Zuck), where Jeff Suffering shares his political development. Apparently “Something Must Break” was an anti-abortion song (honestly, without printed lyrics, it’s impossible to know what he’s singing about in that song—he could be speed-screaming a casserole recipe for all I know). And after years of reflection, Jeff Suffering notes his changed views on the subject by saying:

Many who claim they are pro-life also seem to be completely against universal health care, free water, housing as a human right, taking care of immigrants fleeing oppression and generally all people considered “the least of these” defined by their own sacred text. No one set up a system to take care of unwanted children and mothers before ripping women of bodily autonomy and freedom.

So he re-wrote the song to condemn his former thinking, and to call out the hypocrisy of conservative politicians who call for liberty while at the same time suppressing freedoms. He notes that many of Ninety Pound Wuss’ songs called out the hypocrisy of the Church and that he’s keeping true to that.

This struck me. Mostly because I was suddenly hit with the realization that my own faith journey seems to have mirrored some of the bands that I knew in my youth—and that the Christian punk scene impacted me in ways I probably have not fully considered until now. A lot of the Christian punk bands sang about Christian hypocrisy, which I guess primed me for seeking something more true when it came to the Church...

--

I came of age at a magical time: the mid-90s. And more than that, I discovered skateboarding in 1995, which put me right in the crux of “alternative” culture. Further, my mom has always been someone who viewed shopping as a recreational activity which meant I spent a TON of time in the mall. So I was steeped in the fashion, music, and aesthetics of what most people think of when they think “the Nineties.” Fresh Jive clothing, JNCO, clear plastic technology, wallet chains, Final Fantasy VII, Alien Workshop skateboards and clothes, the Nintendo 64, the advent of the internet… these were the textures of my upbringing.

But there was a complication: I was raised in a sometimes fundamentalist Baptist environment.

I say sometimes fundamentalist because my (large) Southern Baptist congregation would vacillate between old-school Baptist, contemporary evangelical, and Bob Jones University-esque Independent Baptist fundamentalism—depending on which group was the loudest at the time.

My mom worked for the church and wound up very influenced by all of this and so there were limits on my interaction with popular culture—which honestly probably predestined me for the “alternative” cultures of skateboarding, alternative rock music genres, and my often unconventional fashion sense. Because I had to justify my music choices, I became a very discerning listener.

I discovered rock music at the end of my seventh-grade year. I was on a “date” with my girlfriend at the time (she approached me at the beginning of the year, asked if I would be her girlfriend and I said yes—that kind of girlfriend). My mom had taken us out shopping and we wound up in a Christian bookstore. It was 1995 and dc Talk had just released their groundbreaking Jesus Freak album (an absolute monster record that would not only change my life, but probably popular Christian music forever). Deeply influenced by the grunge genre (seriously, the title track cribs the famous drum kick of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), it grabbed me in a place that I did not know existed. Prior to that day I listened to film scores and Weird Al (my mom was still cool, even though she was expected to tow the fundie line from time to time). Because the record was Christian, my mom bought it for me.

I was now set to be defined by alternative rock for the rest of my life.

Just before that time, my best friend and I would hang out at a local ice-skating rink. It was our only exposure to mainstream music. Because it was the mid-nineties, the singles from Green Day’s Dookie (an album I’m convinced every person my age, regardless of music preference, has in their house somewhere) were ubiquitous. Something about “Basket Case” in particular grabbed my attention. But I knew that there was no way I’d be able to buy that album—aside from the title and lyrical content, any non-Christian music was off limits. So I set about looking for a Christian equivalent to that sound.

One of the cool things about Christian bookstores at the time was that they let you listen to CDs before you bought them. At the Christian bookstore I would come to frequent, their entire music inventory was scanned and put into a phone system where you could enter a code and listen to like thirty second clips of every song on an album. They also had entire CDs on particular listening stations for when they wanted to highlight particular groups.

Now, I was about to learn that I was alive during the heyday of a legendary Christian record label known as Tooth and Nail Records. Brandon Ebel founded the label, as I heard him put it once in an interview somewhere, so that there would be good music for Christian kids to listen to. In the days of big-haired Contemporary Christian Music powerhouses like Michael W. Smith and Sandi Patti—and even kinda corny rock bands like Petra—Tooth and Nail was a revelation. Ebel was signing obscure West-Coast skate-punk, alt-rock, and ska bands (who were part of a booming, largely Southern California subculture coming out of various evangelical churches at the time). Bands like Strongarm, Blenderhead, and The Crucified… bands that would scare the more polyester members of my church.

I kept seeing a band named MxPx as I browsed the shelves that day. Their On the Cover record featured these guys with piercings, tattoos, and a Superman t-shirt and I could tell that they were not like anything I’d seen on the shelves before. So I gave them a listen.

You know those moments in music biopics when people hear the featured artist for the first time and they kind of lose their minds? Like in Walk The Line when the record producer hears Johnny Cash play “Folsom Prison Blues” and realizes that history is happening right in front of him? That was me with those headphones on in the music section of Long’s Christian Bookstore on Edgewater Drive, on the outskirts of Downtown Orlando. I lost my mind, giddy with excitement. If this were 1962 and I was hearing “Love Me Do” for the first time, I’d be one of those screaming girls.

I snapped up a copy of “On the Cover” and was suddenly inaugurated into the world of punk rock and independent music labels. Within probably a week I had my first pair of JNCOs and Airwalk skate shoes. My first skateboard was a crappy thing made of particleboard I bought at K-Mart, but I soon upgraded to a board that I assembled myself—complete with my beloved Alien Workshop “Gas Mask” deck.

This one

This sudden change affected my mother. We would argue—over clothes and music, typical teenage stuff. My inner rebellious streak was unlocked. I would sneakily watch MTV (I got nailed while watching Gavin Rossdale play “Glycerine” in the middle of a thunderstorm during MTV’s Spring Break—one of the most powerful musical performances I’ve ever watched). But, by and large, this rebellious streak was directed toward legalism and the hypocrisy I saw in many of my fellow church-members.

Mike Herrera of MxPx has since admitted that he felt forced to include cringe-y overly church-y lyrics in their Tooth and Nail-era songs, and so he’s distanced himself from tracks like “I’m the Bad Guy” off Teenage Politics. Even as a kid I thought the lyrics felt forced, but the meaning behind them stuck with me:

Legalistic people suck legalism makes me sick I wonder what makes them tick? I wanna go puke on it Ephesians verse 2: 8 states God has saved us not by works but by grace so what's it gonna take? There's no getting thru to you

And a bit later:

Jesus knows my heart but you don't care you've already made up you mind

--

There was a lot of pressure on kids like me. My youth-pastor (who became a mentor to me) was often in hot water with church leadership because his services were too loud and he attracted the “wrong kind of kids” (kids in gangs and such). I was always a true-believer. But I was also frustrated by the lack of conviction of many of my peers. I went to a Christian school attached to my church, and almost none of them were actual Christians. And the faculty of that school were dogged legalists who treated me like a troubled kid—even though I was probably the stand out Bible student of my grade, who never drank or smoked or did drugs or had sex (while the beloved star athletes did this, but were excused because they had better grades than me). Ironically, my commitment to Jesus (as I understood Him at the time) put me at odds with my fellows in my supposed Christian environment, a place that I have come to know very well even to this day (it’s tough being “conservative” and “liberal” in the “wrong” ways).

There’s a much longer story behind the catalyst for me to leave my childhood church and denomination. The quick of it was that there was a sex abuse scandal, which came on the tail of a ton of theological infighting, which led to more infighting after the pastor was removed from leadership. For me, this was coupled with both a hunger for something mystical and spiritual and an introduction to Catholicism thanks to my then-girlfriend.

I also became a reader. I was intimidated by books pretty much all my life. But I noticed that the people I admired read. So, after I left high school, I decided to become a reader of books. I started with The Lord of the Rings as a way to rip the band-aid off. Then I picked up 1984, a book that I had wanted to read ever since it was introduced to me through my exposure to the nascent Internet world (and reading 2600 magazine). That book helped me articulate what Christian punk unlocked in me, and what I saw was wrong in the Church as I had known it—thought-policing and double-think and all that.

This was because the Church as I had known it was actually pretty faithless, terrified that any exposure to the world outside its walls would result in collapse. Like all totalitarian ideologies, fundamentalist-leaning Evangelicalism unknowingly acknowledges its own fragility. It is afraid of freedom—even the freedom of Christ.

--

I became Episcopalian in 2005, during my junior year at Palm Beach Atlantic University. My former youth-pastor would tell a couple of my friends that he couldn’t wrap his head around me doing this. “Chuck was so counter-cultural,” he’d say.

“But if you think about it,” one of them replied, “this is completely in line with something Chuck would do. To him, this is counter-cultural.”

This is true.

I became Episcopalian at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida. A gorgeous gothic church set among the wealthiest people in the world. The moment the light over my head clicked on, the idea seemed so deliciously rebellious. Many of my friends were attending an Evangelical megachurch with a rock band and smoke machines, replete with pastors trying desperately to be cool. The idea that my church could be an old gothic building with clergy in robes (one of them being a woman), ancient hymns, gorgeous stained glass… this was too much not to pass up. Further, I was a bicycle-riding surfer and writer with a lip-piercing and thrift-shopped clothes coming to worship among the country-club set. It was perfect.

It then turned out that I actually believed the stuff the Episcopal Church believed. The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer read like summaries of where my theology had developed during those years. And receiving communion from a member of the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” after years of hungering for that sacrament sealed the deal for me.

I was home.

--

At some point I’ll share more about my faith-journeys. Like how I reconcile same-sex marriage with traditional teachings of Christian marriage. Or why women’s ordination is a non-negotiable truth for me. About my convictions that “progressive” positions must come by way of dedication to the traditions and scriptures of the Church and that our Christian identity takes precedent over all other identities—thus requiring us to filter all other identities through who we become at baptism. But the simple fact is that the Episcopal Church deepened my faith in the Jesus I met as a child in the Baptist church—a church that gave me the tools that would lead me to where I am today.

If not for that fundamentalist streak I’d never have been funneled into the world of Christian punk. And without Christian punk, I might not be an Episcopalian.

As my supervisor during my hospital chaplaincy put it: my Episcopalianism made me a better Baptist. Sure.

And yes, for me this is still very counter-cultural.

--

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I am deeply blessed to have had the Rev. Dr. Kate Sonderegger as a theology professor in seminary. A woman who is both rigorously academic and richly spiritual is less common than many might think. Her thinking and writing about God is rooted, more than anything else, in her voluminous love for God.

In her long-awaited series Systematic Theology, she articulates something that forever changed my relationship with God. She begins her work from a similar place as the Nicene Creed, though drawing from the supreme commandment of the Hebrew shema: the confession that God is One. But she notes that God’s “One-ness” isn’t simply referring to the number of “gods” in the heavens—it is referring to the fact that God is singularly unique and that this uniqueness indicates something radical. She writes:

Radical oneness, radical uniqueness, demands thought beyond any class, any universal, any likeness. This is an annihilating concreteness. (p. 25)

She goes on to say that God’s radical uniqueness means that He is radically free:

The Lord’s radical Uniqueness frees Him from all comparisons, all genus and likeness. The One God is free from His creatures; more, He in his Unicity is Himself freedom. (p. 27)

And

God is free not so much as being over against another, not so much as being hidden against all that is manifest, not so much as being undetermined by all creaturely rules; but rather God is free simply as being One, this very One. (p. 35)

She also notes the challenge that comes with this uniqueness by writing

This confession of the First Commandment annihilates our thought: we cannot think the absolutely Unique. God is Mystery, Holy Mystery. (p. 25)

So, to try and put this in more everyday terms: God is His own Be-ing. God is His own is-ness (Sonderegger uses the term “Aseity” to refer to this quality). This uniqueness makes God radically free, if for no other reason than God has no peer which means He is never at risk of being obligated to anything or anyone. As I often put it in sermons: God is free to do what God wants because God is God. If God had an equal, then God could have a rival—a second will that might inflict itself upon the will of God, thus rendering God not free. But this radical uniqueness and freedom means that we humans lack the capacity to fully comprehend God, because our minds are limited to think of things in terms of metaphor and comparison. Consider the Avatar films (which I deeply love): James Cameron has spent actual decades developing a uniquely evolved ecosystem, but the creatures and plants—as fanciful as they are—are still pastiches of things we see in our own world. Something truly alien would either be inconceivable (as Kevin Vandermeer suggests in his excellent Southern Reach books), or drive us insane (as H P Lovecraft would articulate).

Even the scriptures themselves acknowledge this reality at times. “No one can see me and live,” says the Lord God to Moses. Prophets are shown hands and feet and hems of robes—bits and pieces of God—because the human mind is not capable of grasping God in God’s Aseity (again, His is-ness).

At the same time, as our scriptures testify and the Christian faith confesses, God chooses to relate to us and His creation and wants for us to related to Him in return. So does this mean that God is setting us up for something futile? Something impossible?

No. It simply suggests that God, being singular and unique, relates to us and the creation in ways that are themselves singular and unique.

God is His own relation to the world, to us.

Think about it this way: we have relationships with all kinds of beings. We relate to our fellow humans in particular ways, ways unique to us as a species. We also relate to various plants and animals in particular ways. And they, in turn, relate to us in their own particular ways.

A sermon illustration that I tend to use too often comes from what Cesar Milan, of The Dog Whisperer fame, says about dog behavior. Cesar frequently notes on his shows that “bad” dog behavior often stems from dog owners treating dogs like people. Dogs don’t know how to be people. They know how to be dogs. Treating them like people fosters anxiety and other mental health issues. And so dog owners need to learn to think like a dog and try to relate to their dog(s) on dog terms—to the extent that they can.

I tend to use this illustration when speaking about sin because, as I see it, sin involves us thinking that we are God, not human, and so we find ourselves afflicted and anxious in a world impacted by us trying to be something that we are not. But this illustration also works to help us think about how God relates to us in that, just as any other being we know has its own means of relating to us, so does God. We just need to learn to see it.

Part of our problems when it comes to belief in God, or even our ideas about God, are rooted in thinking of God as being like us, just writ large. “We are in little what God is in big,” writes the mystic AW Tozer. But that is a one-way street. God is not an “in big” version of us. Perhaps a good way to think of this is in terms of a seed and its tree. A seed and a tree have different relations to the world, even though one grows into the other. A bird, for instance, views a seed and the tree it came from in quite unique terms (eating one and nesting in the other).

The unknown author of the medieval meditation manual known as The Cloud of Unknowing writes

He whom neither men nor angels can grasp by knowledge can be embraced by love.

In other words, God might not be knowable by our minds, but we can touch Him through love. As the ancients and the scriptures teach, God is love. I John 4:16 says “God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.”

In Hawai’i we have a ubiquitous word: aloha. It often gets mis-understood as only a greeting or farewell. But the word itself means something akin to love and grace and mercy—sometimes all at the same time. Frequently, aloha is seen as equivalent to the concept of love. All things exist in a web of aloha, a relationship of reciprocal offerings. The ‘ō’ō bird’s aloha for the nectar of the ‘ōhia lēhua flower helps spread the seeds. Those seeds are small enough to fit into the tiny holes in freshly cooled lava, where they find protection and a space for capturing rainwater, allowing them to sprout, take root, and begin tilling the lava into dirt. Other birds nest in its branches, dropping guano and other seeds, helping to foster the formation of soil, enabling other plants to sprout and giving rise to the Hawaiian islands themselves. The energy (for lack of a better word) that draws all these things together is aloha, love. And we Christians hold the idea that God is that energy.

God is aloha.

This means that God is always and constantly relating to us, able to be experienced by us. It’s just on terms quite unique to God—but not terms entirely unknown or unknowable to us.

God is His own Being. God is always to be found. Let those who have eyes to see, see.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed. He also “painted” the header image using ProCreate.

#Theology #Bible #film #Godzilla #Jesus #Episcopal #Church

I have a confession: I love earnest and even corny religious things. Saints candles, gaudy lenticular reproductions of DaVinci’s The Last Supper, vanilla-scented Virgin Mary statues for the car, the extremely goofy silicone Jesus I bought at a Christian bookstore recently…

Look, give me a Catholic anime mascot character and I. am. in.

Though this might have more to do with me being a weeb...

I love it all. It represents a kind of “true-believer” innocence that reminds me not to take my religion too seriously, too academically, too intellectually. Maybe it’s because I grew up hanging around churches and Christian bookstores, but the moment I see something like a full-color Saint Francis lawn statue or even a WWJD bracelet my heart gets “strangely warmed” like that Wesley brother who started Methodism.

This extends even to liturgy sometimes.

While I will avoid the cringe-inducing cheesiness of much Evangelical worship, or the “bless-their-hearts” attempts found among Roman Catholic “folk masses,” I am not immune to some Rich Mullins or even the Gaithers from time-to-time. And it’s not only music, but even the prayers that might make my Anglo-Catholic fellows wince that I sometimes find power in.

Which leads me to make another confession: I love Eucharistic Prayer C. In the Episcopal Church this is frequently derided as “the Star Wars Prayer” because of such celestial language as:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.

This Eucharistic prayer is right at home with the petition found in the Prayers of the People, bracketed as optional, which asks the Lord to have mercy on those who travel “through outer space” (alongside “those who travel on land, on water, or in the air”). It is also of a piece with the famous “Space Window” at the National Cathedral that features an actual moon rock among the stained glass.

While I do agree that the call-and-response nature of Prayer C is not great (and why I adapted an alternate version of Prayer C to incorporate the responses into what is known as the “anaphora” itself), it is maybe our most “penitential” Eucharistic prayer in the Episcopal Church, contains the most overt declaration our Eucharistic theology (“Risen Lord, be known to us in the breaking of the bread”), and does much to situate the Christian story in both Jewish and global history.

Many in the Episcopal Church do not like Prayer C and choose to omit the line about people traveling through outer space because they find the language of these things corny and embarrassing. But me? I find it earnest and reflective of where we were as a country and a Church when our most recent Book of Common Prayer was assembled.

See, the current Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church is known as the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It was a landmark development that changed the nature of the Episcopal Church when it was approved. This Prayer Book is most famous for centralizing the Eucharist as the principle act of worship across the Episcopal Church, as well as articulating a renewed theology of Baptism that expected public and active declarations of faith—as opposed to the private family affairs Baptism had been for centuries prior. The 1979 book was the result of a lengthy process that would be seen as a major victory for the so-called “High Church” and “Anglo-Catholic” elements of the Church while also putting the liturgical language of the Church into “contemporary” English. Despite its radical move toward a much more ancient and traditional sacramental theology, the 1979 book contains distinct notes of the hippy counter-culture that had influenced Western Christianity throughout the mid-to-late 20th Century. It was a Prayer Book that would play well in the grand gothic arches of our major cathedrals, while also being right at home in a wood-paneled parish hall.

The previous revision of the American Book of Common Prayer was in 1928. This means that, in addition to revising the Prayer Book to reflect the changes that had taken place within the Episcopal Church, the 1979 book also needed to be usable for at least 50 years (in case you’re wondering, the process toward a new Prayer Book revision is under way—initially for 2030, but we’re not sure if that is still the year, given the interruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and gestures around). So that meant that the church bodies responsible for the Book of Common Prayer had to imagine what things might be like over the subsequent half-century in the United States.

By the late 70s, the United States had emerged from a major economic recession and the end of a deeply unpopular war. The opening of the decade had seen humans first set foot on the moon, the culmination of an almost miraculously speedy program that served as the greatest non-war governmental program in human history. After the ending of the Apollo program, NASA had placed a functioning space station in orbit with plans for a permanent and international one in the near-future. Then there was the advent of the Space Shuttle, a reusable space-faring vehicle that hinted at the promise of expanded and more affordable human space flight. This time period was known as “the Space Age.”

I was born around three years after the 1979 Prayer Book was published (though I was raised as a Baptist and so the Prayer Book would not become a part of my life for many years). I also grew up in Orlando, Florida. My childhood church included many members who worked for companies like Lockheed-Martin, building components for the space program. Practically every year in school we would take a field trip to Kennedy Space Center. Every Space Shuttle launch occasioned an interruption of our school schedule so we could all go outside, look to the East, and see that glowing vapor trail moving toward the heavens. I came to recognize the sound of sonic booms from the Shuttle’s re-entry on its way to land. Heck, my mother even dated a NASA engineer who worked on Atlantis’ engines and later built Endeavor (the replacement to the ill-fated Challenger, the destruction of which is among my earliest memories). This is all to say that “outer space” was part of the matrix of life.

I remember all those fanciful ideas, where we’d have commercial space flights that would allow us to travel around the globe quickly (while experiencing zero-G for part of the flight)—like the Pan-American space shuttle seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Thoughts of orbital hotels, or even lunar hotels. Trips to Mars or even the moons of Jupiter. It was an exciting time.

And it was this same exciting time that the liturgical scholars of the Episcopal Church were assembling the rites and words for God’s people, keeping an eye to the next fifty years. They too were dreaming and praying, imagining a world drastically changed by people traveling outside our atmosphere and seeing Earth among the stars with their own eyes—not just mediated through Time magazine covers or IMAX films at Kennedy Space Center.

In a sense, I like the language of these prayers for the nostalgia they bring, nostalgia for a world we never saw come to fruition. In those nearly fifty years space travel is still only available to a select few (which includes, of course, billionaires taking 11-minute jaunts into the heavens). There are no orbital hotels or lunar colonies. These prayers recall a different world once imagined—a world that some of us still dream about.

Even then, rockets still go up. People live on the International Space Station. So there are those who are traveling through outer space, even beyond the billionaire vanity trips.

A few years back, I was with family at Walt Disney World on vacation. We were at Animal Kingdom and it was night. I use the SkyGuide app on my phone from time to time, and I got an alert that the International Space Station would be traveling overhead in the next few minutes.

If you’ve never seen the ISS, it appears as the brightest light in the night sky (apart from the Moon, of course). It looks either like a moving star or an airplane with no blinking lights. Chances are that you’ve seen it but didn’t know what it was.

So I looked up and pointed it out to my father-in-law. A few other tourists saw what I was doing and asked. After a minute or so, a crowd of maybe 20 or more people had stopped to look up at the ISS flying overhead, all of them in awe. It was clogging up foot-traffic in the park and I was amazed that even among Disney’s multi-billion dollar attractions, people would turn their attention to a bright dot in the sky and marvel.

The Space Age was a time of hope. It still casts a shadow of hope on us. And these corny and embarrassing prayers capture that fact. People actually do travel in outer space and they do need our prayers—perhaps especially the billionaires.

There’s also the fact that maybe some day, we all will be able to truly appreciate “this fragile Earth, our island home,” floating as that pale blue dot among the “vast expanse of interstellar space,” and not only feel the awe of God Himself, but also how small and precious we are and thus how foolish we are to squander and hurt this wholly unique gift on which we live and move and have our being.

—

*The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Episcopal #Church #Catholic #Jesus #Space #SpaceTravel #Science #SciFi #liturgy #worship #Retrofuturism #SpaceAge

Yesterday at the Hands Off demonstrations in downtown Honolulu, I had (at least) two encounters that felt like they might be blessings from God. One was when I was handed a trans pride flag (which I wrote about already). The other was when a guy wearing a Trump hat yelled at me (and my clergy colleagues) something about illegal immigrants and then told me to “go back to the mainland.” I know that last one probably doesn’t sound much like a blessing to you. So, let me try to explain.

I’m trying to shift my understanding of the concept of blessing. In the Matthew Beatitudes, Jesus notes that blessings do not always skew toward what we might consider “positive.” For instance, Jesus refers to mourning and persecution as blessings. He says things like:

Blessed are people who are hopeless…

Blessed are people who grieve…

Blessed are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous…

Blessed are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me… (see Matthew 5:1-12*)

So having people wave and be welcoming to see a priest carrying a trans pride flag is a great thing and feels like a “typical” blessing (even though this is the sort of thing that Jesus cautions us about in Luke 6:26). But I have to consider the possibility that being yelled at is also a kind of blessing. I mean, consider the words of Job:

Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? (Job 2:10, NASB)

In the Hawaiian Bible, this verse reads:

Eiʻa, e loaʻa anei iā kākou ka maikaʻi mai ke Akua mai, ʻaʻole anei e loaʻa iā kākou ka ʻino kekahi?

I put the two key words in bold. Maika‘i is a word that means “good, handsome, delightful.” It is the root for the Hawaiian term for “blessed,” pōmaikaʻi (the word pō is a word that refers to “thickness” and works here as an intensifier, indicating a “state of goodness,” thus “blessed”). The other word, ka ‘ino, (ka is the article, so “the”), is a word often used for “evil” and “wickedness,” also used for “spoiled” or “gone bad.” It is also a word used to refer to a storm. In this sense, we get an interesting read from Job: do we accept only the good, maika‘i weather as being from God? Do we not also have to accept that He sends ka ‘ino, stormy weather as well? Or as Jesus Himself puts it, right after He gives us the Beatitudes:

[God] makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45 CEB)

Both clear weather and stormy weather can be both “good” and “bad”—even at the same time. So it is my (and our) duty to accept both as blessings, to find the blessedness in even what we might call “bad.”

So what’s the blessing in having an angry Trump supporter yell at me to “go back to the mainland?” Well, before I get to that, allow me to unpack the baggage of that statement for haoles (a Hawaiian term for “foreigner” that has turned into a phrase and sometimes epithet for exclusively Caucasian people). Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States where Caucasians are not a majority and don’t hold outsized cultural power, and, thus, one of the few places where they can experience the sort of discrimination usually experienced by people of color in other parts of the country. So being haole is already a touchy thing. It carries with it an assumption that one does not belong here. Darker skinned Hawaiians will sometimes call light-skinned Hawaiians “haole” as an insult. As a Caucasian myself, there is the automatic assumption that I am on vacation, or am clearly from somewhere else—frequently expressed as being given a fork and spoon at a restaurant and not chopsticks**. One of my friends once referred to a guy as “he wasn’t a haole, he was a local-looking guy”—as though there aren’t “local” haoles. So, being told to “go back to the mainland” is about the closest I can get to the experience of being told something like “go back to Africa.” It’s telling me that I do not belong here. That I belong on the “mainland” of the United States (what we here prefer to call “the continent” since, from the Hawaiian perspective, the Hawaiian islands are the mainland).

This is something of which I’m very sensitive. While I am from the continental US, I’m here in Hawai‘i by invitation—I was invited by the Saint Mary’s to be their priest. I never held dreams of living in Hawai‘i, never once vacationed here. My first time ever on Hawaiian soil was for a job interview. Further, the Episcopal Church here in Hawai‘i has its roots in the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, which resulted from King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma inviting Church of England clergy to come and establish a church here in Hawai‘i because they felt that it offered a vision of Christianity better reflective of the Hawaiian people. So, I am not following a colonizing trajectory. But I also understand that I look an awful lot like the sort of people who have colonized this place. So, while it hurts to be lumped in with the people who continue to pillage this place for profit, I do understand the reasons why it happens. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.

Now, this guy said his piece after reading the sign I was holding. Which, I must confess, was not my choice. A friend asked me to hold his sign while he was taking care of something else. It said “Hands Off!” followed by a list of things that included public lands, Social Security, and immigrants. We were standing adjacent to a pedestrian crosswalk and the light was red. This guy was staring us down, and I saw the red Trump hat on his head. So I gave him a shaka. His eyes scanned my sign and that’s when he yelled something about illegal immigrants. I couldn’t really understand him, except when he yelled about “going back.” Which leads me, finally, to talk about how this is a blessing.

The guy saw on my sign and in my Caucasian appearance something that, to him, screamed “mainland” and not, to him, “Hawai‘i.” I am going to assume that this guy might have been “local.” One of the interesting quirks about Hawaiian politics is that, one, we are a very “blue” state, but tend to skew “conservative” on some issues. And, second, the Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) population leaned heavily toward Trump in the last two elections. Why? Because the Democrats in Hawai‘i have had political dominance since the end of World War II, but Native Hawaiians have continually been marginalized in their own homeland. Their sacred lands are being used for various military, scientific, and recreational purposes. They continue to be priced out of the housing market (to the point where Las Vegas has become a sort of second home for Hawaiians). And their cultural concerns are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than legitimate issues to be listened to and honored. Further, there are ten times more tourists on the islands per year than residents, but residents are taxed in order to support the tourist industry and not the other way around—on top of the plague of “income properties” that are built here for tourism purposes while beach parks are rife with Native Hawaiians living in tents and barely making ends meet. Because of this, the logic among many is to either “give the other guys a try” or to vote for someone that they think will break the system so that something better might be built from its ruins. As a Kanaka Maoli friend of mine put it at the protest: “That’s the logic. It’s not great logic, but that’s what they’re thinking in supporting Trump.”

So I have to wonder: did this guy see the sign I was holding and see it as reflective of trying to maintain a status quo that has continued to marginalize local people? Are these positions signaling to him a desire to further a kind of political system that will continue to offer soaring rhetoric about being on the “right side of history” while quietly lining the pockets of (different) billionaires who see Hawai‘i as a golden goose to squeeze of all it can offer to people who only want to take take take?

That is the question we all have to ask. And this is why his anger was a blessing to me: it’s causing me to ask what I’m aiming to do as part of such demonstrations. We’re all mad right now. What we’re doing at the moment is collectively yelling A‘ole!, no!

A‘ole to gutting the government programs that the poor rely on.

A‘ole to ignoring our environment and the unabashed pillaging of Earth’s resources.

A‘ole to sending human beings to what are effectively gulags and concentration camps.

A‘ole to disappearing students for no reason other than their political views regarding the genocide happening to the Palestinian people does not line up with the preferred narrative.

A‘ole to the path toward fascism this administration is on.

But that a‘ole cannot simply be about putting things back the way they were. We must demand something more. As a Christian, I want to see something that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God—where no one is lost, all have enough, and we reject the mechanism of death—used to provide a sense of “peace” to our people at the expense of others. To do that, we have to put a stop to what we see happening now—while also advocating for something better to be built in its place.

Hands off, yes. But also, hands on to the tools and materials for making a better world to come.

Blessed are people when they are handed pride flags, they are giving hope to often hopeless people.

Blessed are people when Trump-supporters yell at them to go back to the mainland, it gives them pause to consider how a better future is possible through Christ Jesus.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

_*Note: This is from the Common English Bible translation, which follows an odd modern English translation custom to change “blessed” into something like “happy.” It reads weird and doesn’t exactly correlate with what Jesus is recorded as saying, so I correct the translation to “blessed” for that reason._

**Note 2: My wife and I refer to this as “getting haole-d.” I can’t express to you, reader, how awesome it feels to have someone just give us chopsticks without asking first.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #Politics #HandsOff #Hawaii

I just sat at my desk after an eventful day. In the Episcopal Church in Hawai'i, our custom is to observe the annual Chrism Mass and Renewal of Ordination Vows on a Saturday about two weeks prior to the start of Holy Week (this is typically a Holy Tuesday observance throughout much of the Church, but given that we are spread among an island archipelago, moving to the aforementioned Saturday works to better accommodate “neighbor island” clergy). This also just happened to coincide with the April 5 “Hands Off” protests/demonstrations. The service is held at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, which is practically across the street from the state capitol building—where the demonstrations were taking place.

A number of us clergy (and laity) decided that being present at the demonstrations only made sense, given the spirit of renewing our commitment to minister to God’s people and to participate in the proclamation of the good news of liberation, especially among people feeling the squeeze from those who claim the name of Christian as they support genocide, cuts to aid starving children both home and abroad, etc. etc. And so we walked over to the capitol building to “come and see” what was going on.

A view from the event

Now, I’m a rare (read: weird) Episcopal priest in that I pretty much always wear a black cassock (the fancy name for long black dress that you sometimes see priests wearing: I look like Neo or Snape or Kylo Ren, depending on your generation). So I stood out. People wanted a few selfies. Some thought it was a costume and were genuinely surprised that an honest-to-God priest was out there among them. I gave people blessings (including the Trump hat wearing dude in a car that tried to cuss me out and told me to “go back to the mainland”). Mostly I was there to be a presence, to minister and pray. I learned from my participation in the George Floyd demonstrations back in 2020 that folks are warmed to seeing representation from the Church—which speaks to the idea that (some) folks want the Church, but often feel like it is concerned with things quite disconnected from their lives.

We call this the ministry of presence, and is something we clergy also offer in times of hurt and anguish (like an illness or loss of a loved one). This refers to those times where we’re not going to offer answers, just responses, and trust that the Lord God is working through us simply being there.

While walking among the crowd, a little subset of three people saw me and said “here, now you have a sign” and handed me the trans pride flag that appears at the head of this post. I said “mahalo” and carried it with me as I walked. Something about a cassock-clad priest holding a trans pride flag garnered a few responses and I caught a number of people taking sneaky pictures of me.

Here’s the thing: that flag ministered to me.

I grew up deeply Southern Baptist, leaning toward Independent Baptist (these are the fundamentalists who think that Southern Baptists aren’t “conservative” enough). I was incubated in a very Queer-phobic environment. Our attention was mostly on gay men, but all the other letters of the alphabet were just there, slightly off camera. My views on same-sex attraction and Queer love changed while in my twenties. I was attending an Evangelical university in West Palm Beach at the time, while also working retail to help pay my bills. I had gay co-workers and I came to realize that homophobia is an exercise in abstraction. Once I met actual, open, flesh-and-blood gay people it caused me to reconsider many things. And I was doing this while part of a Biblical Studies program at my university. I began the process of trying to reconcile my religious convictions with what I was seeing “on the ground” as it were. And this all was happening alongside my conversion to the Episcopal Church.

But that’s probably a story for another time.

Suffice it to say, my journey from hating Queer people to seeing compatibility between traditional Christianity and Queer “identities” was a hard-fought battle. But along the way I continued to wrestle with reconciling Trans identities and some aspects of Christian belief, as I understand them. And, to be completely honest, I’m still doing this work (but given the current state of things, I won’t be sharing this at this point—I worry that my thinking will be misconstrued and potentially used for hateful purposes by those with ill-intent; there’s nuance there that I don’t think we’re in a place to appreciate at the moment). But one thing is absolutely certain: Trans people are human beings, created in the image of God. They are gifts, blessings to the world, and to deny them this is to deny a work of God.

I needed this reminder. It is easy to get caught up in the abstractness of ideas and beliefs, and removing them from the flesh-and-blood people that are affected or reflected by these ideas and beliefs. But people aren’t just ideas and beliefs. People live. People sweat in the heat and come home tired from work. People go to protests, or roll their eyes at protests as they drive by. People fall in love and break-up. People want to be free to pursue happiness.

When I was in seminary, a little axiom came to me one Sunday: the minister is always on the other side of the altar rail. From the perspective of the laity, the minister is the one at the altar, or giving communion. But from the perspective of the clergy, the ministers are those who sit in the pews and who come up to receive communion. This is the balance of the ministerial life. God speaks to me through the wider community as I am ordained to try and allow God to speak to you all through me.

In the midst of ministering, I was ministered to. It came in the form of a small polyester flag with marker writing on it. And so now, through these words, I hope to minister to you all in return. Trans lives are human lives. Trans people aren’t just an abstraction, aren’t just an idea. Whatever we might think about them, they are flesh-and-blood people wanting what everyone wants: a life where they are free to pursue happiness and discover who they are in the grand web of the earth and universe, who they are in light of the God who lovingly made them.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #TransRights #Politics #HandsOff

I am a Godzilla fan and have been since childhood. Godzilla is for me what Star Wars and Star Trek are to others (though I am a fan of both of those franchises as well). My office is replete with Godzilla toys...

Proof!

… and I used to be a subscriber to a variety of Godzilla-related fanzines, the most famous of which (in North America, at least) is G-Fan. Older Godzilla fans like myself may recall a years-long debate that took place in the Letters section (which I believe was called “G-Mail” now that I think about it) regarding the mechanics of time travel in the 1990 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

This movie is preposterous and amazing at the same time

The film’s plot involves a convoluted plan concocted by people from the future to travel back in time in order to ruin Japan’s economy, because Japan has become too rich in the future and other, notably Western, countries want to put a stop to this. As you can imagine, this film was a bit controversial in its day.

This plan involves the “Futurians” traveling first to 1990 to let Japan know that there are time-travelers and that they want to help Japan solve its Godzilla problem. Which then involves the Futurians taking a handful of 1990 Japanese with them to the Bikini Atoll in the late 1940s, where they encounter a “Godzillasaurus” (Godzilla before he is mutated by atomic bomb tests—and who helps entrenched Japanese kill a bunch of American soldiers), and teleport the Godzillasaurus to a different location so that the dinosaur will never turn into Godzilla. The Futurians then secretly leave behind three critters called “Drats.”

These things

Which are then exposed to the nuclear radiation and become the fearsome, three-headed golden dragon known as King Ghidorah. Thus granting the Futurians their own city-destroying monster that they can control.

The implications of this is that the original 1954 Godzilla film never happens, and thus none of the previous films in the so-called “Heisei Era” happened either.

not even the one where Godzilla fights a Monsanto creation

Given that later films in the series will refer back to Godzilla having been around since 1954, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is notorious for being a lore-breaking film. Which inspired one of those great nerd pastimes: writing letters to fan publications attempting to patch plot holes and make sense of the lore.

Basically, the debate surrounded the “rules” of time travel. Much like the discussion in the film Avengers: Endgame, different movies and stories were cited as the basis for the “rules” of traveling through time, Back to the Future being the most common one. The debate went on for a few months and then vanished for a couple of years, until one letter-writer chimed in and made a claim that has affected my thinking on a lot of things over the years:

Given that we have never seen a real-world example of time travel, we have to assume that time travel “behaves” as depicted in the film as presented.

In other words, claiming that Back to the Future or The Terminator or The Time Machine serve as “the rules” for time travel is to import a narrative framework onto a film like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, as silly as it is, thus refusing to accept the story on its own terms. It is to insert an outside set of rules into a story, thus affecting the understanding of the story and attempting to view it according to a different standard.

It’s a refusal to let the story be. It’s an attempt to view one story through the lens of another, thus rendering it as a different story altogether.

Two other examples come to mind: the first is James Cameron’s reaction to the infamous discussion about whether Jack could fit on that floating door with Rose at the end of Titanic. In an interview, Cameron once said that the reason Jack couldn’t fit on the door with Rose is that “on page 147 that Jack dies. Very simple.” In other words, this is the story that Cameron wanted to tell: the grand ship as a symbol of class-divide and hubris is reduced down to a single piece of wood which becomes the catalyst for an act of self-sacrificial love.

I think I just wrote my Good Friday sermon.

The other example comes from the theologian Gerard Loughlin. In his excellent book about reading the Bible, entitled Telling God’s story, he challenges the “liberal” reading of figures like John Shelby Spong who deny the virgin birth of Jesus on the grounds that it doesn’t make rational sense, who argue that we are left with a choice between a Mary who was raped or who conceived by way of “parthenogenesis”. To this, Loughlin writes:

Of course the choice is not between parthenogenesis or rape; it is between the story we have, which mentions neither, or some other story. (see footnote 48 on page 121, emphasis mine)

Loughlin, like Cameron, invites us to consider stories on their own terms and merits. This includes the Bible. For Christians, traditionally, the scriptures present the story of the world. In those writings were/are the connective narrative tissues that reveal the meaning and purpose to what we see happening in the cosmos around us. But even in the Church, Christians have seemed to forget this relationship and now see the story of the Bible and the story of the cosmos as two separate stories, often inverting the relationship. As Loughlin later writes

The biblical story is to be fitted into the story of the world, rather than the world into the story of the Bible.

When we consider the long arc of the Bible, we see that the Bible tells us that God called forth a creation out of chaos, thus establishing a trajectory, a narrative. In the course of that creative work, something gave shape to nothing (as in, nothing being the place beyond the boundaries of something), and thus the possibility of us humans opting for an alternative trajectory—moving toward the nothing.

The Chinese theologian and spiritual writer Watchman Nee speaks of this, in his tiny but rich book Sit, Walk, Stand:

Since the day that Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge, man (sic) has been engaged in deciding what is good and what is evil. The natural man has worked out his own standards of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and striven to live by them.

What Nee is getting at is that, as a result of humanity’s giving into temptation in the garden, we fostered a trajectory that moves apart from God’s trajectory, thus giving space to impose a different narrative onto the world. The reason why the world feels so given to “wrong” and injustice is because we are experiencing the long-gestating outworking of a sense of rightness and justice that comes from an ultimately empty narrative—“some other story.”

Nee goes on

Christ is for us the Tree of Life. We do not begin from the matter of ethical right and wrong. We do not start from that other tree. We begin from him; and the whole question for us is one of Life.

Nee builds on this to say that we have a tendency to seek out even good things like love, but defined apart from Christ Jesus, thus rendering them lifeless and void. “If we only try to do the right thing,” he writes, “surely we are very poor Christians. We have to do something more than what is right.” Elsewhere he puts it “With [Christ] it is a question of his grace and not of right and wrong.”

This notion of grace is crucial because grace, by its God-defined nature, is effortless. Grace is the fabric of creation, the force that guides the trajectory of the cosmos. When we attempt to impose our own narrative, we deny grace and wind up doing violence to the story of the universe.

This explains, I believe, how we got ourselves into the mess we see today. People professing the name Christian are embracing fascist ideas because they’ve allowed another story to be the definitive story, a story rooted in the void of chaos, the nothingness that exists beyond the bounds of the something that God called into being. And it is this story—not the story rightly told in the scriptures—that has stirred the ire and rage of people who now hate Christianity. Because it is some other story, told under the banner of Christ.

Nee writes

Nothing has done greater damage to our Christian testimony than our trying to be right and demanding right of others. We become preoccupied with what is what is not right[…] But that is not our standard. The whole question for us is one of cross-bearing.

Those in the MAGA movement who use the title Christian got that way because they came to believe that theirs was a story of being right. Being right involves drawing lines in the sand and building walls and closing borders. Being right involves deporting those who don’t look or act the way one has determined is “right.” But the actual, biblical story is one of grace. A story of love.

A graceful story is a story that is open to emergence, of allowing things to unfold and being open to the discovery what comes next.

Once, about twenty years ago, I had gone snorkeling with friends in Fort Pierce, Florida. It was early in the morning and we were riding the outgoing tide alongside the jetty at the state park there. I was taking lead. The water was fairly clear, but there was still a limit to our visibility—which was maybe fifteen feet or more. As the current pulled me along I saw a large, dark shadow immediately in front of me. It was oblong and gray, at least seven feet in length. My mind went to exactly one place:

Shark.

I tried to slow my movement, but the current was strong. I was moving inexorably toward a tooth-filled death, helpless.

As I got closer, things began to come into focus. The gray creature was awfully still, and definitely more rotund than any shark I’d ever seen. Plus I couldn’t make out a dorsal fin. Then suddenly, everything became clear and I realized:

Manatee.

*Sup?*

In front of me was not God’s perfect seafaring killing machine. It was instead maybe the most gentle creature on earth. We all watched in awe as it rolled over on its back and swam alongside us before departing into the murk.

Was I “right” in thinking this was a shark? When I only had limited knowledge, sure. My fear and rising panic were entirely justified because I was working off of both limited data—which in turn caused me to impart a different story onto what I was seeing. But grace allowed the story to unfold, to emerge, and I received new data and the realization that I didn’t need to panic. If I had stopped moving and jumped out of the water, claiming that this was a shark, I would have been “right” so far as anyone knew. But my “rightness” was exposed as “wrong” as more things unfolded in the story.

What has happened for a lot of us in the world is that we’ve determined was is “right” or “wrong” based off the experience of the world as we see it. We foster a note of willful ignorance because our being right has maybe served us.

But grace moves us past arbitrary lines of “right” and “wrong,” and allows us to accept the story as it unfolds. It lets the story be. Having to be “right” risks us telling some other story, of foisting the rules of a different story onto the story as it is.

The world is God’s story. Let the story speak.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #film #Godzilla #Jesus #Episcopal #Church

People sometimes call me a techie. There was a time where this was true, and is something that I’m getting back into.

See, what I’ve come to realize about the phrase “techie” is that it often means “uses gadgets.” Using an iPad for preaching, or wearing an Apple Watch, knowing my way around social media or the features of my phone, these have garnered the techie designation, but, really, this is just me being a consumer who uses purchased products. Yes, they are “tech,” but my utilization of them was pretty much in accord with standard use. To use a microwave is a “techie” as using a tablet or phone in this case.

But being a proper “techie” is, to me, someone who navigates the concepts around their devices, who seeks to grasp an understanding of their innermost parts, to turn a biblical phrase. In that sense, I was a proper techie in my younger years, when I was learning computing from Mrs. Vincent, my math teacher. This extended into my late teens when I discovered 2600 magazine (which turned me on to the political dimensions of technology) and began to understand hardware integration and decided that I wanted to develop video games. So I convinced my mom that we needed a new PC and that me building one was an important educational opportunity. I acquired the parts (including an ASUS motherboard that I thought was legit but I’m pretty sure turned out to be stolen—I discovered this when I went to boot my machine for the first time and was greeted with an HP logo where there shouldn’t have been one; if not for Mrs. Vincent teaching me about BIOS and DOS, I would have been completely lost) and assembled my machine while watching Hackers, a machine that I would later try to learn C programming on (I wrote a calculator!), even if my ulterior motive was to have a gaming rig that could support the brand new VooDoo 2 graphics card so that EverQuest would play better. I even attempted to use chat rooms as a means to evangelize (which one pastor at the time said was not legit) and I even talked about the possibility of sticking a webcam in the church and streaming the sermon with a chat box underneath the stream (which people didn’t seem to understand then—now every church is doing this!) But my time as a techie began to fizzle out shortly after, the moment my grasp of BASIC vanished during a class at the local community college. After that, I just became a gadget-consumer.

I’ve since gotten back into my techie interests thanks in part to my dropping big-corporate social media in favor of the Fediverse, followed by the installation of Ubuntu Linux on an old mid-2011 Mac that has breathed considerable new life into that machine (as well as me). I’ve since started this blog, where I’ve actually learned a degree of coding through the use of MarkDown and CSS, and I’m now very much into the Free Open Source Software movement that is absolutely suppressed by the big corporations.

All of this is simply a prelude to say that, as a priest, I’ve begun reflecting theologically on technology and our (Christian) relationship to it. If being a proper techie is to seek to understand the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of technology, then it is inevitable that one will bump up against the theological aspects of technology as well.

God And The Machines

Popularly, the term technology is often applied to gizmos. Things with integrated circuits that utilize electricity. We often fail to remember that things like bread and windows and legal pads and gel pens and roads and chairs and cast iron skillets are all forms of technology. According to Wikipedia technology is “the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.” Technology is, more simply, the practical application of ideas (in addition to also being a term applying to the tools or results of that application). This definition is, to me, an interesting thing to consider in regards to humanity’s relationship with technology in the Bible.

The first piece of technology that humans make, according to the mythological account found in Genesis, is a form of rudimentary clothing. The story goes that Eve and Adam, the first people, were naked and unashamed. But the moment they decided to listen to a talking snake and his advice about whether or not to eat a piece of forbidden fruit, the couple become aware of their nakedness and get to work using fig leaves as means to cover up (there’s a very funny old English translation of the Bible called the “Breeches Bible” because it says that Eve and Adam used the fig leaves to make “breeches” for themselves—leafy britches!). This is technology. Eve and Adam had the conceptual knowledge—the idea—that they were naked and so went about making use of resources to apply that knowledge in a practical way. Then God, once He confronts them over their disobedience (which He figures out because they’re wearing the aforementioned britches), He introduces the technology of hide-based clothing, by killing two lambs and using their skins to cover Eve and Adam.

This story sets up the complicated relationship we have with technology. It is both borne out of our foibles and limitations, as well as being evidence perhaps of divine mercy. Both death and life are intertwined in the advent of human ingenuity.

At the same time, technology becomes a means of mediating God’s own self-revelation to humanity. God gives a law to His people through the use of the technology of writing, in which He also instructs them to build a box that symbolizes His presence among them, to be kept housed in a tent that is designed for portability. Later, that tent is upgraded to a building called a temple, itself situated amidst the technology known as a city, the language of which God also uses to refer to His own home/realm. Once we get to the beginning of the Common Era, we have Jesus (God incarnate) utilizing a whole range of technologies as a means to both communicate things about God, but also to serve as mediators of His presence and grace. The manger, the fishnet, bread, wine, a cross and a tomb are but a few of the technological examples put to use by God Incarnate to reveal His full plan to the world. And in the case of the bread and wine, these are said to become the body and blood of Jesus—and not in some notion of symbol or metaphor, no these are God-ordained technologies of grace, what we today call “sacraments.”

In a sense, these sacramental signs are a kind of machine, things that use power to perform a specific action. In this case, it is both the power of God and the power of the entire creation that is behind these technologies, mediating God’s grace and moving us toward the restoration of the world. As the Orthodox theologian Michael J. Oleska writes:

Eastern Christians believe in sacred materialism. God uses physical objects and visible elements to communicate with His People. The created universe is the means by which we enter into communion with Him. He chose food as the most perfect way to enter our lives. And what is the bread? Flour, yeast and water, baked to a certain temperature? No, it is much more, for to create bread, one needs the whole world. The earth must turn, the rain must fall, the soil must be fertile, the sun must shine, night must come, the wind blow. If all this is in harmony, and humans interact with it appropriately, tending the garden as God originally planned, bread can be baked, communion with God restored [...]

It is all Christ. He chose to make water into wine as his first miracle, but He is always doing that, every vineyard since time began [...] The Word made Flesh only does in His Incarnate Form what the Word, embodied in the whole creation, has always done. (from “The Alaskan Orthodox Mission and Cosmic Christianity,” The Chant of Life: Inculturation and the People of the Land p. 188)

We Are God’s Technology

I have to admit, the idea that technology is “applied conceptual knowledge” sounds a bit like what Saint John the Evangelist writes in his gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [...] The Word became flesh and made his home among us.

The “Word” there is the English rendering of a Greek concept known as “Logos.” It’s a fairly difficult concept to translate directly into English, to be honest. The best I’ve come up with is that the “Logos” is akin to the “kernel” in a program like Linux, the core element around which everything else is built/based.

Honestly, this image is probably the actual best representation of what “the Logos made his home among us” means. (from the Perry Bible Fellowship)

Basically, the idea is that God looked out at timeless time and decided that He wanted to create a universe where He would come to live, and so He built a universe around the “kernel” of Himself as human. So when Genesis says that humanity is made “in God’s image,” we Christians are saying that we are built to look like what Jesus (that is, God-in-flesh) is. Yes, I understand that this does not make sense when we think of time linearly—but there’s really nothing that says time is linear; plus we Christians affirm that God does not exist within time as we comprehend it.

Anyway, Saint John speaks of this notion as “Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.” The “Word” (Logos) is the anchor around which everything exists. One of the Episcopal Church’s Eucharistic prayers puts it as “In your infinite love you made us for yourself.” In other words, we are made by God to do what God intends us to do.

Which means we are God’s technology.

This might sound weird at first. Especially if we still associate technology with machines or gadgets. But when we recall that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (as the Psalmist declares) we realize that our “being made” is a confession that to be created means that we fall into the realm of technology. Saint Paul articulates this when he writes that we are “God’s building.” This is overt technological language, applied to us as created beings. We, and the whole universe, are an application of God’s conceptual knowledge—indeed THE conceptual knowledge—reproducible and with particular intention.

And what is that intention? To love God.

I know that sounds selfish on God’s part. Is God so insecure that He felt the need to create an entire universe so that it could foster sapient life on (perhaps) a single planet with the express purpose of giving Him worship and adoration? When we think of God as lacking in love, then yes it does sound like He’s insecure. But when we consider that God is a complete and perfect Being lacking in nothing, then it changes the idea of why God created.

God did not need to create, not in the sense of an obligation (as in filling a lack). Instead God chose to create as an outgrowth of His ever-flowing love. Love demands an object. And if, as Jesus tells us, God is Love, then the only logical conclusion we can reach is that the universe was created to be an object of that Love, borne as a consequence of an eternally radiating love emanating from a complete Being who has love to spare. And if that Being is the originator of all that is, then the love poured into us finds its most worthwhile expression when directed back at the One who graced us with everything that is—out of His love.

But notice what Jesus says about how we apply that love ourselves. He doesn’t tell us to do what all of the other religious practices of His time were doing, which was to direct love at God/the gods in order to win their favor, as though God needed this love. No, Jesus tells us that our love of God is demonstrated best when we love our neighbor—which Jesus defines as everyone and anyone. We are to mediate God’s love among ourselves and in so doing it is directed toward God, who is the One most worthy of receiving love. This is what He designed us to do.

This post is long enough without getting into the programming bug we know as sin (I’ll take that up in a later post). Instead I’ll leave us here to ponder what it all means that we are God’s technology of love, given the gift of technology ourselves that can serve as a mediating factor for receiving God’s love in order to spread it around—by which we show God how much we love Him in return.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Technology #Linux #Computers #Philosophy #Christianity #Bible #Church #Jesus

What is a Christian?

This seems like it should be a simple question. “Christian” means “little Christ” or even “like-Christ.” So, anyone who attempts to be like Christ is a Christian, yeah? I mean, I’ve had this stated to me outright more than a few times over the years whenever I try to challenge one’s definition of Christianity.

But this is incorrect, even from a biblical standpoint. Because while, yes, the Bible does note that there’s a moment where these followers of Jesus’ disciples are called “Christian,” there is a broader bit of context to consider.

The people who would one day become known as “Christians” were originally called people of “the Way.” “Christian” was a later term applied to them, by the people of Antioch (with plenty of folks out there postulating that this might have been intended as an insult). So they were branded with this name, which they later embraced. But it was not the term that they first applied to themselves—nor was it a term Jesus gave them, at least not in a direct sort of way.

This is all to say that, in order to understand what it means to be “Christian,” we first have to consider what it meant to be people of “the Way.”

For starters, what was “the Way?” Perhaps the most concise answer to this question is provided by Jesus Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one gets to the Father, except through me.” Now, the term “way” was already a loaded term for Jesus. As a Jew, He would’ve been taught that the Torah was “the way” to God. Following the commandments given by Moses and expanded by scribes and religious teachers continues to be the means by which Jews understand their life and relationship to God. Keeping these things puts them on the path (or, “way”) to God.

Regardless of what one might think about the theological claims about Jesus, He was very clearly a religious reformer/revolutionary. In the gospels, we see Him taking umbrage with the labyrinthine interpretations of the Law that were foisted upon every day people; we see Him opposed to a predatory financial system rooted in the Temple’s religious customs; we even see Him willing to buck deeply held notions around women and non-Jews. Jesus is very interested in expressing a different way of not only being Jewish, but also a different way for non-Jews to have a relationship with the God of Judaism (who was believed and proclaimed as THE God). Jesus lays out—in two sermons, acts of healing, and various parables—an alternative way of living, an actual practice, which He Himself embodies. And so when we get to that famous line in John’s gospel about Him being “the way” what He’s effectively saying is: “go where I go, live a life like mine, and you will see God, you will achieve what the Torah is all about.”

But Jesus’ followers came to see Him as more than an ethicist or reformer. Beyond those dimensions, indeed the soil from which those dimensions sprout, His followers see Him as God, living in human flesh. Which means there emerges a theological dimension to both understanding and following Jesus. And this is the thing that Christians spend their first 300 years or so hammering out, resulting in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinoplian Creeds.

Today, it’s easy for us to look at those theological arguments and wonder what the big deal was all about. But try and consider things from the perspective of the ancients. They were trying to understand precisely who it was they were following and why they should follow Him at all. Because if He’s fully God as well as man, or a simply a human endowed with spiritual power, or even a sort of demigod, there are ramifications to what it means to follow Him.

The kernel of these ideas were held by those first people, articulated as “the Way.” So, this movement later rebranded as Christian carries with it pre-existing theological baggage that continues once the new name for the movement takes hold. It’s not simply a movement of people trying to live an ethical life akin to the one Jesus did. It’s a group of people who do this while also worshipping Jesus as God. Which means that “Christian” is a term that carries particular meanings rooted in both a way of life and a way of worship.

Theology requires a grammar. The conventional term for this grammar is “doctrine.” Misused, “doctrine” is about lines in the sand that separate degrees of faithfulness and rightness before God. But the correct view of doctrine is that it provides the boundaries for what makes a particular theology or religion definably itself. Further, those doctrines inform practices meant to embody what that theology or religion has to say or mean for its adherents.

Dance is a helpful example. There is a clear grammar to dance—whether hula, or ballet, or modern, etc. But once that grammar begins to be stripped away we begin to see something other than dance: perhaps floor gymnastics, or a form of martial arts. This is not to say that dance cannot innovate. It simply means that we have to either review the grammar of dance, or delineate when something ceases to be dance because it has strayed into a space where it uses a different grammar.

Consider the phenomenon of the modern smartphone. Many of us continue to refer to the device as a “phone” but it is completely unrecognizable from the device that Alexander Graham Bell first invented. Now, the “phone” portion of the device is a piece of software and part of what is actually a small personal computer. There is a clear line of recognizability from the wall-mounted telephone of yesteryear and the cellular telephone (today referred to as a feature phone). But the modern smartphone is built more from the design language (that is, “grammar”) of the personal MP3 player than it is the telephone.

Christianity is like this. The doctrines of the faith are what make it definable, following a trajectory of development where we can see certain commonalities in both belief and practice. At the same time, we have also seen a certain degree of disruption (to use the term in its tech-industry, startup sense), largely in the form of the Protestant Reformation, that has affected this notion and has lead us to a place where we have multiple things calling themselves “Christian” while only a few can be accurately identified by that term.

Which leads me, finally, to answer my initial question: what is a Christian?

A Christian is a person who follows Jesus as He has been understood by the Church. By this I mean that Christians believe in Jesus as He is articulated in the Creeds (particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds), and both worship and follow Him in the particular ways defined by the heritage of the Church. Christianity is practiced, not simply “believed.” It is the result of the out-working of what it means to follow Jesus and who Jesus is, placed amidst a trajectory (tradition) of continual out-working. Christianity carries continuity—of both practice and belief.

This is not to say that Christianity is something frozen in time. Rather, it is to suggest that innovations within Christianity (say, the ordaining of women to the priesthood, or same-sex marriage) have to carry continuity with what came before, either through a form of historic recovery (in the case of women’s ordination) or integration into that continuous stream (in the case of same-sex marriage).

The Creeds, as a source of Christian grammar, offer flexibility. They are “what” statements, not “how” statements. This means that there is wiggle-room in how these things are understood. However, there is not wiggle room in regards to the “What” being stated about Christian belief. For instance, we can differ on what it means when we say that we “believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting” (Saint Augustine of Hippo to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin offers a pretty solid range), but if we say that there is no resurrection of the dead and/or life everlasting then we have broken the boundaries of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different theological language. Similarly, the moment we elevate the Bible to a place traditionally occupied by Jesus, seeing it (and not Him) as the “authoritative Word of God,” we’ve also crossed a key boundary of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different religious language (the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is probably the most notable instance of this, and held as the standard statement on “Biblical inerrancy” throughout much of Evangelicalism—interestingly, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 seems to have amended its wording to better reflect that Jesus is the main revelation and the Bible is merely a testament to that fact; so not all Evangelical denominations are created equal here, it seems).

Additionally, there is a continuity of Christian practice that constitutes this grammar: gathered together as people who have been baptized, to share in bread and wine, informed by the reading and expounding of the scriptures and the singing of hymns and psalms, all assembled in an ordered fashion. And from this gathering emerges a way of life, an ethic, itself reflective of a particular grammar of action.

So, to be “Christian” is to be a particular thing. This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons cannot rightly claim the name “Christian.” Yes, they profess Jesus. But their understanding of who Jesus is resides outside the grammar defined by the Creeds (which, by the way, are themselves a kind of summary of what the Bible is all about), by rejecting His divinity. They might be cousins to the Christian faith, but they are cousins removed (akin to the relationship between Muslims and Jews—both claim the same God, but they each have a unique grammar in regards to that God). “Christianity” loses coherence when we fail to assert these facts—which has led us to where we are today, with neo-fascists espousing abhorrent ideas and calling them “Christian.”)

Lastly, let me be clear about another point: saying that someone is not “Christian” is not the same thing as saying that they are headed for damnation. Jesus saying “no one gets to the Father apart from me” is, in my faithful estimation, Him saying that He’s the one who decides the ultimate fate of human souls in the afterlife. I tend to believe that, in time, everyone is welcomed into the always-open gates of the New Jerusalem. But, ultimately, Jesus is the one who saves. Not me. Not any particular institution. Rather, the Church is the place that gives us the language for what it means to be saved, to live into what Jesus has already done. Christianity is, as far as I’m concerned, this profoundly beautiful thing that allows us to live with the freedom that comes with being saved by Jesus. It gives us the language by which we can live thankfully in the light that we no longer feel we have to save ourselves, making it all up as we go along.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Church #Jesus #History #Politics #Bible #religion #theology