The Church now stands at the threshold of one of her most searching seasons. Lent is not just another stretch of the calendar. In fact, if ever there was a Church season that could see through the masks we wear all year long, it’s Lent. It’s a season that presses upon us who we really are. In that sense, it’s recalibrating. It calls us back to better clarity.
But first, Ash Wednesday, the gateway into Lent.
In Ash Wednesday’s solemn liturgy, cooled cinders are placed upon our foreheads—the remains of what fire has consumed, the residue of destruction. As they’re smeared, you are told, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This is the biblical origin of the philosophers’ ancient phrase “Memento mori”—remember that you must die.
If, for some reason, you miss these words, rest assured, the ashes themselves will preach them. They are rough to the touch, pitch black, and stubborn to remove. They insist that death is no abstraction. It is the wage of sin, and it leaves its mark on every human life. There is nothing delicate about it. It is brutal consequence.
If you’ve ever stood in line to receive those ashes, then perhaps you already know the quiet gravity of it. One person steps forward, then another, and then another, until at last it’s your turn. You are dust. Memento mori. Each of us must face the same end. Each of us must reckon with the same truth. The Divine finger of God’s unalterable Law presses heavily against our hearts, corralling us into the fellowship of Adam, who heard God say through him to all of us, because of what we’ve done, “cursed is the ground because of you” (Genesis 3:17).
And yet, there is something else to know in these moments. Pay attention. If possible, watch the finger applying the ashes. If you can’t see it, look around you. See the same mark you bear being borne by everyone else around you. The mark is in the form of a cross. However uneven the lines may be, that shape is unmistakable.
See that mark and know you are a child of promise. Yes, memento mori. But also, memento Christus—remember Christ! You were claimed by the One who has entered death and overcome it. The cross traced in ashes declares that the end of Man is not the end of Christ, and therefore it is not the end of those who belong to Him.
Scripture teaches that we carry in our bodies not only the death of Jesus but also His life (2 Corinthians 4:10-11). His death was no defeat. On the contrary, it was the death of death itself. By His resurrection, the grave has lost its dominion, and its sting has been taken away (1 Corinthians 15:54-57). We are children of that promise!
Regardless of how other churches prefer to enter into Lent, this is how Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Hartland, Michigan, begins it. We keep Ash Wednesday. We need the reminder. Left to ourselves, we grow comfortable. We begin to imagine that life in this fallen world is stable, predictable, maybe even secure. Ash Wednesday strips away those illusions. It teaches us to see clearly what sin has wrought, and at the same time it directs us to the only refuge that endures—to Christ, who has entered the darkness and shattered it from within.
And then we go forth into the season. We meet the great struggle at the heart of our redemption. The contest between Christ and death will appear, for a time, to be no contest at all. Our Lord will be mocked, beaten, scourged, and crucified. He will yield Himself fully into the hands of His enemies. To every earthly calculation, it will look like utter ruin.
Yet that is precisely where the victory is won. And we will receive it as it truly is, even when it appears weak or foolish by the world’s measure. We know it’s a kingdom established by a crucified King.
The cross, in all its horror, stands at the center of the Gospel. It is harsh to behold, and yet it is good—profoundly good—because there the Son of God bore the sin of the world and reconciled us to the Father. And so, Saint Paul writes with fervor, “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Indeed, we do, and without shame. The Gospel is and remains the power of God unto salvation for all who believe (Romans 1:16-17).
For all of these reasons, I encourage you, if you’ve never attended the Ash Wednesday liturgy, make the effort to do so. Receive the ashes. Hear the Word. Begin the Lenten journey as the Church has long begun it—with repentance, with sobriety, and with hope fixed firmly on Christ.
Here at Our Savior, we’ll gather on Ash Wednesday for worship at 8:10 a.m. and then again at 6:30 p.m. You are welcome to come. Indeed, join with the faithful. Be reminded of life’s frailty, and—far more importantly—to hear again the promise of the One who said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25-26).
I’ve seen a few letters circulating from local school districts about student walkouts protesting ICE. Beyond our own communities’ borders, there’ve been other stories and accompanying images about students pouring out of school buildings, holding signs, chanting slogans, and presenting themselves as voices for compassion and justice.
At first glance, these walkouts—misspelled signs and all—can seem admirable to some, maybe even virtuous. I’ve read plenty of comments from folks in various Linden forums praising the students for exercising their right to protest. That said, there are plenty of others in those forums tippety-tapping my thoughts, making it so I don’t have to write a single word. On my part, I’m not convinced a majority of the participating students actually understand or even care about the actual protest itself, if only because there are so many reports of kids joining them just to skip school. Some of the parents in one particular forum admitted as much, saying their kids flat out told them they see it as a way to take a day off.
Still, I’m sure some sincerely believe they are standing up for people being mistreated. But even with that, I’m in relative disagreement. Apart from the fact that the events in Minnesota gave birth to the walkouts—and it’s only after $9 billion in fraud was discovered in the Somali community, thereby serving as the perfect, all-encompassing distraction—the whole situation has been framed entirely by emotion. There isn’t a single thing about it that suggests actual thought. It has “knee-jerk” in its soul. And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that people have always been drawn to causes framed in emotional language—most especially youth.
When I say emotional language, I mean just that. Even the forum commentary surrounding all of this was perpetually framed in simple emotional terms. It was stuff like compassion versus cruelty, inclusion versus exclusion, justice versus oppression. These are powerful categories, and they resonate emotionally. And yet, the reality of immigration policy, law enforcement, and perhaps most importantly, national sovereignty, is far more complex than a misspelled protest sign allows.
The plain fact is that a nation, like pretty much anything, cannot function without order. Laws exist not merely to punish but to create stability and fairness. When students walk out of school to protest the enforcement of existing laws, they might “feel” they are expressing compassion or inclusion. But what are they doing implicitly? They’re arguing that the law itself should be disregarded when its necessary enforcement becomes uncomfortable.
But again, all of that said, I remain unconvinced that most of the students participating in these protests are even capable of reaching that conclusion without some help, which I assume the teachers and administrators who appear to be egging them on are disinterested in providing. I read one comment from a teacher implying that it brings her joy to see her students embrace anything that stands against Donald Trump.
That’s not helping students think through complex issues. That’s not teaching. That’s propagandizing. That’s the imposition of ideology.
Now, I’m not saying all protests are inherently bad. I stopped shopping at Target when they started letting men use the women’s restrooms. When they corrected course, I returned. But what I am saying is that public demonstrations—the kinds with people holding signs and marching and shouting—they are, by design, built on emotion. There’s no room for discussion or reflection in such demonstrations. The loudest voices, the most extreme slogans, and the simplest narratives that can be repeated as mantras tend to dominate. All nuance disappears. The quiet but necessary work of examining—of learning, reasoning, and weighing competing ideas is replaced entirely by chanting and the inevitable social media applause.
Which makes student walkouts like these somewhat satirical.
First of all, a human brain isn’t even fully developed until the mid-twenties. There are plenty of studies about how cognitive capability is inhibited until that point. So, my point about these kids not understanding what they’re doing remains fixed. I suppose secondly, education is meant to form the mind. Assuming a school is actually doing this, when students leave classrooms to protest rather than study, they are, by default, putting aside the very tools they need to grow into thinkers who understand the world they hope to change.
Notice I prefaced by saying “assuming a school is actually doing this.” There’s a reason homeschooling and classical/parochial education are booming right now. The modern American education system seems incapable of fulfilling its charter, especially given the results. America’s scores, compared to those of other countries, prove we are no longer leaders of the intellectual pack. But we’ve mastered gender confusion. We’ve graduated to “2+2=4” being racist. We most certainly excel at woke, and we’ve become top-tier engineers of Marxism-inspired social justice.
I suppose this stirs the question of responsibility. Schools are not ideological training camps. At least they’re not supposed to be. I suppose in their mineral form, they’re institutions entrusted with preparing young people for adulthood. One of the most important skills students must develop is the ability to think critically and to act responsibly as adults. When a school’s leadership allows a walkout—or worse, fosters and praises it—at a minimum, it risks teaching that obligations and responsibilities can be set aside whenever a person feels like it. That is not a lesson that serves students well in the long run.
For example, if I, as a parent, allowed my daughter to skip school or basketball practice because she felt more like going shopping, I would be teaching her that commitments are conditional and responsibilities are negotiable. I’d be setting her up to fail as an adult.
In adult life, obligations rarely disappear simply because you’d rather be doing something else. Learning to weigh convictions, fulfill duties, and perhaps, as it meets with these walkouts, to choose appropriate times and means to make one’s voice heard is part of becoming a mature and responsible person. Regardless of whether we like it, the fact remains that schools share in the task of teaching that lesson.
I guess what I’m saying is that any student who walks out should be treated the same way any other student who leaves school without permission is treated. The absence should be marked unexcused, missed work should have to be made up according to school policy, and whatever ordinary disciplinary measures apply—detention or suspension or whatever—should be imposed consistently. Rule enforcement like this does not mean administrators are cruel or that students should be forbidden from having opinions. To believe otherwise is to let one’s emotions steer. The lesson is that rules are important, and they only mean something when they are applied evenly.
The unfortunate thing is that many schools wouldn’t even consider doing this. And why? Because they’d become living contradictions. From what I’ve read, it sure seems that a significant number of teachers and administrators want the kids to protest. They want them to embrace progressive ideologies and demonstrate adjacent behavior. Holding them to school policies, especially in this instance, risks accidentally teaching that law enforcement is, at its core, about the rule of law. A school cannot function if its rules are treated as suggestions, obeyed only when convenient, and ignored when they aren’t. By holding students accountable to the school’s own rules, educators would be demonstrating how a lawful system—whether a classroom, entire school, or much larger society—is actually supposed to work.
Concerning immigration laws and ICE’s enforcement of them, they risk accidentally teaching that a school—or nation—that does not enforce its laws should not expect to remain for long.
There are moments in my life when the world seems to divide itself into two kinds of time. There are times of noise. And by noise, I mean the ceaseless insistence that I give my attention to this or that thing. It feels like I live in that time most of my waking hours. But then there are times of silence. Those are moments for thinking. Well, maybe not just thinking. Maybe they’re more about paying attention to the right thing, and memory is one of attention-to-the-right-thing’s accessible wells.
Admittedly, these two kinds of time rarely coexist comfortably. One tends to drive out the other.
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I most certainly didn’t watch the halftime show. The great machinery of American sports moved on without me a very long time ago. And the thing is, I do not feel poorer for it. What may be a national ritual for pretty much everyone else has never really been a ritual for me. Call me a fuddy duddy. That’s fine. There was a time when I followed this stuff. And I’m not judging anyone who does. I’m just saying that I don’t have the time required for proper devotion.
“But the quarterback is the youngest to ever go to the Super Bowl,” someone might say. That’s completely lost on me. “But Bad Bunny is the halftime show, and he just won like fifty Grammys or something.” Yawn. All I know about him is that he doesn’t sing in English, which means I couldn’t sing along if I wanted to. And then there’s the plain weirdness of a guy known for performing in women’s clothing. Yeah. No thanks.
And then there’s Charlie.
For Charlie, Jennifer and I watched the TPUSA halftime tribute. The performances were not what I would normally choose. Modern country is not my native tongue musically any more than the seemingly talentless, autotuned, largely digitally-created pop anthems of the stadium might be. But the songs were not the point. The point was where I began—the noise versus memory. I miss Charlie. I wanted to watch what TPUSA put together, if only for him.
When the videos and images of Charlie played at the end of the TPSUA halftime show, the weight of his absence landed pretty squarely on me again. I know I said audibly to Jennifer, “I can’t believe he’s gone.” Probably more than once. I haven’t watched any videos of Charlie since his death. I’ve avoided them. But then, suddenly, I was watching him in clips. In that moment, it was hard to just keep him safely in the category of someone I once knew but is now gone. There he was, moving and smiling and pointing. For me, that was a flashback to my times with him—laughing, talking, leaning forward in conversation about something he insisted that I know and remember. Again, as I always have to clarify, we were not besties. But he was legitimately a friend.
There was my friend. Ugh. Life is by no means an abstraction. It’s motion and voice and presence. And then, all of a sudden, it’s little more than memory.
I’ve never been a fan of Kid Rock. Not really. I struggle to see how he can sit in an interview, every other word from his mouth being the f-word, and then stand on stage and sing of Jesus. That doesn’t make sense to me. That said, fewer and fewer people actually do make sense to me. Most seem like they’re barely hanging on in faith, so I suppose Kid Rock needs some space, too. Still, the Gospel changes people. We’re not who we were before it found us. We want to be better. That said, it pays to keep in mind that the person bringing the message doesn’t empower the message. As Saint Paul made clear, the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). We don’t save people. God does. And He does it by His Gospel.
I only mention Kid Rock because of the song he sang. “Til You Can’t,” hit pretty hard, not for its added theology, but for the deeply human reality it presented. Again, it’s all motion and voice and presence, until it’s only a memory. That’s how I was feeling about Charlie when I saw those videos and images.
Beyond these things, from what others are saying, the contrast between what I watched and what I didn’t watch was unquestionable. One performance, as usual, was built to be a worldly spectacle, teaching spectators how to worship pleasure. I believe the halftime show I watched was built, not just to compete with or protest this, but for remembrance. And not just to remember Charlie, even though that’s what I spent most of the time doing. It was an attempt to remember what makes America worthy of our concern—and perhaps even our active participation—enough to stir us to lift a finger to help.
Either way, whatever you took from whichever you watched, I’m pretty sure the world has probably moved on to other things already, as it always does. Still, I took something unforgettable from it. I was able to remember a life that had touched mine. And I was able to find thirty-five minutes of cultural rest as an American who just wants to “cut my grass, feed my dogs, wear my boots,” as Lee Brice sang, and not hear the world preach another sermon about how I’m irredeemable, backward, or somehow shame-worthy for thinking a man can’t be a woman, or for loving what America used to be. I suppose, unlike Super Bowls of the past, I walked away from this one feeling better, not worse—like maybe we still have a chance. The viewership numbers coming out certainly seem to suggest the possibility. It seems that as many as 22 million of us feel this way.
Maybe that’s the real story. Maybe Charlie’s legacy organization did what he’d have wanted it to do. Maybe millions of ordinary people experienced something more than a time of noisy spectacle. Maybe they experienced a time of memory. Maybe they were given a moment to ponder what’s good.
If that’s what happened, then perhaps the world hasn’t moved on quite as much as it thinks it has.
The only thing I have to share this morning is gratitude for the congregation I serve.
I’ll start by saying something that most who follow me already know. I despise Michigan’s climate. I despise the long gray months. Right about this time, rest assured, I’ve already lost all patience for the Michigan cold that seems to settle into my body, making it ache in far too many places. I just told Jennifer on Thursday morning that I despise the way winter in Michigan overstays its welcome, and that, for me, spring and summer feel more like rumors native Michiganders recall from ages past than experiences they actually have each year. Truly, if geography were the only factor for my presence here, I would have departed years ago for someplace warmer, brighter, and far less committed to seasonal suffering.
And yet, I will never leave. I say that knowing the paradoxical nature of the sentence, because I eventually will leave. You can count on it. But the thing is, even if I leave, I’ll never be gone. Not really. That’s because I love Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Hartland, Michigan—the congregation I’ve been blessed to serve since the very beginning of my pastoral ministry. I’ve been the pastor here for almost twenty years now. Even after I eventually retire and find a little place in Florida (or wherever Jen agrees to settle) with a few nearby palm trees adorning a no-big-deal pool, this will remain my real home—the penultimate gathering of a family I love so very much. And I do mean penultimate. It’s second only to heaven.
I could spend all morning telling you why I feel this way. And you know I could, too. You know I’m a wordy guy. Trust me when I say that twenty years of service in this place have not gone by unnoticed. It’s a very “real” community in every sense of the term. It’s by no means a bunch of folks gathered around a religious product designed to scratch their itching ears (1 Timothy 4:3). It’s a living body—Christ’s body—made of real people bound together by Word and Sacrament ministry, and standing beside one another in both a common need and a common confession.
It might sound strange at first, but I love that this is a congregation that knows how to struggle. Trust me when I say that we’ve endured some really tough times. And regardless of those who’ve since departed our humble confines, offering dire predictions on the way out door, this congregation remains, and continues to do so, having never forfeited its soul.
That said, I can promise you, there are stories in these pews that could humble even the most fearless. They’re stories of extreme betrayal and massive loss. But they’re also ones that sing a perpetual song of hopefulness—of fortitude, and of repentance and faith. They’re the kinds of tales that cost something very real but were sung anyway.
That’s because life together here at Our Savior has never been about the absence of pain. It’s about Christ and His ever-present mercy. When that’s the heart of a congregation, its pulse can only ever remain steady. It can only ever keep a confident tempo through both comfort and discomfort.
When I see this in real time—when I’m really paying attention—I realize I’m seeing real Christians, not performing what they believe, but living it. And they’re doing so sincerely, without getting duped by some disrupter’s false narrative. I’m surrounded by people who really are looking for and trusting what’s true—trusting that God is at work, even when it seems like the evidence for continuing with Him in the work is pretty thin.
In fact, just recently, I was reminded of how visible that faithfulness actually is. Our Savior was harshly criticized online several weeks ago for the way our security team diligently protects this place. Let the reader understand. We have a school. We do not take unexpected presences and questionable actions lightly. And we will do what’s necessary to protect the innocent among us. Add to that, even more recently, we endured more online venom for what we believe, teach, and confess concerning our funeral practices. A non-member family was somewhat peeved that we would not accommodate each and every detail they required. We will help however we can. However, Our Savior in Hartland is not a religious fast-food restaurant. You cannot stop in to order up a baptism, wedding, funeral, or whatever. Again, let the reader understand.
Indeed, the world’s viciously ignorant comments can sting on occasion, even when you expect them. Nevertheless, these moments are always extraordinarily clarifying for me, if only because they remind me of something important.
A congregation that takes both truth and responsibility seriously is bound to draw criticism from a world that finds them offensive or inconvenient. And far from discouraging me, the hateful comments only deepened my gratitude as the pastor of a congregation willing to be misunderstood and thoroughly misrepresented by the world rather than be found unfaithful to its Savior. This congregation knows that caving to the culture is never the better choice. Holding to faithfulness is always best, even when it means being insulted, or, perhaps worse, being painted unfairly before onlookers.
I suppose from another perspective, I love this congregation because it has taught me what pastoral ministry actually is. Yes, the seminary is good for this, too. Peter Scaer wrote a piece last week about the cruciality of seminary training. He’s right, it’s essential. But it’s here in the trenches that you learn what being a pastor is really all about. You learn it alongside God’s people in hospital rooms and at kitchen tables. I just experienced this with a friend on Thursday, a member of this congregation I truly adore. Even as we rejoiced together in Word and Sacrament, we sat and talked about anything and everything before she left for a medical appointment. That’s what family does.
I love this congregation because it has allowed me into these spaces, and in doing so, they’ve shown me what it means to stand in the stead and by the command of Christ more clearly than any book or classroom ever could.
From that vantage point, I could never see my job here as some sort of professional assignment from the seminary placement office. Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, my alma mater, did a wonderful job in this regard. I was taught to know these moments are so much more. This is where I’ve been called. I belong to this place. And in that belonging, I have found not only my vocation—what God had in store for me long before I ever knew what I wanted for myself—but also a deep and enduring gratitude for the people who “are” the place in which I eventually ended up. They remind me each and every day of the week why the Church, even when it’s fumbling through life in general, will always be one of God’s most gentle and enduring gifts to the world.
I love Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Hartland, Michigan. I love the people. I love being called their pastor. I love the work, even though, as I already said, it can get choppy. And I suppose by choppy, I mean personally challenging, too, even to the point of mental and emotional fracture. But again, I’m with family. That can happen in a family. Still, I can promise you that I love this place and the work the Lord entrusted to me here. He put me squarely in the middle of people who confess Christ—who show up when it would be easier to stay home, who know the seriousness of engaging with the surrounding world, and who keep praying and trusting through it all.
There is a kind of demonstrated holiness in that persistence, one that shows the ordinary rhythm of the Christian life.
That’s Our Savior in Hartland, Michigan. That’s my church. Well, not my church. She’s the Lord’s church. And I’m blessed to be a part of it. And as I said at the beginning, no matter where I exist physically, Our Savior in Hartland, Michigan, will always be my home. It will always be my family.
I suppose that’s my simplest confession this morning. Indeed, when it comes to the weather, I’d much rather live anywhere else but Michigan. And yet, I thank God for placing me here. This is where He wants me, and that’s more than enough for me to want to be here, too.
And if I may add one final word, especially for my fellow pastors who might read what I’ve written here. Feel free to say this kind of thing out loud to your own people on occasion. Don’t assume they already know it. Don’t wait for anniversaries or crises or your eventual retirement sermon. Tell them you love them right now. Tell them you’re grateful. Tell them what it means not only to be the one called to serve them, but what it means to stand alongside them in the same need for Word and Sacrament. Tell them you appreciate all the little moments that’ll never be remembered in detail just as much as the ones that’ll make your monthly newsletter’s front page. Certainly, it’s the pastor’s job to tell the people in his care that Christ loves them—and what a privilege it is! But it’s also a pretty great thing to tell them how much you love them, too. I’m guessing it probably matters more than most realize.
I shared something yesterday about Christian Nationalism. It was an attempt to describe what it actually is, rather than what some would prefer it to be. I stand by what I wrote because it was, essentially, a comparison that boiled the premise down to its mineral elements.
It did not take long, however, for the predictable distortions to appear. I’ve seen plenty more today. That, in itself, is revealing. It is a perpetual reminder that American Christendom has a longstanding weakness. It has the strange tendency to allow the surrounding culture to define the terms of its beliefs. Of course, the result is almost always misrepresentation that immediately becomes an assumed standard. In this case, it seems the world was allowed to frame the argument before the Christians really even knew what they were talking about.
Admittedly, when the Church engages the world, this tension is inevitable. The world does not approach the Church as a neutral observer. It reshapes and deliberately misrepresents what it sees. That is simply the nature of the relationship. The world isn’t hoping for the success of godliness. It wants its demise.
In this particular case, the world has placed Christian Nationalism beneath its own assumption. The assumption is that racism is an inherent characteristic of Christian Nationalism. But again, that assumption is imposed rather than demonstrated. It’s a stigma applied from the outside, and then treated as if it were part of the thing itself.
Again, I repeat, my brief explanation of Christian Nationalism stands, especially my reply to one post that it’s morally incoherent to defend Christianity as the highest or most humane moral ethic for governance while at the same time attempting to justify racism in any form. That’s because, even as an ethic for governance, Christianity cannot be apart from itself as some civilizational artifact. It’s an unbroken schematic that makes unalterable claims. One of its claims concerns the nature of the human person. All have fallen short of the glory of God. None is lesser or greater than another. All need a Savior. Christ is that Savior, and He gives life to all who believe in Him, regardless of tribe or nation. Racism stands in direct contradiction to this basic affirmation of Christianity.
But since it has already been brought up pretty much everywhere, there’s something Christians should probably be talking about, if only to secure the term’s proper definition. There are the Nick Fuenteses and the Corey Mahlers of the world. Everything has its fringe. And the fringe elements are rarely hard to explain. In this case, I’ll simply say that guys like Mahler and Fuentes have gained followings in part because they speak into a very real sense of dislocation, particularly among young white men. That concern shouldn’t be set aside lightly. But no one should assume that the racist result is built on moral credibility. The fact that a listener is wounded doesn’t mean that the diagnosis being offered to him is good, or that the remedy is even remotely Christian.
I think part of what we are witnessing is a failure of catechesis to meet with a genuine cultural disorder. I wrote in a reply yesterday that “many young men have been catechized for years to see themselves as the problem. They’ve been told by so many that they carry inherited guilt. And the only acceptable reconciliation so far has been that they apologize for existing, and that they confess their own Christian traditions as uniquely toxic. Eventually, some of them snap in the opposite direction. When every moral narrative tells you to hate yourself, the temptation is to find one that tells you to justify yourself at any cost, even if that narrative is crude, racialized, or overtly unchristian.”
Writing this, I was thinking of how almost every straight white man/husband in most commercials is a dunce. Conversely, wives are shown as having to endure their idiocy. Even further, all other races and creeds are framed with elegance and respect. This is just a sample among countless, all cultivating self-contempt among white men. And worst of all, it does this without any possibility of parole. There’s no escape. Ever. When relief is nowhere to be found in a cultural framework, it makes sense that some men would devolve into despair or defiance.
But here’s what Fuentes and Mahler get wrong, especially when they try to apply their racist views to Christianity. The Christian Faith isn’t designed to terminate in shame. It’s aimed toward forgiveness, restoration, and ultimately, a community—the body of Christ.
Now, lest we pile on these two alone, don’t forget that CRT and DEI do the same corrosive things, just from the other side. The problem isn’t even with calling out injustice or drawing attention to historical wrongs. There’s plenty of that in every nation’s history to go around. And that’s not something that the Christian ethic misses. The problem is that things like CRT and DEI redefine the person in the same way that godless Marxism does purposely. It categorizes in terms of group identity and inherited moral status, ultimately assigning guilt collectively rather than personally. When that happens, even if repentance were possible (which it isn’t in Marxism), it would be meaningless. That’s because forgiveness has already been replaced with perpetual reckoning, and reconciliation becomes impossible because the categories themselves are considered unalterable.
So, on one hand, one set of ideals is telling young men that they are permanently and inherently unforgivable because they are white and Christian. The other tells them that their resentment is a justifiable response to people who are doing what they’re doing because they’re somehow racially inferior. One condemns incessantly without mercy. The other vindicates an ungodly response. But neither offers a path back to a shared human community.
But again, the mineral definition of Christian Nationalism has nothing to do with any of this. For those in the Confessional Lutheran sphere keeping score, the following is my working definition. It’s my wording, yes. But it’s not necessarily my definition. It’s a summary of what emerged very early in Christian thought.
In short, Christian Nationalism, in its most basic sense, is the belief that a nation is best governed according to the moral ethic of Christianity, recognizing that public life is never morally neutral and that the Christian moral tradition has uniquely upheld human dignity, ordered liberty, and the common good without requiring the Church to rule the state or imposing a theocracy.
That’s it. You’ll see there’s no theory of race. There’s no call to justify resentment. There’s none of that. Because none of it belongs.
And so, I suppose the tragedy in all this is that some very loud voices at the extremes, for whatever reason, continue trying their hardest to make it nearly impossible to understand what Christian Nationalism is. Personally, after listening to Reverend David Ramirez discuss the issue on “The Gottestdienst Crowd,” I prefer where he lands. He’s no slouch concerning its deepest history, and so, he proves he understands it. And he should be commended for it. That said, so many in Christian, namely Lutheran, circles continue to define Christian Nationalism by its worst caricatures, while at the same time, the fringes insist on supplying those caricatures in abundance. Between those two things, clarity is lost, and what could be a fruitful discussion about something real collapses into arguments about things that have nothing to do with the premise itself.
It’s becoming harder to pretend that things out there aren’t coming apart at the seams. I mean, people are no longer joking about civil war. Some commentators and podcasters have already jumped ahead to predicting how such a war would end. Of course, the media continues doing its part to up the ante.
CNN admitted last week that it adjusted Alex Pretti’s image to make him look more attractive in order to stir sympathy for his death. CNN also had to backtrack after leaving out that Pretti had initiated a violent interaction with ICE a week earlier, resulting in broken ribs. In other words, federal agents already knew Pretti. They knew he was dangerous. And so, when he leaned into the officers that day, when he pushed into them, when he spit on them as they tried to get away from him and into their vehicles (as the videos show), and when he ultimately died in the scuffle, which was unfortunate—but it was no surprise to the agents that he was carrying a loaded weapon with two additional magazines. But the thing is, CNN knew all this stuff, too. And yet, they reported everything but these details. And CNN’s original narrative is still out there, gaining traction. All wars have their martyrs.
Other media outlets carried the “ICE is detaining children” headline as far as they could before eventually retracting it. And yet, it turns out the child in the widely circulated image had been abandoned by his illegal father, and his mother refused to claim him. Rather than simply sending the child back into the world alone—a world in which kids like him are almost always trafficked—he was kept in federal custody. He wasn’t locked in a cage. He was being protected, which is most certainly the government’s job when it comes to little ones left to a world of wolves. But again, the thing is, the news outlets knew this, and yet they elected to foster a completely different narrative, stoking embers and adding kindling to an already blue-hot climate. Add to this the irony of a progressive left that would butcher children in the womb while weeping over a child rescued from the wolves, but only because the rescuer wore an ICE uniform rather than an abortionist’s surgical gown.
And so, again, “civil war” is a term showing up in my feed more than I’d prefer. But what should any of us expect? So many are actively laboring to make the climate perfect for one.
Having said all this, civil war is not necessarily my chief concern. Yes, what’s happening culturally and politically is troubling. Still, I’m thinking ecclesially. I’m wondering if American Christianity would even survive such a thing, especially a conflict in which Christianity is a primary target for the opposition. The progressive left is already doing everything it can to snuff the faith (John 15:18-19). What would happen if that side were to win an armed conflict? I guess I’m just wondering out loud if anything in the modern faith is still fixed enough to be confessed in a way that would survive through such an event.
For the record, this weekly message goes out in various forms to about 7,000 folks worldwide. I don’t pretend to have a comprehensive map of global Christianity, and so, I don’t necessarily know the liturgical practices of most of the churches and people who may be reading this. But I do know my own church. And I know what kind of Christianity formed it.
Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland, Michigan, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod with which we maintain fellowship, is creedal in nature. Creedal Christianity did not emerge from comfort. It was forged under pressure. It survived being surrounded by hostile empires, wars, internal heresies, and, most importantly, competing visions of who Jesus was allowed to be. Creedal Christianity is a faith maintained by precise statements—what we believe and what we don’t, why we do what we do, why we’re distinctly different from the world around us. Regardless of what the more fashionable Christian influencers may have told you, these things are not relics of an overly philosophical age. They are the Church’s collective memory, crystallized at the very points in history where the fires were hottest, where the culture was hell-bent on consuming and assimilating us, and where losing our identity would have meant losing Christ altogether.
While studying the Church’s creeds with the kids in confirmation over the years, I’ve often told them that confessional statements like the ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds) are very important guardrails that protect our inheritance. What I mean is that by these confessional statements, the Church was essentially saying to the world, “We heard what you’ve said about Jesus, and we’re banning that interpretation from our midst forever.” They didn’t do that because the Church is allergic to questions, but because some interpretations—some answers to very important questions about God—can kill the faith (Galatians 1:6-9). The creeds exist precisely because the Church learned, often through blood, that not every version of Jesus is compatible with the Gospel.
For example, Arius, a bishop in Alexandria, came along offering a Jesus who was inspirational but not eternal. He insisted that Jesus was not God from eternity, but rather the first and greatest of God’s created beings. To be exalted, yes. But by no means divine in the sense that He is of the same substance as the Father. In reply, the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) gave birth to the Nicene Creed, which said, essentially, “Um, no. He is the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made….”
This response was not a modern branding exercise. It certainly didn’t come from thin air. It came from God’s Word (John 1:1-3, Colossians 2:9, and countless others). It was an important clarification made to preserve the one true faith that saves. I mean, what’s the point of confessing faith in Jesus—even being willing to die for Him—if the Jesus you confess is false? Creeds are in place precisely for this reason—to preserve a right confession of faith (1 John 2:22-23).
Even better, creedal Christianity never just remained on paper. Creedal Christianity was always ritualized Christianity. What the Church confessed with her mouth, she inevitably enacted with her body. I should pause here for a moment and admit that resistance to rites and ceremonies has always struck me as weird. Enacting what we believe is natural. We already do this instinctively in ordinary life. When people love one another, they don’t merely say it. They demonstrate it. They show up, they make vows, they give gifts, they mark anniversaries. When a nation believes in its sovereignty, it doesn’t just write a constitution, and then that’s it. It raises flags, sings anthems, swears oaths, and builds monuments that enshrine it. Belief naturally seeks embodiment. It inevitably embraces postures and practices that make the invisible visible. In the same way, the rites and ceremonies that emerged were the Church’s way of training the faithful to live inside the truth they confessed, week after week, year after year. It was a very natural way for the body and mind to remain in stride with what the heart confessed to be true (James 2:17).
When this kind of synchronization happens, the Christian faith becomes incredibly resistant to drift. Without them, almost anything can influence direction.
I suppose the thrust of my concern is that this is precisely what much of contemporary church culture has abandoned. Mainstream American Christendom seems to thrive on elasticity—on keeping Jesus just vague enough not to offend anyone and flexible enough to serve every demographic.
The irony in this is that it’s meant to promote growth. And yet, the American Church has been in free fall for decades. This free-floating, syrupy, confessionless, “deeds not creeds” landscape has not resulted in growth. It has resulted in massive erosion. But that’s what happens when your Jesus is more life coach than the eternal Son of God who comes again in glory to judge both the living and the dead (Acts 17:31).
Interestingly, even as creedal Christianity isn’t so much about growth as it is continuity, the early Church did grow—and quite rapidly. Why? Could it be because it refused what American Christianity is all too eager to embrace? The early Church did not survive persecution by becoming more appealing to Roman tastes. It survived by becoming more precise—more dogmatic, more confessional, and in my humble opinion, more liturgical. By its faith, life, and practices, it told the surrounding empires in no uncertain terms, in effect, “We will not adjust Christ to fit your world. You will have to adjust your world to Christ.”
Creedal Christianity can speak this way because it’s anchored in otherworldly things. It is, therefore, by design, capable of surviving this world’s storms. It doesn’t roll over when the challenges come. It can and does remain fixed in place even as everything else tries to pull it apart.
I know I’ve already gone on long enough. I’m guessing the skimmers left five minutes ago. For those who stayed to the end, I suppose I’ll circle back to where I started.
I’ll just say, again, that civil war is not my chief concern. Empires rise and fall. Cultures always burn themselves out eventually. Still, the real danger is not whether America fractures entirely. I’m just wondering if the American Church still possesses a faith sturdy enough to remain standing through it.
I don’t have this concern for creedal Christianity. It’ll survive. History has already more than proven that when and where the pressure mounted, a Church built on crisp confession remained immovable. Our Savior in Hartland is an heir to this hope-filled reality, and so, we enjoy that future. This is true because Christ did not promise His Church an easy path, but He did promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the fixed Gospel confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16-18). That’s a creedal statement, and where such confessions remain, so does the Church and the Lord who preserves her.
Unsurprisingly, what I wrote about last Sunday played out similarly this past week when protestors stormed a church in Minneapolis, demanding that the Christians within embrace their obnoxious crusade against ICE. And when they didn’t, they were shouted down and shamed. Like rainbow armbands in sports—an ideological symbol being imposed in this or that form, all with the threat of punishment if refused—the demands placed on the Christians in that church followed the exact same pattern.
I hope New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is watching this stuff. These two scenarios—the athletes refusing to comply and the Christians in Minneapolis doing the same—while different on the surface, reveal the same underlying dynamic. The shunning common to both betrays collectivism’s innermost spirit. Mamdani did say he intended to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Well, we’re watching historic Marxist collectivism being paraded in real time.
Essentially, forcing anyone under threat of punishment to submit to ideologies and their symbols is a distinctly Marxist, and therefore a readily socialist, impulse. Mamdani is an avowed socialist. He believes that the “warmth of collectivism” is the subordination of the individual conscience to the demands of the collective, and it must be enforced not by persuasion but by institutional pressure. Marxist warmth, in practice, always comes with enforcement, because collectivism only works when dissent is treated as a problem to be punished.
Taking this a step further, what I’m really thinking about right now is the symbols themselves. What’s the harm in wearing a rainbow patch on your jersey? What’s the trouble with a church’s pastor raising a fist alongside protestors to stem trouble? What’s the trouble with driving a company car with a BLM or an ICE-out sticker on its bumper?
Well, for starters, the first thing I’ll say is that every movement in history revealed its true ambitions not first through laws, but through symbols. In that sense, symbols are rarely neutral. You know as well as I do that they train the eye and discipline the conscience. Symbols have a way of testing allegiance long before force is ever required. That’s why armbands, flags, and gestures matter, even before they are compulsory. They are never just a thing.
Since I’ve already sort of wandered near to what I was concerned about last Sunday, you’ll remember that rainbow armbands, jerseys, and other such things have been forced into soccer, basketball, volleyball, football, and so many other sports. When I say forced, I mean it. They’re always framed as harmless signs of “tolerance.” And yet, the countless stories of athlete after athlete being shunned or punished for refusing to wear one expose the deeper truth. Tolerance, by definition, allows dissent. But what we’ve witnessed is enforcement against dissent. Participation is no longer optional. If a person refuses, he or she becomes an example of moral failure and must be shamed accordingly. The only way forward for such a reprobate is total annihilation in the form of cancellation.
History teaches us to pay attention when ideological movements do this—especially when they migrate from persuasion to enforced uniformity. The comparison to past regimes is uncomfortable, but symbols worn on the arm (or, thinking back to COVID, maybe on one’s face) have long functioned as tools of social sorting. Everyone is identifiable. The ones wearing the symbols of compliance are safe. The ones without it are suspect. Again, the purpose is not merely expression but visibility.
But I think it gets even worse still.
I’ve long thought that the LGBTQ, Inc. movement’s use of a flag was bad news. The same goes for the BLM flag. This is true because flags never really originated as tools of personal expression. They were militaristic. They began as tribal identifiers—markers of people, allegiance, and territorial claim. They were carried by nations and armies not just to establish sovereignty, but often to impose that sovereignty’s will on others. Historically, when a flag was raised where another flag once flew, it signaled conquest—one culture replacing another, one authority displacing a rival. When I saw that Minnesota had changed its state flag, making it eerily similar to Somalia’s flag a few years ago, I wondered about displacement. When I started to hear about the billions in fraud orchestrated by the Somali community, to which the Minnesota government largely turned a blind eye, the flag’s redesign made a little more sense. It was a quiet announcement of who’s now in charge in the state.
Of course, in the modern age, flags have been repurposed for everything from corporations to clubs, but that does not erase their original meaning. A flag still signals a collective identity that believes its vision and mission, good or bad, must be announced and then carried into the world, and maybe in ways that will assure it finds a footing as the governing one. Even General Motors would love to see its flag being flown at a Ford building.
But what if it suddenly became a cultural expectation that Ford must fly GM’s flag? That would be extremely telling.
When a group’s flag moves from voluntary display to institutional expectation—on school walls, corporate labels, in movie and TV scripts, on government buildings and athletic uniforms, or wherever and whatever—it stops functioning as a gesture of tolerance and becomes an advancing army’s sovereign demand for submission instead. I spoke in terms of war in last week’s note. Indeed, when what I described starts happening, you know a very real conflict is underway. It’s no longer a debate, but instead, warfare is underway, and territories are being taken. The occupying nation now marks its seized lands. In these territories, dissent can only be treated as resistance.
I think this is a crucial distinction often obscured in public debate. And so, again, I think one of the best forms of resistance is to refuse to display the LGBTQ Inc. flag, which more and more people are choosing to do, especially among the youth—most assuredly among young men. In one sense, I think that’s happening because common sense is making somewhat of a comeback. On the other hand, “Not the Bee,” the Babylon Bee’s source for non-satirical news, reported a study suggesting Americans are pretty much sick of the LGBTQ, Inc. agenda. America has grown tired of the stuff being shoved down our throats day in and day out. The study noted that most Americans seem to have realized it was never about “live and let live.” It was always about something more. One line in the article stood out. It said, “[Young people] have been told they are ‘bigots’ if they believe [unnatural sexual relations are not okay] … but even if they tried not to be ‘bigots,’ they were told they were bigots anyway…” Maybe another way to think of this is to say, as I already did, that common sense is making a comeback. Common sense knows that a person can affirm human dignity while also rejecting ideological compulsion. The former is humane. The latter is totalitarian and dehumanizing.
From another perspective, I should return to that “live and let live” thought. It sure seems most ideologies seeking dominance began by insisting they merely wanted to be left alone, when that’s not at all what they really wanted. The eventual enforcement of their imposed symbols made it clear.
And so, I suppose the question before us is no longer about tolerance and treating people with respect. The question is whether any movement, however well-intentioned it claims to be, has the right to force individuals and institutions to accept its ideology publicly. The Minneapolis church and the shunned athletes sure seem to suggest that this question is no longer theoretical but is already being answered in practice. The moment you are required to display allegiance before you’re allowed to belong, you are no longer living in a free society. You are living under occupation.
This past Thursday morning, since our school was closed due to the snow, leaving both the church and school offices vacant for most of the morning, I sat in my office and did a little reading. I found myself chewing on a few stories about professional athletes in various parts of the world who’ve refused to wear team-sponsored rainbow armbands, jerseys, and such before, during, or after competition. The articles mentioned situations going back to 2018. Some of the athletes named gave no particular reason for refusing. Others insisted that competition should be about the sport, not political ideologies. Several noted religious objections.
Interestingly, one hundred percent of the Christians who refused, no matter the country, were reprimanded by their teams and ultimately labeled as bigots by activist organizations. The Muslims who refused, however, experienced no such reaction. In particular, two relatively recent stories stood out.
Back in 2024, Sam Morsy, the captain of Ipswich Town, a professional soccer team in England, refused to wear a rainbow armband. He cited Islam’s prohibition. Team leadership supported his position. LGBTQ Inc. did not push back. In that same year, Noussair Mazraoui, a player for Manchester United, refused to wear a team jacket specifically designed to show support for the LGBTQ community. Like Morsy, he cited Islam’s prohibition. The club ultimately scrapped the jackets entirely, so no one on the team had to wear one. Again, the usual suspects were relatively quiet in reply.
I suppose the first thing I’m inclined to say to the athletes who refused to comply is, “Bravo.” I say this regardless of their reasons. What they did required courage, if only because they gambled their own futures based on principle. Still, the obvious remains. Why were the Muslims able to escape public shaming, and the Christians were not? How is it that the Muslim players suffered very little harm to their careers, while the Christian athletes took significant hits?
Interesting, isn’t it, because what unfolded in most cases seemed to be a selective application of moral pressure. If you were a Christian, you were attacked. If you were a Muslim, you were left alone.
I don’t know about you, but the disparity exposes something altogether troubling to me. What appears to be being enforced is not some sort of universal moral standard, but it’s more of a power calculus. Christian beliefs are manhandled. Muslim beliefs, by contrast, are probed with gentleness. I doubt it’s because of some newfound respect for religion. It’s because of something else entirely.
At a minimum, it’s the fear of being considered Islamophobic. At most, it’s risk management. It’s an unspoken acknowledgement of the potential for violent extremism. I can only imagine what would happen if a crowd of LGBTQ activists went screeching through one of the more balkanized Muslim neighborhoods in London, calling out the religious community as shameful and unloving. You can get away with such things in Christian communities. But that’s because Christians don’t have a history of driving trucks through gatherings or blowing themselves up in the middle of crowds. And so, to demonize Christian athletes for their religious apprehensions but not the Muslim athletes has an air of risk management.
The irony in all of this, of course, is that such selective outrage undermines the very claims of diversity and tolerance and acceptance and fairness and inclusion and all the other buzz words that LGBTQ Inc. claims it desires. And yet, if conscience is only respected when it belongs to some and not others, then the movement isn’t being honest about its real agenda.
What all of this suggests—uncomfortably, but plainly—is that Christianity itself is the real target. But why? Because, in the end, as my friend Charlie Kirk so often insisted, the issue is not necessarily cultural or political but spiritual. In principle, there’s no need for LGBTQ Inc. to attack Islam. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Seen through that lens, the pattern starts to make a little more sense.
In any war, effort is always concentrated where the real enemy exists. You don’t waste resources battering positions that want the same things you do. You certainly don’t provoke like-minded forces that are stronger than you for fear they might fire back. You focus instead on the fronts that can open into the lands you want to conquer. Christianity occupies that space.
That’s why Christian conviction draws the real fire. It really is the last major moral framework in the West that openly challenges the reigning cultural orthodoxy while refusing to play by its rules of power and intimidation. And perhaps what makes it so appetizing is that Christianity has no doctrine that encourages or glorifies violence, insisting that by killing others, the divine is pleased enough to reward the killer.
That said, violence is sometimes thrust upon Christians. When it is, we have every right to self-defense, which could lead to a persecutor’s messy end. Still, we do not seek it out. We do not believe God rewards us when we kill others. We live as Saint Paul insisted: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). Knowing this about us marks us as relatively low risk but potentially high reward. And so, from there, the assumption is that once the Christian front collapses, the rest of the cultural terrain will fall into line on its own. Beyond that, what replaces Christianity is almost beside the point. Who cares, so long as Christ and His followers are crushed. That’s a spiritual agenda, more so than anything else.
But here’s the thing. The Lord wondered rhetorically, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). And yet, even as the Church might not grow but shrink, Christ promised that the Gospel would never be conquered, and the gates of hell would never prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18). Christianity will stand to the End of Days. Those promises reframe everything. They remind us that the pressures being applied right now are by no means new, nor are they unexpected. The Bible has not hidden from believers that faithfulness would be costly, that allegiance to Christ would eventually put us at odds with whatever spirit happens to rule the present age. That said, what is new is the packaging. Right now, it seems the ruling spirit looks like activists jackbooting to the tune of tolerance and inclusion while finding every conceivable way to justify Christian exclusion and moral coercion.
Nevertheless, whatever the persecution—regardless of its form or the generation in which it’s being exacted—none of it changes the Christian trajectory. The Christian response is not panic or retreat. It’s certainly not bitterness or rage. It’s courage—quiet, steady, and unyielding courage—rooted in the confidence that Christ will have the last word, whether the persecuting crowd approves of that word or not.
Faithfulness has never meant safety. But it has always meant trust. Empowered by the Holy Spirit for such trust, we can go into any challenge with the otherworldly capability to confess Christ clearly and without hatred. What’s more, we can do this without fear because we know to whom we belong, and that He is worth the cost—or as the sign in front of our church here in Hartland reads at this very moment: “Christ is worth more than what you fear losing because of Him.”
I did something unusual on the drive to my office this morning. After a minute or two of familiar music, I turned it off and drove the remaining twenty-three minutes in silence. Not necessarily quiet, but silence.
Actually, my actions may not have been entirely accidental. Yesterday, two things happened. First, a friend wrote a post about leaving social media. It made perfect sense to me because I have the same feelings fairly regularly. Second, as I always do, I led my congregation’s monthly Ladies Guild Bible study group here at Our Savior. It’s a fantastic group of ladies who are devoted to Christ and His Word. The topic of the study was peace—what it is, what it isn’t, and how, from a Christian perspective, it has little if anything to do with our circumstances. Admittedly, the study’s conversations stayed with me, too. And so, here’s what I mean.
I drive a black two-door Jeep Wrangler. I’ve driven several Wranglers in my lifetime. The one I have now has a hard top. It’s slightly lifted by about two inches. The tires are also a bit larger than stock. Anyone who’s driven a Jeep Wrangler knows they’re not necessarily serene vehicles. Put a soft top on it, which I’ve owned before, and “not necessarily serene” becomes a massive understatement. They become wind tunnels. Maybe the newer models aren’t so bad. But the ones I’ve known were never quiet. Even with a hard top, wind slips through where it can. The road hums. Things creak. At seventy miles an hour—at least that’s the pace I’m going to admit—the whole thing speaks in resonance and vibrations.
And yet, for one reason or another, this morning’s ride was rather peaceful by comparison to most.
Usually, all my Wrangler’s sounds are buried beneath something else—music, podcasts, and news clips from various sources. Apparently, I’m inclined to drown out the natural sound every day, and to do so as a matter of habit. But not this morning. Today was wind, asphalt, engine, motion, a Buick in the passing lane slowing everyone else’s pace, a truck hauling who knows what to who knows where, the rhythm of rain (that would eventually become snow) tapping against the windshield and being sent away for a few seconds by the wipers before returning. All of this was happening.
I don’t want to get too philosophical here. However, there is a lesson to be learned. There’s a lesson in everything, if only we’re willing to consider the possibility.
Concerning my morning drive, I wondered how much of life we miss because we’re always piping something else into it. We insulate ourselves from the ordinary textures of being alive. I get why we do it. Real life isn’t polished, and perhaps worse, it doesn’t flatter us. In that sense, the real world is noisy in ways we’d never willingly choose. I mean, who wants a life that rattles and hums, whether literally or figuratively? And so, for one reason or another, we do what we can to cover it up, choosing instead to curate our surroundings. I listen to music and such while driving to pass the time. But is passing the time always best? Well, when someone or something else is thinking for me, maybe not. But regardless of the reason, I suppose one of my concerns is that, when we pipe so much extra stuff into our lives, we risk losing our bearings. In other words, we risk forgetting where we are, what we’re supposed to be doing, and maybe even who we’re with because we’re always somewhere else listening to that somewhere else’s noise.
Does that make sense? Maybe not. Again, I don’t want to be too philosophical. In the end, I’ll simply say that sometimes it’s good to turn things off and unplug—not because the anticipated silence will be actual quiet, but because it’ll be an opportunity to let life sound like life. And by the way, regardless of how some might ultimately define peace, only Christians know what peace truly is when life is making a racket. But again, even in a superficial, everyday sense, even mortal peace doesn’t always come from hearing what we prefer. Sometimes it comes from hearing what’s been there all along. I suppose a Jeep Wrangler, absent all artificial sound, traveling noisily down US23, is sometimes just the place to learn that lesson.
I am under no obligation to pretend Renee Good was morally virtuous. By all accounts, she lived in ways entirely contrary to what I believe actually is virtuous. I also get the sense that she and her “wife” delighted in provocation, which is why they said and did the things they did in the place they were. As such, I think such behavior played a role in the dreadful situation our nation is currently enduring. But even so, as a human being—as a Christian—regardless of any disagreements I might’ve had with Good had I known her personally, I would never want or cheer for her death. Why? Because Christians do not traffic in such things. We pursue life—even for those we believe are squandering it, even for those we don’t know, even for those with whom we disagree.
Indeed, what happened is terrible. That said, if you’re glad she died, if your first thought was, “Good riddance,” or perhaps more, you’re rooting for other protestors to die, then you are missing the mark entirely, and you’re playing right into the hands of those who actually do want things to get worse. What’s more, you’re pushing the ideological continents further apart, and you’re giving those on the other shore a very good reason to point the finger and say, “See! This is what your convictions produce!”
Stand against what you will. Side with whomever. But at least do so with integrity. Repent and resist the temptation to be glad about someone else’s harm (Matthew 5:44). It fosters devilry, brings only despair, and is one sure way to mark you as the bad guy, even if your position is the better one.
Cruciform Stuff 