Even if we speak the same language, that does not mean we hear each other, understand each other, or know each other. We might speak the same language but have a different dialect. If you’re from Philly, you might not understand someone from New Orleans. If you’re from Chicago, you might not understand someone from Charlotte. “Ya’ll” and “Yous guys” mean the same thing, but one is prevalent in the South and the other in the North. Our dialects are closely tied to land and place. In fact, throughout the gospels, Judeans from Jerusalem can consistently pick the followers of Jesus out of a crowd because of their Galilean dialect. Everyone spoke Aramaic in those days, but the way they spoke it was unique to their corner of the world.

In 1945, the linguist Max Weinreich was asked the question, “What is the difference between a language and a dialect,” and he replied, “A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy.” What did he mean? He meant the distinction between a “language” and a “dialect” is political rather than scientific. Empires and States determine whether a dialect is a language. The distinction is highly arbitrary, and it often comes down to the arrangements of power, national sovereignty, and cultural recognition. It’s sort of like who gets to be considered “white” in America. Whether something gets to be a language is political.

Distinct dialects are supposed to be the “same language” if speakers can understand each other. It’s called the principle of mutual intelligibility. However, the principle is frequently broken for political reasons. Cantonese is very different from Mandarin, with its own grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, yet it’s considered a dialect in China for political reasons. Scandinavian, Danish, and Swedish speakers can understand each other, but they’re all considered languages. Likewise, Russian and Ukrainian speakers can understand each other 50 percent of the time, yet these are distinct languages as well. And “the Romance languages” of Spanish, Italian, and French are all just regional dialects of Latin, yet they are the languages of empires. Whether a regional tongue is recognized as its own language depends on the whims of an empire or nation-state and their desire to project unity, rather than the reality of linguistic science.

“Pastor, why does any of this matter?” Because language is the first thing the colonizers stole. Outlawing the language of a people was the first devastating tool of colonization, and it was often the primary one in the hands of Christian missionaries, used to erase the cultural identity of indigenous people and force their assimilation. Throughout history, European colonizers employed a wide array of violent, social, and administrative tactics to suppress native tongues. Then, by creating a monopoly over every area of society and culture with the colonizer’s tongue, empires actively dismantled indigenous languages to cement their control over the people.

You don’t have to flip through too many history books to find accounts of British authorities seeking the extinction of the Welsh language. For centuries, the British Empire severely criminalized speaking of Gaelic. The Spanish Empire made Arabic illegal in the 16^th century to dismantle the cultural influence of the Moors. As the British and other European colonial powers spread their tentacles around the globe, they brought the same cruel enterprise to indigenous people everywhere. The primary goal was always the same: linguistic extinction – linguistic genocide. As Ray Gwyn Smith wrote, “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”

In the United States, the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 established a system of Native American boarding schools like the infamous Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, where indigenous children were stolen from their parents and land, and shipped to these schools for forced assimilation. Here, government officials and school administrators labeled all indigenous languages as mere “dialects” or “vulgar vernaculars,” refusing to recognize them as legitimate. Speaking those languages was considered a barrier to “civilization,” “modernity,” and “national unity.”

Children were severely punished for speaking in their native tongues, which disrupted intergenerational transmission and pushed many of these languages to the brink of extinction. The political reason behind this was obvious: cultural erasure and land consolidation. By stripping children of their native tongue, colonizers sought to prevent communication between different tribes, to neutralize resistance, to forcibly assimilate indigenous peoples into the dominant society, and to erase traditional ecological and cultural knowledge by detaching indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. According to Army Officer Richard Henry Pratt, the purpose was explicit: “Kill the Indian to save the child.”

Attempts to eliminate a language are always a prelude and a partner to the elimination of a people. People and language are so bound up together, you can’t outlaw one without the other. This is why President Trump signed an executive order designating English the official language of the United States. He was forcibly encouraging immigrants to assimilate into American culture. But the order also rescinded federal mandates that required agencies to provide services to individuals who speak English as a second language. The designation of English as the official language went hand in hand with his brutal immigration policies. The attempts to eliminate a language are a prelude and a partner to the elimination of a people.

Scholars call this practice “linguistic imperialism,” and Chicano feminist Gloria Anzaldúa called it “linguistic terrorism.”[i] We hear it whenever a xenophobic American aggressively yells, “Speak English!” or “Go back to where you came from!” But it is not just a practice of white supremacists, but an oppressive part of the everyday life of so many minority communities in America. I’ve had members of this church tell me stories about their bosses and colleagues looking at them with disdain simply because they are speaking their native tongue at work. We can all be linguistic imperialists or linguistic terrorists without even realizing what we are doing.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus spoke Aramaic, and not Hebrew? The Hebrew people were forced to speak Aramaic when they were taken into exile by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Aramaic was an imperial language. It was the language of their captors and conquerors. It was the language of trade and commerce, law, and politics. It was a dialect with an Army and a Navy. It was the “English” of the first-century world.

Jesus and his disciples were poor and oppressed Galileans, forced to speak in an imperial tongue. This is very important because it means that everyone who was gathered in Israel for Pentecost from all over the Mediterranean world was already speaking the same language. Everyone already spoke Aramaic, which means they didn’t need the Holy Spirit to blow into the room with tongues of fire in order for them to understand each other.

So, what does the story mean when it says, “All the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. And a crowd came together in bewilderment, and asked: ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?’ Parthians, Medes, Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’” It means the disciples were speaking in the mother tongues of the people in the crowd, in their native languages, their indigenous dialects. They were speaking in everyone’s native language. They declared the wonders of God in the language that their mother’s sang to them as children, and their father’s spoke their names.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t speak Aramaic! The Holy Spirit doesn’t speak colonizer. It speaks in the language of the indigenous through the mouths of the oppressed. The Holy Spirit blew into Jerusalem and sent tongues of fire down onto the disciples to disrupt the language of empire with a dialect so powerful that the crowd thought the disciples were drunk! And they were right; they were drunk on the Spirit of love, life, and liberation! They were inebriated by the Spirit that subverts the power of linguistic terrorism with a new form of communication, a new level of connection, a new depth of relationship, a new accent of joining, and a new practice of intimacy.

Theologian Willie James Jennings notes, “Christianity was ripe for a tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.”[ii] Yet Jennings argues that Acts 2 rejects this separation with a revolution of joining and connection that reveals once and for all that a people and their language cannot be divided. “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”

Jennings claims that Pentecost is “the epicenter of a revolution; the revolution of the intimate. This moment of divine power signifies the full presence of the Spirit in the most crucial reality of human life: language. The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space, of voice, memory, sound, body, land, place, [culture]. It is language that runs through all these matters. It is the sinew of existence of a people. [And] this revolutionary intimacy of the Spirit gave birth to a way of belonging we now call church.”[iii]

He writes, “To speak a language is to speak a people. Speaking announces familiarity, connection, and relationality. God speaks people fluently, and now God gestures to the deepest joining possible: a one-flesh union with God and with each other. The Spirit is the force that creates this joining, and the revolution of the Spirit is always poised to unleash itself again at the slightest moment of our faithful waiting and yielding.”[iv]

Last week, as we were setting up for worship, I put on the Rededicate 250, the white nationalist propaganda festival that was masquerading as a worship service celebrating the “faith” of the Founding Fathers on the National Mall. One of my favorite comments came from Ziare, who said, “Who are these people and what are they talking about?” They were speaking the language of faith and the language of scripture, but what they were saying was unintelligible. They were using their tongues to give praise and thanksgiving to God, but they were not talking to the same God that we are talking to this afternoon.

As I listened to the speeches, I noticed something strange myself. There was something missing from all that was being said, and I realized that there was no Spirit in it. There was passion, there was anger, there was excitement, there was even power, but there was no Spirit in it. There was no Holy Ghost in it. And that is not because they are Republican, or followers of Donald Trump, or primarily white, or Christian Nationalists, but because they were conjuring that old European colonial Christianity that has always used the language of faith and scripture to dominate people.

What they don’t realize is that the Spirit of God cannot and will not coexist with domination! They are North Pole magnets! You can’t put them together. Wherever there is domination, there is no Spirit! Wherever there is Spirit, there is no domination! Because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom! I’ve read the Bible, and I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and I’ve never found domination there. Domination is not the Torah! Domination is not a beatitude! Domination is not a fruit of the Spirit!

Domination is the opposite of loving God and neighbor! Domination is the opposite of blessed are the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the thirsty, the merciful, the pure, the peacemaker, and the persecuted! Domination is the opposite of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control! Domination is the language of empire and not the language of God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, and people who live in the Spirit, are diametrically opposed to the forces of domination in this world. That’s why we can hear someone speaking the language of faith and scripture and still not know what the hell they’re talking about!

The Spirit blew in with wind and fire and empowered the disciples to break free from linguistic imperialism, to praise God in the mother tongue of their neighbors, to speak the truth to power, to stand boldly in the face of the empire, to join with people in a loving, life-giving, and liberating way. Power and domination are not the same thing. You can have power and not lord it over your neighbors, or your spouse, or your employees, or your friends, or your children, or your constituents. In fact, real power – true power – spiritual power comes from the Holy Ghost, and it cannot exist in the presence of domination.

The Spirit empowers us to form completely different kinds of relationships and build multi-lingual and multi-ethic communities as an alternative to the empire. The Spirit empowers us to resist the linguistic genocide of colonialism. The Spirit empowers us to ignite a revolution of intimacy where we learn to speak each other’s languages and to love each other’s people. That’s why Pentecost is the birthday of the church. And even though the church has rarely established anything more than the monstrous relationships of patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire, the possibility always exists for a new beginning. The Spirit is always hovering over us, waiting to burst through the door to restart the fire of the revolution.

When Peter stepped up to explain what was happening, he remixed the vision of Joel where God said, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, on all people, on all ethnicities, on all nations. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my slaves, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” Peter said, “You want to know what this means? It means the wind of the Spirit breaks through every man-made notion of race, tribe, nation, or boundary! You want to know what this means? It means the fire of the Spirit burns down every man-made structure of age, gender, sexuality, or social location. You want to know what this means? It means nothing can limit the Spirit’s power to bring people together in a revolution of intimacy.

The Spirit is for ALL flesh, which means we cannot harm any flesh, exploit any flesh, oppress any flesh, and claim to be in step with the Spirit. The Spirit is for ALL flesh, which means we cannot terrorize any flesh, lynch any flesh, bomb any flesh, crucify any flesh, and claim to be in step with the Spirit. The Spirit pours out on ALL flesh and all peoples; therefore, it is incompatible with the oppression and domination of any flesh. Remember that this Spirit is none other than the Spirit of the crucified and resurrected Jesus; therefore, it is a Spirit that is always one with the crucified peoples of history and poised to bring them back to life!

As liberation theologian Oscar Garcia-Johnson claims, the Holy Spirit has always already been at work within marginalized, colonized, oppressed, indigenous, and immigrant communities all over the world.[v] It has never been the responsibility of the church to bring the Spirit of Pentecost to the nations of the world, and certainly not to try and control the Spirit or dominate people with the Spirit. It has always been the responsibility of the Christians to go find the Spirit where it is already living, breathing, and burning in indigenous life, cosmology, and culture.

The good news of Pentecost is that the Spirit still breathes and that means the language of liberation still lives. They tried to outlaw it. They tried to steal it. They tried to beat it out of children’s mouths in boarding schools. They tried to scrub it off tongues with soap and shame. They tried to drown it in the hold of the slave ship. They tried to bury it under the floorboards of the plantation. They tried to crucify it on a cross! But they could not destroy it!

The Colonizers tried to eliminate the language of the people, but they could not steal the Spirit. And as long as the Spirit was still breathing, the language of liberation could be revived. It is not a dead language. It is not Latin. The language of liberation cannot be stopped, it cannot be killed, it cannot be destroyed. It is always hovering, waiting, searching, hoping for the moment when people of God are ready for a new outpouring of wind and fire and tongues of intimacy.

Friends, this is something the empire never understood. Whenever you try to take a people’s tongue away, the Spirit will give them a new one. Enslaved Africans were stripped of Wolof and Yoruba[vi] and Mandinka and Akan, but in the Spirit, they created Gullah-Geechee, Louisiana Creole, Haitian Creole, Yiddish, Chicano, Spanglish, Rasta, and African American Vernacular English or Ebonics, and more. They took the master’s language, and they bent it, they baptized it, they filled it with wind and fire.

That is exactly what happened on Pentecost. The Spirit took the people the empire had scattered across the Roman Empire and handed them back their own voice. Not the imperial language. Not the Aramaic of Babylon. Not a dialect with an Army and a Navy. But their mother tongues. And when a colonized people heard the wonders of God in the tongues that the empire tried to take, that prayer service in the upper room turned into a jailbreak.

This is why the church exists. Not to project unity like an empire or dominate our neighbors, but to be one of the few communities on the face of the earth where every flesh, every tongue, every nation, every people hears the love of God in their own mother tongue. That is the revolution of the intimate. That is the belonging we call church. We are learning to speak a different language—the language of liberation—the language of the Holy Ghost–the language that creates a whole new people and entirely different way of life together. The Spirit doesn’t speak colonizer. The Spirit doesn’t speak domination. The Spirit doesn’t speak fascist. The Spirit doesn’t speak nationalist. The Spirit only speaks life, love, and liberation.

When Rev. Charles Adams was asked to give the closing prayer at Rosa Parks’ funeral, he began by giving thanks to God for the life of this remarkable civil rights hero. But at the end, Rev. Adams turned a funeral into a revival when he said, “I wish I had 10,000 tongues just to thank you. If I were Chinese, I’d say, ‘Odeeya.’ If I were Danish, I’d say, ‘Mang-uh tag.’ If I were Italian, I’d say, ‘Grazie.’ If I were Hebrew, I’d say, ‘Todah rabah.’ If I were Greek, I would say, ‘Eucharisto.’ If I were Japanese, I’d say, ‘Domo arigato.’ If I were Portuguese, I’d say, ‘Obrigado.’ If I were Spanish, I’d say, ‘Muchas gracias.’ If I were German, I’d say, ‘Danke schön.’ If I were French, I’d say, ‘Merci beaucoup.’ If I were Russian, I’d say, ‘Spusiba.’ If I were Kenyan, I’d say, ‘Ashante.’ If I were Nigerian, I’d say, ‘E ṣe pẹ̀pẹ̀.’ If I were Zulu, I’d say, ‘Enke abonga.’ If I were Sotho, I’d say, ‘Ke a leboga.’ If I were mute, [I’d say it with my hands and my feet]...But since I am who I am, and I got what I got, and I feel what I feel, so I’ll just say ‘Thank you! Thank you! Praise your name!”

Don’t let anybody ever tell you that Pentecost is something that happened a long time ago in a distant past. Because the wind is still blowing. The fire is still burning. The Spirit is still hovering over all of us, waiting to burst through the door and restart the revolution. The same Spirit that rained down on the disciples is in this room right now, ready to empower us to break free from every form of domination, and to speak each other’s languages, to love each other’s people, and to build beloved community. So let the empire keep its official language! Let it keep its Army and its Navy! We have a better tongue! We have the language of liberation! We have the speech of the Holy Spirit. And with it, we can sing about the wonders of God, we can shout down the walls of Babylon, we can speak new worlds into existence, and we can spark a revolution of intimacy.

[i] Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

[ii] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Oscar Garcia-Johnson, Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South, Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019.

[vi] British anthropologist and sociologist J.D.Y. Peel is widely credited as the first major scholar to academically discuss and document the relationship between Yoruba culture and Pentecostal/indigenous religious movements in Nigeria.

Every holiday has its own songs. The 4^th of July has its patriotic anthems, Christmas has its carols, Easter has its hymns, New Year’s has its Auld Lang Syne, Halloween has its Thriller, and Mother’s Day has its Hip Hop. I know that may sound strange, but of all the genres of music, Hip Hop has the most and the best songs for Mother’s Day. We’ve got Tupac’s “Dear Mama”, Kanye West’s “Hey Mama”, Kendrick Lamar’s “Momma Said,” Chance the Rapper’s “Hey Ma”, Eminem’s “Headlights”, Jay-Z’s “Smile”, Nas’s “Dance”, Drake’s “Look What You’ve Done”, Ghostface Killah’s “All That I Got is You”, and my personal favorites, LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and Poison Clan’s “Shake Whatcha Mama Gave Ya.”

Why does Hip Hop have the best Mother’s Day music? It is a highly respected tradition and rite of passage for Hip Hop artists to dedicate a song to their mother. Hip Hop originated in Black and Brown communities as the voice of marginalized and oppressed people, a form of cultural resistance against systemic injustice, economic inequality, and police brutality. It functioned as a weapon of speech and a platform for oppressed people to tell their stories, build collective identity, and challenge dominant power structures.

The music is built on sharing raw, emotional stories about life on the streets, which naturally includes honoring their mothers. Many hardcore Hip Hop artists were raised by single mothers who were the primary source of love, sacrifice, and strength in their lives, serving as a “backbone” against poverty and adversity. Mothers were the original, unshakeable support system who maintained the household and the neighborhood. Hundreds of Hip Hop artists have made tributes to the matriarchs who raised them, expressing gratitude for their resilience, apologies for the conflict they caused, and grief over the loss of their beloved mothers.

If Jesus had been born in NY, LA, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, or Houston, he might have become a hip-hop artist, and we would have a tribute song about his mother, Mary. The region where Mary grew up was the first-century equivalent of a poor Black or Brown neighborhood in a segregated city. Galilee was economically depressed, socially abandoned, and overpoliced. It was known as “Galilee of the Gentiles,” but a better translation would be “Galilee under the Gentiles,” to describe their long history of occupation under the boot of different empires. By Mary’s day, Galilee had been occupied by five different foreign powers for seven hundred years, which is almost three times as long as America has been in existence.

First-century Galilee was deeply impacted by Roman imperial rule and King Herod's intense taxation that placed a tremendous economic burden on people dependent on subsistence farming, and it caused rampant poverty. The Roman occupation was so brutal in Galilee that it became the seedbed of revolutionary activity. A radical sect known as the Zealots was founded in Galilee by a man named Judas, who led a revolt against Governor Quirinius’ tax policy, six years before Jesus was born. Later, his sons, Jacob and Simon, helped found an extreme group of Zealots, known as the Sicarii or “dagger men,” who passionately fought for social revolution.

Herod knew the Galileans were always on the brink of insurrection, so he worked to make rebellion impossible. He built military garrisons and cavalry centers throughout the region to minimize the chances of Jewish revolutionaries taking matters into their own hands. In fact, Herod was so oppressive, scholar Richard Horsley claims, “he instituted what we today would call a police state complete with loyalty oaths, surveillance, informers, secret police, imprisonment, torture, and brutal retaliation against any kind of dissent he heard of anywhere in Galilee.”[i]

Everyone in the first century knew Galilee was a generationally oppressed community that was also the home and headquarters of the greatest revolutionaries in Jewish history. This is where Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born. Mary was a common name in the first century. There are so many Marys in the gospels it is hard to tell them apart: Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary, sister of Lazarus and Martha, and the other Mary (whoever that is). But the reason there are so many women in the first century who were named Mary is that it is the Aramaic version of Miriam, the name of Moses’ sister, who is celebrated for her pivotal role in saving Moses from the Nile as well as for her music and leadership, which she used to help deliver people to freedom.

Names are extremely important in Jewish culture. To give a child a name was to give it a purpose, a calling, and a mission in life. Names were aspirational—they were hopes, and many women were named Mary in first-century Galilee because all of the Jewish mothers and fathers in that region were hoping their children would grow up to be like Maryam, a liberator who would help deliver their people from the new Egypt that was brutally oppressing them. Imagine if a whole host of people named their daughters Rosa, as in Rosa Luxemburg or Rosa Parks.

We usually reserve sermons about Mary for Christmas. It is rare to hear about Mary in the month of May. That’s because we often reduce Mary’s witness to a single chapter of her life. In most of our minds, she has no context or backstory. My timeline this week was bombarded with gifts for Mother’s Day, and one that caught my attention was a book being sold that gives mothers the opportunity to write down the story of what their lives were like before their children were born. Why would we need something like that if women were not reduced to childbearing?

Like so many mothers, Mary’s life has been reduced to childbearing. We imagine that Mary’s life began when she conceived Jesus and that pregnancy was her primary vocation in life. We treat her like a perpetual mother, a holy womb for God, or even an obedient and compliant little girl. For hundreds of years, the Catholic church has insisted that Mary was a perpetual virgin for the rest of her life, who never got married, had sex, or gave birth to any other children after Jesus was born, even though we know historically that’s not true!

But Mary does have a backstory. She was a daughter of Galilee, a child of dreamers, resisters, and revolutionaries who were tired of being poor, pressed down, put upon, and pushed up against the wall. She was a descendant of radical Galileans who were tired of living like slaves in an occupied land, tired of eking out a living in a sparse land, tired of surviving hand to mouth, tired of struggling to get by, tired of the anxiety of not knowing where her next meal was going to come from, tired of not having enough nourishment to sustain life.

That’s why Mary sang those famous lyrics in Luke 2, “God has scattered the arrogant in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Her words seem novel, but Jewish listeners would have recognized something incredibly familiar. Like a jazz musician, hip-hop artist, DJ, or producer, Mary was riffing, sampling, and remixing a song that had been sung by Hebrew women and prophetesses who came before her.

She remixed Miriam’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people out of bondage. She remixed Deborah’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people from the hand of the Canaanites. She remixed Judith’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people a victory over the Assyrians. She remixed the song of the woman in Psalm 113 who proclaimed, “God raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes. God gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.” And above all, she remixed Hannah’s song, who said: “My heart rejoices in the Lord, I rejoice in your liberation.”

Long before Mary carried Jesus in her womb, Mary carried the song of her people in her heart and the dreams of her ancestors in her bones. And she gave voice to a wild new version of that ancient song. It’s probably not surprising that most Hebrew women prophetesses were artists and poets; dancing and playing tambourines, composing music, and singing songs. But what is surprising is the common theme that appears in all the songs Mary remixed: deliverance—God’s liberatory activity on behalf of the people. Liberation is the common thread in every song that Mary carried and remixed into her famous song.

And over the years, Mary’s song became possibly the most terrifying, most hated, most banned, and most revolutionary song in Western History. Throughout history, poor and oppressed peoples have found great hope and strength in Mary’s song, while those at the top rung of the social ladder—the powers that be- have often found Mary’s song troublesome, abrasive, and threatening. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Mary’s song was known to strike fear in the hearts of the Russian Czars of the Romanov Dynasty. During the British Empire’s occupation of India in the late 19^th century, Mary’s song was prohibited from being sung in churches.

In the 1980s, poor Guatemalans were so emboldened by Mary’s song in their fight for better wages that the government banned her words. The infamous US-backed dictator, General Pinochet, outlawed Mary’s song because he was afraid it would incite a revolution. A group of Argentinian mothers who lost their children during the Dirty War began placing Mary’s song on posters throughout the capital, so the government forbade the display of her “dangerous” words in public. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement sang Mary’s song in Zuccotti Park, confronting the greed and enormous disparity between rich and poor in America.

Loise Malcolm, who grew up as the child of missionaries in the poor villages of the Philippines, says that she remembers the day her parents first read the words of Mary’s song to the Filipino people. They responded with such a boisterous celebration that her parents were stunned! They asked the Filipino people why Mary’s song elicited such exultation, and the people told the missionaries it was the first time they’d heard the good news that God cares about them, the poor and the oppressed.

Only when we acknowledge the context that Mary grew up in, the history of resistance in Galilee, and Mary’s role as the carrier of her people’s songs of liberation, can we understand what’s going on in John 2. Here we find Mary and Jesus together at the wedding of a friend in Cana, six miles North of Nazareth, when something terrible happens. The wine runs out, and Mary says to Jesus, “Woman, why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would never address my mother “Woman,” nor would I dismiss her so quickly and arrogantly. I would be afraid to talk to my mother like that. Can you imagine if your mother asks you to wash the dishes or take out the trash, and you said, “Woman, don’t bother me. My hour has not yet come.” You might end up in the trash can! Jesus is lucky Mary didn’t pop him in the mouth!

But Mary got the last word. She did not even acknowledge Jesus’ comments, and she would not be dismissed by Jesus’ words. She continued to involve her son even when he did not think it was his time. She rejected the idea that his time had not come, and she looked at the servers and said, “Do whatever he tells you.” Haven’t we all had our mothers do something exactly like this to us? This is one of a mother’s superpowers. They can ignore our protests and find a way to get us to do exactly what they wanted us to do in the first place!

But there’s so much more going on here than a family squabble. The crisis of running out of wine at a wedding was a social scandal in the first century. It meant that the family hosting the wedding was poor, and running out of wine at their child’s wedding would have been humiliating. It would have been the cause of great shame, embarrassment, and a loss of dignity for a poor family and the newly married couple. Mary recognized what was about to happen because she knew the pain and the shame of poverty first-hand. She grew up poor herself, which is why she was the first to see the crisis and immediately asked her son to address the situation.

The crisis in Cana was not that people drank too much; the crisis in Cana was poverty. Jesus saw six stone water jars standing nearby, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. He told them to fill the jars to the brim with water, and he turned 180 gallons of water into 180 gallons of the finest wine, and the host of the banquet was overjoyed. He turned poverty into plenty. He turned the ceremony into a celebration. He turned embarrassment into elevation. He turned humiliation into honor. He turned frustration into festivity. He turned scarcity into abundance. He turned shame into glory. He turned crisis into jubilee. He turned mourning into dancing. He turned sackcloth into joy. He turned not enough into more than enough. He turned the old water of empty ritual into the new wine of the kingdom of God.

And it was all because of Mary and her persistent intervention. When it came to social crisis, when it came to abject poverty, when it came to public shame, Mary would not take “no” for an answer, even if it came from her son. Mary faced a “no more” moment and a “no way” answer, and she responded, “Yes, there is!”, “Yes, we can!”, and “Yes, you will.” Jesus thought he wasn’t ready. Jesus thought this wasn’t the moment. Jesus thought that it wasn’t the right time. Jesus thought the hour had not come to intervene and begin his ministry, but his mama knew better.

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices like racial gerrymandering. In doing so, they destroyed the work of an entire generation of black and brown civil rights leaders fought and (in some cases) died for, disenfranchised millions of Americans, and dishonored the legacy of those (like John Lewis) who were brutally beaten on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, those who marched from Selma to Montgomery with King, and the ‘Mothers’ of the voting rights movement like Fannie Lou Hamer, Marie Foster, and Amelia Robinson. If that doesn’t signal to you that we are in the fight of our lives against whiteness and fascism, the time has come to get involved politically, what will?

Mary knew that whenever there is poverty, the time has come. Whenever there is scarcity, the time has come. Whenever there is shame, the time has come. Whenever there is humiliation, the time has come. Whenever there is a lack of resources, the time has come. Whenever people are hurting, the time has come. Whenever people are suffering, the time has come. Whenever people are oppressed, the time has come. Whenever people are being harassed, the time has come. Whenever people are being exploited, the time has come. Whenever people are being mistreated, the time has come. Whenever people are being injured, the time has come. Whenever there is inequality, the time has come. Whenever there is racist gerrymandering, the time has come. Whenever there is voter suppression, the time has come! Whenever there is disenfranchisement, the time has come.

And that’s true in our own lives as well. Maybe there’s something you’ve been waiting on and meaning to do. Maybe like Jesus, you’ve been saying to yourself, or your mama, or your spouse, or your friends that you need to do it, you’ve been called to it, you’ve been ordained for it, you’ve been baptized into it, you’ve been anointed for it, you’ve been equipped for it, but it’s not the time. Maybe you’ve been resisting the quiet promptings of your heart, softly trying to push you to take the next step in work, in life, in love, or in ministry, but you’ve been saying, “Now is not the hour.” Well, Mother Mary is ignoring all of our protestations. Mother Mary is hearing none of our hesitations. Because Mother Mary knows what God knows that the time has come!

A friend of mine called me the other day and told me a story that she’d been asked to be the chair of the board of an organization that was going through a time of crisis. The leaders had asked her if she would serve, and she didn’t want to do it. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t interested. So, she turned them down. Then one day she was driving her to a restaurant and a check her car with the valet who was a woman. The woman didn’t know her and had never met her. She looked at my friend and said, “I see a special anointing on you. Honey, let God use you.” And my friend knew that this was the Spirit speaking to her, and she decided to take the position.

Sometimes we object to God’s timing. We say, “Not now, God. This isn’t the time for that. I’ve got too much going on. I’ve got bills to pay, mouths to feed, children to raise, appointments to take, a job to do, people to see, a life to live. I don’t have enough time or enough resources right now, and I just can’t do it.” But Mary disagrees. Mary knows that scarcity is a lie. Mary knows that with God, there is always enough. Mary knows that with God, all things are possible. Sometimes we need a word from Jesus’ mother, or our own mother, or our grandmother, or another person’s mother, or somebody like Mary who knows what it’s like to live on nothing, who's been through the fire and the flood, and who still believes in the power of transformation to get us moving.

Sometimes we need a push from someone like Mordecai, who told Esther, “Perhaps you have come to this position for such a time as this.” “And even if I should perish,” she replied, “I will go to the king”, because I know now is the right time. Sometimes we need a push from someone like Dr. King, who said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Sometimes we need a push from someone who rejects the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” and calls us to embrace the “fierce urgency of now.”

Sometimes we need a push from someone who believes that now is the time. Now is the time for compassion. Now is the time for mercy. Now is the time for grace. Now is the time for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Now is the time for generosity and solidarity. Now is the time for marching, protesting, advocating, organizing, and action. Now is the time for justice. Now is the time for equality! Now is the time for liberation.

And if you ask me why, I’ll tell you, “It’s because mama said so!” Mama Mary said, “God has scattered the arrogant in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things. God has sent the rich away empty.” And just like she said to her son 2000 years ago, she says the same thing to us today, “Now your time has come to do the same!

[i] Richard Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People, Trinity Press; Valley Forge, 1975.

What is faith? Jesus commanded us to have it and said that if we possessed an amount as small as a mustard seed, we could move mountains. We are told that it is impossible to please God without it or endure the trials and tribulations of this life without it. Paul said we need to learn how to walk by it and to live by it, and that our salvation depends upon it. The hymn we sang this morning said, “We’ve come this far by it.” George Michael famously sang, “I gotta have it.”

But what is faith? Do we know what we’re talking about when we talk about faith? The author of Hebrews provides one of the only definitions of faith in the Bible: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Yet even this familiar definition is based on a poor translation of the Greek, which actually says, “Faith is the foundation of things hoped for, and the revelation of things unseen.” What if faith is more about foundation than assurance, more about revelation than conviction? It turns out faith may not be as simple as it seems.

As a child, I thought that faith was believing God exists, even though there was no way to verify it, which meant that my faith in God was the same as my relationship to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Later, I thought faith was about accepting Jesus into my heart and believing that he was the ‘Son of God’ who rose from the dead, which also required praying all the time and never thinking about sex. Eventually, I thought faith was an intellectual assent to doctrine, dogma, and orthodoxy, which required believing all the right things about Jesus. Only later did I realize I was trapped in an elaborate system of control masquerading as Christianity and succumbing to the 2000-year-old problem of worshipping Christ instead of following Jesus.

When I was in seminary, my mind was blown when my New Testament professors, Richard Hays and Douglas Campbell, taught me the phrase “faith in Christ” or Pistis Christou, that appears countless times in the letters of Paul, should be translated as the “faithfulness of Christ”, and that Jesus’ faithfulness is not merely an object of belief, but a way of life that we are called to emulate. We are not justified by believing the right things about Jesus, but by participating in his faithful life. Faith should be understood in the context of the Roman virtue of pietas, less like belief and more like duty, loyalty, devotion, and fidelity. This moves faith away from a merely personal existential state and toward a relational and external commitment to follow Jesus’ life and teachings.

Then, seventeen years ago, my life was rocked again when my younger brother Andrew was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Even though he and I accepted Jesus on the same day at the same Acquire the Fire rally at Bojangles Colosseum, our minds would never believe the same things again. After his diagnosis, religion would be indistinguishable from a hallucination or delusion. Like many neurodivergent people, he’d never be able to intellectually assent to doctrine, dogma, orthodoxy, or the “right” beliefs. So, I realized if that’s what faith is, then my brother would be lost by no fault of his own—and I simply could not accept that theology.

So, I kept searching for the meaning of faith, and I stumbled across the Hebrew word emunah, which is the most common word for faith in the Hebrew Bible. And it has almost nothing to do with intellectual belief, but carries the deeper meaning of active trust, faithfulness, and steadfastness. Emunah implies a lived, action-oriented faith that functions as a verb, signifying unwavering reliance and loyalty. It is a word that means “faith in motion”—a total trust that is lived out every day. It is never something static that we possess, or simply believing in the existence of God, but about living faithful and trustworthy lives of devotion to God.

Eventually, the concept of emunah cracked open and gave birth to a liberative understanding of faith. Theologians like James Cone, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Delores Williams taught me to see faith as our embodied response to a liberating God who has a preferential option for the poor and who desires freedom and wholeness for all people. Liberating faith learns from people on the margins, whose backs are against the wall, and have the boot of the empire on their necks. It is not a neutral faith. It does not pretend to be apolitical. It takes sides in the face of injustice. It challenges systems of oppression. This faith is an active, concrete commitment to pursue justice for the crucified peoples of history in response to the liberating activity of the liberative God.

Recently, my faith was fleshed out even further when I heard Kelly Brown Douglas speak in Chicago last month at the Alliance of Baptists Gathering. She said, “We live at a time when all the old certainties have come unglued, in a culture of disorientation that is not incidental but intentional and rooted in ceaseless distraction, calculated chaos, and catastrophic cruelty.” And Douglas proclaimed that “in times like these, we must reclaim our freedom, which is the very freedom of God.”

She said, “We have a duty to be free. Freedom is a sacred trust, because to be free is what it means to be made in the image of a God who is free.” Then she began talking about her grandmother, who was born in slavery and died in slavery, and yet knew God in freedom. She told us, “the enslaved understood themselves as children of a God of freedom, and that reality gave them strength to resist systems that denied their humanity. Their faith in a free God gave them the ability to reject black inferiority and white supremacy, and to resist the evil system of plantation slavery even though they never saw emancipation in their lifetimes.”

Drawing on Black intellectuals like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, she proposed that we practice fugitivity. A fugitive faith that is embodied by those who live emancipated lives, even though they are not fully free. Her words were an answer to a prayer we’ve been praying as a community. We’ve been asking, “What does it mean to practice collective liberation in a world where not everyone is free?” We know, as Fannie Lou Hamer said, “Nobody is free until everybody is free,” but we also know we need to live into freedom right here and right now. Well, the concept of fugitivity gives us the ability to hold these two truths together.

While freedom is always incomplete, fugitivity is the insurgent refusal to accept unfreedom as normal. It is the refusal to accept the precariousness of life. It is the refusal to be defined by systems of domination. It is the audacious demand that we must resist the webs of unfreedom while living in unfree conditions. Fugitive faith, according to Douglas, requires working to repair the breach created by systems of oppression while at the same time working to close the gap between our present and God’s good future. Fugitivity is how we live in the already/but not yet, liminal, transitional, threshold space between liberation now and our liberative future.

As I looked at the great roll call of the faithful in Hebrews 11 and 12, I noticed they were all examples of fugitivity. Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, the writer of Hebrews says, “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. Not the place they came from and left behind, but “a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one.”

The same was true of Moses, who led the people out of Egypt, into the freedom of the wilderness, but died before he ever saw the promised land. And even though the author doesn’t mention Martin Luther King, we know that on the night before he died, he said, “God has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews, but we know it was a person of high standing and an apostolic teacher of equal rank to Timothy. Since the 1860s, scholars have argued that Hebrews was written by a woman named Priscilla, the evangelist and missionary partner of Paul, who hosted house churches in Rome, Corinth, and Ephesus, and was noted for training Apollos. The book was written as a letter to a community of Jewish Christians living in Rome who were experiencing extreme pressure, severe trials, and violent persecution. In fact, their suffering was so intense that many were tempted to abandon their faith in Jesus and return to the safety of traditional Judaism to avoid being crucified or worse.

So, the letter encourages the Hebrews struggling in the heart of the Roman empire to remain steadfast, to be resilient, to engage in patient endurance, and to practice perseverance in the face of suffering and persecution. We see this same call echoed in 1 Peter and Revelation. The task of the church in times of great suffering and persecution is to persevere—to survive, to thrive, to refuse to let our lives be determined by the forces of evil. In other words, to practice fugitivity. And I believe we could use this same kind of encouragement in the American empire today.

Why does the author commend Rahab, a prostitute from Jericho, for having faith? Because she literally harbored fugitives! That’s faith! And then Pricilla continues her roll call of the faithful by describing all the wild things the heroes and heroines of the faith did throughout their lives. She says, “By faith they conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.”

She’s not done! Pricilla continues, “Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented. They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground.” She says All these were commended for their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised.”

This means that according to the most definitive source on faith in the entire Bible, faith is not about what we think with our minds or even believe in our hearts. Faith is the power to persevere in the midst of all the trials and tribulations in life. It is the strength to live as a free and liberated human being in the midst of an unfree and oppressive world. Faith is fugitivity. It is not just physical escape, although it may include that at times when necessary. Faith is fugitivity as an ongoing, “constantly moving” refusal of the categories imposed by racial capitalism.[i]

Behrouz Boochani escaped from Iran and migrated to Australia, where he was arrested and detained for six years on Manus Island by Australian authorities. During his time there, Boochani practiced fugitivity by writing an award-winning book, No Friend but the Mountains, only using text messages and WhatsApp. It chronicles his acts of fugitivity in prison through humanizing stories about the men he was interned with, their mental health, and their resiliency, and challenging accepted stereotypes about refugees.

He wrote, “The prisoner constructs their identity against the concept of freedom. Their imagination is always preoccupied with the world beyond the fences, and in their mind, they form a picture of a world where people are free. At every moment their life is shaped by the notion of freedom. It’s a basic equation: a cage or freedom…[The] refugees held in Manus Prison have modified their perception and understanding of life, transformed their interpretation of existence, matured their notion of freedom. They have changed so much — they have transfigured into different beings …[All] of them are unique in their own special way; they have become distinctly creative humans; with unprecedented creative capacities.”

Fugitive faith is a practice of resistance—it is claiming our freedom even when freedom does not seem to exist, even when freedom is partial, even when freedom is barely a promise or a possibility. Fugitive faith is the active, creative, and collective resistance to oppressive systems through technologies of flight, evasion, and the creation of alternative realities. Is the ongoing, often daily act of escaping, evading, or resisting domination, not just a one-time escape, but the persistent, never-ending movement towards liberation, regardless of the circumstances. Fugitive faith is both daily acts of refusal and disengagement that challenge oppressive regimes while at the same time imagining, creating, and building alternative futures.[ii]

People practicing a fugitive faith were some of the first to recognize the connections between ICE and Border Patrol invasions of our cities and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that forced citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves and denied them any legal due process. When ICE and CBP agents invaded our cities, abducted our neighbors, harmed our families, destroyed communities, and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood, practitioners of a fugitive faith remembered that it has always been the case in America that to protect fugitives is to become a fugitive. To harbor fugitives is to become a fugitive! To care for fugitives is to become a fugitive! To love fugitives is to become a fugitive! So why not take the pejorative term the empire has heaped on us and turn it into a positive description of our way of life? Why not refuse to be classified or objectified by state power and define ourselves in solidarity with our neighbors—as fugitives?

We cannot allow the empire to define people as refugees, migrants, aliens, foreigners, immigrants, illegal, criminals, or any other ridiculous term they come up with to dehumanize our neighbors! Instead, we must say—we are all fugitives! We are all fugitives of empire, fugitives of colonialism, fugitives of whiteness, fugitives of capitalism, fugitives of patriarchy, fugitives of homophobia, fugitives of xenophobia, fugitives of ableism, fugitives of fascism, fugitives of white Christian nationalism, fugitives of American imperialism, fugitives of anything and everything that is trying to dehumanize and destroy our neighbors. Instead, we must describe ourselves as an international family of fugitives living lives of liberation and fighting for freedom, even if we never see it fully. In this way, being a fugitive is a unifying identity.

Alan Pelaez Lopez migrated from Mexico to the U.S. alone at the age of five. They eventually became an activist and an artist, and in their poetry collection Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, they write,

“we resist(ed) in quotidian ways because we knew: that we are more than papers and that this has a temporal end, that we are always already fragmenting and approaching. this receives its injuries when we hold the hands of our loved ones in public. this receives its injuries when we remember the taste of iguana stew and roasted grasshoppers resting on clay bowls. this receives its injuries when we refuse to forget our roots::routes. this receives its injuries when we dare to accept and give love. this receives its injuries when we fail and try again. this receives its injuries at the moment of engaging in creation. This receives its injuries when we choose to recognize one another instead of waiting for the law to recognize us.”

They say, “to survive fugitivity is to experiment with everyday forms of escape. to survive fugitivity is to hold joy, grief, anger, and pleasure all within the same hour. it’s not romantic. escape(/ing) tends to hurt, and more o$en than not, escape(/ing) is unrecognizable. to survive fugitivity is to lean on that which punctures the body, fragmenting the idea that the body is ours, which is to say, to survive fugitivity is to experiment with the (re)making, (re)shaping, and (re)imagining of our bodies each day. [now] ain’t that intergalactic?”[iii]

As the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved famously said, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” This is what it means to practice fugitivity—to engage in the hard work of claiming ownership of our freedom and learning how to live free and liberated lives in the midst of a world that is still hell-bent on our domination. We start by refusing to allow the empire to define us. You are not defined by our relationship to America, to whiteness, to colonialism, to patriarchy, or to empire—you are defined by your relationship to the God of liberation and to our friends in a fugitive faith.

So, we make fugitive music, we write fugitive poetry, we create fugitive art, we build fugitive communities, we lead fugitive worship, we engage in fugitive ministry until our lives end or liberation comes. We care for each other, we protect our neighbors, we keep us safe, we read together, we study together, we organize together, we march together, we advocate together. We give, we share, we feed, we clothe, we shelter, we love. We refuse the oppressive systems of empire, and at the same time, we create new ways of life and new forms of freedom. We become fugitives for Jesus. And we don’t give up. We keep on going. We continue. We endure. We persevere. We remain. We survive. We thrive. We strive. This is what it means to have a fugitive faith.

It is a faith that can sing…

I know that I can make it.

I know that I can stand.

No matter what may come my way.

My life is fugitive.

[i] Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Autonomedia, 2013.

[ii] Tina Campt, Listening to Images, Duke University Press, Durham: 2017

[iii] Alan Palaez Lopez, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, the operating system, 2020.

The most familiar word for these stone structures in the West is the Gaelic word “cairns,” which means “heap of stones.” In the Celtic tradition, cairns are ancient rock stacks with a profound spiritual history spanning thousands of years, serving as tombstones for the burial sites of the dead, markers for important ceremonial locations, altars for worship, ancient monuments, and memorials for significant sacred experiences. People built cairns after a vision quest, or after making it through sickness, hardship, grief, or reaching the summit of a mountain. Whenever something significant happened in their lives or the community, human beings throughout the ages would pile stones on top of one another in order to remember.

The thirty Algonquian-speaking nations, who were the original inhabitants of Canada and Northeastern America, built piles of stones to honor spirits, mark sacred spaces, and facilitate spiritual journeys. These sacred heaps of stones are called Manitou Hassennech[i], which can mean many things, including “spirit stones”, “stones of power”, “stones of prayer”, “stone beings”, and my favorite, “the gathering of the grandfathers.” Indigenous peoples believe these piles of stones are not lifeless memorials to the past but have the power to speak in the present. They prompt us to ask, “What are the stones saying?”

In the Hebrew Bible, these piles of stones are called “Galeed,” which means a “heap of testimony.” I love that term, don’t you? How many of us can say, “I have a heap of testimony?” Amen! These heaps of testimony tell the story of what we’ve been through and how God delivered us from the trials and tribulations of life. We should all probably have piles of stones all over our houses that we can point to and say, “This is one is where I recovered from surgery…this one is for when I lost my job…this one is for when I lost my father…this one is for the relationship that didn’t pan out…this one is for my children.”

Immediately after crossing the Jordan River, Joshua commanded the leaders of each of the tribes of Israel to take a large stone from the middle of the Jordan River, carry it over to the other side, and lay it down in a pile. This giant rock formation was to be a “perpetual memorial” of the day they miraculously crossed the Jordan for future generations. The stones were meant to be a reminder of God’s saving acts of deliverance and liberation. They would call the place “Gilgal,” which means “a circle of stones,” signifying that God had rolled away the shame and reproach of slavery in Egypt, and if you visit the Holy Land today, you can still see the stones.

I must admit, I’m not a fan of the book of Joshua because it has been the primary text that European empires have used throughout history to justify conquest, holy war, settler colonialism, resource extraction, along with the genocide and displacement of indigenous nations in Latin America, Africa, Australia, Canada, and the United States. In the words of Phyllis Trible, it has become a ‘text of terror’ and a book of horrors used by European Christian colonizers to legitimize the most violent acts of murder and destruction in human history.

In the 1950s, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, hosted a Bible study group at his home of Israeli intellectuals, politicians, and military generals that focused exclusively on the Book of Joshua, aiming to link the new state’s conquest and settlement policies directly to the Bible. They called themselves “The Joshua Generation”[ii] and envisioned the Israel Defense Forces as the modern successor to Joshua’s army enacting the ancient Israelite conquest of Canaan. This bible study group helped cement the Book of Joshua as the foundational text shaping modern Israeli identity and advanced the Zionist ideology that we see in Netanyahu’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon today.

The history of European settler colonialism is a stunning reminder of the catastrophic consequences of what scholars have called “eisegesis,” the process of using the Bible to justify our own lives, making the text say what we want it to say, and imposing our own ideologies and presuppositions onto scripture. If only David Ben-Gurion had read more than one book with his generals, he might have seen the ways the prophets would judge his genocidal reading.

Gilgal was not only a reminder of God’s deliverance from Egypt, but it was also the place where the Hebrew people celebrated their first Passover, the place where a new generation was circumcised to renew their covenant with God. For generations, it served as a primary site for sacrifice and worship. Over time, Gilgal became the base of operations for the conquest of Canaan, where the army returned between battles to recuperate, reorganize, and resupply. It was the place where Saul was anointed as Israel’s first king and established the monarchy, which did not please Samuel or God.

By the 8^th century, Gilgal was no longer seen as the place to remember God’s powerful act of liberation, but the center of idolatry, corruption, spiritual rebellion, broken covenants, and divine judgment. The prophets Amos and Hosea specifically linked Gilgal with the sins of the nation and declared that the spirit of Israel’s corruption was concentrated at that location. Amos warned the people not to go to Gilgal for any reason, especially not to worship, because their sacrifices would be rejected. Speaking on behalf of God, Hosea claimed, “Every evil of the people of Israel is in Gilgal; there I began to hate them.”

There’s a line from Joshua from the building of Gilgal that haunts the story of Israel. After the stones were piled in place to commemorate the exodus, Joshua said, “Remember God’s liberation so that you can answer your children in the future when they ask you, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ By the time of Amos and Hosea, no one could answer that question. The history of the Gilgal causes us to ask, “What happens when a people forgets the meaning of their stones?” “What happens when a people forgets their history?” “What happens when people can no longer remember who we are and whose we are?” “What happens when the stones of liberation become the stones of oppression?”

If we forget the meaning of our stones, we can become the very thing that we were liberated from. If we forget our story, we can be grafted into the story of empire. If we lose sight of where we’ve been, we can become Egypt, even though we were freed to become something completely different. If we forget where we’ve come from and what we’ve been through, we can forget about the one who brought us out of slavery and through the wilderness. If we forget about our liberation, we can easily forget about our Liberator.

After the Civil War, the Daughters of the Confederacy began working to establish monuments to Confederate soldiers, generals, and political leaders, aiming to instill a “veneration and love” for Confederate ancestors and frame the Civil War through the lens of the “Lost Cause” ideology. They built over 2000 monuments and 800 physical statues, honoring the Confederacy in public spaces. But what a lot of us forget is that these concrete statues and stone monuments were built “for the children of the South”, with the explicit purpose of shaping the minds of future generations.[iii]

The Daughters of the Confederacy sought to teach children ages 6-16 to reject the history being written by the North, downplay the brutality of slavery, view the South’s cause as righteous, see Confederate leaders and soldiers not as traitors, but as “noble and chivalric” heroes worthy of admiration, honor their Confederate dead, and maintain pride in their Southern heritage.[iv] They targeted children by inviting them to participate in monument unveilings, encouraging them to join children’s chapters, and ensuring these lies were in their school textbooks. The efforts solidified the ideology of white supremacy in the South for generations.

Like the descendants of Gilgal, they turned the rubble of liberation into the stones of oppression. “When your children come to you in the future and ask you, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ How will you answer?” Have you ever tried to explain a Confederate monument to a child? I remember being in Cape Town, South Africa, in October and walking through The Company’s Garden, a massive, important park in Central City. There are four statues there: Jan Smuts, Viscount Milner, George Grey, and Cecil Rhodes, all murderous colonizers and white supremacists. I asked myself, “Why are these still here? What do these stones mean?”

There are a lot of monuments to colonizers in Africa, and during the Global Anti-Racism Summit, I learned about a student protest movement that began at the University of Cape Town in 2015 called “Rhodes Must Fall”[v] that targeted a statue of the British imperialist on their campus. The movement evolved into a campaign to decolonize education, address institutional racism, and challenge colonial legacies. The students were successful, and Rhodes did fall in April of 2015.

The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement was partially responsible for inspiring the movement in America to remove Confederate monuments in the wake of the Charleston church massacre and the murder of George Floyd. More than 480 symbols of the confederacy have now been removed since 2015, because the children know exactly what those stones mean, and they don’t want anything to do with them! I’m reminded of Malcolm X’s famous line, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!”[vi]

A culture that exists only to perpetuate itself, and that desperately clings to vestiges of its former glory, is not a culture at all—it’s a cult. Perhaps you’ve heard the President is planning to construct a 250 ft. tall arch made of white stone near Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of American independence. Talk about turning stones of liberation into stones of oppression! He is calling it the “Arc de Trump”[vii] after the Arc de Triomphe in France, which I love because the one in France was commissioned by Napoleon, who ruled France for only ten years before he was defeated and sent into exile. If Napoleon can be defeated, then so can Donald Trump!

What will we tell our children when they ask us, “What do these stones mean?” I know what Jesus would say. He’d look at the “Arc de Trump”, the East wing of the White House, the border wall, and all of the Trump towers across America, and he’d say the same thing he said about the Temple in Mark 13, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; everyone will be thrown down.” Jesus had no love lost for dead stones, and as followers of Jesus, neither should we.

John told the pretentious Pharisees that God can raise up children of Abraham from stones. Jesus was tempted by the Devil to turn stones into bread. Stones were weapons of judgment used to threaten a woman accused of adultery, to silence the ministry of Jesus, to kill prophets, and to assassinate deacons like Stephen. Stones built walls of exclusion and segregation that shut other people out and deprived entire communities of access to the basic necessities of abundant life. Then there was the stone that was placed in front of the grave where Jesus was laid, signifying that his life was over and his movement of love and justice was dead. And we know what God did with that stone!

Stones, throughout the gospel, are symbols of lifelessness, violence, death, hopelessness, and imperial inevitability. And the question that animates the story of Easter and the story of the Easter Church is not only “What do these stones mean?”, but “Who will roll away the stone?” Who will roll away the stone of empire? Who will roll away the stone of violence? Who will roll away the stone of torture? Who will roll away the stone of humiliation? Who will roll away the stone of injustice? Who will roll away the stone of death? God will do it!

The God of liberation, who delivered the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, answered, “I will! I will send an angel down from heaven, I will roll away the stone from the tomb, I will tell the angel to sit down on top of it, I will show the Devil my backside, and I will take the stone of death and make it into a resurrection pulpit! I will transform the dead stones of empire into the living stones of a new world. I will take the stone the builders of the empire rejected, I will make it the cornerstone of a new kingdom. I will take the one they crucified, and I will make him into a rock of salvation and liberation. I will take his fickle followers, and I will make them into living stones—a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, my own people.”

As followers of Jesus don’t need to construct monuments or erect statues or raise arches or put up buildings, because we are the monuments! We are the statues! We are the arches! We are the building! We are the sanctuary! Because we are the living stones! Person by person and stone by stone, together we are being built into a spiritual house with Jesus as our cornerstone!

The stone that the builders of empire rejected, the stone that the colonizers rejected, the stone the slaveholders rejected, the stone the confederates rejected, the stone the fascists rejected, the stone America has rejected, the stone White Christian Nationalists have rejected, the stone that so many churches have rejected, has become the cornerstone. Jesus is our foundation, and we are the house built on top of a bedrock of peace, justice, love, life, and liberation.

When I started out as a pastor at my first church, there was a lot of pressure to grow the congregation. I didn’t feel comfortable praying for numerical growth. I thought that was selfish and unbiblical. So, I prayed, “God send us the people we need to make us into the church you want us to be.” God answered that prayer, and people who started showing up were recovering evangelicals—specifically gay and lesbian couples who’d been kicked out or ostracized by the church. It turns out that is exactly who we needed to revive our faith and revitalize our congregation. They blew new life into our old bones, and the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone!

The people of Israel forgot that their stones of Gilgal were a symbol of God’s liberation, not a monument to human violence, conquest, domination, and empire. Just like the people of Israel, we have forgotten the meaning of our stones. We build monuments, statues, and arches instead of giving food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless, healthcare to the sick, and love to the imprisoned. We build skyscrapers instead of sending money to the poor. We build Temples instead of solidarity with the suffering. We build cathedrals instead of a beloved community! We build institutions instead of the kingdom of God! Or worse, we build tombs for ourselves—the grave of tradition, the crypt of the status quo, the catacombs of fear.

We’re building with the wrong materials. We traded the rock of liberation for dead and lifeless stones. The church was never meant to be entombed in an edifice of static stones! We are called to smash all the idols! We are called to bring down the monuments to slavery, segregation, and genocide! We are called to tear down all the Temples of oppression and exploitation! We are called to destroy all the systems and structures of injustice! We don’t need those kinds of stones because we are living stones! We are breathing stones! We are rolling stones! We are crying stones! We are singing stones! We are dancing stones! We are marching stones! We are fighting stones! We are praying stones! We are loving stones!

Maybe you feel like you’re too different, maybe you feel like you’re too young or too old, maybe you feel like you’re too much or not enough. Maybe you feel like you don’t fit in. Maybe you feel like there’s no place for you in skyscrapers of this city, in the grand old institutions of this world, maybe you feel like you’re not ever going to see your name on a building or find yourself on a monument. Maybe you feel like you’re never going to be memorialized on a statue, or an arch in this country. Maybe you feel like the only stone that’s ever going to say your name is your tombstone. Guess what—that’s not true because God says you are a living stone!

You are a living stone! You’re a living statue! You’re a living monument! You’re a living memorial to God’s liberation! We are living stones! And we are part of a community of living stones! Peter says, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people; once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Even if you’ve been rejected from every structure in this world, God is taking the stones that the builders rejected and making us into the cornerstone of a new kingdom, a beloved community of peace, and an alternative nation to the violent empires of this world.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a living stone than a dead monument. I’d rather be a living stone than a lifeless statue. I’d rather be a living stone than an inanimate institution. I’d rather be a living stone than all the buildings, systems, and structures of this world. I’d rather be a living stone than just another brick in the empire. All we have to do to be living stones is offer our lives as a living sacrifice to God and to the world, and to give praise to the one who called us out of empire, the one who delivered us, the one who liberated us, the one who saved us, and the one who brought us out of the darkness and into the marvelous light.

So, rise up if you’re a living stone! Cry out if you’re a living stone! Speak up if you’re a living stone! Praise God if you’re a living stone! Remember that your life is a heap of testimony to the story of God’s liberation, remember that you are being built into a spiritual house of love and a kingdom of peace, and never forget that Jesus said, on these stones I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against thee!

[i] Herman E. Bender, “Manitou or Spirit Stones, Their Meanings and Link to the Native American Cultural Landscape in North America,” The Hanwakan Center for Prehistoric Astronomy, Cosmology and Cultural Landscape Studies, Inc., Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, 2014.

[ii] Rachel Havrelock, The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible, Princeton, NJ: 2020.

[iii] Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, UNC Press, Chapel Hill, 2021.

[iv] See also Ryan Andrew Newson’s theological reading on Confederate Monuments in Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption, Baylor University Press: Waco, 2020.

[v] Musawenkosi Cabe, “How Rhodes Must Fall Amplified Calls to Decolonize,” New Internationalist, August 21, 2023.

[vi] Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” speech at Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland Ohio, April 3, 1964.

[vii] Sareen Habeshian, “Trump’s victory arch design for US capital moves forward,” BBC, April 16, 2026.

It is getting harder to recognize Jesus in America today. We live in a nation where people claim to follow Jesus, but the Jesus they follow has no wounds. Instead of hands with nail scars, Jesus’ hands are covered in blood—the blood of Iranians, the blood of Palestinians, the blood of Venezuelans and Cubans, the blood of immigrants and transgender people. Their Jesus bears no marks of crucifixion because he is not the crucified but the crucifier. He is not the executed but the executioner. He is not the Roman victim, but the Roman soldier. This Jesus has no wounds because he is not the wounded, but the wounder.

The Jesus of Pete Hegseth and other White Christian Nationalists is not Jesus at all, but the Devil in disguise, and the reason we know this is because their Jesus has no wounds. And Jesus—if it is really Jesus—always bears the marks of Roman violence and oppression. The true Jesus, the authentic Jesus, the Jesus of history, the Jesus of faith, always has wounds.

Not just any wounds. These are not battle scars of military victory. They are not wounds that come of fighting in a holy war against the enemies of God, or engaging in a violent revolution, or taking up arms against the Roman Empire, or getting in scraps with the chief priests and scribes, or boxing the Pharisees and Sadducees, or wrestling with his own disciples. Jesus’ wounds are always the wounds of crucifixion, the wounds of imperial oppression and violence, the wounds of state-sponsored terror, the wounds that come as a direct consequence of living in solidarity with the poor and marginalized, and challenging unjust power structures.

In the gospel of John, the first thing Jesus did when he rose from the dead was to show the disciples his wounds. Throughout Western history, we’ve had wonderful artistic depictions of this event, like Caravaggio’s painting, but I don’t believe we’ve ever seen a realistic version. In every rendering, the wounds of Jesus appear like they’ve been cleaned and treated with antiseptic. All the blood and tissue have been tended to, leaving only neat, symmetrical holes with cauterized edges. This sanitizing is a product of the Western imagination and not the gospel, which gives us no indication that Jesus wounds were anything other than the mangled extremities of a man who was subjected to the most brutal form of lethal mutilation the empire had ever invented.

For generations, the church has understood Jesus’ wounds as proof of the resurrection and cast aspersions on poor Thomas for demanding to see his wounds as a failure to believe. Over the centuries, Thomas’ name has become synonymous with doubt and disbelief, which was considered to be a threat to our faith and a challenge to the church. Doubting Thomas, as he has so often been called, has become the scapegoat for doubt in a European Christian tradition obsessed with orthodoxy, consumed with controlling people, demanding assent to doctrine, and hellbent on requiring members to believe the “right things” as the only path to salvation.

On the other hand, Thomas also became the patron saint of cynics and the skeptics—the hero of the atheist and agnostic, who gives us permission to doubt and question not only the truth of the resurrection, but our fellow disciples as well. Some have even argued that it wasn’t Jesus that Thomas had a hard time believing in, but the testimony of his friends. Perhaps Thomas was the first to recognize what Gandhi made famous when he said, “I love your Christ, but I do not like your Christians, because they are so unlike your Christ.”

However, I believe both of these views of Thomas miss a more profound truth at the heart of this story. For starters, Thomas was no weak or fickle disciple. He was an extremely dedicated follower of Jesus. Back in John 11, when Jesus was planning to head back into the region of Judea, the disciples told him, “Why do you want to go back there again? Don’t you remember they just tried to stone you?” But Thomas spoke up and said, “Let us go with him that we might also die with him.” Thomas was a courageous and loyal disciple—a brave maverick who was ready not only to follow Jesus back into danger, but to die with him if necessary.

Thomas did not need a special sign to follow Jesus into danger or die, so why would he need proof to believe the resurrection? What if instead of doubting Thomas, we gave him the burden of proof? What if this story is not a foil of what not to do, but a model of what we should demand of each other when it comes to identifying the risen Jesus? Thomas’ faith might be a corrective to the Christo-fascism and white Christian nationalism that dominate this country and currently occupy the halls of the State Department and the Pentagon.

Instead of blindly believing every leader who says, “This is Jesus” or “That is Jesus,” Thomas teaches us to say, “That’s well and good. But unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe in your Jesus. Could the story of Thomas be meant to teach us how to recognize Jesus and distinguish him from all the Devils who come to us disguised as Jesus, asking for our loyalty and obedience?

Maybe the story of Thomas is meant to teach us how to say, “Don’t try to give me a Jesus with no wounds. I will not accept it. Don’t try to give me a Jesus with no scars. I will not receive it. Don’t try to give me a Jesus with no holes in his hands, his feet, or his side. I will not believe it. Don’t try to give me a Jesus who was not crucified. I will not tolerate it. Don’t try to give me a Jesus who was unscathed by the violence of the empire. I will not have it. Because that kind of Jesus can’t do anything for me or for our world.”

One of the reasons we look down on Thomas’ request for an encounter with the wounds of Jesus is because of John Calvin. In his interpretation of this story, Calvin claimed Jesus’ wounds were unnecessary, even superfluous, and argued that confiding in the word of God alone should be sufficient proof of the resurrection.[i] Calvin shamed Thomas for desiring to see the wounds of the risen Jesus, leading to an erasure and a denial of Jesus torture and execution by the empire. But Jesus’ wounds, and our wounds, cannot be reduced to a theological construct.

Jesus’ wounds are a text that is as holy as the gospel itself. They can be read like sacred scripture and can challenge misinterpretations of the Bible. They are a truth against which other truths must be measured. The fact that the risen Jesus continues to possess the wounds of his torture and execution is a bold and definitive statement that the resurrection does not deny or erase the horror of the Roman cross. It does not deny or erase the suffering of humanity, the violence of injustice, the brutality of empire, or the terror of the crucifixion. The risen Jesus constantly bears the wounds of the empire’s savagery as a testimony that speaks truth to power. God does not deny, or forget, or erase, or whitewash, or sentimentalize, or soothe, or sanitize the ruthless violence of the imperial state, but bears those wounds in order to heal them.

At the center of our faith is a prophet who rises from the dead bearing the wounds that were the result of challenging the forces of the empire. And the fact that they remain even after the resurrection is a final protest against the power of death by rejecting even the psychological evasion we use to make death more casual, ordinary, palatable, and place—the deeply human pathology of denial. How does that joke go, “Denial is not just a river in Egypt!”

We human beings love the denial. We are experts at denial. And we live in a country that was born in denial, bred in denial, and remains addicted to the practice of denial. America runs on denial, and we are structured for denial and formed deeply in the habit of denial, so much so that we do it without even knowing what we’re doing. I think of denial like a warm blanket—or an electric blanket—that protects us from the cold truth of reality and history. And whenever someone comes along and tries to rip the warm blanket of denial off of our bodies, we lash out at that person and try to kill them until we get our warm blanket back and crawl back underneath.

The wounds of the risen Jesus are a rejection of all forms of denial—all our attempts to stay under the warm blanket of comfort and self-delusion. We never encounter the risen Jesus without always being reminded of how he died. The wounded Jesus refuses to allow us to forget about the brutality of the empire or the suffering of the oppressed in our world. His wounds are a portal through which we can see the world through the eyes of God, who has a preferential option for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. Jesus wounds are a portal through which we can see and connect with the crucified peoples of history.

In Jesus’ wounds we can see the African ancestors who died in the middle passage, the indigenous nations destroyed by European conquest, the beautiful souls who were strung up on the lynching tree, people murdered in the streets by police or vigilantes, Venezuelan fisherman blown out of their boats, immigrants dying in detention centers, Palestinians killed in Gaza, and Iranians dying in an illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked war. If we look into Jesus’ wounds, we can see the wounds of our society that remain unhealed—the wounds of slavery, genocide, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, homophobia, and so many more.

The wounds of the risen Jesus are a dangerous memory[ii] that constantly serves to remind us that we cannot make wounds disappear by denying or ignoring them. Wounds cannot be healed by erasing or forgetting how they were created. The wounds in our lives, or our families, or our churches, or our societies, or our nations, or our world cannot be healed by pretending that they didn’t happen, forcing people to move on, or hoping they will go away.

The story of Thomas teaches us that healing always requires returning to the wounds, and witnessing the wounds, telling the truth about the wounds, testifying about the wounds, and telling the story of how they got there, and then tending to those wounds in ways that truly repair them. Not just bandaging the wounds or covering them up so they can’t be seen, but exposing them to the air, to the world, taking ownership of them, and acknowledging their existence. Resurrection is a form of reparations; it is a process that involves tending to the wounds of life and death in a way that leads not only to their healing, but to the birth of a new creation.

The South African theologian Allan Boesak was a preacher who rose to prominence as a leader in the anti-apartheid movement and was later imprisoned during the struggle. Once while preaching in America, Boesak told the story of a school principal from Soweto,[iii] a township in Johannesburg, where South African apartheid police opened fire on high school students protesting the Bantu education system. It was one of the worst tragedies of the apartheid era; nearly 700 children were killed, and another 4000 were injured.

Boesak said this school principal was considered a gentle fellow. He did not go to protests; he did not speak out, and he was not a controversial figure. Even though he was black, he had a lot of white friends in South Africa. They respected the principal because he did not come to their parties to talk politics. He avoided the subject entirely, which his white friends loved because it allowed them to continue living in denial like nothing was happening. They would often offer him warm platitudes like: “You’ve got to tell those children, ‘It’s alright.’ They need to be patient. Things will get better; you just have to give us some time.”

One day, out of nowhere, those white friends saw the school principal at a rally. He didn’t say anything, but he was sitting on the stage. Then, a few months later, they saw him again, this time he was speaking at the rally. Then, a few weeks later, they saw him again; this time, he was not only speaking at the rally but leading a march. So, his white friends confronted the principal and asked him: “What happened to you? We depended on you. We respected you. We loved you. Now look at you—you’re out here making the situation worse.”

And the school principal looked at his white friends and said, “You know what happened? I had a dream and a vision that one day I will die, and when I do, I will appear before the great judge in heaven. And as I’m being prepared for resurrection, the great judge will ask me: ‘Where are your wounds?’ And I will have to say, ‘I don’t have any.’ And, when I say [this], the great judge will look at me and say, ‘Was there nothing worth fighting for?’”

After finishing his story, Boesak addressed the congregation: “In the end, when life is over and the battles have been won and the children have died and the blood is no longer on the street…we will appear before whatever judge--either of our conscience or the judge in heaven--and we will be asked: ‘Where are your wounds?’ And if we have no wounds, the judge will ask us, “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” Then Boesak asked, “Church, where are your wounds?”

“As long as people are discriminated against,” he continued, “as long as people go to bed hungry, as long as people die from endless war, as long as this world is not a place that is safe for our children, there is always something worth fighting for. The wounds you get,” he said, “will be wounds that signify that you knew where to stand and who to stand with. And the One who will ask you about your wounds will not be me…it will be the one who appeared before Thomas and said, ‘Look at my hands and put your hand in my side.’ And I pray that we will have something to show. I hope we can be a church that can say, ‘Here are my wounds, here are the places where the empire wounded me, because I knew that there was something to fight for.’”

Friends, we not only need a wounded Jesus, but wounded disciples and a wounded church. The question before us today is not whether the tomb is empty, whether Jesus has risen from the dead, whether we believe in the resurrection, or whether we trust the testimony of our friends, but whether we follow a wounded Messiah or a counterfeit Christ—whether we follow a Jesus of the scars or a Devil in disguise. Will we follow the Jesus who stands with the crucified of the earth, whose body bears the violence of empire? Or will we follow a Jesus who blesses empire, who hides behind flags and power, who demands obedience but never suffers?

Thomas showed us the way. He testifies to us that the wounds are not only the witness, but the way. He teaches us that faith is not passive acceptance—it is courageous discernment—it is demanding an experience with the one who stands in solidarity with the crucified people of the world and not just a shiny, sentimental savior. Thomas shows us that we must engage in a holy refusal to believe in any Jesus who does not bear the marks of love in a violent world.

Whenever somebody tells us, “Look, here is Jesus,” Thomas teaches us to have the sacred audacity to say: “Show me the wounds.” Whenever somebody says, “I’m a follower of Jesus…” we must have the audacity to respond, “Show me the wounds.” Whenever somebody says, “God told me to do this…” we must have the audacity to respond, “Show me the wounds.”

We are living in a fascist empire, run by white Christian nationalists, engaged in a holy war. We do not need more blind belief, easy answers, comfortable religion, sentimental Sundays, or unwounded Messiahs, unscathed disciples, or unblemished churches. We need churches full of Thomases. We need churches full of people who refuse to settle for a woundless Christ. People who know that if there are no wounds, there is no resurrection. If there is no cross, there is no Christ. If there is no Friday, there is no Sunday. If there is no grave, there is no empty tomb.

The truth is this: if we truly follow the wounded Jesus, we will be wounded ourselves. Not because we seek suffering, but because we are trying to practice love, life, and liberation in a broken and violent world. And whenever we do that, it will always cost us something. If we tell the truth, we will be rejected. If we care for the poor, we will be persecuted. If we stand with the oppressed, we will be opposed. If we work for liberation, we will be lambasted. But the wounds we receive—they are sacred wounds that tell the truth about who we are and whose we are.

Our wounds will testify that we chose truth over denial, love over likability, solidarity over safety, justice over comfort, and community over empire. And one day—whether before the judge of heaven, the judge of Creation, or the quiet judge of our own conscience—when we are asked: Where are your wounds? We won’t have to say, “I don’t have any.” Instead, we will be able to say: “Here are the wounds I received from telling the truth. Here are the wounds I received from standing with the marginalized. Here are the wounds I received in fighting for the oppressed. Here are the wounds I received from welcoming the stranger. Here are the wounds I received from caring for widows, orphans, and foreigners. Here are the wounds I received from loving too deeply. Here are the wounds I received from following Jesus.”

In that moment, the wounded Christ will not look at us with judgment or shame, but with clear recognition, because our wounds will look like his. Because our wounds look like his wounds, that will be the evidence that we have not followed the devil in disguise, or the false messiah of white Christian nationalism, or the fake Jesus of fascism, or the counterfeit Christ of European colonialism, or the shiny, sentimental savior of evangelicalism. We will have followed the real Jesus—poor and rejected prophet from Nazareth—the crucified one who always bears the marks of the empire’s violence—the one who said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”—the one who carries the scars of the suffering of the world so that we will never forget that there is always—always—always something worth fighting for.

[i] Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma, Baylor Press: Waco, 2018.

[ii] Johann Baptist Metz, Faith and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, PublishDrive, 2007.

[iii] Allan Aubrey Boesak preached this story many times, including at the NEXT Church Annual Gathering in Atlanta in 2015. Some suggest Boesak is referencing a story by South African author Alan Paton (likely from a context related to his books Cry, the Beloved Country or the play Sponono). It is possible that Boesak adapted it to describe a “gentle,” non-political school principal in Soweto.

They were radical egalitarians who believed in the full equality of women, had women leaders, and believed God was both genders. The Shakers were abolitionists who believed in racial equality, took public stands against slavery, participated in the Underground Railroad, and welcomed Black members into their community (something completely unheard of at the time). They were also pacifists who rejected all forms of warfare, including the American Revolution, who practiced celibacy and communal living, and adopted orphaned children.

Shakers viewed dancing as the highest expression of joy and thankfulness, representing a victory over the powers of darkness. Worship was seen as labor, with intense, energetic dance movements designed to exhaust the flesh and mortify the body, helping the spirit overcome worldly desires, and unite individuals with the community and the divine. The purpose of their trembling and dancing was to “shake” off all sin and evil, and if you see the movie, you won’t believe that white people ever danced like that in worship.

One Shaker song goes, “The gospel is advancing, and freedom is commencing, with leaping and with dancing we’ll hail the Jubilee. The fire is increasing, the flame is never ceasing, I feel I am releasing, and now I will be free. The bands of sin are breaking, the devil’s kingdom shaking, and his foundation quaking because we will be free. But we will shout like thunder and fill the world with wonder, we’ll break our bands asunder, and then we will be free.”[i] The Shakers’ radical gospel, egalitarian community, and ecstatic dancing literally shook America.

What does shaking have to do with Easter? Well, like R.E.M.’s song It’s the End of the World as We Know it, the story of the resurrection in Matthew’s gospel starts with an earthquake. We are told that there was a great shaking of the earth when an angel of the Lord came and rolled away the stone. The quaking was so tremendous that Roman soldiers who had been sent to guard the tomb, “shook in fear and became like dead men.” The earthquake caused them to shake in their boots so hard they became scared stiff and could not move!

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that there was an earthquake. The prophet Haggai proclaimed, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all the nations, so that the desire of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with splendor.” There are many earthquakes throughout the Bible, and from various Psalms, to Numbers 16, to Amos 9, to Isaiah 24, to Ezekiel 38, to Habakkuk 3, they all announce the arrival of God’s judgment on an unjust empire. Earthquake symbolizes God’s displeasure with injustice, oppression, and evil. They are the ultimate moment of disruption, disorder, dismantling, and social and historical reorganization.

The Easter morning earthquake was God’s judgment on the crucifixion, the torture, the humiliation, the kangaroo trial, the conspiracy of the religious leaders, the bloodthirsty demands of the crowds, the irresponsibility of Pilate, on trite claims of ‘law and order”, on violence of King Herod, the corruption of Temple State, the blasphemy of Caesar, and the oppression of Roman Empire itself! Easter is God’s judgment on a Good Friday world. Easter is God’s verdict on all forms of crucifixion and all types of empire. Easter is God’s vindication of all those who have been unjustly arrested, tried, tortured, and murdered by the state.

As Ben Wildflower wrote this week, we do not serve “a law-and-order God. This is a God who leads a jailbreak. This is a coyote God, smuggling you across the border, breaking the rules and regulations to deliver you to the promised land. This is a God who knows, in his body, what it is to suffer under the hellish forces of nations that gloat as they massacre the innocent [all over the world, and this God [has come to shake it all up and] to burn it all down.”[ii]

The Greek word for earthquake is σεισμὸς, “seismos”, which is where we get the word seismic, as well as a helpful figure of speech that marks precisely what this moment in history is: a “seismic shift”. The resurrection of Jesus was nothing less than a groundbreaking, earthshaking, seismic shift that changed everything! In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve only episodically, but through “irrational events” and “paradigm shifts” like the Copernican Revolution that turn everything upside down on its head and introduce a completely new way of seeing the world.[iii] He could have been talking about the resurrection, which was most definitely a revolution.

What does it mean if the dead don’t stay dead? What does it mean if the graves can’t hold our bodies down? What does it mean if people get up? What does it mean if the worst that the empire could do did not keep Jesus in the ground? What does it mean if God is more powerful than Rome? What does it mean if love is more powerful than death? What does it mean if crucifixion is not the last chapter? What does it mean if death is not the last word?

What does it mean if oppression is overturned, unjust convictions are expunged, illegal murders are overruled, and innocent victims are vindicated? What does it mean if the ones who suffer are sanctified? What does it mean if the condemned are consecrated? What does it mean if the tortured are triumphant? What does it mean if the executed are exalted? What does it mean if the tombs are open? What does it mean if the crucified come back to life? What does it mean if the radicals are risen and revolutionaries are resurrected? What does it mean if dead prophets from Nazareth wake up and walk back out into the world?

When the Nazi’s rose to power in Germany, a Jesuit priest and philosopher named Alfred Delp became an outspoken critic of the fascist regime and a leader in the Catholic resistance. He was a part of a clandestine group called the “Kreisau Circle,” which led him to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Berlin, before being executed. Even though his hands were in shackles, before he died, Delp found a way to write on tiny slips of paper and smuggled out notes to his congregation in Munich.

He wrote, “There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken…The world today needs people who have been shaken by ultimate calamities and emerge from them with the awareness that those who look to the Lord will still be preserved, even if they are hounded from the Earth. [Fascism] has already rent our souls, destroyed our people, laid waste to our land and cities; it has already caused our generation to bleed to death. [Yet] even in times of shaking or quaking, certainty rises. Our souls remember the song, and with the joy of the Lord, we sing once again ‘Alleluia!’ [And] the voice of such a person is not so easily silenced.”[iv]

After the war, theologian Paul Tillich wrote a book titled Shaking the Foundations, where he contended that when current events are so staggeringly disorienting that it seems as if the very earth is tilting off its axis, an existential crisis occurs. We experience the crumbling of the institutions we once trusted as well as our personal and social securities, which forces us into a confrontation with eternity and ultimate meaning. Tillich called this “the shaking”, and wrote, “The world is shaking morally, and in the minds of people; what the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah described... is happening now”.[v] But the shaking, for Tillich, was not merely destructive, but necessary. It was God breaking the false foundations of the world to reveal the ‘rock of eternity’.

Tillich’s reflections echo the book of Hebrews 12, where the author claims the purpose of an earthquake is to dislodge oppression and evil and “to remove what is shaken so that what cannot be shaken remains—the unshakable kingdom of God. The earthquake of the resurrection was about shaking up the world as we know it until we can see the difference between what is shakable and what is unshakable, what is temporary and what is everlasting, what is earthly and what is divine, what is finite and what is eternal. However, the goal is for us not only to see the difference, but to remove what is shakable and to cling to what is unshakable, to detach from what is earthly and cling to what is divine until we’re able to sing, “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling!” “On Christ the solid rock I stand! All other ground is sinking sand!”

The earthquake of Easter came to shake up the soldiers, to shake up the Roman empire, to shake up the Temple state, to shake up the religious authorities, to shake up the status quo, to shake up the institutions, to shake up injustice, to shake up poverty, to shake up greed. The earthquake of Easter continues to shake up our world today—to shake up patriarchy, to shake up whiteness, to shake up homophobia, to shake up xenophobia, to shake up indifference, to shake up oppression, to shake up exploitation, to shake up crucifixion, to shake up domination, to shake up intimidation. The earthquake of Easter comes to shake up everything that is inhibiting the flourishing of humanity or Creation until there is nothing left but the kingdom of God.

During Lent, we read Resmaa Menakem’s book The Quaking of America, which argues the U.S. is currently experiencing a period of intense instability driven by far-right fascism, Christian nationalism, “white-body supremacy”, and the threat of political violence. Resmaa calls the sociopolitical climate in America “the Quaking” and claims the crisis is not just political, in but somatic—a collective trauma response embedded that is not just happening out there somewhere, but it is literally happening in our bodies, and he urges us to engage body-centered practices to settle our nervous systems, resist violence, and work to build a “living, embodied, anti-racist culture.”[vi]

Now Lent is over. Good Friday is gone. Holy Saturday has ended, and I’ve been looking at Resmaa’s Quaking in light of Easter, and I’m beginning to wonder: what if the quaking has to come before the rising? What if the earthquake has to come before the resurrection? What if the shaking has to come before the standing? What if the seismic shift has to come before the cosmic lift? What if tremors have to come before our transformation? What if convulsions have to come before our conversion? What if rumbling has to come before our revolution? What if gyration has to come before our liberation? What if everything in our lives and our world has to be shaken up before we can experience the power of a new creation?

If that’s true, then we must learn how to welcome the earthquake of Easter. Easter marks an event of world-changing consequence, of cataclysmic significance, of seismic change. The earthquake of the resurrection not only opened the tomb, but it also opened our lives, our future. It opened our dwindling hopes, our grieving hearts, our colonized minds, our closed-off bodies. And it opened our breathless lungs so that we could sing “Hallelujah” again!

One Sunday at St. George’s Cathedral in South Africa, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the rector, the members of the notorious Special Branch of the South African Security Police force broke into the church, wielding weapons to intimidate the people and to record Bishop Tutu’s sermon, hoping to incriminate him. In the middle of preaching, Tutu stopped and looked directly at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral and met their eyes with his in a steely gaze. Then he said, “You are powerful, very powerful, but I serve a higher power. I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”

Then, in an extraordinary challenge to political tyranny, the bishop turned to the security police, with a smile on his face and said, “Since you’ve already lost, I welcome you to come and join the winning side!” There was an enticing warmth in his invitation, but also a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power, from people cowering in fear into a people filled with the courage of the resurrection.

The soldiers surrounding the cathedral that day greatly outnumbered the congregation, but the people literally leaped to their feet and started shouting praises to God, singing “Hallelujah” and dancing. They danced right out of the cathedral onto the streets of Cape Town, straight into the security police stationed outside, who did not expect a confrontation with dancing worshippers. Not knowing what to do, the soldiers retreated to create space for the people to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.[vii] It was an earthquake against apartheid, and it was only possible because the people believed that life was more powerful than death.

Everybody was shaken on the first Easter morning, except the women—the two Marys who set out at dawn on the first day of the week to look at the tomb. The soldiers were shaken, the empire was shaken, the stones were shaken, the earth itself was shaken—but not the women. Sure, they were afraid—who wouldn’t be! But they were not petrified or immobilized by the earthquake, or the stone rolled away, or the empty tomb, or the angel of lighting, or by the news that Jesus was risen from the dead. They did not shrink before the moment. No, the overwhelming emotion they felt was not fear but great joy. Their joy was more powerful than their fear, and their joy is what emboldened them to become the first witnesses of the risen Jesus, the first evangelists of the word, and the first preachers to share the good news of resurrection.

There’s an old saying that goes, “We are Easter people, and ‘Alleluia!’ is our song!” Well, if we are Easter people and Easter was an earthquake, then that means that we are the earthquake! Like the women, we are sent out from the grave to shake up the world with the good news that Jesus is not dead—he has risen! We are sent out from the grave to shake up the world with the good news that oppression is not the last word, domination is not the last word, occupation is not the last word, crucifixion is not the last word, destruction is not the last word, hatred is not the last word, violence is not the last word, war is not the last word, death is not the last word—love is the last word! Life is the last word! Liberation is the last word! Resurrection is the last word!

“What can separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul asked, “Will affliction, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced,” He proclaimed, “that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We have good news today! Love has conquered death! Life is eternal! Liberation is ours for the taking! The future is open! Hope is everlasting! Joy has come in the morning!

So don’t domesticate Easter. Don’t cover it with a candy coating! Don’t drench it in chocolate! Don’t smother it with sugar! Don’t make it fluffy like a marshmallow! Remember that Easter is an earthquake! Easter is an earthquake that shifts the ground under our feet, that disrupts the world, that turns life upside down and inside out, and shakes down everything that is unjust and evil so that we can build a new world on the rock of ages, cleft for me!

We are Easter people! We are earthquake people, and Hallelujah is our song. So, we will keep on singing, “Hallelujah! The world is shaking!’ “Hallelujah! The stone is rolled away!” “Hallelujah! The tomb is empty!” “Hallelujah! Christ is risen!” “Hallelujah! Joy has come!” “Hallelujah! Death has been conquered!” Hallelujah! Love has won!” “Hallelujah! Liberation has arrived!” “Hallelujah! The Kingdom is here!”

[i] Kevin Siegfried, “Jubilee,” Traditional Shaker, South Union, Kentucky, Siegfried Publishing #007-13, 1997.

[ii] Ben Wildflower, “Christ the Excarcerator,” Sojourners, April 2, 2026.

[iii] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962.

[iv] Alfred Delp, The Prison Meditations, 1941-1944. Translated by Abtei St. Walburg. Ignatius Press, 2006.

[v] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.

[vi] Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning, Central Recovery Press, Las Vegas: 2022.

[vii] Jim Wallis, God’s Politics, Harper, San Francisco: 2005.

What does it mean to celebrate Palm Sunday at a time like this? On Saturday, February 28, the United States began an illegal, immoral, and unprovoked war on the nation of Iran in a joint operation with Israel. Over the next three days, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was “inundated” with more than 200 calls across dozens of military installations, including 110 complaints from enlisted soldiers and officers reporting that their commanders invoked the extreme rhetoric of Christian apocalyptic prophecy to justify the war on Iran. At least a dozen fanatical U.S. military commanders told their troops that the war is a messianic battle to bring about Jesus’ return. One commander went so far as to tell his unit, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark Jesus’ return to Earth.”[i]

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that the current Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, describes himself as an ardent Christian Nationalist who idolizes religious violence and even published a book defending the Crusades. He believes we are engaged in a Christian holy war and has started holding regular prayer services at the Pentagon (yes, you heard that right). This past Wednesday, Hegseth held his first prayer service since the beginning of the war, and after quoting from Psalm 18, which thanks God for pulverizing our enemies into dust and trampling them like mud in the streets, Hegseth offered this barbaric prayer:

“Almighty God who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle…snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate their wicked plans and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish, let their bowels go down to slaughter. Pour out your wrath on those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind. Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence…make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation…Give them overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy…that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them…We ask this in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings. Amen.”[ii]

Hegseth’s prayer bears a striking resemblance to Mark Twain’s satirical “War Prayer,” penned over 100 years ago as a scathing indictment of war and the blind patriotic religious fervor that often serves as its motivation. Twain sarcastically begins, “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead..” and concludes with, “We ask this in the spirit of love, of him who is the Source of Love, the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all. Amen.”[iii]

We are living in a monstrous eschatological nightmare that Naomi Klien and Astra Taylor call “End Times Fascism.” While the fascism of the 30s and 40s always had an “Armageddon complex”—a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a final grand battle, it also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral, and purified. Not today. Klein and Taylor argue, “The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.”[iv]

You don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end-times fascist. Plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, where the world collapses under, and a chosen few survive in various kinds of arks, bunkers, and gated ‘freedom cities. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are traitors to humanity, traitors to Creation, and traitors to God.

How are we supposed to respond to end times fascism? Klein and Taylor contend that we must learn how to “counter these apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”[v]

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is one of those stories. This is the story of Jesus’ most biting critique of violence, war, military power, triumph, victory, and empire. This is the story of Jesus’ most unflinching rejection of economic, religious, and political domination. This story is Jesus’ most radical denunciation of all the systems and structures of oppression and injustice. This is the story of Jesus’ most authoritative condemnation of white Christian nationalism and end-times fascism. This is the story of Jesus’ most lucid summary of his life and teachings. And this is the story that led to Jesus being arrested, imprisoned, and killed.

It happened during the festival of Passover, the Jewish Independence Day, a festival of freedom, commemorating their deliverance from Egypt. Dreams of liberation were swirling in the minds of millions of pilgrims who traveled to the holy city of Jerusalem for the celebration. Over the centuries, pastors and scholars have developed a variety of ways to interpret this story.

Some focus on the careful preparations Jesus sent his disciples to make, revealing a well-planned, thought-out, and intentional activity.

Some focus on the donkey as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Zechariah 9, where it states, “Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and riding on a donkey.”

Some focus on the cloaks spread out on the road by the crowds as an allusion to 2 Kings 9, where military commanders laid down their cloaks, crowning Jehu as king.

Some focus on the palm branches as symbols of victory that reenact the parade thrown for Simon Maccabeus when he entered the city of Jerusalem after the Maccabean revolution.

Some focus on the persistent cries of “Hosanna” from the crowds, recalling Psalm 118 and how the word “Hosanna” means “Save us now!”, “Deliver us now!”, “Liberate us now!” from the corruption of Temple State and the brutality of Roman occupation.

Some focus on how the fickleness of the crowds, whose misplaced hopes in a militant messiah who would fight the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel, led to their disillusionment.

Some focus on the fact that the very same people who shout “Hosanna” on Sunday, shout “Crucify him!” on Friday, and the painful reality that if we were in Jerusalem that weekend, we might have been one of them.

Some focus on the stark contrast of the two parades that took place on Passover—Jesus’ entry on a donkey through the East gate and Pontius Pilate’s entry on a war horse through the West gate, symbolizing a clash between the kingdom of God and the Roman empire.[vi]

Some focus on the idea that this was not a procession, a parade, or even a triumphal entry, but a political protest and a subversive form of choreographed street theatre meant to lampoon the principalities and the powers.[vii]

Some focus on turning over the tables of the money changers, the driving out of those buying and selling as a powerful and seditious act of civil disobedience that interrupted commerce and disrupted the economic engine that fueled the Temple state.

Some will focus on how Jesus’ actions were not a “cleansing of the Temple” or a call for “reform,” but a righteous demand for total abolition of the Temple state and the building of a completely new reality in its place.

Some even focus on how Jesus’ protest was a full-throated rejection of the temptations of economic, religious, and political power offered by the Devil in the wilderness—temptations that European and American Christianity have too often succumbed to.

Palm Sunday invites us to ask, “Why are we still sitting at the tables Jesus overturned? Why are we still protecting systems that Jesus came to dismantle?” The story of Palm Sunday overturns the table of white Christian nationalism, it overturns the table of end times fascism, it overturns the table of empire, and it overturns the tables of violence, injustice, oppression, and premature death and destruction that our world has become obsessed with—and it calls us to be the kind of people who do everything in our power to overturn these tables as well.

But there is a devastating reality at the heart of this story: it did not work, at least not immediately. Jesus was unsuccessful. His well-planned journey into the city, his humble entry on a donkey, his parody parade of Pilate, his choreographed street theatre, his shutdown of Wall Street, his rejection of economic, religious, and political temptation, his abolition of the Temple state, and his challenge to Roman occupation were all failures. He was betrayed, arrested, abandoned, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, humiliated, and crucified. This tragedy is enough to make us all ask, “Why did he do all this? What was it all for? What was the point?” In fact, many of the disciples asked this very question and walked away, determined that it was all pointless.

The point is not obvious when we are trapped inside a European Christian colonial imagination. We need people who have their backs to the wall, a boot on their necks, and the full weight of the empire bearing down on their lives to help us open our minds. We need oppressed people to provoke a jailbreak of our imaginations so we can understand the true meaning of Palm Sunday.

In his book, Freedom Dreams, Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “Too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their vision rather than on the merits or power of the vision themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that continue to inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.”[viii]

Kelley goes on to say, “Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us. Struggle is par for the course when our dreams go into action. But unless we have the space to imagine and a vision of what it means fully to realize our humanity, all the protests and demonstrations in the world won’t bring about our liberation.”[ix]

The catalyst for political engagement has never been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movements because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one we inherited. The dream of another reality is what galvanizes us for political engagement. This is why love and imagination may be the most revolutionary impulses we have, because they inspire hope and change. As artist aja monet writes, “The capacity to dream, to cultivate and facilitate the collective as self-determined visionaries, is how we demand the alternative.”[x]

That is why we need a collective imagination that conjures visions of liberation even in the bleakest moments. In fact, difficult times are often when the most powerful dreams appear. We need freedom dreams to combat fascist nightmares, because the only way to ensure our survival is to envision a radically different future for ourselves and for all people. In the words of the revolutionary poet Jayne Cortez, we are trying to envision “somewhere in advance of nowhere.”[xi]

That’s what Jesus was doing during, on the most important holy day of the year, when he rode into the city of Jerusalem and turned over the tables—he was envisioning a new future in the nowhere of empire, in the nowhere of occupation, in the nowhere of oppression, in the nowhere of religious exploitation, in the nowhere of poverty, in the nowhere of sickness, in the nowhere of death. Contrary to the theology of white Christian nationalists and end-times fascists, whose vision of the future is nothing but war, violence, destruction, apocalypse, death, and forced conversion, Jesus envisioned a future of peace, healing, justice, equity, abundance, love, life, and liberation.

His trip to Jerusalem was never about the donkey, the cloaks, the Palm branches, the tables of the money changers, or the seats of those selling doves. It was always about giving the people hope! Like Harvey Milk and James Baldwin, Jesus believed that we have to give people hope, and that requires stimulating their imaginations, inspiring them to dream, and casting a vision of a future that is different than the nightmare of the present. On the day when his people were remembering God’s great act of liberation from the empire of Egypt, Jesus conjured a new dream of freedom, a new vision for the future that gave people hope they could hold on and continue working together with God to transform the world they lived in into the kingdom.

When Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers and quoted from Jeremiah, saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves,” it wasn’t because he wanted people to bow their heads in prayer. When we separate these words from those leading up to them, we miss what everyone in the Temple would have known. Jeremiah 7, also says, “For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood, and if you do not go after other gods to your own demise, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever.”

Jesus was casting a vision of a new Temple and a new society where everyone was included, a new community where the last are first and the least are greatest, a new religion where no one is exploited, a new form of worship that is filled with justice, a new city that does not oppress the alien, orphan, or widow, a new foreign policy that does not shed innocent blood, a new economy that does not worship the idol of mammon or bow down at the golden calf of capitalism, and a new form of life where there is peace with God and between all people.

He called his vision the Jubilee and the kingdom of God. Paul called it the new creation and the new humanity. Dr. King called it the beloved community. Indigenous nations call it the way of harmony. The Jewish people call it shalom. Many activists today call it abolition. Here, we call it collective liberation. No matter what you call it, it is the vision of a world where oppression has been eliminated, and a dream of freedom has become a reality for everyone.

Matthew’s gospel has a small foretaste of this vision that the other gospels do not. He tells us that after Jesus quoted the prophet Jeremiah, the blind and the disabled came to him in the temple, and he healed them. This might not seem like much, unless you know that the sick and disabled were not allowed in the Temple. People with disabilities were prohibited from entering the inner courts of the temple because of purity laws and were restricted to the outer areas with the Gentiles.

Tables are not the only thing Jesus overturned—he overturned centuries of religious bigotry and exclusion. Jesus broke down the dividing wall that was literally segregating the poor, sick, and disabled. He brought the outsiders in, centered the marginalized, and healed them.

Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem for his disciples, or the crowds, or the religious leaders. Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the disabled, and the oppressed. Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the battered and the bruised, the broken down and the beaten. Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the hungry, the hurting, and the heartbroken. Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the thirsty, the homeless, and the imprisoned. Jesus rode into Jerusalem for every single person in this world. And Jesus rode into Jerusalem for you; he rode in for me, and he did not do it to win, or triumph, claim victory like the empire. He did it to give us hope and to spark our imaginations that another world is possible—another world is always possible.

The most cynical thing we can believe is that the world is inevitable, immutable, irreversible, or indestructible. But the Devil is a liar, and that is a lie! And we must resist this lie with every ounce and fiber of our being. Jesus rejected that lie! And he told us to reject it as well. His primary message was “repent” or change, which means change is always possible, not just for individuals but for structures, systems, organizations, institutions, and nations. And if change is possible, then hope is possible because a new beginning is possible and a whole new world is in our reach.

That’s why, two thousand years later, we are still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe hate is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe injustice is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe violence is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe war is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe oppression is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe the empire is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe Rome is not inevitable and America is not inevitable. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we believe the only thing that is inevitable is God and God’s kingdom. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.

Passover was a freedom dream. Palm Sunday is a freedom dream. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we want freedom dreams instead of fascist nightmares. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we prefer Jesus’ vision over the fatalistic future of white Christian nationalists and end times fascists. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we’re trying to make a somewhere out of nowhere. We’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we know you can kill a man, but you can’t kill a dream. You can execute a man, but you can’t execute a dream. You can even crucify a man, but you can’t crucify a dream. So, we’re still shouting “Hosanna!” because we still believe in Jesus’ dream of freedom, justice, and liberation, and we’re not going to stop shouting “Hosanna” until the dream becomes a reality.

[i] Natasha Lennard, “Military Leaders See Iran War as ‘God’s Divine Plan’”, The Intercept, March 5, 2026.

[ii] Rachel Leingang, “Hegseth prays at Pentagon service for ‘overwhelming violence’ against enemies,” The Guardian, March 26, 2025.

[iii] Mark Twain, “The War Prayer,” Europe and Elsewhere, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper & Brothers, 1923, pp. 396–399.

[iv] Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem, Harper Collins: San Francisco, 2006.

[vii] Ched Myers, “Palm Sunday as Subversive Street Theatre,” Radical Discipleship, March 26, 2021.

[viii] Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination 20th Anniversary ed., Beacon Press, 2022.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Jayne Cortez, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, Serpent’s Tail/High Risk Books, 1996.

What do we owe our children, biblically? Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me; do not hinder them; for it is such as these that the kingdom belongs.” These words conjure sentimental scenes from Children’s Bibles in Sunday School, that taught us to see Jesus like a first-century Santa Claus, inviting children to come sit on his knee, or Mr. Rogers, telling provincial stories to kids. However, these portraits often obscure an important reality.

In the ancient world, Children were the bottom rung of the social ladder. In Jesus’ days, infant mortality rates reached 30 percent, 50 percent by age 10, and 60 percent by age 16. Children were considered the property of the head of the household, barely above servants or slaves. Even if they were part of prominent, wealthy families of high social status, children were disregarded and treated as barely human until they were well into adulthood.

Even more startling, the Greek word for “children” used in this passage is not the common word for “child” or teknon, which means an heir or offspring who belonged to someone and was part of a household. Instead, the word here is paidion, a rare term that does not refer to a familial relationship, but the age of a person, specifically seven years old or younger.

Paidion is based on the root word pais, which means “slave” or “servant.” And this reveals a lot about the way people in the first century thought about children, as well as how revolutionary Jesus’ life and teachings truly were. A paidion was not an heir or child of any particular household, as scholar Andries van Aarde argues; therefore, the most accurate translation is not “children,” but “street children,” or “orphans,” which really changes how we hear Jesus’ words.[ii]

“Then he took a poor little street child and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such street child welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.’” “Let the poor little street children come to me; do not stop them. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a poor little street child will never enter it.’” It was remarkable that Jesus drew attention to children at all, but it would have been shocking for a person in the first century to hear Jesus instruct his followers to welcome and uphold children as models of his social program and as the rightful heirs of the kingdom.

Why did Jesus offer children as such a stark illustration of the kindom? It came as a response to the disciples’ question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” A question that makes it clear they’ve totally missed the point. Jesus consistently spoke in terms of faithfulness, not greatness. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be great, or our children to be great, embedded in that desire is one of the temptations Jesus resisted in the wilderness—the temptation to embrace greatness as an ontological principle. And it is the primary temptation that has overwhelmed the Western Church for the last 2000 years.

Throughout Western Christian history, greatness has mutated into supremacy. Christians pridefully said, “I am great because I’m a Christian, because I’m a man, because I’m European, because I’m wealthy, because I’m able-bodied, because I’m cisgender, because I’m heterosexual, because I’m American, because I’m white,” and “I am great,” became, “I am better.” Oh, you didn’t know supremacy was in the Bible? It’s all over the place—toxic interpretations of chosen-ness and election rooted in blood, heredity, family, ethnicity, tribe, religion, rank, title, or status are ancient forms of supremacy. And one of the forms of supremacy that we don’t talk enough about is adult supremacy.

2000 years after Jesus, and children are still the most vulnerable and overlooked in our society. Pearl S. Buck argued, “the moral test of any civilization lies in how it cares for its helpless members.”[iii] Detrich Bonhoeffer said, the ultimate test of moral responsibility is the kind of world we leave to our children.”[iv] If this is true, then we have failed miserably and are living in one of the most morally bankrupt civilizations in history. We treat our children today no better than they did in the first century! In fact, there is a war on children in our world today.

Our greed and indifference have caused an environmental crisis, and we are leaving our children on a hostile planet with humanity on the brink of extinction. Meanwhile, our government funded the genocide of 20,000 children in Gaza. 4 million children have been displaced by the war in Sudan and are facing famine, disease, and death. Our nation started an unprovoked, illegal, immoral, and unjust war with Iran, whose first casualties were 175 elementary school girls. And we know there will be many more because war always causes the death of innocent children.

Immigrant children all over our country, like 5-year-old Liam Ramos, pictured in his blue hat, have been terrorized, abducted, separated from their families, and detained in concentration camps. 11 million children in the United States are living in poverty, and Trump’s ‘Big Ugly Bill’ will significantly increase that number over the next five years as it cuts SNAP benefits for another 16 million children.

In addition, the number one cause of death among children today is gun violence. Not poisoning, cancer, or motor vehicle accidents, but guns—a totally preventable problem! Yet our political leaders seem to be totally impotent and unwilling to address this horrific reality. As the British journalist Dan Hodges wrote, “Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”[v]

It’s no surprise that we are banning books in schools, outlawing DEI and CRT, and defunding public education. We don’t want our children to learn the truth about American history because we are afraid they might learn that the constant poverty, terror, violence, and premature death they’ve been subjected to are a result of the greedy choices made by adults in the generations that came before them. This is one of the ways the Bible is right when it says, “children are often made to suffer for the sins of their parents” (Exodus 20:5).

Regrettably, the church has not been a safe refuge of protection for children in this violent and oppressive world. There has been an epidemic of child sex abuse in the Catholic and Evangelical churches, and in both cases, it was covered up to protect the abusers. On top of that, children who weren’t the victims of physical abuse have been subjected to spiritual and emotional abuse from a toxic theology that poisons their minds with a colonized version of Christianity, rooted in patriarchy, capitalism, and whiteness, that uses religion to control children instead of loving them forward on a journey toward liberation.

When I pastored in DC, the evangelicals were zealous about the International Justice Mission, an agency dedicated to the “abolition” of sex slavery around the world. It is part of a crusade, over the last twenty years, among conservative Christians to eliminate sex trafficking around the world. It’s sad that even when some evangelicals tried to broaden their concern beyond abortion and homosexuality, they remained obsessed with sex. And rather presumptuously, they called the churches that partnered with the IJM “Justice churches,” which drove me crazy.

Today, the International Justice Mission has a 130-million-dollar budget,[vi] and is supported by people who overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections. Back in the early 2000’s, my critique was that they were too focused on child trafficking in other countries and not enough on the US. Little did we know that while they were pursuing a crusade on sex-trafficking in Asia and the Global South, one of the largest child sex-trafficking rings in history was happening right under their noses by Jeffrey Epstein!

The evangelical movement’s moral inconsistency and abject hypocrisy are now more visible today than ever, as those who described themselves as the most committed to sexual morality and family values continue to support a President who has not only been personally charged with sexual assault, but is also deeply connected to the reprehensible pedophile sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. The irony of evangelical morality is almost too unbelievable! This is what happens when your entire moral system is only concerned with caring for children while they are in the womb. Or as George Carlin joked, “If you're pre-born, you’re fine; if your preschool, you’re screwed.”

All the morally corrupt structures, hierarchies, blind obedience, the obsession with wealth, and the exploitation of children we see in the Epstein files are not new issues. They have been deeply woven into the fabric of evangelical Christian culture and its institutions for generations. From centuries of moral policing, secrecy, and social control, Christianity has created systems where power is absolute, and accountability is absent. Centuries of institutionalized Christian thought have shaped a political culture in our society that tolerates and even enables child predators.

If we want real change, we need to examine not just the individual criminals or the cover-up but the system that makes such crimes possible, but normal, and expected. Epstein didn’t operate in a vacuum—he thrived in a society conditioned to respect authority, to defer to wealthy elites, and ignore uncomfortable truths. He was protected by a global network of high-profile wealthy and elite individuals and nations across royalty, politics, business, law, finance, media, entertainment, and academia who engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to cover up their crimes.

As writer Kiah Wakefield states, “For thousands of years, the wealthy and influential often have escaped consequences that would destroy ordinary citizens…However, what makes the Epstein Files so destabilizing is that they collide with…the concept of democracy, which is founded on the belief that we live in a generally moral and ethical society where evil is punished. [But] the Epstein Files completely shatter the narrative that our society is just or moral.”[vii]

“Epstein haunts the public imagination,” she says, “because it threatens the public perception that leaders actually care for children, or any of us for that matter. At stake is not just criminal accountability but a deeper psychological and spiritual question: Are we being governed by protectors or by predators? Are we ruled by guardians or wolves?”[viii] I believe if you ask any of the victims or their families this question, they would answer, “wolves!”

This brings a whole new meaning to Jesus words of warning, “If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” We may never indict or prosecute any of the predators in those files here in America, but we can be sure they will eventually be found guilty and be judged in the courtroom of God. You may escape prosecution in America, but you can’t escape God. As the old folk song goes, “You can run on for a long time, but sooner or later God’s gonna cut you down!”

It is tempting for us to imagine that our oppression and exploitation of children is an aberration in American history, but children were the primary victims of America’s two founding institutions: chattel slavery and indigenous genocide. Child abuse, separation, and murder are some of the oldest and most consistent American traditions. The heinous murder of Emmit Till and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls remind us that murdering children has always been a diabolical part of our nation’s ugly reality.

Yet, despite all the vast global, national, and ecclesial crimes against children, there have been movements that have tried to protect them. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) offered a comprehensive, universal set of rights for children. Within the church, there have been calls to develop a Child Liberation Theology. Scholars like R.L. Stollar argue, “People don’t often think about children as a marginalized people group,”[ix] but the current reality suggests we live in an anti-child world where adults are always prioritized over them.

Pastor Rebecca Stevens-Walter claims that children, “are the only population in the world that has no voice in any official capacity,”[x] because they can’t vote or physically defend themselves and are dependent on adults for survival. However, she argues, that should not lead to the ‘fascist’ notion that children have no rights or power. Child liberation theology roots itself in scriptures like Matthew 18 that reinforce Jesus’ radical teachings to reverse child oppression. Jesus not only signaled the importance of children by welcoming them, but child liberation theologians claim the coming of Jesus in the form of an infant reveals that God is a child, “which is contrary to the way we think about power, worth, and value.”[xi]

A woman who embodied this was Julia Esquival, born in the Western highlands of Guatemala. At the age of seven, she had a vision of Jesus on the cross, and it broke her heart open with compassion. She became a schoolteacher, then studied theology in Costa Rica, and hoped to become a minister, but quickly found no church would ordain her as a woman. So, she decided she didn’t need credentials and began to minister at the Ciudad de Niños, a detention center for youth, where she had a second conversion experience.

“The young people there brought me to the gospel,” she explained. “They questioned how far my faith in Jesus went. Was it a faith only concerned with my personal salvation or their lived reality?”[xii] The forgotten children Julia encountered at Ciudad de Niños were signs of the failure of the State and the Church. The church in Guatemala favored the powerful. Elites with wealth and status acted as if they owned the Church, so Julia would go on to say, “The way a country treats its children and adolescents is a measure of how humane or inhumane that society is, [and the same goes for the church.]”[xiii]

Power in Guatemala was among the most unevenly distributed in the world, and the disparity eventually led to a 36-year civil war where government forces, backed by the CIA, sought to root out a weak insurgency, slaughtered whole communities, destroyed hundreds of villages, leading to 200,000 deaths, and the disappearance of over 1 million people. Many were forced to flee into exile, including Julia. Filled with grief at the loss of her home and people, Julia channeled her suffering into poetry and became the voice of the displaced, the voice of the children, and the voice of her people. Julia Esquivel died in 2019, but not before speaking all over the world about the genocide in Guatemala and advocating for the plight of her people.

In one of her poems, she wrote: “There is something within us which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest, which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside. It is the silent, warm weeping of indigenous women without their spouses, it is the sad gaze of the children fixed beyond memory…what keeps us from sleeping is that they have threatened us with resurrection! At each nightfall, though exhausted from the endless inventory of killings, we continue to love life, and we do not accept their death! In this marathon of Hope, there are always others to relieve us in bearing the courage necessary to arrive at the goal. So, accompany us then, on this vigil, and you will know what it is to dream! You will know how marvelous it is to live threatened with resurrection! To no longer be afraid of death. To live each day to kill death. To die each day to give birth to life, and to be reborn another thousand through the love for my people, which nourishes hope!”[xiv]

We are in our own marathon of hope, walking through the wilderness of Lent, in the laboratory of liberation. Though we might feel hopeless, as James Baldwin said, “We cannot afford despair [because] we cannot tell the children that there is no hope.” Hope begins with caring for children. Our mission, as followers of Jesus, is to welcome them, include them, care for them, provide for them, to educate them, empower them, and work in solidarity for their liberation.

Like Jesus, we cannot believe children are less valuable or lower in status than the rest of society. Nor can we believe people should simply care for their own children. We must adamantly demand that ALL children are OUR children. They are not just our future or our present, but our family and our responsibility. They don’t serve us; we must serve them. They are not here to be gifts to us, but we to them. They are not here to bless us; we must bless them. They are not last but first.

As Baldwin once wrote, “Every bombed village is my hometown…every dead child is my child. The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”[xv]

If we are to usher in the kingdom of God, the most important task is to put the last first and to make the least the greatest, which means putting all our children at the top of our priorities. It means fighting against the oppression, exploitation, and premature death of children all over the world, in this country, and in the church. We must interrupt the oppression of children wherever we see it, because, as Alberto Ramento said, “A faith that does not disturb injustice is no faith at all.”

We might not be able to win every battle in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we have nothing to offer our little ones. It is incumbent upon the church, this to be an alternative community that prioritizes children, who builds a refuge for them, who cares for them with every fiber of our being, and who works for their liberation. We must also become an alternative to the violent world around us. We must become a place of unconditional love and nurture for children, and a place where children teach us how to love, show us the path toward truth, and hold our hands as we walk toward liberation together. And as we move along this way, we must remember that our God is not just our Father or Mother, but that God is a child. God could have come any other way, but God entered human history as a child.

For God so loved the world that God gave God’s one and only child, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. That means God became a child so that we might become children of God. Every offense against children is an offense against God, and every act of love, care, and protection for children is an act of love and protection for God. So, let us proclaim, “God bless the child,” but not only those who have their own, or for those who have a home, but also those who are not our own, who are on their own, who have no home, and who are forced to roam.

With Jesus, we must proclaim “God bless EVERY child in this world,” and God bless them through us, bless them through our love, through our lives, through our families, through our work, through our church, and through our community. To care for the least is what it takes to be great. To care for the most vulnerable is what it takes to be great. That means that we can be great people, great families, great churches and a great generation, if we are willing to learn what it means to bless ALL of our children as if they are our own.

[i] On “God Bless the Child” see https://www.grammy.com/awards/hall-of-fame-award

[ii] A.G. van Aarde, “Jesus’ Affection Towards Children and Matthew’s Tale of Two Kings,” Acta Theologica, 2004:2.

[iii] Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds, New York: John Day Co, 1954.

[iv] The actual Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote is from his Letters and Papers From Prison, “The question of ultimate responsibility is not how I might extricate myself heroically from the situation but how the coming generation is to live.”

[v] See Dan Hodges, in widely circulated Tweet posted on Twitter (now X) in 2012.

[vi] On International Justice Mission’s budget see https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/541722887

[vii] Kiah Wakefield, “The Epstein Files and the Theology of Justice, Baptist News Global, January 6, 2026.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Kathryn Post, “Child liberation theology says God is a child, too,” Religion News Service, November 20, 2023.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Emilie Teresa Smith, “The Stubborn Witness of a Revolutionary Poet,” Sojourners, March 2020.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Julia Esquivel, Threatened with Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan, trans. by Ann Woehrle, Elgin: Brethren Press, 1982.

[xv] James Baldwin, “Notes on a House of Bondage,” The Nation, November 1, 1980.

They say the primary language of children is play, that children learn through play, which means this was not meaningless frivolity. It was a game of pretend that relished in a stark contrast of emotions, the wild swing from high to low, and one end of the spectrum to another. The children were rehearsing how to have the appropriate emotions and the appropriate time, how to be responsible for leading important cultural events, and how to celebrate and mourn with each other, which is the bedrock of any true community.

But what if the boys played the flute and the girls didn’t dance? What if the girls wailed, but the boys didn’t join them? All reciprocity would be lost, and the fun would end, because everything depended on their willingness to play the game. Jesus said, “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ^‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”

He was comparing his generation to moody and petulant children who would not play the game, join the dance, or sing the funeral song. The term “this generation” did not refer to a particular age group, as we use it today, to describe Baby Boomers, Gen. X, Millennials, Gen. Z, or Alphas. It did not denote time or age, as much as character. It was a pejorative term used to sum up the largely unfaithful history of the people of God. Jesus repeatedly called his generation “evil,” “adulterous,” “faithless,” “sinful,” and “perverse.”

These adjectives evoke the infamous wilderness generation in Exodus who, despite God’s miraculous interventions on their behalf, stubbornly refused to trust in God, follow the Torah, or accept God’s providential care. This generation is described as having a “slave mentality.” They constantly grumble, murmur, and complain about the lack of water and food. They are nicknamed the bitter and rebellious generation because they long for the comfort and security of the empire, frequently disobey Moses, and worship the golden calf. They did not approach the wilderness as a laboratory of liberation, but as a prison of precarity.

According to Jesus, his generation was similar to the wilderness generation. They were also a hard-hearted, thick-headed, and stiff-necked people who rejected the prophets. Therefore, the broken childhood game of ‘Wedding and Funeral’ was not an abstract metaphor. It marked the reality of the people’s inability to follow John or Jesus. John came wailing in the wilderness, leading a funeral procession for the empire, calling for lament and repentance, but the people did not mourn or repent. Instead, they called him crazy and possessed by a demon.

Jesus came eating and drinking with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, like a bridegroom with a flute leading a wedding procession, but they called him an immoral glutton and a drunk. John came fasting, and they accused him of being too gloomy. Jesus came celebrating, and they told him to fast. God sent them a wedding, and they did not dance. God sent them a funeral, and they did not mourn. What more did they want? Who will they listen to? Is this a generation that never listens, who is never satisfied, who refuses to follow the words of the prophets, who cannot be led, who does not know when to dance or when to mourn, a generation who refuses to respond to either the call of repentance or the good news of the kingdom?

The portraits of John and Jesus in Matthew are a lot like the pictures we have of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X was slightly older and started his ministry before Dr. King, yet even though they are children of the same time, they are often treated as opposites. Malcolm is traditionally considered the gloomy prophet of doom, whereas Martin is widely considered the prophet of hope and dreams. Today, however, we now know this is a caricature created by white supremacy to reduce the complex reality of two dynamic figures, and by the time of their deaths, they were saying nearly the exact same thing.

No matter how we paint these two great heroes of liberation, one truth that is irrefutable—they were both assassinated, just like John and Jesus. The hard reality is that the empire doesn’t care if you’re Christian, or if you wear a suit, or if you preach love, peace, and non-violence. If you’re a prophet in America, just like Jerusalem, they will kill you regardless of how “respectable” you are. God sent us a funeral, and we did not mourn. God sent us a wedding, and we did not dance. God sent us a jazz player and a blues singer, and we shot them both.

Thomas Merton once wrote, “Black people have offered white people a ‘message of salvation’ but white people keep rejecting it because, ‘we are so blinded by our self-sufficiency and self-conceit that we do not recognize the peril in which we put ourselves by ignoring the offer.”[i] Yet despite our blindness and stubbornness, the offers kept coming from leaders like Kwame Ture, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, Shirley Chisolm, Audre Lorde, John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson. Yet the rejection continued and continued until America got so out of step and out of tune with the rhythm and harmony of God, we no longer know when to weep and when to rejoice, what to celebrate or what to mourn.

American society has developed a collective psychosis—what psychologists call an inappropriate affect or pseudobulbar effect, a rapid, involuntary, and inappropriate emotional expression, laughing at a sad event or becoming depressed at something joyous. This collective psychosis was on full display in Marco Rubio’s recent speech to the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day—yes, Valentine’s Day. In his sadistic love letter to white supremacy and settler colonialism, Rubio claimed that the United States and Europe “belong together.”

“We are part of one civilization”, he said, “Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”[ii] Echoing fascist leaders of the past, Rubio glorified Europe’s remarkable achievements, heaped admiration on Christopher Columbus, and derided immigration as the most urgent threat to Western Civilization, calling on our allies to control their borders “not as an expression of xenophobia or hate”…[but] to protect “the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”[iii]

Rubio concluded by proclaiming, “We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”[iv] When he finished, there was a standing ovation, and I can only imagine that as they applauded, Jesus said, “To what shall I compare this generation. ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’

In light of the history of colonialism and slavery, the only appropriate response to Rubio’s glorification of the Western “way of life” is mourning. Rubio has lost touch with reality, history, or any sense of morality. He celebrated what he should be mourning, and he wept when he should be dancing. The same was true of the President’s State of ‘Disunion’ Address this week. He celebrated crackdowns on immigrants. He celebrated bans on gender affirming care. He celebrated new voter ID laws. Finally, he celebrated imperialist actions in Venezuela and taunted a pointless, immoral, and illegal war with Iran, in which we are now fully immersed.[v]

None of these things is cause for celebration! Every one of them is cause for weeping and mourning! Everything Trump celebrated breaks God’s heart and makes Jesus cry, and everything he mourned delights God’s heart and makes Jesus dance. Yet many Christians in America celebrated along with him, not because they drank the MAGA Kool-Aid, but because they lost touch with reality, history, or any sense of morality long before Trump ran for office. The ethics of Jesus were turned inside out and backwards a long time ago.

Consequently, today we are living in a generation where up is down, left is right, good is bad, right is wrong, and moral is immoral. We’re living in our own version of George Orwell’s 1984, where “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”[vi] The prophet Isaiah warned us about this generation when he said, “Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes prey. And God was displeased that there was no justice in the land (Isaiah 59:15-16). Woe unto you who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20).”

In Matthew 11, John was in jail awaiting execution, and his disciples were flailing in the wind, losing hope that the Baptist’s movement would survive. They looked at Jesus as their only hope now and wanted to know if he was really the Messiah or if they needed to keep waiting and looking for someone else. The crowd was agitated too, provoked by the Pharisees and scribes, nervous about the violence of King Herod, anxious about how the Roman occupation might react to another Jewish revolutionary leader.

Jesus told John’s disciples, “Look at my work! Tell John what you see! As John said, a tree is known by its fruit. Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” And then Jesus described his work in the terms of Leviticus 25, Isaiah 61, Luke 4, the principles of the jubilee: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Afterwards, Jesus addressed the crowds’ confusion with a string of rhetorical questions. Three times in a row, he asked them, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” and each time he responded with a hypothetical possibility. Did you go to see a reed shaken by the wind? Did you go to see someone dressed in soft robes? Or did you go to see a true prophet? Here we see Jesus at his most spicy and sarcastic.

A shaking reed in soft clothes was quite an image! The reed was the symbol of King Herod’s power that was used on his currency commemorating the founding of Tiberias. Still, the people had turned that symbol into a critique—calling Herod a weak-willed, wavering, flip-flopper. Jesus was telling the crowd that Herod was so driven by anxiety and fear that he shifted his positions according to the prevailing opinion of the day, with cowardly behavior, prone to bending to the winds to survive politically.

‘Soft robes,’ was Jesus’ second dig against the elite—a clear derogatory comment about the wealth and opulence of the royal regime, which stood in stark contrast to the extreme poverty of the people they were supposed to serve. Those who dress in the finery of soft robes live in royal palaces, elite places of power and luxury, not in the wilderness. What a difference between the soft robes of empire and John’s coarse garment made of camel’s hair. Jesus was contrasting the prophet and the prince, the one in prison and the one in the palace, the way of John and the way of Herod—the way of God or the way of empire.

Jesus rhetorically asked the crowds, “What did you go into the wilderness to see? You didn’t go out there to see King Herod, did you? You didn’t go out there to see one of Rome’s puppet kings, did you? You didn’t go out there to see the filthy rich son of the empire, did you? No, you went out to see a prophet in all his wildness. So why are you wavering now? Why are you second-guessing your choices? Why are you leaning back toward the empire? Why are you so disturbed about John’s imprisonment? Why are you losing hope? What did you think was going to happen? What did you expect? Of course, there would be consequences! This is what they do to prophets! This is how the empire reacts to the movement of God in the world!

Later, Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus, you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets.” It was Jesus’ version of the quote by the activist, Grace Lee Boggs, who said, “If you want to know what you would have done in the time of slavery, civil rights, or the Holocaust, you are doing it now.”

How are we to respond to this powerful truth-telling! The temptation would be for us to say, “I love when Jesus talks tough, speaks truth to power, and sets the record straight, but I don’t feel any better about the world—in fact, I might feel even worse!” Hearing this searingly accurate assessment of Jesus’ generation and ours is certainly helpful, but is it hopeful? Walter Brueggemann reminds us that there are three prophetic tasks: truth, grief, and hope. So, we must be careful here not to miss the hope that is implied in Jesus’ prophetic assessment of his generation and ours.

Throughout the Bible, there is a word about evil, adulterous, faithless, sinful, and perverse generations. Even in the worst generations in the history of the world, there have always been exceptions. Even when most of the population has turned toward empire and destruction, there has always been a remnant who did not turn away from God. Even in the most depraved and degenerate generations, there was always one who remained faithful. [I don’t think y’all hear me right now!] Even in the most repressive and regressive generations, there was always a group of people who continued to follow in the way of love, justice, and peace.

In the generation of Noah, wickedness, violence, and corruption, and evil reigned, but God said there was one family who remains faithful and survived the flood. In the generation of Abraham, violent xenophobia and rapacious inhospitality reigned in cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, but God said if you can find ten righteous people, and Lot and his family were delivered. In the generation of Elijah, royal violence and political corruption reigned, but God told the prophet that 7000 had not bent the knee to Baal. In the generation of Jeremiah, idolatry, instability, infidelity, and injustice reigned, but God said, “If you can find one faithful person”, I will spare the city.

In every generation, there was a faithful remnant of surviving loyal believers, always smaller in number than those who claim to be faithful who exist to fulfill God’s agenda in history, to carry God’s presence in the world, and prepare the way for the Lord. Hope is found in the fact that in every generation, no matter how evil, there are always people who refused to walk in the rhythm the empire, who did not lose touch with reality, history, or morality, who mourned when they should be mourning and who celebrated when they should be celebrating, who stayed in step with God and in tune with Jesus, who danced with justice and in sang with liberation. And we can be, and we are those people!

Through the eyes of the empire, we might look like we’re out of step, we might sound like we’re out of tune, we might even look drunk and disorderly, but they don’t know that we dance to the beat of a different drummer and we sing to the tune of a different conductor. And only those who can hear the beat of justice and the harmony of liberation will know why we dance the way we dance and why we sing the way we sing.

Dr. King proclaimed, we need maladjusted people. “We need people who are maladjusted to segregation and discrimination, maladjusted to a religious bigotry, maladjusted to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in an affluent society, maladjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.”[vii]

In fact, he claimed, “it may well be that our whole world is in need of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. People who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried the words that echoed across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”[viii] Only through such maladjustment, King said, “will we be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”[ix]

What did we go into the wilderness to see? What did we go out into the laboratory of liberation to see? We did not go to see a shaking reed in soft robes. We went into the laboratory of liberation to learn how to stay in step with our Creator, to stay in tune with the harmony of creation, to learn how to grieve over poverty, injustice, and oppression, and to dance and sing with joy when we experience love, life, community, and liberation. We came to tune our hearts to break for the things that break God’s heart and to dance for the things that bring delight to the divine. Lent is the laboratory where we learn how to weep for the things that make God weep and rejoice for the things that make God rejoice.

Our generation may be going to hell in a hand basket, but that is no reason to give up hope and that does not excuse us from doing the work we need to do in the laboratory of the wilderness, because in every generation there have always been a few people who refused to bend the knee to the empire and the forces of evil, people remained faithful to God and faithful to humanity. The structures of empire will do everything they can to make you get in step and to sing in harmony with them. And it is easy to get swept up in the rhythm of the empire.

But we dance to the beat of a different drummer. We sing to the tune of a different conductor. And if we keep singing with God and dancing with Jesus, then we will be the remnant. We will be the faithful ones. We will be the maladjusted. We will be the exceptions. We will be the anomaly. We will be the deviation. We will be the alternative. We will be the ones who fulfill God’s agenda, who carry God’s presence, and prepare the way for liberation.

We will be the steadfast and righteous ones—who persevere, who endure, who continue to walk in the way of peace, love, justice, and liberation, no matter what is going on with our generation. Because we know faith is proven by its works, a tree is known by its fruit, and wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. Because we know that the beat we are dancing, and the tune we are singing, is good news for the poor. So, we will keep on dancing and keep on singing until our generation moves to liberation or gives way to another.

[i] Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1980.

[ii] Marco Rubio, speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] See Donald J. Trump, “State of the Union Address,” February 24, 2026.

[vi] George Orwell, 1984, Secker & Warburg: London, 1949.

[vii] Martin Luther King Jr., speech at Southern Methodist University on March 17, 1966.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

In 1979, Black science-fiction writer, Octavia Butler published the book Kindred, which is the story of young African American writer named Dana who is living peacefully with her white husband in Los Angeles, when she is suddenly and repeatedly transported back in time from her life in 1976 to a 19th-century plan…

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When I was in divinity school, the academic consensus dismissed stories of demonic possession in the gospels through a paternalistic modern process of rationalization. According to this interpretive technique, the first-century worldview lacked any knowledge of modern science or Western medicine. Those living in that ‘primitive’ time merely had spiritual language to describe a person they perceived to be speaking erratically or behaving strangely. Using this logic, modern Biblical scholars developed two ‘rational’ explanations for what first-century authors meant when they described someone as possessed: a) epilepsy or b) mental illness.

The problem with interpreting possession as epilepsy is that there was already a Greek word for epilepsy, ἐπιληψία (epilēpsía) in the first century that derived from the verb ἐπιλαμβάνειν (epilambánein) meaning “to seize, possess, or afflict.” Historically, the term reflected a belief that seizures were caused by demons or gods seizing control of a person and was often referred to as “the sacred disease.” Greek physicians had extensively studied this phenomenon, which means the diagnosis of epilepsy (and the word epilēpsía) was well known in the first century. Yet even though it was common and available, none of the gospel writers chose this word to describe possession. In fact, the word “ἐπιληψία (epilēpsía)” never appears in the Bible.

Likewise, there were also Greek words for people who were mentally ill, which appear in the gospels as well—yet they were also not regularly used for people experiencing possession. The gospels writers were intentionally precise with their language, and the word they chose to for possession was almost always δαιμονίζομαι daimonizomai. Today, we now know it is both inappropriate and offensive to associate people experiencing epilepsy or mental illness with possession, so many avoid these stories completely. But instead of avoiding possession or attempting to explain the phenomenon away, what if we asked a different question? Why were so many people daimonizomai or possessed in first-century Galilee?

During the Algerian War in the 1950s, Paris-trained psychiatrist and Martinique philosopher, Franz Fanon, became the director of a mental hospital where he witnessed and treated countless people possessed by spirits. Possession had become rampant in Algeria under French colonialism, which brought unspeakable violence into the lives of the Algerian people. The Algerian’s situation, as a colonized people, seemed utterly intractable, and Fanon surmised that demonic possession was one of the many ways Algerians managed the intense fear, pain, and suppressed aggression that was caused by French colonial oppression.

Fanon viewed possession as a tool of survival and resistance, where the “demons” were embodied manifestations of the trauma of colonial occupation. Through possession, Fanon claimed, the colonized avoided the catastrophe of direct conflict with the occupying force by ‘choosing a lesser evil.’ He believed the invasion and occupation of Algeria by French forces generated a bodily response that was self-defensively creative and debilitatingly mystifying. Therefore, demonic possession, according to Fanon, was a socio-political mechanism—a psychological and embodied self-protective response to the violence of colonial occupation, demonstrating that wherever there is domination, there is also always resistance.[ii]

Scholars drawing on Fanon have interpreted these instances of possession as “coded protest” or “discourse by other means”—a way of expressing political dissent in a situation where direct rebellion is too dangerous or impossible. For instance, the phenomenon of ‘amafufunyana’, which began to be reported in South Africa in the 20^th century, is a Zulu and Xhosa term for a form of spirit possession, often manifesting as severe psychological or erratic behavior. Researchers and traditional healers have linked the social, economic, and cultural disruptions caused by European colonialism, urbanization, and the forced migration of indigenous peoples away from their homes.[iii]

In the 1970s, the Malaysian government established free-trade zones to encourage multinational corporations to build manufacturing plants and cut their costs by hiring young women as a cheap and easily controlled labor force. Within a decade, these corporations were exploiting over 47,000 girls from the Kampong society. However, managers and health care officials quickly became concerned about frequent outbreaks of possession that were happening on the production lines and began shutting down factories.

Psychologists and medical experts blamed the incidents on the low education, superstitious beliefs, and personal moral failings of the Kampong women, diagnosing it as “epidemic hysteria” or “mass psychogenic illness.” However, one researcher, Aihwa Ong, determined that the women’s sudden subjection to the harsh conditions of factory work had disrupted their indigenous cultural convictions, and these episodes of possession were an expression of fear and protest to the violations of their morality.[iv] According to Ong, possession was the way the Kampong women’s bodies and minds resisted the forces of oppression.

In societies experiencing colonization, Paul Hollenbach states, demonic possession is often a reflection of “class antagonisms rooted in economic exploitation, or a socially acceptable form of oblique protest against, or escape from, oppression.”[v] Possession, therefore, should be understood as an embodied mechanism of resistance to colonial occupation. The foreign occupation of the social body is mirrored back to the colonizer through the foreign occupation of human bodies. Colonial occupation traumatizes communities so deeply that it triggers a psycho-somatic spiritual response in the colonized population. Possession is best understood as individual bodies seeking to ‘work out’ or ‘exorcise,’ and then resist, what is happening to the collective body.

Why were so many people possessed in first-century Galilee? Because of Roman occupation and oppression of the Jewish social body. The story of Jesus’ encounter with a man in Gerasa illustrates the concomitant relationship between colonial occupation and demonic possession. The city of Gerasa was a part of the Decapolis, a region made up of ten cities on the east side of the Sea of Galilee was a Roman cultural and political outpost on the eastern imperial frontier, populated by many military veterans who settled on conquered lands as payment for their service.

About the time the gospel of Mark was written, Simon bar Giora led the town of Gerasa in a violent rebellion against the Empire, and in response, Emperor Vespasian sent an expedition of the Tenth Legion to Gerasa, burned the town to the ground, and killed a thousand of its people. In Jesus time, Gerasa was a symbol of violent Roman military occupation as well as violent Jewish resistance. This explains why a story that appears, on the surface, to be the healing exorcism of a man possessed is filled with Roman military language and imagery.

A “Legion” was not the name of a cadre of demons. It was the largest military unit in the Roman Army, made up of 5,000 soldiers—equivalent to a division. It just so happens the Legion occupying Palestine at this time was Legion X Frentensis, the Tenth Legion of the strait, founded by Augustus Caesar himself. The symbol of the Tenth Legion, which was emblazoned on their shields, was the image of a wild boar—yes, a pig. In fact, the Tenth Legion was one of the primary reasons why Jews in the first century referred to all Roman soldiers as pigs—an epithet oppressed and over-policed populations still use for violent officers of the state today.

The Tenth Legion was an expert military division with legendary exploits. They defeated General Pompey, they defeated Mark Antony, they conquered Macedonia, Syria, and Parthia, and eventually they fought in the Jewish War in 70 A.D., helped to conquer Jerusalem, and were responsible for destroying the Temple. As a violent military force, they were less like the Green Berets, Delta Force, or SEAL Team 6, and more like an entire division of the 82^nd Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, the 2^nd Calvary, or the Big Red One. As a military force, the Tenth Legion had inflicted incredible destruction and leveled entire communities.

When Jesus landed in the Decapolis at the ruins of Gerasa and was immediately confronted by a man possessed by a demon named “Legion”, he was being confronted with the impact of Roman military occupation on the social and individual bodies of all the Gerasenes. This was a confrontation with empire, colonialization, and the consequences of its oppressive power. As Ched Myers notes, “This is an extraordinary tale, portraying on one hand how Roman imperialism was destroying the hearts and minds of a colonized people—the Gerasene demoniac’s possession symbolizing Rome’s military occupation of the land—while on the other, remembering the hopeful old story of God’s liberating power.”[vi]

Mark’s gospel was using coded language to offer a symbolic portrait of how Roman imperialism was destroying the hearts and minds of an occupied people. His first-century readers would have loved nothing more than to see the famous Roman Army’s Tenth Legion driven into the sea like pigs. There is no way to read this story with integrity and deny its overt military and political implications. Mark is saying that Jesus has come to liberate people from Roman imperial occupation by driving out the infamously brutal Tenth Legion!

A “herd” was not a term that was typically used for a group of pigs. Instead, it was a word commonly applied to a disorganized group of military soldiers, recruits, or veterans. The extraordinary military force of the Tenth Legion, which was so powerful that “no one could subdue it,” begged Jesus not to send them out of the country, and when Jesus “gave them permission,” he was giving them a standard Roman military command as in “you are dismissed!” Then the swine followed another military command and ‘charged’ down the steep bank, as if they were the Light Brigade, into the sea to be swallowed up like Pharaoh’s army.

The people of Gerasa likely held the man responsible for his own possession, just as we often blame the victim for their oppression in American society today. This perspective played right into the hands of Rome. However, Jesus focused instead on the real problem at hand, Roman oppression, which is a common feature of how the gospels frame the phenomenon of demonic possession. The gospel writers, and presumably Jesus, understood possession to be a psycho-somatic social and spiritual disease that resulted directly from Roman military occupation.

Jesus never shamed those possessed or blamed the victim, but exorcised, healed, and liberated whoever he encountered indiscriminately—clearly implying that possession is not of their own making. As Richard Horsley writes, “The casting out and naming of ‘Legion’ is a demystification of demons and demon possession. It is now evident to Jesus’ followers and the hearers of Mark’s story that the struggle is really against the rulers of the Roman Empire.”[vii] “Jesus,” Michael Newheart agrees, “demystified the demons, showing that the real culprit was Rome”[viii]

Jesus’ demystification of demons has a social and political import for the way we read the gospel and where we locate the demonic in scriptures. In the stories of Jesus exorcisms, the demonic is not the person possessed, but the colonial occupation that provoked possession as an embodied response and mechanism of resistance. It’s not ‘chicken and egg’ but ‘cause and effect’ that helps us to understand possession and exorcism, as it enables us to locate the source of the demonic power in the Roman imperial apparatus of violence and destruction. The devil is always the one who “comes to steal, kill, and destroy,” as the gospel of John professed.

Why does this matter? Richard Horsley argues, possession now “can be understood as a combination of the effect of Roman imperial violence, a displaced protest against it. By asking the sick man for his name, Jesus was surely seeking to help the man clarify the fact that his real issue was with Rome, and the man actually need not fear supposed ‘demons.’”[ix] Further, as Ched Myers contends, “this portrait…reminds us that those who are co-dependent upon a dominant system, no matter who dysfunctional or dehumanizing, will usually resist change. Personal or political, liberation has a cost, which the majority is unwilling to risk.”[x]

Every time Jesus cast out demons, he was performing both a personal and political exorcism. He was liberating the individual and the social body from the demonic power of an occupying imperial military force and its oppressive power. Make no mistake, these actions were a threat to the religious and political authorities who accused Jesus of using Satanic power to release people from the power of colonial oppression.

In our nation today, I.C.E. and Border Patrol have occupied American cities like the Tenth Legion and the bequest of Trump’s fascist authoritarian regime. They have unleashed the state sponsored terrorism, violence and violence, abducted our neighbors, brutalized our communities, and executed innocent people. This is far more than a political and military invasion. I.C.E and Border Patrol are nothing less than a demonic force creating a psycho-somatic social and spiritual response of resistance from the people they are oppression.

When we cry, “I.C.E. Out!” We are making a clear political demand for federal troops to leave our cities and to cease from terrorizing, abducting, and killing our neighbors. AND we are also performing an exorcism. We are also casting out demons. We are also following in the footsteps of the one who told Rome’s Tenth Legion, “Get Out!” and sent them barreling like swine over an abyss to be drowned. We are also healing the land from the violent occupation. We are also liberating our bodies and each other from the effects of colonialism.

So let us chant “I.C.E. Out” like we have come face to face with the Devil and we know his name. Let us chant “I.C.E. Out” like we are performing an exorcism. Let us “I.C.E. Out” like we are trying to conjure Jesus and our ancestors from the grave. Let us chant “I.C.E. Out” like our lives and our democracy depend on it (because they do). And let us chant “I.C.E. Out” until the occupying force is abolished from our cities, our states, our country, and our bodies forever.

[i] This essay was inspired by Molly Crabapple’s imaginative artwork picturing Alex Pretti being attacked by demonic pigs with sharp teeth wearing ICE uniforms.

[ii] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963. See also his Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, and A Dying Colonialism, Chevalier, H. (trans.), New York: Grove Press, 1959.

[iii] Harriet Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine, New York: Academic Press, 1977.

[iv] Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, SUNY, 1987.

[v] Paul Hollenbach, “Jesus, Demoniacs and Public Authorities”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 99, 1981.

[vi] Ched Myers, “Confronting Legion,” Radical Discipleship, June 16, 2016.

[vii] Richard Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel, Louisville: WJK, 2001.

[viii] Michael Willett Newheart, “My name is Legion”: The Story and Soul of the Gerasene Demoniac, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004.

[ix] Horsley, ibid.

[x] Myers, ibid.

As we began the celebration of the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this week, we have experienced a cacophony of contrasting images of peace and violence. The war in Ukraine is inching violently toward four-years. Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement in Gaza at least 1,193 times since October 10. Civil wars continue in many northern African countries. Economic catastrophe and the state-sponsored murder of thousands of protestors in Iran have provoked the largest wave of civil unrest since the 1979 Revolution.

In DC, the President continued to demand Greenland be given to the U.S., and he finally received the Nobel Peace Prize; of course, he had to take it from a Venezuelan woman. Meanwhile, the military occupation of Minneapolis grew as 3,000 more federal agents were sent to terrorize the city after the unrest over the murder of Renee Nicole Good. They’ve brutalized people on the streets, clashed with protestors, forced schools to close, shut down businesses, and ground the city to a halt.

In contrast, peace literally walked among us here in Charlotte this week as the Buddhist monks on a 2,300-mile walk to Washington DC, stopped in our city to pray for us and to bless us on the birthday of Dr. King Jr. We learned one of the monks was struck by a car and lost his leg, but they’ve continued walking. Their leader, Bhikkhu Pannakara, explained that while their walk has been physically painful, they are sustained by the “energy of mindfulness” and by seeing peace bloom all around them on their journey. He said, “We walk to awaken the peace that already lives within each of us,” and they asked us to “be fully present,” and to practice loving-kindness and compassion, which have “no boundaries.”[i]

As I saw the monks, I could not help but think of the prophet Micah’s vision of peace where it says, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths…for all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.”

The monk’s presence in Charlotte on the birthday of Dr. King, while our world is at war and the nation is plagued by state-sponsored violence, caused me to reflect on the power, the promise, and the possibility of peace. What does it mean to become people who practice peace? What does it mean to practice peace in a world at war? What does it mean to practice peace in a violent empire? What does it mean to practice peace at a time when our nation seems hell-bent on imperialism abroad and fascism at home? What does it mean to practice peace as followers of Jesus when the only symbols of peace today seem to be Buddhist monks?

As the monks teach us, peace is not a static state; peace is a dynamic journey. And I believe the life of Dr. King can show us how to practice peace in a violent empire, so long as we are able to embrace the entirety of his life and not settle for a tiny little crumb. This weekend, thousands of preachers, politicians, and leaders will quote from Dr. King, but most of them will take his name in vain. There will be a lot of MLK malarkey as people blasphemously invoke his name and misuse his message.

Americans have become incredibly cavalier when it comes to quoting Dr. King. The peak of absurdity came during the Super Bowl in 2018, when Dodge ran an ad for Tucks with a voice-over of King’s “Drum Major Instinct” speech.[ii] It was a desecration, and wildly ironic because King had harsh words for advertisers who sell cars in that very speech! A few years ago, PagerDuty’s chief executive took this phenomenon to a new low when she quoted Dr. King in an email announcing layoffs at the company.

One of my favorite memes is of Clippy, the paperclip emoji from Microsoft Office, who would pop up at the bottom of the screen and say, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” In this meme, Clippy says, “It looks like you’ve quoted Martin Luther King Jr. out of context instead of engaging with the complex reality of white supremacy in America. Would you like some help with that?” There are a lot of people who need Clippy’s help right now!

Gratuitous, out of context, “tone deaf” uses of Dr. King’s words have become so frequent that Cornel West dubbed it “The Santa Claus-ification of Dr. King.”[iii] When we memorialize a person, we must be careful not to sanitize, sterilize, and sentimentalize their words. Or worse, reduce their entire canon down to a single catchphrase or soundbite quoted out of context for the sake of supporting something King would have opposed. It’s astonishing that King delivered over 2,500 public speeches and spoke nearly a million words, yet if you listen to politicians and pundits today, you’d think King only ever said one thing: “People should be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

Quoting that one line from King is not only lazy, it’s also offensive, especially when it’s done out of context. But this common political practice does not stem from ignorance or coincidence. It is an intentional act that is part of a long and concerted effort to co-opt King’s message for the creation of a colorblind racist society.

When legislators proposed a holiday honoring Dr. King, it took ten years to pass, and when it finally did, 90 representatives and 22 senators voted against it. In fact, there are six lawmakers in Congress today who opposed it! It passed in 1983, no thanks to two North Carolina Senators, John Porter East and Jesse Helms, who used a filibuster to oppose it and read a 300-page document asserting that King was an un-American communist puppet of the Soviet Union. President Regan also opposed a national holiday, but when he realized the Bill would pass in spite of him, he tried to co-opt King’s message.

Regan marked the first official MLK day by misusing King’s words to oppose employment quotas designed to address racial discrimination. Dr. King explicitly believed in quotas, but Regan said, “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, so we oppose the use of quotas. We want a colorblind society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”[iv]

From that day on, a toxic tradition was born of politicians and pundits using the same one line from Dr. King to support policies and projects King would have opposed and to oppose policies and projects that King would have supported. Several political leaders used that very line a few years ago to claim that Dr. King would have been glad to see the Supreme Court overturn Affirmative Action. But King was the one who initiated the first, successful, affirmative action policy in the U.S. called “Operation Breadbasket!”[v]

King was well aware of arguments against affirmative action, which is why he wrote: “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for Black people is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. They agree Black people should be granted equality, but believe they should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it’s not realistic.”[vi]

In ‘65, King compared affirmative action to the G.I. Bill, which singlehandedly built the white middle class in America and said, “We have ample precedents for special compensatory programs in the history of this nation, and a society that has done something special against Black people for hundreds of years must now do something special for Black people.”[vii] King’s support for Affirmative Action was clear and irrefutable.

So why do people invoke his words to support banning books on slavery, forbidding the study of race, eliminating DEI and CRT, ending affirmative action, and attacking black and brown immigrants when King spent his life adamantly working for all the things they’re trying to eliminate? Well, it’s because they know how powerful he was and continues to be. They know how powerful his life and his witness can be. They know how revolutionary his memory can be. They know how liberatory his wisdom can be. You don’t try to co-opt something that has no power.

The systems of domination in our world don’t want us to know about the real Martin Luther King Jr., just like they don’t want us to know about the real Jesus. Because they know that when we know the real Jesus and the real Martin, we can tap into a kind of power that is stronger than anything they have, and then the forces of injustice and evil are in trouble.

Dr. King is one of the most powerful ancestors we have and whenever people can move beyond the sentimental ‘Santa Claus-ification,’ the shallow soundbites, and the cynical co-opting of his message and embrace the entirety of his life and teachings, the potential of tapping into his power to revive his movement right now in this very moment becomes extremely palpable and pregnant with possibility.

As many of you know, we are coming up on the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer, and museums around the country are preparing to host exhibits to help us to better appreciate the meaning of American independence. This week, I learned about a museum in Texas, of all places, that is commemorating the “semi-quincentennial” with an exhibit that begins with two pieces of furniture from history sitting side by side. The first is the worn-down chair that Thomas Jefferson sat in when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The other is the rusty bench that Martin Luther King Jr. sat on when he wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”[viii]

King’s understanding of peace expanded throughout the course of his life. We know from our history books how King was a follower of Jesus, and a student of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Thurman, which led him to become a practitioner of creative non-violent direct action, which is already far beyond what most Americans mean when they use the word “peace.” Early in his career, King believed that peace required the end of Jim Crow, apartheid, and segregation in the South, as we can see in his work in Montgomery, Albany, and Birmingham. King also believed peace would require voting rights for Black Americans, as we see in his march from Selma.

But King did not have a static concept of peace. The peace he carried was dynamic and expansive. King was on a journey, and later he came to believe the peace obtained by Civil Rights would mean nothing if people continued to be trapped under the weight of economic oppression. came to believe there could be no peace so long as people were in poverty, and for peace to reign, poverty would have to end. So, he went up North to Chicago to fight the de facto segregation and discrimination in housing, employment, wages, and education.

King believed a hungry man is not a free man and said, “It is a cruel jest to say to bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”[ix] He believed that overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, but an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

He cried out, “Oh, America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes...God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject, deadening poverty.”[x] He claimed, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: a guaranteed income.”[xi] And “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”[xii]

After leaving Chicago, King started the Poor People’s Campaign advocating for an “economic bill of rights,” and began offering a public critique of capitalism. Eventually, he went to Memphis to stand in solidarity with sanitation workers who were striking for safe conditions and better wages, where tragically, he also lost his life. If this were all Dr. King ever did, he would still be the most important person in American history, but he was not content with a static peace. Somewhere along the journey between Chicago and Memphis, King began to make connections between the racism he fought in Birmingham and the poverty he fought in Chicago to the war that was being fought 9,000 miles away in Vietnam.

King’s dynamic concept of peace, expanded a third time when a year before his death he came out against the war in Vietnam in a speech at the Riverside Church in NY and said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”[xiii] Just as he believed there could be no peace with racism, no peace with poverty, King came to believe there could be no peace with imperialism and colonialism, either.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift” he said, “is approaching spiritual death.”[xiv] He claimed, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the three giant interconnected evils of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”[xv] Therefore, King proclaimed that in order for there to be peace we need a radical revolution of values that transforms us into people who are creatively maladjusted to racism, bigotry, militarism, economic inequality, and violence.

King’s words are as true today as they were when he said them, 60 years ago. And even though you won’t hear many politicians quoting his “Beyond Vietnam” speech as they pay their respects to King this weekend, we are still facing those three giant interconnected evils of racism, materialism, and militarism; we still need a radical revolution of values, and we still need to be creatively maladjusted to injustice and oppression in this world.

But what King proved to us is that it is possible to live a life of peace in a violent world. He proved to us that it is possible to practice peace in a violent empire. He believed what Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And what Jesus said, “with God all things are possible.” This means that we, too, can practice peace in a violent world. And in fact, we already are.

A sociologist who studies violence, named Nicole Badera, recently published a piece showing that ICE Observers, like Renee Good and those of us here in Charlotte, help reduce violence. Her research shows that “the vast majority of men are only willing to engage in public violence if they feel like the people around them will approve of (and reward them for) that violence. So, ICE Watch works because it surrounds men with people loudly expressing their disapproval of their violence. And the noise of whistles and shouting offers the added benefit of drawing large crowds of bystanders who can cause them to perhaps abandon their activity altogether.”[xvi] In this way, ICE observers across the country are practicing peace in a violent world.

For us to expand our understanding of peace as King did throughout his life, we must first begin by expanding our definition of violence. As Corretta Scott King said, “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”[xvii]

This means every time we feed a hungry person, we are practicing peace. Every time we work for better education, we are practicing peace. Every time we care for mothers and their children, we are practicing peace. Every time we fight for workers’ rights, we are practicing peace. Every time we advocate for affordable housing, we are practicing peace. Every time we stand in solidarity with the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed, we are practicing peace.

Every time we protect our immigrant neighbors, we are practicing peace. Every time we stand up against state-sponsored oppression, we are practicing peace. Every time we say “Abolish ICE,” we are practicing peace! Every time we fight for justice, equality, and liberation, we are practicing peace! Every time act in solidarity with the most vulnerable among us, we are practicing peace!

We know that one day their swords will be beaten into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. We know that one day nation shall not lift sword against nation, nor learn war anymore. We know that one day Micah’s vision of peace will come. We know that one day Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God will come. We know that one day Dr. King’s vision of a beloved community will come.

But we also know that we are not supposed to sit around and wait for God’s peace to come. Peace is a dynamic, ever-expanding journey, and we are called to be peacemakers right here and right now in the present moment. We are called to ‘make peace’ We are called to make peace in our schools, we are called to make peace in our neighborhoods, we are called to make peace in our workplaces, we are called to make peace in our streets, we are called to make peace in our churches, we are called to make peace in our cities, we are called to make peace anywhere and everywhere we can in this violent empire.

And to do that, we might have to make a slight change to the third verse of the great freedom song we sing every year on MLK weekend:

“We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace, we shall live in peace today!

Oh, deep in my heart I do believe We shall live in peace today.”[xviii]

[i]Adam Gabbat, “Buddhist monks pass halfway mark on 2,300-mile Walk for Peace through US,” The Guardian, January 17, 2026.

[ii] “Dodge Super Bowl ad using Martin Luther King Jr’s speech sparks backlash,” ABC News, February 5, 2018.

[iii] Louis A. Ruprecht, “Cornel West: Do Not ‘Santa Clausify’ MLK Jr.” Religion Dispatches, January 25, 2010.

[iv] “Reagan Quotes King’s Speech in Opposing Minority Quotas,” Associated Press, January 19, 1986.

[v] https://www.chipublib.org/blogs/post/operation-breadbasket-dr-kings-northern-legacy/

[vi] Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America,” Stanford University, January 15, 1967.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/13/nx-s1-5675314/your-15-minute-guide-to-250-years-america-in-pursuit

[ix] Martin Luther King Jr., interview on NBC in 1967 at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta GA.

[x] Ibid., Strength to Love, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.

[xi] Ibid., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Harper & Row, 1967.

[xii] Ibid., “All Labor Has Dignity,” Memphis TN, March 18, 1968.

[xiii] Ibid., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” The Riverside Church NYC, April 4, 1967.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Nicole Bedera, “I’m a sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping.” MSNOW, January 16, 2026.

[xvii] Coretta Scott King, “Solidarity Day Address,” Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, June 19, 1968.

[xviii] Revised lyrics for the third verse of the Freedom Song “We Shall Overcome.”

[Drawing by Seth Pilz, Gastonia NC]

This week, after the horrifying and heartbreaking murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and a double shooting in Portland, I was haunted by the words of the song “For Those Lost, for those Taken,” by Samora Pinderhuges:

Promise me I’ll be alive, when I leave my home
Promise me I’ll be alive, when I drive, alone
Stoplights could be murder
Movements could be murder
Conversations be murder
Promise me I’ll be alive, when I leave my home
Promise me I’ll be alive, when I drive, alone

I told myself I won’t break
They shouted a warning
They made up a story
They say I resisted, and I might go missing

All my momma does is pray
She’ll wake in the morning
And not be in mourning...
That’s why I just need you to listen! -

Promise me I’ll be alive, when I leave my home
Promise me I’ll be alive, when I drive, alone[i]

With God as our witness, in the legacy of the prophets, we curse this administration for terrorizing our communities and ripping apart our neighbors’ families. We curse ICE and Border Patrol for shooting 14 people and killing four people this year. We curse the federal agents for murdering a mother, a daughter, a wife, a poet, and a verifier in cold blood. Los Angeles got me so upset, Portland made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Minneapolis goddam.[ii]

With Jesus as our witness, in the legacy of the prophets, we say, “Woe to you Jonathan Ross, woe to you Greg Bovino, woe to you Kristi Noem, woe to you Steven Miller, woe to you Donald Trump, you fools, you blind guides, you whitewashed tombs, you hypocrites, you snakes, you brood of vipers. You will not escape the judgment of God!”

As John the Baptist said, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Today I want to talk about the ax John was prophesying about while standing flat-footed in the Jordan River. It may seem unusual to talk about an axe when the emphasis of John’s words is on the threat of what the axe might do to the tree, but bear with me a moment, as this axe is more than it seems.

The axe John referred to was not an agricultural tool of a lumberjack, but a Roman axe, known as a ‘fasces,’ an instrument of social control and a symbol of Roman domination. It was a weapon made of wooden rods enclosing an axe head that was carried by Lictors, who were like secret service bodyguards who protected Roman councils, governors, and emperors, but were also employed as a first-century police force.

Lictors used these instruments of state-sanctioned violence for a multitude of purposes: to maintain public order, to enforce obedience to the magistrate, to incite psychological terror among the population, to make arrests, to inflict corporeal punishment (flogging with the rods) and capital punishment (decapitation with the axe), and to provide vivid symbols of subjection to Rome and tokens of their absolute imperial power over everyone.

Emperors were always surrounded by twelve Lictors, representing the twelve original Etruscan states, each wielding fasces. These weapons were carried in military processions, and whenever emperors or other magistrates would speak to the people, Lictors would lower their fasces to connect with and intimidate the crowds. Abusive behavior and excessive use of force by Lictors was so common that one of the popular reforms in Rome was to require them to remove the axe head from their fasces before entering the city, presumably to reduce executions.

These “axes of authority” were considered to be the most dangerous symbols of a Roman magistrate’s civil and military power, violence, and punishment, known as imperium. They survived as symbols for 1900 years into the modern world of tyrannical power and authoritarian domination. In fact, the word “fascism” is derived from the word ‘fasces’, the name of the Roman axe. Benito Mussolini loved the image and power of the Roman fasces so much that he adopted it as the logo for his National Fascist Party in Italy.

As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We may not be in Rome, but we love to do what the Romans do. In America today, Trump has become the magistrate, Border Patrol has become the Lictors, and the axe has become a gun used to murder ordinary citizens like Renee Nicole Good. Fascism has always been about the wealthy and powerful elite exercising their ability to discipline, control, detain, and (if necessary) execute people with extreme prejudice and total impunity. And today those wielders of fascism have taken an axe to our democracy, an axe to our cities, an axe to our communities, and an axe to our security.

They can cut down society, and they can cut down people, but they cannot cut down our faith, they cannot cut down our hope, they cannot cut down our light, and they cannot cut down our God. John the Baptist proclaimed that God is the one who truly wields an axe, and it is an axe of justice laid at the trunk of every tree that does not bear good fruit. God’s axe is stronger than anything wielded by a king, a governor, an emperor, or a president. God’s strength is greater than Herod, Pilate, Caesar, or Trump. And God’s kingdom is more powerful than Israel, Rome, Italy, or America.

In the first century, the people of Israel were living under a brutal occupation. Roman soldiers and Lictors patrolled the streets with fasces, terrorizing people at will, giving out floggings with the rod and beheadings with the axe heads. Like ICE and Border Patrol today, Roman soldiers were exempt from civil law, and there was no military law. All disputes about their actions were determined by the commanders. If a soldier used excessive force against a citizen, a commander might, in very rare cases, convene a trial, but like the police in America today, they never judged their own with real accountability. There was no integrity, only brutality, cruelty, and impunity.

Most Roman citizens felt that prosecuting a soldier was a waste of time and potentially dangerous, as the trial would be held by military authorities who despised civilians. It was an ugly reality for Roman citizens in the first century, as soldiers brutalized them without fear of consequences, but the people of Israel did not even have the status of citizenship.

The Jewish people were Roman subjects who could be brutalized or killed without any recourse. And the worst part was that they had been ‘sold out’ by their own religious and political leaders (the Pharisees and Sadducees), who were wealthy members of the ruling elite and had become defenders of the current hierarchical social order and lined their own pockets through allying with Herod and Rome.

Believe it or not, I’m still talking about the first century!

So, when John the Baptist appears in the wilderness wearing camels’ hair, eating locusts and honey, and proclaiming, “Repent for the kingdom of God has come near,” and began baptizing people, it was a shock to the system and the status quo. John did not set up camp in the cities or centers of power and commerce, but at the Jordan river nearly 20 miles from Jerusalem.

To travel there, people had to embark on an incredibly demanding hike down the famously dangerous Jericho Road, potentially taking about 8 hours, given the steep descent from 2500 feet above sea level. Yet many people still came out to see John from everywhere, Jerusalem, Judea, and all around the Jordan valley, including the Pharisees and Sadducees.

John did not ask anybody for permission when he took the old Jewish ritual of immersion in water known as the mikvah, which was always done in private for the purpose of purification, and transformed it into a public ritual for repentance and liberation from the empire. The preaching and public rituals of John the Baptist were a massive confrontation with the local Jerusalem elite and allies of Rome because John proclaimed judgment on a world dominated by the Roman empire.

Radical does not begin to describe the shift that he initiated. He chose the Jordan River, through which the Israelites passed as they entered the land after their Exodus in the wilderness, echoing their deliverance from the empire of Egypt through the Red Sea, to signify that this baptism was an act of liberation from the occupation of Rome and the oppressive political and religious leadership of Israel.

Drew Jackson’s poem “Waters of Insurrection” puts it this way:

I went out into the desert
Where the prophet speaks his word.
He spoke of things I cannot say
That I had ever heard.

His mouth was filled with power.
His eyes burned deep with fire.
But not because he hated,
It was justice he desired.

He wanted public love to roll
Like fast and might rivers.
The things he said, they touched my core
And gave my soul a shiver.

I stood and listened closely
To hear him talk oppression,
But I could little understand
His talk about confession.

I came to hear him speak about
The sins of evil Rome,
But what he wanted was for me
To think upon my own.

Apparently, from what he says
My sins make me complicit.
He told me that repentance
Is my real act of resistance.

He stood knee-deep in water
And reached in my direction.
I grabbed his hand and I stepped in,
Committing insurrection.[iii]

Repentance is a word with so much baggage from fundamentalist and evangelical circles, where it has been used to provoke guilt and shame about our inadequacies and inability to meet the absurd and impossible moral standards set by wealthy white men. But that is not what John meant when he called us to repent.

The word simply means “turn” or “change.” John lived in a bleak world filled with imperial domination, abject power, the cruelest forms of brutality, rampant injustice, exploitation, and oppression that caused untold pain and suffering for most people. Just like America today, it was a world that required a change, filled with people who were desperate for a change, so John proclaimed, “Change! The Kingdom is already here! Come immerse yourselves in the waters of liberation and be the change you want to see in the world!”

In 1993, the grandmother of black science fiction, Octavia Butler, published The Parable of the Sower, a novel about what the world would be like in 2025. Global warming has brought droughts, famine, and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, where they fend off the homeless with guns and walls. Fresh water is scarce and as valuable as money. Pharmaceutical companies have created “smart drugs,” boosting mental performance. Fires are common. Police services are expensive, though few people trust the police. Public schools are being privatized, as are whole towns.

In this atmosphere, a Presidential candidate named Christopher Donner is elected based on his promises to dismantle government programs and bring back jobs with the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again.’[iv]

Amid this nightmare, a woman named Lauren Oya Olamina gives birth to a new religion called ‘Earthseed,’ a pragmatic, forward-looking theology that emphasizes community, resilience, interdependence, and adapting to survive and grow without rigid dogmatic beliefs. They feel the divine isn’t a being to worship but the constant, unstoppable force of change itself, which can be directed or resisted. And humans aren’t just victims of change but can actively shape it through learning, action, and community. Their sacred mantra is simple yet profound:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.[v]

This is the same message as John the Baptist and the message we need to hear today: “Change and be liberated! Change yourself and change the system. Refuse to be dominated. Refuse to be intimidated. Refuse to be accommodated. Refuse to be segregated. Refuse to be suffocated. Refuse to be decimated and instead be liberated. Change and keep on changing.”

Lord knows, our world is in need of change. Something has to change! It can’t keep going on like this. But changing the system takes time and requires collaborating, organizing, strategizing, and igniting the power of the people. So, while we’re working on that, we also need to change what we can change right now. We need to change ourselves—how we think, how we live, how we move, and how we show up.

America is in need of a new baptism. America needs radical change. America needs liberation. But like the Pharisees and Sadducees Americas religious and political leaders are compromised and corrupt. Their allegiance is to money and power and not to the people. They are trapped in a fascist cycle of affluenza and authoritarianism, blinded from reality, possessed by an unclean spirit of ruthlessness and brutality, apathetic and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people who are struggling to survive. They are predatory, bloodthirsty, and murderous.

But this is not the first time America has needed to change, and it won’t be the last. Renee Nicole Good wasn’t the first ally who was killed while acting in solidarity with her neighbors who were being oppressed, and she won’t be the last.

Change will come. It always does. The question is which way things will change, and what our role will be in it. Will we move deeper into the bleak midwinter of this fascist nightmare? Or will we begin to thaw out the frozen dreams of a generation and find our way into the Spring? What John and Octavia want us to understand is that it is not up to the Pharisees and Sadducees, or the Kings, and Emperors, and Presidents, but up to us. We, the people, have the power to determine the future—not just the future of the nation, but our future and the future of this nation.

On April 3, 1969, the night before he was murdered in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. told a story about his time in Birmingham. He said, “Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and when they came, we just went before the dogs singing, ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.’ Next, he’d say, ‘Turn the fire hoses on.’ But Bull Connor didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the ‘transphysics’ we knew about. And that was the fact that there is a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. So we went before the fire hoses, because we had known water. If we were Baptists or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. Fire hoses couldn’t stop us.

We would go before the dogs, and we would look at them; and we went before the water hoses, and we would look at it, and we’d just go on singing ‘Over my head I see freedom in the air.’ And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And old Bull would say, ‘Take ’em off to jail,’ and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ And every now and then in jail, we’d see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, our words, and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to; and so, we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.”[vi]

I love the part where King said, “They turned the fire hoses on us, but we had known water. We knew water because we had been baptized, and fire hoses couldn’t stop us.” John said, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” There is a certain kind of fire that the water of this world can’t put out, and King and members of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Freedom Movement had that unquenchable fire that could not be put out.

King looked at the weapons that were used against him, the fire hoses, and in those very weapons, he saw the water of baptism. He saw in the fire hose that was pointed at him to destroy his witness, to stop his momentum, to knock him down: his baptism, the liberating, life-giving, resurrection power, and he turned the those fire hoses around spiritually and pointed them straight back at the powers and principalities that were trying to threaten him and his people and said, “You can’t intimidate us, or terrify us, or stop us with fire houses because. We have known water. We have known water, and we have a fire that cannot be put out.”

King knew water. Lauren Olamina knew water. Renee Nicole Good knew water. But they also had a fire that could not be put out. What about us? We have known water, too, haven’t we? We have known axes. We have known guns. But we also have known fire. We have known ICE. We have known Border Patrol. We have known state-sponsored terrorism. We have known fascism. We have known authoritarianism. We have known dictatorship. We have known tyranny. We have known white supremacy. But we have also known fire. We have known fire.

As the poet Nikita Gill writes,

The rage you are feeling
Comes from the same place
Inside your heart as the love.

This is why you refuse to accept
A world where cruelty reigns
And the fire consumes all.

You have known hope
And joy and kindness
Like you have known water.

And justice is a river
That demands
You do not give up on it.[vii]

So don’t give up on it! Don’t give up on justice. When the world tries to cut down our neighbors, and our leaders like King, and our advocates and allies like Renee Good, we must remember that we have known water and we have known fire. We must hold on to the unquenchable fire of the Holy Spirit and keep on going, and we must not give up. We must keep on organizing. Keep on fighting. Keep on praying. Keep on creating. Keep on working. Keep on loving. Keep on resisting. Keep on changing. Because the kingdom of God is at hand. And one day justice will roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

[i] Samora Pinderhughes, “For Those Lost, for Those Taken,” BLACK SPRING, 2025.

[ii] This is an imaginative reworking of Nina Simone’s famous Civil Rights era protest song, “Mississippi Goddam,” that references cities that were invaded by ICE and Border Patrol in 2025-2026.

[iii] Drew Jackson, “Waters of Insurrection,” God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming, InnerVarsity Press, 2021.

[iv] Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top,” Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968.

[vii] Nikita Gill, Your Heart is the Sea, Thought Catalog Books, 2019.

There was more than one countdown at my house on New Year’s Eve. Yes, we counted down to the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, but we also counted down to the series finale of Stranger Things, the two-hour-long final episode of the blockbuster television series on Netflix. The ball drop happens every year, but the Stranger Things series finale was a once-in-a-lifetime event that was watched live by over 34.5 million people. My daughter, Lucy, and I have watched every episode together since she was six years old, and enjoyed the show for nearly a decade, so it was a watershed event in our household to watch the finale together on New Year’s Eve.

For those who don’t know Stranger Things, it is an American television series created by twin brothers from Durham, that is set in the 1980s, and centers on four 12-year-old boys playing Dungeons & Dragons in the fictional small town of Hawkins, IN. The story begins when one of the boys, Will, goes missing, and they simultaneously find a mysterious young girl with psychokinetic abilities, named Eleven, who opens a gateway between Earth and a hostile alternate dimension known as the ‘Upside Down’ at a nearby human experimentation facility.

Spoiler alert: In the fifth and final season, we discover that Will the Wise (the boy who was kidnapped) has powers, and a debate ensues among his friends about whether he is a wizard or a sorcerer. The difference between a wizard and a sorcerer is the source of their powers: wizards ’s power comes from study, and a sorcerer’s powers are innate. While this information may only seem relevant to fans of the show or ‘super nerds’ deeply immersed in the fictional world of Dungeons & Dragons, the same debate about wizards and sorcerers could be had about the strange characters who appear on the scene in the Christmas story in Matthew 2.

These mysterious figures, often called “the wise men,” have inspired the imagination of countless poets and artists for thousands of years—from Da Vinci to T.S. Elliot. Hundreds of myths and legends have grown up around this story, making it difficult to distinguish them from the Biblical narrative. As much as I love the hymn, We Three Kings from Orient Are, it does not reflect Matthew’s account of the story at all. First, they’re not kings. Second, we’re never told how many there were. Matthew says they brought three gifts, but that doesn’t mean there were only three Magi.

The only thing John Henry Hopkins got right in his famous hymn was the word “Orient,” which means “East,” because that’s where Matthew said these strange characters came from, the direction of the Persian Empire. In addition, the term “wise men” is a stretch, at best a poor translation, at worst a dangerously misleading identity. The Greek word for these mysterious visitors is Magos, or magi, and it never means ‘wise.’ Instead, it means something like a ‘magician,’ ‘wizard,’ or ‘sorcerer.’

In his translation of the New Testament, scholar David Bentley Hart leaves the word magus untranslated because there is no English equivalent. In a footnote, he writes the Magi were most likely Zoroastrian priests, from Persia and Medes, associated in the Hellenistic world with oneiromancy (the interpretation of dreams) and astrology (the reading of the stars).[i] Hart claims that ‘sorcerer’ is the closest English word, but fans of Dungeons & Dragons and Stranger Things might argue the Magi were wizards because their power seems to derive from the study of the stars.

In the ancient world, Magi were not amateur entertainers who did card tricks or pull rabbits out of hats or even professional magicians like Harry Houdini or David Copperfield who perform great disappearing acts or impossible escapes. They were more like the wizards we have in art and literature, like Merlin from King Arthur, Jafar from Aladdin, or Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, or Dumbledore from Harry Potter, or the real-life Nostradamus.

Magi had intimate knowledge of the natural world and were keen observers of the cosmic order. They were court officials and royal advisors who were skilled in the interpretation of dreams and who appear in a few other places in the Bible. In Genesis 41, when Pharaoh dreams of seven cows and stalks of grain, he called on all the magi in Egypt to interpret it, but only Joseph was able. Joseph was a magus. In the book of Daniel, when King Nebuchadnezzar could not find a magus in all of Babylon to interpret his dreams, he called on Daniel to do it. Daniel was a magus.

Kings and emperors courted the Magi because they were particularly interested in astrological signs like comets, stars, and other heavenly phenomenon as they were famous for signaling the birth and death of political leaders and kings. A generation before the star rose over Bethlehem, a different star stretched across the sky in July of 44 BC, four months after Julius Caesar was brutally murdered. It was so bright that it could be seen during the day for an entire week.

This stunning astrological event was interpreted by the citizens in Rome as a sign that the recently assassinated emperor had been deified by the gods. As a cunning strategist, the young emperor Octavian, later to be known as Augustus, seized on the star’s appearance, calling it the “Julian Star” and using it as religious and political propaganda to persuade the Senate to grant Julius Caesar the status of divinity. This meant, of course, that Octavius would now be considered the ‘Son of god,’ making his rule over the republic inevitable. From that day on, every Roman coin had an image of Caesar on one side and this star on the other.[ii]

Other emperors like Nero, Tiberius, Vespasian, and Domitian had a love/hate relationship with magi; sometimes courting them and other times expelling them from the city when they read the stars in an unfavorable way. Magi could be a destabilizing influence in the royal court if they predicted events that challenged the current ruler, such as the short reign of a king, an emperor’s imminent death, or the birth of a new king. So, it’s no surprise the vassal of Rome, King Herod, was terrified by the appearance of magi who were inquiring about the birth of the king of the Jews, since he considered himself the rightful king of Judea!

Many people have a fairy tale version of this story, in which they sentimentalize the magi, their journey, or the fact that they brought gifts. However, there really was nothing out of the ordinary about the magi, or traveling long distances to another nation, or even bringing gifts. All those occupations and activities were quite common in the first century. The Magi’s identity, journey, and bounty are not that remarkable, but what is remarkable is their anti-imperial behavior.

In a recent post, Erna Kim Hackett, the founder of Liberated Together, wrote, “The Magi capture my imagination with their distinctly non-colonizer vibes. Here are some lessons I learned from the Magi in how NOT to be a colonizer. 1. The Magi are attentive to the sacred rhythms of creation under the empire. Their spirituality begins with curiosity, not certainty. Like indigenous ancestors, they treat creation as a sacred text, listening to the stars and attending to their dreams. Their spirituality is receptive rather than possessive. They do not force their spirituality onto Herod, his courtesans, or the holy family. They are humble rather than entitled.

To practice the spirituality of the Magi is to practice attention. It is learning how to stay awake in the dark. It is noticing where the Creator is shining light, disrupting certainty, and inviting refusal. It is following stars and dreams instead of tyrants. Empire survives by distraction. It numbs us with outrage cycles, spectacle, urgency, and fear so that we never actually see what is happening. Our attention becomes shallow, reactive, and short. To cultivate deep attention is to resist.

2. The magi make no deals with the empire. The Magi decline Herod’s request to engage in surveillance on behalf of the empire to seek out and reveal the location of Jesus. They refuse to be deputized into a reconnaissance expedition. They will not cooperate or capitulate to the whims of a violent, despotic ruler. [Even more importantly], they do not calculate how an alliance with the empire or silent accommodation to the King might benefit them or be “strategic.” They do not obey Herod and refuse to become agents of the state.

3. The magi add wealth to the holy family. One of the primary pillars of colonization is extraction. Traditionally, Kings and empires come, and they take what they want and leave people poorer than they found them. From India under British rule to American settler-colonialism, to Venezuela and other places in the Global South today, trillions have been stolen and siphoned up North through conquest, trade, and ‘development.’ But the Magi do the opposite. Instead of extracting wealth from the people they encounter on their journey, they bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

The Magi were not voyeurs or consumers who came to extract a spiritual experience and then disappear. They redistribute wealth. If we focus solely on the symbolism of these gifts, we miss the most important fact, which is that they are financial resources. The Magi leave Jesus and his family materially far more secure than before they arrived, which will be very important as they flee Herod’s bloodthirsty wrath. Jesus’ parents desperately needed these resources, and the wealth the Magi gave them was most likely used to fund their escape to Egypt as refugees.”[iii]

Lastly, Hackett goes on to write that the most important behavior of the magi is 4. They leave. I know it might sound silly to us today, but the problem with colonialism was never the desire for exploration, or traveling around the world to new destinations, or even global trade. The problem was always greed, extraction, and long-term unwanted occupation.

But the Magi came to Bethlehem, encountered something sacred, valuable, priceless, and something easily commodified into wealth, yet they worshipped at the feet of a liberator who was not of their own tribe, nation, ethnicity, or religion, and then they LEFT! Leaving is very non-colonizer energy. You know what they say, “Colonizers, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Knowing when to leave and leaving is as important as coming.

The Magi engaged in a mindful and merciful mutiny. Their spirituality was attentive to the rhythms of creation, the movement of the stars, and the meaning of their dreams. They practiced radical generosity, giving lavish gifts to the holy family. They refused to cooperate with Herod’s devious and deceptive plan to execute the infant Jesus. They were mindful, merciful, and mutinous, and even though it did not prevent Herod from committing genocide and killing every infant in and around Bethlehem, it saved one family and one child. And, as it says in both the Talmud and the Quran, “if you save one life, you save the world.” “If you save one life, you save all of humanity.”

Our situation in America today is very similar, if not worse, than that of those living in the first century under King Herod. We are living in a country with an authoritarian government, ruled by an autocratic leader, engaged in a mass deportation effort that has terrorized communities, brutalized countless people, ruined thousands of lives, torn families apart, separated husbands from wives, spouses from partners, children from parents, and forced people to suffer degrading, concentration-camp-level conditions. And Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller had the gall to gleefully dance to Vanilla Ice performing “Ice, Ice, Baby,” at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party.

The greed, corruption, cruelty, and evil are out of control! Then Saturday, we woke up to a monstrous epiphany—the despotic and tyrannical ruler of our nation blatantly violated international law and committed a host of war crimes by ordering the violent, illegal military takeover of the sovereign nation of Venezuela. This brazen return to gunboat diplomacy and American imperialist oil extraction by the Trump regime is now the 42^nd time the US has orchestrated or participated in a military coup d’etat in South America, which we have not done since the forcible removal of General Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989.

Every time we think we’ve seen the worst this administration can do, they take things another step beyond the pale and beyond all reason. How are we supposed to live as people of faith and good conscience at a time when our leaders have lost all sense of decency, humanity, or shame and taken this country completely off the rails? How are we supposed to live in this time of great violence, war, dehumanization, and devastation?

We must start by remembering that we are not the first people in history to face these trials and tribulations. Our ancestors came before us and can show us the way to resist and survive. And we do not face these trials and tribulations alone. God is with us, that is what ‘Emmanuel’ means, which is what the Epiphany story is all about. God is with us!

Epiphany is not about a coup d’etat, regime change, or the forcible removal of foreign leaders. Epiphany is not about imperialism, colonialism, or American exceptionalism. Epiphany is not about Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, or a shameless theft of foreign oil. Epiphany is about the fact that God is with us in the flesh. God has become human so that humans might become divine. God has taken up residence among us. God has moved into the neighborhood. God is with us, and if God is with us, who can be against us! Amen!

Epiphany is about the birth of liberation! Epiphany is about the protection of a refugee family! Epiphany is about tuning in to the rhythms of creation. Epiphany is about giving gifts to the poor. Epiphany is about refusing to cooperate with the violent leaders of genocidal schemes of the empire. Epiphany is about being mindful, merciful, and mutinous!

The Magi provide us a model of what we are called to do in times of overwhelming imperialism, violence, and oppression. We are called to engage in practices of mindfulness, gifts of mercy, and acts of mutiny against the empire. We are called to be mindful spiritually, merciful financially, and mutinous socially and politically. This is how we resist this regime! This is how we face a fascist administration! This is how we thrive in a time of tyranny! This is how we expand ourselves in a time of extremism!

If you want to know what to do when empires start taking, Kings start killing, when bombs start falling, when soldiers start stomping, when nations start warring, the answer is—be like the Magi. Keep on studying creation. Keep on dreaming big dreams. Keep on journeying forward. Keep on praying for change. Keep on giving to the poor. Keep on resisting the empire. Keep on being mindful. Keep on being merciful. Keep on being mutinous. Keep on protecting refugee families, keep on remembering that God is with us, and if God is with us, then nothing can stand against us. And if w

e keep on remembering that, then no matter how much war, violence, and oppression are going on in the world around us, like the Magi, we too will be overwhelmed with joy.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT: 2017.

[ii] Richard Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, OR: 2006.

[iii] Erna Kim Hackett and Liberated Together, “Lessons from the Magi in Not Being a Colonizer,” Instagram post, December 16, 2025.

When I sent my playlist to Tim, he said “JUICY” by Notorious B.I.G. was a stretch as a Christmas song, but I reminded him in the last verse Biggie Smalls reflects on growing up in public housing with his mother and says, “We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us. No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us. Birthdays were the worst days. Now we sip Champagne when we thirsty.” Now, if that’s not a Christmas song, then I don’t know what is!

Two of my favorites on the list are “Ain’t No Chimney’s in the Projects” by Sharon Jones and “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” by James Brown. They remind me that the story of Christmas did not begin in Rome or Jerusalem in the halls of imperial power, with kings, queens, high priests, or scholars, but in the marginalized region of Galilee in a tiny little town called Nazareth with a poor, unknown peasant girl named Mary.

Many of us have heard the story so many times we don’t feel any shock when Luke says God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a young woman engaged to a man named Joseph, whose name was Mary. In the first century, Galilee was a border region known as “Galilee of the Gentiles” because of its mixed population. People from Judea looked down on the Galileans with contempt as impure, unclean, mixed breeds, and unsophisticated hayseeds.

Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas with a heavy hand of oppression and exploitation. Subsistence farming in a rural area was hard enough, but the people of Galilee also suffered under the weight of a crushing triplet of heavy taxes, including the Roman Tribute, the Temple tax, and a tax to pay for Herod’s aggressive construction projects in the city of Sepphoris, for which he also conscripted people into grueling labor. The word “poverty” does not fully convey the precarious struggle for 99% of the people living in the ghetto of Galilee.

Nazareth, which is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or the Talmud, was the smallest town in all of Galilee. With only 1000 people and fewer than 50 total houses, Nazareth was more like a hamlet or neighborhood than a town. In fact, Nazareth was such a poor, tiny, rural village of farmers and day laborers that the only thing it was known for was its insignificance, obscurity, and bad reputation, which is why Phillip asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

While there’s been little scholarship on the historical Mary, we know that she was most likely an illiterate peasant woman who suffered under heavy taxation, grueling conditions, grinding poverty, and the rugged daily routine of manual labor eking out a living through agriculture and domestic chores. Like women in many parts of the world today, Mary probably spent, on average, about 10 hours a day on domestic chores like carrying water from a nearby well or stream, gathering wood for the fire, grinding grain, cooking meals, and washing utensils and clothes.

Mary lived a bleak and grueling life filled with great pain and suffering as a poor peasant woman in the gritty ghetto of Galilee, in the nowhere nothing town of Nazareth. Yet it was to this humble and ordinary woman, in that wretched and destitute place, God sent the angel Gabriel who told Mary, “You have found favor with God!” The Christmas story makes it abundantly clear that God favors the small, the poor, the insignificant, and the lowly.

Loise Malcolm, who grew up as the child of missionaries in the poor villages of the Philippines, remembers the day her parents first read the words of Mary’s song to poor Filipino farmers. They responded to it with such a boisterous celebration that her parents were stunned! They asked the people why Mary’s song elicited such exultation, and they told the missionaries it was the first time they’d heard the good news that God cares about them, the poor and the oppressed.

It is hard for me to imagine that Gabriel’s visit (and the pregnancy that followed) would have been initially received as good news. Why would an unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock be good news for a poor peasant in Nazareth? Many poor folks see pregnancy as a burden, another mouth to feed, a curse instead of a blessing. Then, on top of the grinding poverty and grueling labor, Mary would have to explain this complicated pregnancy to her super religious family and find a way to tell Joseph, “You are not the father!” Mary was in trouble. Can you imagine?

Mary is often painted as a passive character in the Christmas story. Typically, the focus is not on her but on her child. When she is seen, she is seen sentimentally, as a mother simply doing what mothers are “supposed to do”—give birth, give comfort, give care. Even the baby shower gifts from the Magi were for Jesus and not for her. But we should be careful not to overstate Mary’s response to Gabriel or to miss the fact that she does not sing any songs, let alone a song of joy, until she is fully supported and blessed by her cousin Elizabeth.

It is unfair to read Mary’s song out of the context of her life. She was a poor, marginalized, and oppressed woman who was run down and tired, suffering under the weight of heavy labor, with many trials and tribulations. She did not sing because she was happy. She did not sing because she was free. Yet she sang a song of joy because she believed deeply in the need for justice and liberation.

She sang like Miriam Makeba, who said, “I sing the truth, about my life, what’s happening, about the things that hurt us. Music expresses what cannot be put into words and what cannot remain silent.” She sang like Bernice Johnson Reagan, who said, “We sing to announce our existence. We sing to change our condition.” She sang like Pauli Murray, who said, “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”

I imagine Mary sang with her hand on her heart, a lump in her throat, and tears streaming down her face, with both hope and pain in her voice. Just like Stevie Wonder, I believe Mary sang about the joy inside her tears—a true joy that magnified her Creator in spite of her pain and suffering. This is one of the reasons why we need Mary’s song this Christmas, because 2025 has been a year!

It has been a year of destructive executive orders, devastating tariffs, continued inflation, the dismantling civil agencies, disruption for federal workers, a government shut down, attacks on DEI, CRT, Civil Rights, the persecution of unhoused and transgender people, undermining freedom of the press, a big ugly bill cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits for the poor, tax breaks for the wealthy, mass deportations, Border Patrol invasions of American cities, terrorism of immigrant communities, and an illegal and unjust war in Venezuela, just to name a few.

The empire has done everything it can this year to try to take the “merry” out of Christmas. But even if they were successful at taking the “merry” out of Christmas, that does not mean they can steal our joy. Because happiness, merriment, and good cheer are not the same thing as joy. No, happiness is an emotion that arises from feelings of pleasure and changes based on circumstances, but joy is something more profound that is not dependent on our feelings or circumstances.

Joy is also not the same as optimism or positive thinking because our joy can exist and persist even in the middle of grief, sorrow, pain, and suffering. Even when we are experiencing sadness, loss, addiction, depression, loneliness, sickness, and even death, we can still have joy. Even if you can’t bring yourself to be “happy,” “merry,” or “cheerful” this year because of all you have going on in your life or the world, you can still have joy. Even if the empire or the challenges you face in life this year have taken the “merry” out of Christmas, it cannot steal your joy.

Because joy is rooted in the power of our relationship with God, our Creator. Joy is a gift, a habit, a practice, a virtue, a fruit of the spirit, and a disposition of the soul that cannot be touched or shaken by the outside world. Joy is a transcendent song that is so deeply rooted in the core of our being that it can be sung at every age, embodied in any season of life, and vocalized alongside the color of every emotion. Joy is understanding that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

Joy is understanding that we are created in the image of God and are all beloved, unique, irreplaceable parts of humanity and the universe. Joy is understanding that our purpose for existence is what Jacob Marley said to old Scrooge in The Christmas Carol, “Humanity was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business.” Joy comes from knowing we are in the business of loving God and our neighbors.

Contemporary poet and activist Ross Gay believes that joy and suffering are not opposites but mutually dependent human experiences. His work takes the paradox of finding joy in a suffering world and turns it into an everyday spiritual discipline that fuels activism. In a recent interview, he said, “I think there’s a conception of joy as meaning something easy. And to me, joy has nothing to do with ease. [Instead], joy has everything to do with the fact that we’re all human and we’re all going to die. Whenever something beautiful and wonderful is happening between us, we are also in the process of dying, and that common experience is what elicits joy.”

He continues, “Joy is when my alienation from people and [separation from] the entire universe disappears; everything becomes luminous. Like mycelium under the forest, there’s something connecting all of us. And among the things uniting us is that we have many common experiences, and a foundational one is that we are not going to be here forever. And that’s a joining, a joy-ning.”[i]

The Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran, wrote”

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.

And he answered:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was

oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy

you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was

burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood

that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you

shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that

is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you

shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which

has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say,

“Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at

your board, remember that the other is asleep upon

your bed.[ii]

The joy Mary sang about was not a pleasant feeling of happiness we hear about on the radio this time of year. It was about the tough paradoxical joy that exists like a divine reservoir of love deep down in our souls that rises up inside of us when we remember we are beloved children who have been lifted up and liberated by the love of God. Mary’s song echoed back through history as a song of praise for all the times God delivered the people. Like a jazz musician, she improvised on the song of Miriam when God delivered her people from Egypt. She riffed on the song of Hannah when God delivered her from childlessness. She remixed the song the prophets when God delivered them from Babylon. And she rearranged the songs of the Maccabees when God delivered them from the Greeks.

Mary’s song was a song about the joy of deliverance that has been sung by countless generations who demanded that another world is possible, a new kingdom is coming, and liberation is on its way. She reminds us that singing with joy is always an act of resistance. Like the dance parties at Manolo’s Bakery here in Charlotte last month, it is saying, “You can invade our city, you can terrorize our communities, you can even abduct our neighbors, but you can take our joy!”

Mary sang these radical and revolutionary words, “God has shown strength with her arm; she has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. She has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; she has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, “the wildest, most passionate, and revolutionary hymn ever sung,” and throughout history, Mary’s song has become the most powerful and the most persecuted protest anthem of all time.

Mary’s song was said to strike fear in the hearts of Russian Czars. During the British Empire’s occupation of India, Mary’s song was so dangerous that it was prohibited from being sung in churches. And on the final day of British rule, Mahatma Gandhi ordered Mary’s song to be sung everywhere the British flag was lowered.

In the 1980s, poor Guatemalan women were emboldened by Mary’s song to fight for better wages, and it caused such a stir that the government outlawed her words; the same was true in El Salvador and Mexico. The Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, was so afraid Mary’s song would incite revolution that he banned it. When a group of Argentinian mothers lost their children during the Dirty War and began placing Mary’s song on posters throughout the capital, the government was forced to forbid the public display of her words.

In 2011, at Zuccotti Park, the Occupy movement began singing Mary’s song to confront the extreme greed of Wall Street and the unparalleled economic disparity that exists between the rich and poor. And Mary’s song continues to inspire us today. Just this year, a queer Catholic artist named Libby Kercher created a new icon of Mary trampling a snake with the words I.C.E written on it, and this prayer, “Hail Mary full of grace, Kick I.C.E. out of this place!”

In America, our government has never banned Mary’s song, but they don’t really have to because we have become so good at singing her words without embodying what they say. Who took the Mary out of Christmas? The American Church did. We distorted Mary’s song by making her in the image of American motherhood. We turned her into a silent member of the nativity who does nothing but give birth and quietly ponder the mystery of the incarnation. We treat her like a sentimental mother, with a holy womb for God, or an obedient and compliant little girl, but Mary is not a patriarchal stereotype to soothe the conscience of fragile men. She was a revolutionary!

Mary has a song of joy to sing, and she will not be silent, and she will not stop singing until we hear it. Her song proclaims God’s love for the poor. It foreshadows all of Jesus’ life and teachings. It announces the upside-down kingdom where the proud are scattered, the powerful are cast down, the lowly are lifted, the hungry are filled, and the rich are sent away empty. It testifies to the gospel message that last are first and least are greatest. Long before Jesus ever said a word, his mother preached good news to the poor, liberation to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed.

Our joy comes from the same place that God’s joy comes from—the protection and provision for the most vulnerable people, the widows, the orphans, and the immigrants among us. And as Mary taught us, loving humanity is an invincible joy that the world cannot destroy. We can have that same joy ourselves. Even if we can’t get the “Merry” back in Christmas, we can put the “Mary” back in Christmas. Joy does not come from Christmas lights, trees, garland, decorations, stockings, presents, candy canes, fancy dinners, chestnuts roasting by an open fire, or all the money in the world. Joy comes from a deeper place.

Even if the Grinch burst into all of our houses this Christmas and took all the Christmas trees, lights, ornaments, stocking, all logs in the fire, all the pop guns, pampoogas, pantookas, bizilbigs, and drums, all who-pudding, who-hash, all popcorn and plumbs, even the roast beast, leaving us nothing but a single crumb too small for even a mouse, and nothing but the hooks and wire on the walls, we could still wake up on Christmas morning and sing “Fahoo Fores Dahoo Dores. Welcome Christmas,” like the Whos. Even if we lost everything, we could still have joy because they can take the “Merry” out of Christmas, but they can’t steal our joy.

So, if you see me crying this Christmas, I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want you to think I’ve lost my mind or my faith. You might find me crying for our immigrant neighbors. You might find me crying for those who’ve been abducted or deported. You might find me crying for our children and their future. You might find me crying for my transgender siblings. You might cry me crying for the Venezuelan people. You might find me crying for those who lost food stamps. You might find me crying for those whose healthcare premiums went up 20%. You might find me crying for our neighbors without housing or shelter in the winter cold.

You might find me crying for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. You might find me crying for the sick and the dying. You might find me crying for the beaten down and the broken-hearted. You might find me crying for those who have been pressed down on all sides. You might find me crying for our city, our country, and our world. But when you see me crying, you must remember that there is joy inside my tears. There is joy inside my tears because I know that no matter what happens, we have God who loves us and fights for us, a God who looks with favor upon the lowly, a God who does great and mighty things, a God who showers mercy on those who revere her, a God who comes with the power of liberation in our lives.

We serve a God who is breaking into human history again, turning the world upside down. We serve a God who brings down the powerful from their thrones, a God who lifts up the lowly, a god who fills the hungry with good things, a God who sends the rich away empty, a God who comes to the aid of her children, a God who remembers us in her mercy, a God who keeps and fulfills her promises, and…AND—we have each other. And if we love God and love each other, then there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can steal our joy.

[i] Krista Tippet, “Ross Gay on the Insistence of Joy,” On Being, July 25, 2019.

[ii] Kahlil Gibran, “On Joy and Sorrow” published in The Prophet, Knopf: 1923.

“Harsher punishment for parole violators and world peace!” What a contradiction! We know “harsher punishment” is not the most important thing our society needs, but what about world peace? On the second Sunday of Advent, we reflect on the theme of “peace,” looking forward to the song the angels’ and the multitude of the heavenly hosts on the first Christmas night, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among all people!” With this glorious refrain, we are encouraged to believe that ‘peace on earth’ is the meaning of the birth of Jesus and the season of Christmas. Even Charlie Brown was able to grasp that much of the story.

While it’s easy for us to laugh at the beauty queens in Miss Congeniality, their answers reveal something about the way we talk about peace. Most people talk about peace in trite and meaningless ways that mirror the empty platitudes of those beauty queens. We often succumb to a vacuous and sentimental vision of peace—a hollow, shallow understanding that has made peace into a superficial idea with no specificity and no teeth—an overly-individualistic, non-threatening concept with no specificity that makes no demands on our lives—a generic, trivial, otherworldly peace that costs us nothing.

For instance, last Christmas, Starbucks launched its “Drink in, Breathe Out” campaign, which focused on providing customers a moment of calm amidst the stress and frantic pace of holiday preparations, offering an escape through their coffee products. Nothing creates more peace than a peppermint white chocolate mocha! This campaign was another example of how capitalism has commodified contemplation and transformed mindfulness into an industry.

But the Starbucks campaign is also an example of the common American Christmas practice of conflating tranquility, serenity, stillness, or calm with the biblical concept of peace. Lord knows we could all use a little tranquility and serenity at this time of year, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to find it, but we should be careful not to confuse that with the peace that the angels sang about or the peace we are called to practice as followers of Jesus.

When peace has no social or political application in our lives, we find ourselves in danger of buying anything the Empire is selling. As the adage goes, “If we don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for anything.” In George Orwell’s 1984, the three slogans of “The Party” issued by the “Ministry of Truth” are “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” This “doublespeak” was a propaganda tactic the Party used to convince people that constant war is the way to peace.

Constant war promotes devotion, patriotism, and sacrifice for the nation. It war keeps people loyal, orderly, under control, and in check. And in the irony of all ironies, the soldiers enforcing order and state violence are called “peacekeepers.” This propaganda was so effective, the people eventually came to believe that constant war was the way to peace, even though it was not good news for them or the world. The Party was successfully able to change the definition of war and the meaning of peace because the people believed the lie.

Sound familiar? We are living in our own 1984 today as the Trump Administration promotes imperialism, engages in a flagrant expansion of war, and seeks to redefine peace. The Trump administration glorifies American imperialism while expanding and redefining war. By executive order, Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War and used the Insurrection and Alien Enemies Acts to justify deploying Border Patrol and National Guard troops into American cities. He describes immigrants, liberals, and anyone resisting his policies as a “war from within,” collapsing the distinction between foreign conflict and domestic policing.

Our culture set the stage for this by declaring war on social problems for a generation—the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime. All failed and created new disasters, such as mass incarceration. Then came the War on Terror, leading to catastrophic, prolonged conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus endless warfare against an amorphous idea called “terror” and a fluid category of “terrorists.” Now the administration designates drug cartels—and even the entire government of Venezuela—as terrorist organizations. This allows them to engage in acts of war with no legal basis, including drone strikes and extrajudicial killings, and bomb civilian fishermen.

The Trump administration claims these military actions are “non-international armed conflict,” a made-up term for extrajudicial murder. Now, dozens of warships line the Caribbean. Soldiers prepare for illegal, unprovoked conflict with a sovereign nation—not to protect Americans, but to provoke Venezuela, topple its government, and seize oil and mineral resources. This is why they are attacking Venezuela and not Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia, where cocaine comes from, or Mexico, where most of the illicit fentanyl is manufactured.

Meanwhile, this week, Trump accepted the brand new “FIFA peace prize.” In his acceptance speech of this dubious award, he claimed to be a promoter of peace and unity around the globe that has “saved millions of lives” and ended over eight wars, “in some cases just before they started.”[i] Yet in nearly all eight regions of the world where Trump claims to have ended a war, untold violent conflict and death continue. Trump is redefining and expanding the definition of war to justify killing more people, all while telling us he’s bringing peace on earth.

As Jeremiah said, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” Human desire makes us susceptible to false promises—especially in crisis. This is why the prophet Jeremiah is the perfect messenger for us in the season of Advent to cut through the false proclamations of peace we often hear in America today, because he lived at a time that was very similar to our own.

Jeremiah came of age during King Josiah’s reforms, sparked by the rediscovery of the book of Deuteronomy. But under Josiah’s successor, Jehoiakim—who was materialistic, selfish, and corrupt—the reform movement became hollow. Jeremiah eventually grew weary of the possibility of reform. In fact, the prophet was not a reformer at all. Because when Jeremiah was called, God gave him a dual purpose: “to uproot and tear down, as well as to plant and build up.”

Jeremiah preached a simple but dangerous message. The people of Israel had broken their covenant with God and needed to repent. Jeremiah issued three charges against the nation: idolatry, corruption, and injustice. One, the people of Israel were worshipping everything but God. Two, the political and religious leaders of Israel were corrupt and evil. And three, there was rampant social injustice, especially among poor widows, orphans, and immigrants. Sound familiar?

All of this came to a head in Jeremiah’s famous “Temple sermon” that we heard a piece of today. In that sermon he denounced the people of Israel for their depending on the Temple state for security and called on them to engage in social justice proclaiming, “if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, then I will dwell with you in this place.”

At the end of that sermon, Jeremiah made a very unpopular pronouncement: God was sending an enemy nation to conquer Jerusalem and to destroy the temple. Jeremiah was referring to the nation of Babylon, and he said, “I see a boiling pot that is tilting toward us from the North, and it is going to pour out [hot molten lava] on all who live in the land.” Twenty years later, the total devastation that Jeremiah predicted would come to pass when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city, razed the temple, and exiled thousands of Israelites.

However, at the time of his Temple Sermon, nobody wanted to hear what Jeremiah was saying. They preferred to live in denial. Instead of listening, they arrested Jeremiah, tried him on a capital charge, and even though he was eventually acquitted, Jeremiah was forbidden to preach in the Temple again. It is no surprise that it was Jeremiah’s Temple sermon that Jesus quoted when “he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying, overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.”

Neither Jeremiah nor Jesus’ Temple sermons would be considered “peaceful” according to most standards today. Yet both Jeremiah and Jesus were deeply committed to peace. We struggle to see what is peaceful about the message of these two prophets because what we often mean by peace is often the maintenance of the status quo, the protection of the current arrangements of power, or a return to order of things. That is often what we mean when we use words like “safety” or “security.” But to call that peace, when so many of our neighbors are suffering under the heavy weight of injustice and oppression, is to make a mockery of ourselves and our neighbors’ pain. It is to cry, “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus were Temple abolitionists committed to establishing God’s shalom on earth as it is in heaven. They were given a dual calling from God “to uproot and tear down, as well as to plant and build up.” Both are required for a true and lasting peace. Unfortunately, the first calling is one that many American Christians cannot abide—the uprooting and the tearing down that is required to build up the ancient ruins and plant the vineyard of peace.

Most Christians in America today are unwilling to accept the reality that there can be no peace so long as there is injustice. There can be no peace so long as there is oppression. There can be no peace so long as there is starvation. There can be no peace so long as there is mass incarceration. There can be no peace so long as there is mass deportation. There can be no peace so long as there is mass accumulation. There can be no peace so long as there is colonization. There can be no peace so long as there is imperialist legislation. There can be no peace so long as there is civilian annihilation. There can be no peace so long as there is extrajudicial extermination. There can be no peace so long as there is a fascist administration.

If we want peace, first we have to pull some things out by their roots and tear some things down! We have to tear down injustice, we have to tear down oppression, we have to tear down racism and white supremacy, we have to tear down the criminal punishment system, we have to tear down the military industrial complex, we have to tear down savage capitalism and economic disparity, we have to tear down the corporate plutocracy, we have to tear down poverty, we have to tear down inequality, we have to tear down xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia, we have to tear down fascism. We have to tear down the roots of violence and devastation everywhere before we can build up a society of peace.

Some people want peace to be cheap and easy, peace without cost or sacrifice. But as Jeremiah and Jesus show us, peace often leads to a prison cell or persecution. They sacrificed their lives in a hard and costly way because they knew that overturning the systems of oppression and caring for the poor and vulnerable are the things that make for peace. You can’t plant the seeds of peace in the soil of injustice. You can’t plant the seeds of shalom in the soil of oppression and expect a harvest of righteousness. It will not happen. The systems of violence in this world must be torn down in order for us to build God’s garden of peace.

In Jeremiah and Jesus’ day, the Temple in Jerusalem was like the Vatican, Congress, the Pentagon, and Wall Street all rolled into one, yet they both believed that even this great ‘mountain’ symbolizing God’s power would have to be torn down in order for there to be true peace. There was a real danger in the time of Jeremiah, just as there is today, that people would choose to prop up the false flag of safety, or cling to a security blanket of political power, like the Temple state, instead of choosing to live into the peace of God.

The people of Israel believed the Temple signified God’s living presence among them and, therefore, that it guaranteed their safety and security, but Jeremiah told them God’s presence cannot be contained in a Temple. Even more so, God’s presence did not depend on the preservation of the Temple, but on their ability to act justly one with another and to care for the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow, and to refrain from violence.

It wasn’t just the Temple people were putting their trust in—it was also misplaced faith in their religious rituals, corrupt leaders, horses and chariots, armies, military alliances with other nations, as well as false prophets with their false promises of peace, as well as themselves. Jeremiah believed people were deceiving themselves by thinking they could create safety and security with their own strength. He called it “the curse of self-reliance,” and he told the people that they were trading the living water of God’s providential care for the cracked and leaking cisterns of their false gods, false leaders, false prophets, and their own false selves.

We do the exact same thing today when we put all our faith in America, in capitalism, in the free hand of the market, in whiteness, in a politician or a party, in a religion, or in even ourselves. We constantly choose the cracked cisterns of insecurity over the living water of God’s protection. Our ‘desire for security’ and our ‘desire for peace’ are at war with one another. In fact, our desire for security as Americans has made us (and the rest world) less safe and less peaceful.

We asked for security, and the military industrial complex that feeds the Pentagon’s demand for efficient killing machines infected our society with military grade weapons. We demanded these weapons of war for our security abroad, and now they are in our cities and our homes. It has led to the militarization of our police forces and our neighborhoods. But the hard truth is that there is no security plan that will save us from an AR-15 assault rifle, a drone, an Apache helicopter, an F-16 or F-35, or a destroyer. Our desire for security is what got us into this mess in the first place, and I’m not sure an increased concern for security is going to get us out of it.

If we want true security, we must not fall victim to the fear that calls for false measures of security, which don’t make us safer but simply assuage our anxieties and ignore the real problem. We must tear down the apparatus of false security and work for true peace instead. True peace is a world without automatic weapons. True peace is a world without toxic masculinity and patriarchy. True peace is a world without homophobia. True peace is a world without white supremacy and racism. True peace is a world without hatred, dehumanization, and oppression. True peace is a world without economic disparity. True peace is a world without oppression.

True peace is a world where the poor are given jobs with fair wages instead of automatic weapons. True peace is a world where children are given a world-class education instead of world-class firearms. True peace is a world where the sick and mentally ill are given health care instead of guns. True peace is a world where our veterans are given a new purpose to help build the common good instead of a new battlefield on which to kill their fellow citizens. True peace is a world where people are engaged in love and justice instead of hatred and violence.

What is true peace? The Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen wrote,

Peace is not a silent state

That comes upon us from within—

Serene, detached, oblivious

Peace is not a force like rain

That comes, unbidden, from above—

Gentle, enfolding, natural

Peace is fire! Yes, peace is fire!

And peace is passion!

Peace requires a strength of will

A certain courage, a heart of iron

A force abiding to fulfill

Peace is not a foregone fate;

For peace, like war, must be waged—

Mindfully, deliberately

With arms ever ready

And eyes wide open[ii]

That’s why Jeremiah said God’s word of peace was like a “fire shut up in his bones” that he had no choice but to let out. But he did not leave everything torn up or torn down. Once his prediction came true, and the Temple was destroyed, and the people were taken into exile, he didn’t say, “I told you so.” He offered his people hope, and he told them that even though they broke the covenant that God would create a new covenant written on their hearts.

Jeremiah told them that if they wanted to find peace in the midst of exile they should not pine nostalgically for the Temple or their old way of life that had been lost in war, but instead to seek the welfare of the city of where they find themselves, invest in the local community, establish relationships, build bridges with diverse people, create lives wherever they are, be good citizens, become a positive force in their neighborhoods, contribute to local flourishing, and work for the common good of all people even in unfamiliar and hostile places—understanding always that your well-being is determined by the well-being of the entire city.

War is madness. Violence is a sickness. Oppression is a disease. Which is why Jeremiah once asked, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no medicine for my people? Is there no healing for my people? Is there no restoration for my people? Is there no physician for my people? Is there no peace for my people?” Jeremiah didn’t answer that question, but we can answer it for him. YES! THERE IS A BALM IN GILEAD! Yes, there is medicine, yes, there is healing, yes, there is restoration, yes, there is peace! If we follow in the way of Jeremiah and Jesus and tear down the systems of oppression, and care for the immigrant, the orphan, the widow, and all the poor and marginalized among us, then we can build up a garden of peace.

This Advent, as we find ourselves living in exile in a fascist American Babylon, let us not lose hope but seek the peace of the city in which we find ourselves. Let us be like Jeremiah and Jesus, who were called to uproot and tear down in order to build up and plant. Let us not succumb to the delusion of safety and security but seek God’s shalom. May we have the strength to walk in the way of peace, the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that the world cannot give, the peace that can only come when we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/dec/05/fifa-peace-prize-trump-world-cup-infantino

[ii] Kim André Arnsen, Norwegian composer, “What is Peace?”, Tuvayhun - Beatitudes for a Wounded World (2018, text, Charles Anthony Silvestri) Commissioned by Manhattan Girls Chorus and Artistic Director Michelle Oesterle

Fifteen hundred years before the Queen’s admonition, the Archbishop of Milan, Ambrose, invoked Naboth’s legacy to protest injustice in the late fourth century, shortly after the church had made its fateful compromise with the Roman Empire. Its opening lines echo down the corridors of history, foreshadowing the countless acts of genocide and dispossession that European Christians would inflict on the people of the land:

“The story of Naboth is an old one,” he wrote, “but it is repeated every day. Who among the rich does not daily covet other people’s goods? Who among the wealthy does not make every effort to drive the poor person out of his little plot and turn the needy out from the boundaries of his ancestral fields? What rich person’s thoughts are not preoccupied with his neighbor’s possessions? It is not one Ahab who was born, therefore, but worse—Ahab is born every day and never dies as far as this world is concerned. For each one dies, there are many others who rise up; more who steal property than who lose it. It is not one poor man, Naboth, who was slain; every day Naboth is struck down, every day the poor [all over the world] are slain.”[ii] And this week in Charlotte, we felt Ambrose’s words in a massive way.

Samuel prophesied that the very nature of kingship and empire is rooted in thievery. In the bible, kings steal from the people to build their kingdoms. They take, and take, and take until they have amassed all the power and resources for themselves and force the people into slavery and subjugation. Proving Samuel’s warning, today, we heard another story that reveals the incredible extremes elite and powerful political leaders will go to take what doesn’t belong to them—the story of Naboth’s vineyard.

This 3000-year-old story might be one of the most important for us to wrestle with as Christians living in the American empire today. It is an anti-imperial and anti-colonial story of conspiracy, murder, and dispossession. King Ahab offered to purchase a vineyard from an ordinary citizen. When Naboth refused to sell, the King was so disappointed he sulked around the palace like a petulant child. Finally, his wife Queen Jezebel grew tired of his despondency and said, “Are you not the king?” Then she cooked up a conspiracy with some local scoundrels to lure Naboth into a death trap, falsely accuse him of a crime, kill him, and take his vineyard.

Some of us may wonder, why didn’t Naboth just sell his land and save his life? But as scholar Ched Myers points out, one of the reasons contemporary readers struggle to understand this story is that we’ve been “socialized into the culture of real estate deals, government annexations, and the right of eminent domain, so we see no problem with Ahab’s proposition. From the vantage point of settler colonialists, the king appears to make a generous offer, and Naboth’s unequivocal refusal seems unreasonable.

Yet if we approach this story from an indigenous perspective, the struggle between Naboth’s ancestral land-stewardship and Ahab’s royal land-seizure represents a perennial and vastly asymmetrical contest, portrayed as a grim parody.”[iii]

Scholar Ellen Davis claims that the conflict in this story highlights the incommensurable difference between a traditional, local, and land-based economy and an aggressive, imperial one focused on production.[iv] Even though it is repeated by King Ahab and again by Queen Jezebel, the only thing Naboth said in the entire story is, “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” The Hebrew word translated “ancestral inheritance” is “Nahala,” and it does not have an English equivalent.

The English language grew up with capitalism, which is rooted in the concept of private property and therefore has no way of translating “Nahala,” which is a word for how indigenous people related to their land—not as something they own, but as something they are a symbiotically a part of and have a responsibility to care for. Naboth’s response to King Ahab’s was essentially: “The land is not something that can be possessed,” “We don’t own the land, it owns us,” “The land does not belong to us, we belong to it,” “We are simply the stewards of this place,” “Even if I wanted to, the land is not mine to give.”

Naboth and Ahab were literally speaking different languages rooted in different cosmological visions of life—one of “nahala” and one of “achaz,” which is the Hebrew word “to seize” or “take possession.” In this exchange, we see an epic clash of cultures and economic philosophies that have shaped the Bible and our world. Even now, we still find ourselves trapped between these two competing visions—of “nahala” and “achaz,” but “achaz” is the dominant one, and it’s killing us all and threatening the earth and the future of humanity.

In indigenous cosmology, the land and people are intimately woven together in a sacred relationship of mutuality and reciprocity. However, as soon as European colonizers began to imagine the land was something that could be possessed, they began engaging in acts of dispossession. Even more disastrous, once they imagined the land could be owned, it was not long before they believed that people could be owned as well. The entire history of the West can be summed up by our rejection of the Hebrew concept of “nahala” in favor of “achaz,” the rejection of the sacred connection between the land and the people.

One of the places where the story of Naboth’s Vineyard has played out in our world is the Rio Grande Valley. Originally inhabited by the Coahuiltecan tribes for thousands of years, Spanish colonizers came in 1519, displaced the people and seized the region for their King, and started living there in 1781. By 1826, the land had been subdivided among various families, and twenty-three acres were purchased by a man named Miguel Salina.

Miguel was a good rancher and manager. He maintained a healthy herd of cattle and grew diverse and abundant crops of cotton, corn, sugar, and beans. He built twelve brick buildings, erected a windmill, and enclosed his land with a sturdy fence. But as Miguel tended to his ranch, war loomed on the horizon. In 1846, General (and future President) Zachary Taylor marched into the Rio Grande Valley to fight a war with Mexico, and he viewed Miguel’s land as a prime defensive location to build what is now Fort Brown.

Acting like Ahab and Jezebel, Taylor sent troops to surround Miguel’s ranch and forced him to sign a lease at gunpoint, relinquishing his land to the government. Fort Brown played a decisive role in America winning the war and annexing Texas.[v] And Miguel was entitled to payment, but federal authorities refused to give him a dime. His son José tried to carry on the family claim with legal battles that lasted for nearly sixty years, never yielding any compensation.

Tragically, the effects of dispossession reverberated for generations. Miguel’s great-granddaughter lived in poverty for ninety-six years, just a few blocks away from Fort Brown, her entire life in the shadow of America’s theft of her ancestral inheritance—her “nahala.” This loss was so much a part of her identity that it was referenced in her obituary.

The colonial theology of possession leads to dispossession, and Miguel’s “nahala” was just the beginning of America’s catastrophic acts of dispossession in Latin America. In less than a hundred years, from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. intervened to topple governments in Latin America a total of 41 times. That amounts to once every other year for a century.

These incidents involved the deployment of U.S. forces, CIA agents, as well as local citizens hired by the U.S. and trained in counterinsurgency military tactics at the School of the Americas in Georgia, all of which caused untold violence as well as incalculable social and economic devastation.[vi]

So, when I hear people say we have an immigration problem in America, I say, “No, we have an imperialism problem in America.” The only reason people would leave their families and travel thousands of miles, risking life and limb to work long hours in harsh conditions for low wages, is because we destroyed the economy and society in the country they came from.

As Americans, we need to reckon with this reality. In addition to the multitude of biblical commands demanding that we must welcome, care for, love, and protect our immigrant neighbors, the refugee crisis on our border is both our fault and our responsibility! We caused it, and then we blamed the victim.

Today, we are living at a time when “would be” kings continue to seek to harm and dispossess people, a time when “would-be” kings continue to use the false pretense of crime as a justification for their dispossession, a time when “would-be” kings continue to employ “scoundrels” like the Border Patrol and ICE to do their dirty work for them. The story of Naboth repeated itself all over again in Charlotte this week!

The Hebrew word for “scoundrel” in this story is “bene beliyaal,” which means “sons of wickedness.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve been calling Border Patrol “sons of wickedness” all week long, or at least something that rhymes with that. The scoundrels who falsely criminalized and assassinated Naboth were nothing more than King Ahab and Jezebel’s hired goons, just as Border Patrol and ICE are the hired goons of America’s would-be king sent to invade our city and to racially profile, falsely criminalize, and abduct our immigrant neighbors. Make no mistake, they are “sons of wickedness” indeed!

To wreak havoc on immigrant communities, rip apart families, destroy neighborhoods, and shut down businesses, schools and churches is not only illegal, but also immoral and inhumane. The land of America, of North Carolina, and of Charlotte does not belong to any of us. It is the home of all of us. So when poorly trained fascist goon squads invade our cities and abduct our neighbors under the false pretense of crime, we must call it what it is—a blatant attempt to terrorize immigrants and dispossess Brown people of their homes, their peace, their safety, their families, their businesses, their communities, and their livelihood.

The question I keep hearing people ask is “Why would people do this? Why would anyone join the Border Patrol or ICE? Why would they want to be a part of terrorizing families and destroying communities and hurting businesses? What would drive someone to do that?” Well, there’s a satirical song by the troubadour, Jessie Welles, that tries to answer this question called “Join ICE.” Welles sings:

Well, if you’re lookin’ for purpose in the current circus

If you’re seekin’ respect and attention

If you’re in need of a gig that’ll make you feel big

Come with me and put some folks in detention

I got picked on at school, I never felt that cool

There’s a hole in my soul that just a-rages

All the ladies turned me down, and I felt like a clown

But will you look at me now, I’m puttin’ folks in cages

I failed the academy, the cops weren’t havin’ me

The Army didn’t sound that fun

So I found me a paramilitary operation

That was keen to hand me a gun

Just last week was kind of tough, I put a kid in cuffs

I zip tied a lady to a van

We can sneak around town, hunt workin’ folks down

I hear they got a great benefit plan

At ICE, we’re respectin’ power

Join ICE, I hear they got great hours

There’s a sign-on bonus of 50 grand

They’re in need of you, needin’ to feel like a man

Join ICE

If you’re lackin’ control and authority

Come with me and hunt down minorities

Join ICE

It’s certainly about the money, but the money also comes with the illusion of having power, control, and authority; of being respected or at least feared. And yet no matter how tempting these illusions seem, none of it is worth becoming a “son of wickedness.”

As a few brave Democratic lawmakers tried to remind members of the military this week, “You must refuse illegal orders. No one should carry out orders that violate the law or the Constitution as a public servant.”[vii] The righteous thing for Border Control and ICE to do is refuse their orders, disobey, and resign. It is not a legitimate moral or ethical position to say, “I was just following orders.” That is what the Nazi’s said at Nuremberg!

On Thursday, I was interviewed by a reporter for The Washington Post, and they asked me if I could have a conversation with the head of Border Patrol, Greg Bovino what I would say to him. I told the reporter that I’d say, “What you are doing is illegal, immoral, and inhumane, and there will be consequences for your actions. Greg Bovino will reap what he sows in this life or the next.”

There are always consequences for those who engage in immoral acts of violence and degradation toward those more vulnerable. They may not be economic or physical consequences, but there are always moral, emotional, and spiritual consequences. As Jesus said, “What will it profit a person to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul?”

Just as King Ahab was about to take possession of Naboth’s vineyard, God sent the prophet Elijah to intervene. God told Elijah to tell Ahab, “Have you killed and also taken possession? Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.” It may sound harsh, but it’s no different than Jesus saying, “you reap what you sow.” There are always repercussions. What goes around comes around. Eventually, everyone has to face the music, pay the piper, and suffer the consequences.

At this point in his life, Elijah was basically retired. He had already engaged in repeated skirmishes with Ahab and Jezebel. Just three chapters earlier, Elijah went into hiding for fear of his life. Jezebel, who was nicknamed “the prophet killer,” had a vendetta against him and a bounty on his head. And Elijah had already anointed a new king and his own successor. But Ahab and Jezebel’s conspiracy and violence were so egregious, God called Elijah out of retirement.

Yet despite his age, the clear and present danger to his life, and the bounty on his head, the beleaguered prophet rousted himself once more to proclaim God’s word, to speak truth to power, and to confront these corrupt political leaders with their crimes and the consequences.

This week in Charlotte, Ahab and Jezebel’s “sons of wickedness” were driving around abducting our neighbors, destroying families, terrorizing our city, and dispossessing the immigrant community. It was heartbreaking and soul-wrenching, and we grieve for the families who had loved ones were taken, life interrupted, and their livelihoods stolen. But as many “sons of wickedness” as there were here in Charlotte, there were more Elijahs.

There were more Elijahs than there were “sons of wickedness.” There were more people helping their neighbors than there were people hurting their neighbors. There were more people feeding our neighbors, serving our neighbors, training our neighbors, protecting our neighbors, caring for our neighbors, and partying with our neighbors than there were people terrorizing and abducting our neighbors.

Border Patrol invaded our city, but we rose to the occasion like a grumpy old prophet coming out of retirement, ready to throw down. We reclaimed our revolutionary nickname as the “Hornet’s Nest” of resistance as we blew our whistles, stood up for our neighbors, and danced our tails off on Central Avenue at Manolo’s bakery.

And what’s more, our immigrant and Latine neighbors taught us a new way to protest—by singing “Mi Gente” and treating all people as if they are “my people.” We organized together, we mobilized together, we worked together, and we partied together. We confronted the power of violence and dispossession with the power of love and justice.

But the fight isn’t over yet. The would-be king is still on his throne, and the “sons of wickedness” are still among us. The true impact of their invasion is just beginning to become clear through the fog of violence they unleashed in our community. Now we must engage in the hard, ongoing work of caring for our neighbors and repairing our city while we remain vigilant and ready to respond to an ongoing threat among us.

This will not be easy. It will require a great deal of strength and fortitude. But the God we serve is not the God of King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, or their “sons of wickedness.” The God we serve is the God of Naboth and Elijah, the god of the immigrant, the foreigner, and the alien.

Our God does grow weary; she gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles: they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not grow faint.

As the song by Jekalyn Carr says, “Don’t faint, here comes [the] change. Don’t faint, it’s about to break. You’ve got to pray through the fire, pray through the flood. Give and receive the love. Don’t faint, it is worth the wait. Don’t faint, [she] has the final say. You’ve got to pray through the fire, pray through the flood. Give and receive the love. Oh, don’t faint, here comes [the] change.”[viii]

[i] Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen.

[ii] Ambrose, De Nabuthae. Full text can be found at https://hymnsandchants.com/Texts/Sermons/Ambrose/OnNaboth.htm.

[iii] Ched Myers, Healing Haunted Histories, Eugene: Cascade, 2021.

[iv] Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

[v] Sara C. Bronin, “Remembering My Family’s Stolen Land,” LATINA, March 11, 2023.

[vi] John Coatsworth, “United States Interventions: What for?” Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring/Summer 2005.

[vii] Greg Jaffe, “Democratic Lawmakers Tell Military to Refuse Illegal Orders, New York Times, November 18, 2025.

[viii] Jekalyn Carr, “Don’t Faint,” Jekalyn X and the Legends, 2025.

During the sermon, he explicitly condemned Trump’s campaign as racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and un-Christian and challenged the ongoing racial disparities in education, healthcare, housing, and economics and reminded us that we’ve had white supremacists in the White House before. Afterward he anointed me with oil for the work of resistance and asked me to help him anoint the congregation as well. It was a night I will never forget. But a lot of people don’t know that the text for his sermon that night was 1 Samuel 8.

Talk about prophetic! Dr. Barber said, “just like Israel, the American people wanted a king, to be like other nations, to have a strongman who will go out before us and fight our battles. And God told Samuel to give the people what they wanted and offered these words, ‘for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’” The people rejected God so that they could have a king who would fight for them.

No other passage in the Bible sums up the fascist predicament we find ourselves in America today and the idolatrous phenomenon of White Christian Nationalism quite like 1 Samuel 8. It clearly and plainly reveals the reason people choose a king, the motivation behind the monarchy, the desire that dictates a dictatorship—fear. The feeling of being vulnerable, insecure, and threatened causes people to turn towards a strongman who looks tough and brazen, who they imagine will fight for them. It is a tale as old as time, but the problem is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It always turns out that the very king who the people thought would save and protect them would go on to enslave and oppress them.

After the most recent election of Donald Trump, Roland Martin jumped on his channel, the Black Star Network, and said the same thing Barber said eight years before, “Just as in 1 Samuel 8, American wanted a king so they elected Saul.” He went on to say, “Remember America got what it wanted, and America is going to get what it deserves.”

Martin highlighted one of the most troubling spiritual parts of this passage. The reality that there are times in our lives and our society when God gives us the desires of our hearts even if they are self-destructive. God will allow us to have what we want even if it does not ultimately benefit us or the world. God will do so that we might have the opportunity to learn through the natural consequences and repercussions of our actions. The Hindus and Buddhists call it “karma.” It’s cause and effect. You reap what you sow. The chickens come home to roost.

But the prophet Samuel would not let the people’s push for kingship go unchallenged. He warned them that a monarchy would give birth to an economy of greed geared to increase the wealth of the elite through ruthless policies of extraction and militarism. He told them the truth about the logic and impulse of empire, it requires kings to engage in the practice of taking, taking, and taking from the people, and then giving that wealth over to commanders, and courtiers, and officers, until a well-structured hierarchical society is established and the majority find themselves enslaved. The prophet Samuel staged the first ever “No Kings” protest in history.

In one of the most powerful prophetic statements in the entire Bible, Samuel told the people, “The king will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, appoint for commanders of thousands and fifties to plow his ground, reap his harvest, to make implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain, your vineyards and give it to his officers. He will take your male and female slaves, the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you will be his slaves. And then you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you.”

Samuel’s warning is one of the Bible’s most strident indictments, not only of kingship, but of empire, colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and policing. The king does not take randomly or arbitrarily. The king takes to amass wealth and weapons, and armies, and power to control and oppress the people to maintain that power and the right to amass more and more power. The Hebrew word yiqqāḥ or yik-kakh, or “take,” appears six times in this passage and it really means “to plunder,” “to loot,” “to pillage,” “to rob,” “to raid,” “to ransack.” It was a word that mean “to steal goods from person using force as in a time of war or civil disorder; the violent and dishonest acquisition of property.” That is the fundamental nature of kings and kingship—thievery!

It is not difficult to hear the resonances between Samuel’s warning to the Israelites and President Eisenhower’s warning to America more than a half-century ago. During his farewell address in January 1961, Eisenhower warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Dr. echoed Eisenhower in a speech at the Riverside Church in 1967, when he warned against the three great evils that plague American society, “racism, materialism, and militarism.”

We did not heed either of their warnings! In fact, we went in the exact opposite direction by advancing the mass proliferation of the military industrial complex into a $997 billion dollar industry, what author William Hartung calls “The Trillion Dollar War Machine.” Reaching a trillion dollars for the first time in history, America now spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, which is 40% of the world’s total military spending. There’s always an economic element to violence and injustice. War is profitable, and now they are making war on the American people.

The Martinique philosopher Aimé Césaire once said “fascism is the practice of colonization turned in on its own people.” Today, this mass proliferation of weapons manufacturing has led to the hyper-militarization of America’s police forces and the American people. There are more guns than people in this country, and the violence and destruction we’ve writ large around the world has boomeranged back from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza into American neighborhoods in mass shootings with AR-15 style assault rifles, over policing, and what Radley Balko calls The Rise of the Warrior Cop that we see in I.C.E. and Border Patrol.

This week we learned that the same federal ‘gestapo’ police force that was in LA and Chicago has come to Charlotte. We must be clear that there is no reason for them to be here. There has been no rise in crime in Charlotte. One tragic stabbing on the light rail does not merit a crime spree. There is one reason and one reason only that Border Patrol has been sent to Charlotte, and that is to terrorize our immigrant neighbors, to traumatize their families, and to create chaos and unrest in our community. It is state sanctioned terrorism – plain and simple.

I know they say the goal terrorism is to strike fear in the hearts of average people. But this terrorism has a multitude of objectives. The purpose here is not only to create fear and chaos, but also to undermine cities with Black populations and Black political leadership in order justify the racist assumptions and legitimize authoritarian rule. The goal is also to distract us from the Epstein files, the government shut down, the rise in health care premiums, the wobbling stock market, and the massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy!

The motto of the Trump and the king Samuel warned the people of Israel about could have been the same, “we’re going to fleece you while we police you.” In the case of the king in 1 Samuel 8 it meant taking sons, daughters, land, resources, and livestock to build an army, and a palace, and a kingdom with loyal servants in high places. In the case of Trump, it means taking away government agencies, necessary regulations, the freedom of the press, the rule of law, Civil Rights, the right to protest, protections for immigrants, transgender people, and the environment, SNAP benefits for the poor, while federal troops terrorize our communities across the country. Trump and his administration are trying to fleece us while they police us.

You might be wondering, how could any follower of Jesus possibly support what is happening. But as our gospel reading shows us, even the closest of Jesus’ disciples struggled with the temptation of power, and the lure of lordship. Even the James and John’s mother, Mrs. Zebedee, got in on the action trying to secure a place of status and power for her boys in the kingdom. It really ticked off the other disciples who were probably saying, “Hey James, John, you mamma’s boys, you better get your mother out of here!” But Jesus told them all, “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over people, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it will not be so among you. Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.”

He was saying, “We are not going to be like the rulers of the nations of this world whose political leaders are tyrants that lord power over and oppress their people. My followers must strive to have a different relationship to power. Instead, we are going to empty ourselves of power to be in solidarity with the poor, marginalized, and oppressed of the world so that we can truly love and serve humanity.” Jesus rejected tyranny, but the rise of White Christian Nationalism and Christo-fascism proves that most Christians in America today have never learned the lesson of Matthew 20 and therefore they’ve never learned how to truly follow Jesus.

When we combine the anti-imperial force of 1 Samuel 8 with Jesus’ rejection of tyranny in Matthew 20, we have a full-blown political theology of resistance tailor made for the fascist moment we face right now. We don’t need Hannah Arendt or Timothy Snyder to tell us why we should be opposed to tyranny, because the Bible already told us so. Jesus told us so! Psalm 146 puts it all together, “Do not put your trust in kings and princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. The Lord who sets the prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, lifts up those who are bowed down, loves those who seek justice, watches over the strangers, upholds the orphan and the widow, and the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

That’s why for last 2000 years people have taken on the motto “sic semper tyrannis” or “death always to tyrants,” and why Christians for the last 500 years have taken on the motto of the Scottish reformer John Knox in proclaiming, “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God!” First, we evaluate our situation and try to name it, acknowledge, and reckon with exactly what we are up against, and then try to answer the question, “How do we resist?” Donald Trump may be the President of the United States, but he is also a tyrant, and the biblical witness is clear that whenever there is a tyrant who is abusing his power and oppressing the people, we have sacred duty, a holy obligation, and a diving responsibility to resist.

But how do we do that? One of the finest Christian resisters of empire in history, Dr. Martin Luther King said it best, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” We must get organized and do so as strategically and effectively as we can. This week I saw at least three, maybe more, extraordinary examples of ordinary citizen organizing in solidarity to protect and support our immigrant neighbors. If they thought they were going to invade our city, abduct our neighbors, harm our families and not get push back they were severely mistaken.

On Wednesday afternoon I was on a call hosted by Charlotte East where all the major non-profit organizations who are serving our immigrant neighbors came together with 450 members of the community to share information, collaborate in preparation for the Border Patrol, and join forces to help protect our neighbors. On Thursday I was invited by one of the leaders here at Collective Liberation to join a WhatsApp group of Moms with over 245 people who’ve come together to get trained as ICE verifiers, to offer rides, groceries, support, mutual aid and community to our immigrant families in around the Charlotte region.

On Friday I heard that the Carolina Migrant Network, Charlotte Democracy Center – Center for Common Ground, Common Cause, Democracy NC, Indivisible Charlotte and the Poor People’s Campaign have come together to form the Charlotte Immigrant Protection Alliance to denounce federal action in our city and to pledge their support for our immigrant community. And on Saturday there was a beautiful and peaceful protest against ICE and showing love for our immigrant neighbors uptown. But the fight is just beginning and there is still so much more to do.

One of the people who I believe has the most to teach us about how to resist is a man very few Americas know named Gene Sharp. Gene was the author of over 35 books and dedicated his life to studying the non-violent direct action of Ghandi, A.J. Muste, Henri David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King to try and distill the strategies, methods and tactics they used that were the most effective in creating change.

Sharp’s key belief was that power does not derive from some intrinsic quality of the powerful. Political power, regardless of its structural organization ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. He believed that all power structures depend upon our obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). And if the people decide not to obey, rulers have no power. If the subjects of any system come to recognize they are the source of the state’s power, and refuse to offer the obedience, then the leader(s) will be left without power.

Sharp has been called both the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.” His book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation has been translated into over 40 languages and directly inspired organizers to the overthrow of 50 different autocratic governments in the last 40 years from Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Tunesia, Egypt, Iran, South Africa and Sudan. The methods he provided been effective in tyrannical regimes across the world and now we need to apply them to the dictatorship here in America. The key to all his methods for people to engage in non-violent direct action that is strategic, to become strategically ungovernable.

We are a people who have no king but Jesus. We are a people who have no king but Christ. We are a people who have no king but the King of Kings and no lord but the Lord of Lords. We are a people who have no king but God—the God of the prophets. There was at least one person in Israel who did not succumb to the fear and insecurity of the people. There was at least one person in Israel who would not bend the knee to a human tyrant or the empire. That was the prophet, Samuel.

And I don’t know if you noticed, but even though Samuel was deeply grieved over the people’s desire for a king, God did not tell Samuel he had the right to resign. Even though Samuel felt rejected, God did not tell Samuel he had the right to retire. Even though Samuel felt dismissed, God did not tell Samuel that he had the right to stop being a prophet. In fact, Samuel’s role as prophet and prophetic voice grew even more necessary now that there was a king. Whenever there are kings, God will raise up prophets. The prophet Samuel would become a continual check and critique on the new king Saul, to try and help him to lead with justice and do the right thing, and challenge him when he does wrong.

Like Samuel, we too can grieve the arrival of the authoritarian regime at our doorstep with the Border Patrol. Like Samuel, we too can feel rundown and rejected by the constant onslaught of this fascist regime. But we are not allowed to resign. We are not allowed to retire from the work of following Jesus, speaking truth to power, and engaging in the prophetic ministry of strategic community organizing, civil disobedience, and non-violent resistance—remembering always that we have no king but Jesus, no king but the king of Kings.

As the ancient Jewish saying goes, “It is not up to us to finish the work, but neither are we free to neglect.” It does not matter how old we are or what our abilities are; there is a role for us to play in this resistance. We have all the tools we need, and the God of the poor, marginalized, and oppressed is on our side, and if God is for us, who shall we fear?

Trump ran on a white-supremacist, “anti-woke” agenda, branded as returning America to a “colorblind” meritocracy—promising to end D.E.I., ban “critical race theory,” and carry out mass deportations. 85% percent of white evangelicals, 61% of white Catholics, and 58% of white mainline Protestants voted for him, while 86% of Black Protestants voted against him. The racial, religious, and political divide in America could not be clearer.

Unlike the typical politician who fails to deliver, the reality Trump has inaugurated is harsher than advertised. A heavily funded masked federal police force with no accountability, I.C.E., is ravaging immigrant families and neighborhoods. National Guard troops have been sent to progressive cities with large Black populations and Black leadership, sowing conflict and chaos under the banner of “crime reduction.”

Scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that a barrage of executive orders is upending decades of Civil Rights—ushering in a “second Nadir,” echoing the regressive rollbacks of Civil Rights during the post-Reconstruction period from 1890–1920.[i] We are living through a bleak, authoritarian white backlash that will demand more courage from ordinary citizens than we’ve mustered in our lifetimes.

But I’m not here to bemoan the current administration. I want to use my life as a prism to understand how we got here, how race, religion, and politics function within us. I believe in the power of stories. As my mentor Meta Commerse says, “Our stories contain both our deepest wounds and our most powerful medicine.” My story is somewhat unique, but as James Joyce wrote, “In the particular we find the universal.”

The question guiding my reflections comes from Christian mystic and civil-rights leader Howard Thurman: “Why does American Christianity seem impotent to deal radically—and therefore effectively—with racial discrimination and injustice?”[ii] A recent research study from PRRI reinforced this question. It found white Christians are 20–50% more likely to hold racist views than white non-Christians.[iii] Why, in America, does being Christian so often correlate with being more—not less—racist?

Part 1 - The Formation of a White Christian Nationalist:

I was born in Appalachia, at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, in Lynchburg, Virginia—home to Jerry Falwell and the Liberty University, which he founded as a segregation academy and as a base for the Moral Majority, the seedbed of today’s White Christian Nationalism. Irony is a recurring theme in my life as I am now diametrically opposed to nearly everything Falwell championed.

Whether I’m a “true Southerner” is debatable, but I’m unquestionably a Virginian. On my father’s side, we descend from landed gentry—segregationists, Confederates, and enslavers—going all the way back to Patrick Henry, who famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” On my mother’s side, we come from Scotch-Irish and Norwegian immigrants who settled on unceded Monacan land.

Virginians are a particular kind of Southerner who live in the Northernmost Southern state, which simply means we have our heads so far up our asses we think we can look down on everybody else in the South. Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy and the birthplace of “Lost Cause” ideology. Coined in 1866 by Richmond newspaper editor Edward Pollard, it romanticized the Confederacy, painted slavery as benevolent, and claimed the war wasn’t about slavery at all. Popular culture baptized this ideology in the blockbuster movie Gone with the Wind.

Every Virginian likes to think they’re a professional historian, but the “history” many of us inherited was “Lost Cause” ideology. A century after it was invented, my father’s high-school teachers taught this ideology to him. Even without a college degree, he developed a complex and exhaustive knowledge of American history through this lens and then passed it on to me.

To give you an insight into my family, my great-grandmother owned a beloved horse that she named “Barry Goldwater.” As you can see, the “Lost Cause” didn’t die; it simply mutated into Goldwater and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” and later Reagan’s racist political nostalgia “Make America Great Again,” and in Trump’s neo-fascist revival of the same name. In many ways, all of America has become the South, and all of America has become a “Lost Cause.”

My parents were hippies in the 70s, living in a trailer in Amherst County. Dad worked third shift at Lynchburg Foundry, and Mom commuted to UVA for her Ph.D. She was a serious second-wave feminist, refused the white wedding dress, kept her maiden name, and made my father read The Feminine Mystique. When she took a job at Lehigh University, we moved to eastern Pennsylvania. The diversity there fascinated my Southern parents, like the fact that my best friend in preschool was a Black girl, the granddaughter of heavyweight champion Larry Holmes.

My mother’s family was devoutly religious—my grandfather and uncle were both Methodist pastors—so I grew up in church whenever the doors were open. I heard very little direct preaching on race but assumed we couldn’t be racist because we were “good Methodists.” Methodism has a conflicted history: while founders John Wesley and Francis Asbury opposed slavery, the church split in 1844 over slaveholding clergy; and racist theology and segregation have endured for generations.

Methodism calls itself a “religion of the heart,” focused on personal piety and holiness, which is another way of saying “a religion of sentimentality.” My parents were deeply involved in the Emmaus Walk, a 72-hour renewal retreat of talks, prayer, and worship that shaped our family’s spiritual life. But like much of the church, Emmaus avoided explicit engagement with systemic injustice.

As a teenager, I didn’t care for church but friends, sports, music, and girls. I came of age in the early ’90s as Black culture surged into the mainstream—hip-hop, sports, entertainment, fashion—shaped me more than Sunday school. I idolized Black athletes and musicians; my appreciation often slid into appropriation. I wore the clothes and spoke the slang without understanding or ever experiencing the cost of Black life in America. I was blasting rap music while Rodney King was being beaten by the police, and the streets were burning in LA.

Later, I came to recognize that I was being thoroughly catechized into colorblind racism[iv]—the dominant white posture after the Civil Rights and Black Power eras receded. Colorblind ideology denies the existence of systemic racism, chalking racial disparities up to market forces, culture, or non-racial factors. Colorblind racism proclaims, “I’m not racist. I don’t see color,” naively imagining that by ignoring race we can eliminate racism and produce equality.

Looking back, I now see how colorblind ideology fused seamlessly with my sentimental Methodist piety, enabling us to spiritually bypass race by saying “We’re all God’s children.” We even sang, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” The predominant Christian perspective on race in the 90s was, “What’s 400 years of slavery between friends?”[v] Colorblind Christianity[vi] shaped me and enabled us all to deny the church’s racist past and its living legacy.

In 1997, my mom was hired by UNC Charlotte to start a doctoral program, and we moved back South—straight into the heart of evangelicalism. My parents wanted a church that wouldn’t bore their teenage sons, so we chose Crossroads, led by an Oral Roberts grad. We were among the first hundred; it soon swelled to thousands.

Dad played in the praise band; Mom taught Sunday school; my brother and I dove into the youth group. We heard Josh McDowell speak on “absolute truth,” hit Christian rock shows, and went to Ron Luce’s “Acquire the Fire.” We learned “spiritual warfare,” devoured Frank Peretti’s Christian horror novels, we got swept up in the bestselling apocalyptic Left Behind series, read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and signed “True Love Waits” pledge cards. I even wore a purity ring—which, thank God, I didn’t take too seriously. Some of my friends did, and they paid for it dearly on their wedding nights!

Unfortunately, racism was never mentioned as something we needed to engage in spiritual warfare with. And while nothing overtly “racist” was being said in the evangelical church, I was being subtly groomed into an extreme right-wing form of American Christianity: White Christian Nationalism. Mirroring the Southern Strategy and Reagan-era colorblindness, this toxic Christianity trafficked in dog whistles like James Dobson’s “traditional family values,” or “colorblind conservatism,” “moral majority,” “states’ rights,” “religious liberty,” and suspicion of “big government.” Meanwhile, the anti-Black, antisemitic, and Islamophobic currents ran just below the surface.

Ironically, this was when I first felt called to ministry. With Methodist ministers in the family, I thought pastors were the most uncool people. But then a whirlwind of Spirit knocked me sideways. I found myself pulling into the Christian bookstore after school and reading theology for hours—Luther, A.W. Tozer, Arthur Pink. What 18-year-old does that by choice? Something had taken hold of me. By graduation, I was a five-point Calvinist with a strong pastoral calling.

I started hosting Bible studies at my house. My friend Ethan, who is Black, bonded with me over reading the Chinese Evangelical Watchman Nee. We visited Pentecostal churches together on Wednesdays and Sunday nights to evaluate the preacher’s theology—to see if they were a good Calvinist. That friendship put a small crack in my colorblind Christianity and first planted the idea that the church should be interracial and integrated.

One of the convictions I continue to hold on to from my evangelical upbringing is that following Jesus should be the ultimate and most fundamental aspect of our existence—meaning we must be willing to live and die for it. However, at the age of 18, living and dying for America and for Christ felt identical to me. I saw no conflict between these commitments. My formation into White Christian Nationalism was nearly complete.

I went to Marion Military Institute in Alabama, intending to become an Army chaplain. On day one, upperclassmen lined us up on the quad and asked about our career paths. The other cadets said, “Armor.” “Artillery.” “Intelligence.” I said, “Chaplain,” and they laughed. I realized I wouldn’t survive as a chaplain. Determined to prove myself a soldier, I switched to infantry and graduated atop my class as an Airborne Ranger, trained to kill America’s enemies. On Sundays, we formed up by denomination and marched to church carrying the American flag—the Baptists with the largest platoon, then Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians at the rear.

Marion is where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered during the Civil Rights movement. Coretta Scott King was born in that county. Selma—site of “Bloody Sunday” and the Montgomery march—is thirty miles away; Lowndes County, where Stokely Carmichael organized a Black Panther Party, is less than an hour away. I knew none of this history back when I was there. But I did know there was an openly white-supremacist student organization on campus, the Sons of Marion, and all the top cadets on campus my freshman year were Sons of Marion.

Modeled on the Sons of Confederate Veterans, they honored their Confederate ancestors and preached the Lost Cause ideology. In their pitch to our incoming class, student leaders recited an old white-supremacist poem claiming only white people would be resurrected when Jesus returned. I was stunned. I promised myself I wouldn’t join, no matter the pressure. Given my history and ambitions, it is somewhat miraculous that I didn’t become a “Son.” Somehow, I was spared the worst of white supremacy, but I still became a White Christian Nationalist.

Part 2 – The Formation of a White Christian Radical

On September 11, 2001, I was a commissioned Army officer working on a degree in philosophy and religion at Campbell University. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Christian nationalism and Zionism spiked overnight. This was a watershed moment for me. As a soldier who’d already given my life to the country, the sudden nationalist zeal rang hollow to me, and as someone studying theology, the radically apocalyptic Christianity came off as absurd. In that moment of crisis, I experienced a rupture in my identity and politics. America went one way, and I went the other. I turned left while America drifted right.

I went to Duke for seminary and developed a critique of the United States as an empire through mentors like Stanley Hauerwas. I also became a youth minister at a small Southern Baptist congregation in Raleigh—hired, ironically, because a warrant officer on the search committee liked my military background. Though I disagreed with the pastor’s theology and politics, he also taught me how to effectively lead and love a congregation.

I was baptized by fire the first weekend at a youth lock-in. A lock-in alone is enough to give up on ministry, but in addition, a white mother pulled me aside and said, “Please keep my daughter away from the Black boy tonight. I don’t want her getting pregnant and ending up like his mother.” I promised her that no one would be having sex, no matter their race. Later, I learned the boy’s mother had been the church organist and had a mixed-race child. This was 2003.

The pastor of that church, to his credit, later hosted a home Bible study on racism. A young mother insisted she had no racial bias. So, the pastor asked her, “How would you feel if your daughter dated a Black man?” “Never!” she yelled, “But that’s not about race—it’s just different cultures.” The disassociation stunned me.

After Duke, I moved to Washington, D.C., to pursue doctoral work at Catholic University and served as associate pastor of a progressive church in Alexandria. My wife and I lived in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood. After years of infertility, we chose adoption.

During our home study, the caseworker asked, “What races are you open to?” We were offended and announced, “All races, of course! How could you ask us that!” We had no idea what we were saying. Our color-blind ignorance mirrored America’s at the time, which was brimming with naïve optimism after the election of Barack Obama and declaring itself to be “post-racial.” We weren’t post-anything.

A Black mother from Petersburg chose us and, in our meeting, her mother told me, “If you were the kind of white pastor I pictured, I’d never let her give you this baby.” Our daughter, Lucy, was born on February 24. The birth mother invited us to care for Lucy in her hospital room, but she hadn’t told her friends about the adoption. When they arrived with balloons and saw us—two white strangers holding the baby—they said, “What are these white people doing here?” When she told them we were the adoptive parents, they said, “You’re not taking this child. We’ll raise her in our community like the others.” We handed Lucy over quietly and came back later.

Adopting a Black daughter was another watershed event that completely shifted my soul and my politics. Lucy was born a month after The New Jim Crow sounded the alarm on mass incarceration. When she was two, Trayvon Martin was killed, and the Black Lives Matter movement began. A new racial consciousness rose alongside resurgent white supremacy. The massive responsibility of raising a Black daughter in America felt like a heavy weight, and I embarked on my own spiritual journey of studying race to try and become a better father and pastor, which eventually led me to a confrontation with whiteness.

In 2011, we moved back to North Carolina to be closer to family—my father had a heart attack; my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I accepted a call to a progressive Baptist church in Cary that had just weathered a church conflict they called “the recent unpleasantness.” Early on, I partnered with a nearby Black pastor for a joint service. From the first musical note, our people were freaked out; I joked that they shat so many bricks that morning that our sanctuary floor could have been re-furbished in a few hours.

The church, like many white dominant congregations, had a Black custodian, Randy, a former soldier and a former pastor. We became friends, and I invited him and his wife to worship and to help lead music. Later, they wanted to join the church. In the business meeting, there was a lot of grumbling over whether he should be allowed to join the church. The vote passed, barely, but the red flags were unmistakable.

Soon after, during a Sunday sermon, Randy and his wife were talking back to me as I preached, a common practice in the Black church tradition. I loved it; it sharpened my preaching. But John, a veteran who had been on my search committee, did not. Mid-service, he loudly shushed them, humiliating them in front of visitors. Later at lunch, he told Randy, “This is not a Black church. We don’t worship that way.”

I was furious and brought the issue to our deacons. They were aghast—until I asked who would call John. Silence. He gave a lot of money. So, I had to call. “Boy,” he said, “don’t you know you work for me?” I replied, “I work for the church, I’m your pastor, and what you did was wrong.” He said they were “distracting me” and asked, “Would you be okay if a hundred Muslims joined?”—as if Blackness and Islam were necessarily intertwined. He left for the Methodists. Ironically, the day he joined, he had to stand between two Latinx families.

We launched a Wednesday series at that same church on anti-racism, and mid-video, an elderly white woman got angry, stormed out, and refused to return. After the killing of Mike Brown and the protests in Ferguson, I preached, “I don’t know how to raise a Black daughter in this America.” An elderly white woman who’d never said an unkind word about anyone came through, shook my hand, and said, “I heard what you said about your daughter. Just tell her to obey the law and she’ll be fine.” Lucy was four.

In 2015, I was recruited to be the sixth senior minister of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte—a historically liberal, influential church with a proud Civil Rights legacy: opposing Jim Crow and even championing court-ordered busing. The reputation outpaced the reality. Many believed their racial justice work was finished and had grown complacent on the issue.

An associate pastor and I planned a year-long series, “Awakening to Racial Injustice,” culminating in a Deep South pilgrimage with a Black partner church. On the eve of our kickoff, Keith Lamont Scott was killed by Charlotte police. Protests filled the streets for weeks. The city was on CNN every night. The National Guard rolled in to protect buildings. We marched and prayed nightly with clergy and neighbors. Nothing in seminary prepared us for the pastoral strain of an uprising.

Interest in our series soared, along with the need for hard conversations. Yet even earnest white participants were blocked by white supremacy and colorblind habits they could not see. Then came the 2016 election. Trump’s openly white-supremacist campaign and victory cut to the conscience of our white-dominant congregation.

Months earlier, I had invited Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Moral Monday’s Movement to preach the Sunday after the election. Nearly a thousand people showed up seeking meaning and hope. He preached for ninety minutes; the service ran almost three hours. He called out colorblind racism as a root of Trump’s rise and invited clergy and laity forward to anoint us with oil for the work of revival, resistance, and resilience.

There was a Deacon’s meeting the next night, and I nearly lost my job. Responses ranged from white fragility to white rage. Some labeled Barber’s sermon “partisan politics” and demanded publicly denounce him or bar him permanently from our pulpit. Others were angry at his words about the new president because they had just voted for him a few days earlier.

We worked through this conflict. A lay team drafted a congregational statement on Racism, which was nearly derailed when a family with three members in leadership brought a substitute statement that scrubbed race entirely in favor of generic “oppression.” It was eventually approved, and so we pushed forward, beginning with diversifying the music, integrating the staff, hiring our first Black clergy, and then another, and slowly diversifying membership.

We did everything the books and scholars recommended to address racial injustice and build a multiracial church. Progress was halting, small gains, heavy pushback, frequent reversals. I was told I preached too much about justice and was “hyper-focused on race,” and was trying to make them into a Black church. I eventually realized I wasn’t just facing white supremacists, polite racists, or colorblind Christians; I was confronting white liberalism—my own included—as a structural impediment to progress—its own unique racist ideology. It was an epiphany.

That’s when I piloted Confronting Whiteness with members of the congregation—to meet people where they were. I developed an intense nine-week small-group course led by a trained facilitator, where participants are invited to experience Black authors and filmmakers speaking directly to white people about whiteness and to reflect on their own racial formation. We launched it in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s murder. Hundreds of our members participated; more than a thousand people have now completed it. We’ve had a lot of success, but like every moment of racial progress in American history, white backlash soon reared its ugly head.

One conversation stays with me: a liberal white woman and former minister at the church took me for a drink and said, “I’m not taking your course. I worked as the only white woman in a Black organization. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. How dare you come here and tell us we have work to do on race when we were on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement before you were born.” Minutes later, she referred to one of our Black women ministers on our staff as “an angry Black woman,” completely oblivious to the harm she was causing. She needed the Confronting Whiteness course as much as anyone, but more than that, her pompous attitude revealed the cynical and self-righteous racism at the heart of white liberalism.

I was undeterred by the resistance and kept preaching and working for racial justice. Critics said my preaching on race was killing the church and that attendance dropped whenever a Black preacher filled our pulpit. I agreed to meet with a group of aggrieved former leaders who had been organizing in secret to force me out. After two years of meeting, the one thing they could all agree on was that they believed our congregation had finished its work on race and did not want to hear about racism from the pulpit anymore. We agreed to disagree.

After Trump’s second election, I preached a sermon that explicitly opposed the violent racism and authoritarianism that I could see his second administration would become. Two weeks later, I was forced to resign—abruptly. The congregation exploded into conflict, the news media went into a frenzy, and the church tried to hide its true motivations for forcing my departure by bemoaning the declining attendance and struggling finances (something all churches in America are facing), even though it was clearly due to my emphasis on racial justice.

In 1941 W.J. Cash defined Southerners as, “Self-satisfied, complacent people who will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere.”[vii] That characterized much of my experience among the Southern white liberals at Myers Park.

I think my story provides evidence that the racial, religious, and political divide we face is more complex than is often presented. It is not as simple as people being republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, “racist” or “anti-racist.” There is a multiplicity of racial ideologies that exist in America and in our churches. You heard examples of each of them in my story. There is 1) blatant white supremacy, 2) subtle or polite racism, 3) color-blind racist ideology, and 4) white liberal racism, among others.

After twenty years of leading progressive congregations and working closely with white liberals, I have changed. I am no longer comfortable as a white liberal but feel something more like a white radical.[viii] And I believe the conflict I’ve experienced stems from the fact that I now possess a very different set of ideas, psychologies, goals, and tactics than white liberals.

Roderick Bush defines a white liberal racist as “A person who is torn between their egalitarian principles and their desire for stability and social order. People who care about racism but without having to significantly alter the racial and economic status quo that benefits them.”[ix] It is an ideology with an aversion to discomfort and confrontation. However, I’ve come to believe that to affect change on racial injustice and oppression, we’re going to have to “break some plates.”

White liberals prefer non-confrontational approaches, gradualism, process, decorum, civility, decency, and politeness. White radicals prefer truth, confrontation, disruption, and accountability. White liberals seek consensus, understanding, reconciliation, unity, and reform. White radicals seek progress, change, equity, and transformation. White liberals are fundamentally committed to the status quo, while white radicals are fundamentally committed to justice and liberation.[x]

The problem is that race is fundamentally about power, not hatred or difference, and as Frederick Douglass once said, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground, rain without thunder and lightning, and the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.”[xi]

Today, white Christians of all denominations and political persuasions are more racist than they were when Donald Trump was first elected and more racist than they were before the murder of George Floyd. Meanwhile, race continues to determine the outcomes of people in every sector of society, from housing, health care, employment, education, and the economy. The ground is moving under our feet to the far right, and doing nothing means we will be swept away with the tide.

So, I return to Howard Thurman’s question: Why does American Christianity seem powerless to deal radically—and effectively—with racial injustice? I believe my story offers some answers. Our participation in white Christian families, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and churches shapes and conditions us into racial ideology because of America’s history of racial injustice. In addition, Racism and white supremacy were already baked into the European Christianity that arrived on these shores with the Anglicans and Puritans, and it has never been extracted.

We’ve never reckoned with the legacy of chattel slavery, segregation, or the 400 years of oppression. Instead, we’ve practiced a faith drenched in individualism and sentimentality, that privatized holiness and ignored unjust systems. We’ve baptized colorblindness as a virtue. We’ve confused America with the church and conservative politics with the gospel. We’ve trained white Christians to call the preservation of whiteness “faithfulness,” and we’ve naively and self-righteously imagined that our political party or our liberalism has made us immune to racial ideology, when we may be the strongest impediments to progress.

Dr. King once said, “For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery necessary to extract it is complex and detailed. As a beginning, it is necessary to X-Ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease.”[xii]

We are in a season of white backlash. White Christian nationalism is now dominant. Neo-fascist authoritarianism has arrived in force. The work ahead is not to move people back to the middle with civil dialogue and polite conversation, but to become a different kind of people—people who refuse to live in denial, people who are freed from the lie of whiteness, people who work to break the chains of racial oppression and injustice even if it costs us everything.

If America is to become a multi-racial democracy, it will be because ordinary Christians, along with people of faith and good conscience, work together to engage in the complex surgery necessary to extract the lie of racism and whiteness from the church, the South, and American society once and for all.

[i] Nikole Hannah Jones, “How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months, The New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2025.

[ii] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949.

[iii] Robert P. Jones, “Racism Among White Christians is Higher than the Nonreligious. That’s No Coincidence,” NBC News, July 27, 2020.

[iv] See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

[v] This line is indebted to Stanley Hauerwas who often used it in his reflections on racism in America.

[vi] See Jesse Curtis, The Myth of Colorblind Christians, NYU Press, 2021.

[vii] W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South, Knoph, 1941. Cash also wrote, [The South at its best is] violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism—these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.”

[viii] The terminology ‘white liberal’ is old and well documented in the Black intellectual tradition, but the term ‘white radical’ comes from a document written by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee 1966 entitled “Black Power” a position paper for the SNCC Vine City Project that critiques both ‘white liberals’ and ‘white radicals,’ yet also calls on the need for more white radicals in the Black Freedom Movement.

[ix] Roderick Bush, The End of White World Supremacy, Temple U Press, 2009.

[x] See Angie Beeman, Liberal White Supremacy, U of Georgia Press, 2022.

[xi] Frederick Douglass, from an address on West India Emancipation, delivered August 4, 1857.

[xii] Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America,” lecture at Stanford University, April 14, 1967.

It’s winter in America,
And all the healers have been killed
Or sent away.
But the people know
There’s something wrong.

Everybody ought to know it’s winter
Winter in America,
And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save.
Sister, save your soul, Lord knows
It’s winter in America.

What does it feel like to be living in a perpetual season of ice and I.C.E.? It is Winter in America, and our hearts are growing cold. Americans today are experiencing high levels of national uncertainty and political anxiety driven by social discord and economic strain. Multiple studies indicate a widespread sense of pessimism and discouragement among Americans today, especially concerning social trust, our morality, and the future of the nation.

One-third of Americans feel a high threat from the political climate, a sentiment that is increasing across all demographics. A Gallup poll last year found that 77% of Americans anticipate the nation will be more politically divided in 2050, a pessimistic view that has increased over the past five years. Another poll found that only 29% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S right now, and only 19% of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction, a deep-seated lack of hope not seen in two decades.

These feelings are particularly pronounced among younger generations and linked to political, economic, and social issues. Only a small minority of younger Americans (44%) are hopeful that progress will be made on major social challenges in their lifetime, indicating a deep skepticism about our future. Even more troubling, a record-high 83% of Americans believe the state of moral values is getting worse. This is simply a snapshot of where we are collectively as a nation. Meanwhile, each of us are also carrying our own personal and familial troubles as well.

Is there a divine word for us and for our nation in this time of pessimism and hopelessness? Yes! The author of Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus told the parable we heard today because his disciples were discouraged. Another translation says they were “losing heart.” The Greek is far more powerful. It claims the disciples were world-weary, run-down, drained, and depleted. The word ekkakeó means “to be utterly spiritless,” “weak,” “exhausted,” or “fainthearted.” The disciples were not just physically exhausted; they were also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted. They were losing their hearts, their hope, their faith, and their will to go on.

As people of faith or good conscience in America today, we find ourselves in a similar situation to the disciples. We too are weary, run down, and depleted. We too are ekkakeó, spiritless, weak, fainthearted, suffering, and struggling. We too are physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually drained. We too are frustrated, disappointed, and disillusioned by what is going on in our world. We are tired of waking up each morning looking at the news and saying, “What fresh Hell is this?” We are worn out by this fascist, authoritarian political nightmare. We are exhausted by the genocide in Gaza, the brutality of I.C.E. ripping families apart, the racist stupidity of National Guard troops being sent to Democratic cities with Black leadership.

Scientists this week said we’ve hit a new tipping point in ecological disaster with widespread death of coral reef ecosystems, marking the first time our climate has passed this horrific threshold. We are run down by environmental disaster, savage capitalism, mass shootings, and White Christian Nationalism. We are fed up with economic disparity, aggressive inflation, constant wage stagnation, housing crisis, and policies that further disenfranchise the poor. We are weary of homophobic policies, attacks on transgender people, the loss of reproductive rights, the disappearance of voter protections, and the erosion of democracy. We are exhausted by the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the immoral and illegal war our government is now waging on Venezuela.

All of this makes us feel ekkakeó, faint, weak, weary, exhausted, discouraged, depressed, drained, despairing, utterly spiritless. I hear it in the voices of my friends. We are losing our hearts, our hope, our faith, and our spirits. Has anybody felt like this lately? Have you felt discouraged? Have you felt disappointed? Have you felt ekkakeó? Have you felt worn down, weary, and exhausted? Have you had trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? Are you weak and heavy laden? Are you cumbered with a load of care? Then this parable, this story, this gospel, this good news from Luke 18 is for you!

The New International Version says that Jesus told his disciples this parable to show them that they should “pray always and never give up!” Pray always and never give up! This parable of the widow and the unjust judge is Jesus’ response to our ekkakeó, our weariness, our loss of heart, our frustration, our exhaustion, our discouragement, our hopelessness, and our despair. And what is even more powerful about this story is that the antagonist is the perfect embodiment of the most frustrating thing we face in America today—bad actors.

Jesus said, “In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for humanity.” And in case you think Jesus may have been overstating his perspective, that is also exactly how the judge describes himself in his own internal monologue. The unjust judge said to himself, “Even though I have no fear of God and no respect for humanity.” If there was ever a statement that described the billionaires, the ruling class, and the current administration, it is this one: they have no fear of God and no respect for humanity.

Their lack of reverence for God is how they can take God’s name in vain and hide behind a demented version of Christianity to justify their crimes against humanity. Their lack of respect for human dignity is how they can justify genocide in Gaza, a masked gestapo police force destroying families through mass deportation, occupying American cities with the National Guard, harassing transgender people, scapegoating the left, dismantling the government, attacking their political enemies, valorizing monsters like Charlie Kirk, subverting Congress and the Constitution, and murdering people of the coast of the sovereign nation of Venezuela.

Just like the unjust judge in this story, they have no fear of God and no respect for humanity! And people like that make us weary! They cause us to faint! They grate on our last nerve. They wear us down. They accelerate our ekkakeó. The very existence of people who have no fear of God or respect for humanity simply accelerates our sense of discouragement and despair. It exacerbates our loss of heart, of faith, of hope, and of spirit, but that’s why Jesus told this story, because he knew we would confront these people who had no fear of God or respect for humanity, and he knew we would need our faith, our hope, our hearts, our spirits restored.

This parable is Jesus’ attempt to encourage us to continue to persist in the life of prayer and in the pursuit of justice, which (I don’t know if you noticed) are described here in this parable as one and the same synonymous activity. Prayer and justice, contemplation and action, meditation and liberation are twin sisters that walk hand in hand. They need each other, they require each other, they are mutually interdependent aspects of faithful existence. According to Jesus, to pray always is to live a life of justice, and to live a life of justice is to pray always.

I think the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it best when he said, “To clasp our hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” And sometimes when we lose our hearts, our faith, our hope, or our spirits, because of sickness, suffering, grief, loss, disappointment, or because of people like the unjust judge, we need to be reminded of who we are and why we are here.

One night during a speech to a packed auditorium in Boston, the famous writer, orator, and leader of the abolitionist movement Frederick Douglass lamented the evils of slavery and concluded his speech hopelessly declaring that white people would never end slavery and the only thing left for the enslaved to do was to rise up in armed revolution, but then he pessimistically said would that result in complete slaughter. Sitting behind him on the stage that night was Sojourner Truth, and in her deep prophetic voice, she interrupted Douglass, saying, “Frederick, is God dead?” Douglass was accustomed to comments from the crowd, but her question stunned him into complete silence. Then suddenly, the audience erupted into applause, praising God, which swept away Douglass’ despair and gave birth to hope all over again.

Sojourner Truth knew what the widow in our story knew, that even the most hard-hearted people who neither fear God nor have any respect for humanity still have a weakness. They can be worn down through persistent confrontation. The Greek verb the judge used to describe what the widow did to him is a term called hypopiazo. It comes from the realm of boxing, and it didn’t just mean “she wore me out,” but “she gave me a black eye.” Now, it’s highly unlikely that the widow physically struck the judge, but he was complaining that she’d beat him up. Or as we’d say it today, the widow had brow-beaten him into submission.

A black eye is not just an injury but a metaphor for a negative mark on a person’s character and reputation. It’s possible the judge was concerned his image was being tarnished by the widow’s constant claims for justice, which were a visible public indication to everyone in society that the judge was apathetic and indifferent. He might lose his honor, prestige, or status in society. Even the most heartless people who do not fear God or respect humanity are still subject to peer pressure, social ridicule, and public embarrassment. Whatever the case was, we know that the widow physically, emotionally, and socially whipped the unjust judge.

This widow’s actions are a master class in patience, persistence, resilience, fortitude, determination, perseverance, faithfulness, and endurance. Many scholars and pastors believe that she teaches us the virtue of persistence, but I believe the widow’s actions go far beyond that. She was not just persistent. She was tenacious! She did not simply keep coming back in the pursuit of justice over again. It was the way she came back. Her tenacity wore down the unjust judge. She did not just tire him out or wear him down; she beat him up one side and down the other.

She reminds us of the many other widows in the Bible and women throughout history who were tenacious in the practice of prayer and the pursuit of justice like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Day, Ida B Wells, Frida Kahlo, Mother Jones, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Delores Huerta, Marsha P. Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera, just to name a few! If there’s anything this story can teach us in this fascist moment, it is that we need to be more tenacious. When we are feeling discouraged, hopeless, and faint-hearted, we need to turn our disappointment back on those who are engaged in injustice with a fire of tenacity in our practice of prayer and our pursuit of justice.

Jesus’ story of the widow proves that we are not required to play nice with people who do not fear God or respect humanity. In fact, there is nowhere in the Bible where it says to take it easy on bad actors in the pursuit of justice. There is nowhere in the Bible or in the teachings of Jesus or in the gospel where it says we need to be nice in the pursuit of justice. Loving? Sure. But not nice. We have permission to push back and even browbeat the opposition into justice.

Paul said we are called to provoke one another to love and good deeds. And Jesus said that we should be so persistent, so resolute, so tenacious in our practice of prayer and our pursuit of justice that those who do not fear God or respect humanity feel like we are bruising them up and beating them down. In fact, Jesus told this parable to his world weary disciples in order to encourage them not to lose heart, or faith, or hope, or spirit but to take your disillusionment, take your frustration, take your discouragement, take your despair, and put it right into the face of those who are harming other people and standing in the way of justice.

We are not called to politely request justice from those who do not fear God or respect humanity. We are called to aggressively pursue justice in ways that make people who do not fear God or respect humanity feel uncomfortable, exhausted, worn out, run down, and browbeaten. We do not have to apologize for how seriously we take the gospel. There is no reason whatsoever to give the unjust judges of the world the benefit of the doubt. Instead, Jesus tells us to be like this widow and to persistently and tenaciously confront them until we wear them down. She is the quintessential example of someone who said, “No Justice! No Peace!” As long as you refuse to give me justice, you will have no peace!

Please take note that the widow did not wear out the unjust judge through civil dialogue, polite conversations, rational arguments, moral persuasion, or by appealing to his conscience. A first person has to have a conscience in order to appeal to it! The unjust judge described himself as a person who did not fear God or respect humanity, and Maya Angelo taught us that “when somebody tells you who they are, believe them!” We are not required to use intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or even moral persuasion with people who do not fear God or respect humanity. We have permission from Jesus himself to use all the tools we have to be aggressive in our pursuit of justice.

When I was in South Africa, one of the white Dutch Reformed Afrikaner pastors asked me, in front of the entire summit, “Are you in conversation in America with Christians like Charlie Kirk?” If you could have seen the look on my face! My answer was “No,” but I also tried to explain that Charlie Kirk was not a Christian but a fascist, and the sentimentality of asking me to “cross the aisle” to engage in “civil dialogue” with someone like him was not realistic or productive.

Later, I was talking with Resmaa Menakem about this, and he said something profound. “Look, do you think Black people haven’t tried all these things in the past? Do you think we haven’t tried crossing the aisle, civil dialogue, and singing Kumbaya? Do you think Black people haven’t tried moral persuasion? If moral persuasion worked, Booker T. Washington would have converted the entire nation! You can’t reason with people who have no conscience and are systematically committed to your extermination.” It’s like the famous quote, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” When that happens, we must use a different strategy.

To be clear, this parable is not a call to try and change the hearts and minds of those who have no fear of God or respect for people. You cannot appeal or rationalize with people who have no moral conscience. You have to find a way to wear them out or creatively maneuver them into doing the right thing! You have to strategically make their lives impossible if they continue to refuse to do justice! There are plenty of stories in the Bible where people engaged in injustice who are on the wrong side of history were transformed by an encounter with the living God, the liberative Jesus, or the power of the Holy Spirit. But this is not one of those stories.

The narrator never says that the unjust judge had a change of heart and began to fear God and respect humanity. This is not a story of transformation. This is a story of how the widow’s persistence and tenacity were effective in provoking justice. When we are facing people who do not fear God or respect humanity, focus on the outcome of achieving justice and leave the transformation up to God. Our job is to pursue justice persistently, tenaciously, ardently, and unapologetically, and let the Spirit transform who it wants to transform.

This parable is Jesus’ good news sent to encourage each of us that no matter what you’re going through, no matter what you’re facing, no matter what your struggles are, not matter what your trails and tribulations, no matter how daunting the future looks, no matter how many politicians do not fear God or respect humanity we face, do not be discouraged, do not be dismayed, do not despair, do not lose hope, do not lose heart, do not lose faith, do not lose spirit, do not grow weary, do not grow faint, do not give up, do not give in!

Instead, take all your emotions, all your frustrations, all your struggles, and let them radicalize you, let them motivate you, let them inspire you, and let them provoke you to love and good deeds. Be like the widow, be persistent, be aggressive, be resilient, be tenacious in the practice of prayer and the pursuit of justice. Let your tenacity be the fire that keeps you warm while it is winter in America. Imagine what would happen if we were not 100 or 1000 or 1 million isolated widows, but if we were all in solidarity together. We could carry each other, we could lighten one another’s load, and we could be more powerful than any empire.

That’s why the old spirituals said,

Walk together, children, don’t you get weary.

Sing together, children, don’t you get weary.

Pray together, children, don’t you get weary.

Work together, children, don’t you get weary.

Keep your eyes on the prize of justice and hold on!