This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been deeply concerned with our country’s recent military intervention in Venezuela. Many have written and spoken about how problematic that action was from the standpoint of international law, foreign policy, and a host of other concerns. Today, I’d like to talk about why the whole situation (and the perspective and moral worldview it represents) is problematic from the standpoint of Christianity. Though many assume Christian resistance to any war is largely due to the inherent violence of armed conflict, that’s a myth worth breaking. Because there are many more reasons Christians should be at least skeptical, if not outright opposed, to this most recent military action. Don’t get me wrong, nonviolence absolutely matters. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the witness of saints and martyrs across the centuries, Christianity has consistently lifted up the sanctity of human life and the call to resist cycles of violence. But the Christian concern about war goes deeper than that—and if we reduce it only to a debate about violence versus nonviolence, we miss something essential.After our country’s actions in Venezuela, my own denomination, The Episcopal Church, issued a statement expressing deep concern about the operation, its legality, and its consequences for civilians and for the Episcopal Diocese of Venezuela The statement names real human costs: Venezuelans killed, some of them civilians; increased instability; and fear for local church communities caught in the middle of geopolitical power struggles. All of those facts should give Christians pause.But here’s the deeper theological issue.Christian opposition to war is not only about the harm done in war. It is also about what war does to our moral imagination—about how quickly it trains us to believe that my safety, my prosperity, and my national interest matter more than the lives and dignity of others. That mindset is fundamentally at odds with the heart of Christian faith.In Christ, God is not reconciling some people, or my people, or the people who look like me or vote like me. Scripture tells us that in Christ, God is reconciling all people, breaking down the walls that divide us and creating a new humanity. The Letter to the Ephesians speaks of Christ tearing down the dividing wall of hostility and making peace—not peace through domination, but peace through self-giving love.War, especially when framed as preventive or preemptive action, does the opposite. It reinforces the belief that the lives on the other side of the border are expendable, that instability elsewhere is acceptable if it secures advantage here, and that power gives moral permission.This is why Christianity developed what we call Just War theory. And it’s important to say: Just War theory is not a loophole that makes war morally comfortable. It is a moral restraint, designed to make war harder to justify, not easier.For a war to be considered just, it must meet demanding criteria: a just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, and a reasonable chance of success, among others. The Episcopal Church has repeatedly affirmed these principles while also condemning the first use of armed force for non-imminent threats and warning against abusing humanitarian language to justify political or strategic goals Measured against those standards, there are numerous reasons for Christians to be deeply troubled by U.S. intervention in Venezuela. The reported deaths of roughly 80 Venezuelans,

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

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

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

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

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith....

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.And as someone who comes from what many would call a more “progressive” expression of Christianity, I know the assumption that sometimes gets made: “Oh, he must think all religions are basically interchangeable.” But that’s just not true. I cherish interreligious dialogue. I value the deep wisdom found in many traditions. I believe we need partnerships across faith lines to meet the challenges of our world. Yet I am a Christian by choice. I’ve chosen this particular path of following Jesus because it is the story, the way of understanding God, that to me makes the most sense and, when followed faithfully, I believe connects me most deeply to the divine and my neighbor.So, this week switch things up a bit by breaking the progressive myth that all religions are basically the same. The idea that all religions are “basically the same” usually comes from the outside, from people who haven’t actually lived inside these traditions. From afar, you can see some common moral themes—compassion, justice, humility, generosity—and those similarities matter. They point to the ways human beings across cultures have intuited the sacred, sought connection with the divine, and tried to shape a meaningful life. But once you step into the interior logic of each religion, you realize they are not interchangeable. They have profoundly different understandings of God, the human person, salvation, liberation, suffering, the meaning of history—just to name a few.One of the best resources for thinking about this is the theologian S. Mark Heim, particularly his book The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Heim argues something far more interesting than the simple “all religions are one” or the harsh “only one religion has truth.” He says religions actually aim at different spiritual ends—not different paths up the same mountain, but different mountains altogether. What I appreciate about Heim is that he takes other religions seriously. He doesn’t flatten them into carbon copies of Christianity. He listens to them long enough to understand that they have their own goals, their own visions of fulfillment, and their own experiences of the divine.For example, the Christian understanding of salvation is not merely enlightenment or moral improvement or escape from suffering. It’s participation in the life of the Triune God—what the Eastern Orthodox call theosis, the Roman Catholics all the Beatific Vision, and most other Christian traditions simply call heaven. This is our full our union with God in Christ through the Spirit and it is inseparable from entering into perfect love of neighbor. That is a unique claim. Likewise, Buddhism’s aim of liberation from suffering by overcoming attachment is not the same thing as Christian salvation. Christianity doesn’t seek the elimination of desire or attachment, but their transformation—inviting us to attach ourselves ever more deeply and faithfully to God and neighbor, and to discover in suffering not quite a problem to be escaped but a place where God, in Christ, has chosen to dwell with us.The truth is, when we say, “All religions are the same,” we’re not actually honoring these traditions. We’re erasing them. We’re implicitly silencing their distinct voices, their unique treasures, their hard-won wisdom.A better approach—and the one I try to take as a Christian—is to say: All religions are not the same, but many religions contain truth, goodness, and beauty.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith....

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.A few years ago, a parent stopped into my study to talk to me, feeling a bit anxious.“Father Jared,” she said, “my child told me they’re not sure they believe in God. I don’t know what to do.”I smiled and said, “You know what? Sometimes, I don’t know if I believe in God either.”She laughed nervously. “Father Jared, you cannot tell me that!” But I explained that this is simply part of the life of faith. Every one of us—including clergy—sometimes struggles with doubt. Because doubt isn’t a defect in the Christian life; it’s built into it.We’ve sometimes been taught to treat doubt like a disease to cure, but maybe it’s more like a companion on the journey—one that keeps faith from growing rigid or self-satisfied. Any faith that can’t survive questioning probably isn’t faith at all—its fear dressed up in religious clothes.So, when someone tells me they’re not sure what they believe, I don’t hear a problem to solve. I hear an invitation—to conversation, to honesty, to relationship. That’s why atheists and agnostics are welcome at my church. Because what matters most isn’t whether you can recite the Creed without crossing your fingers; it’s whether you’re willing to wrestle with the divine, to be open to wonder, to build community around love and truth.John’s Gospel gives us two of my favorite examples of this: Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.Some scholars divide John’s Gospel into believers and unbelievers—and say only the believers are invited into the kingdom. But that’s not what the story shows. Nicodemus, who first came to Jesus under cover of night, and Joseph, who followed in secret for fear of the crowds, are the only disciples who appear when Jesus dies. When all the “faithful” have fled, it’s the half-believers who come. They carry his body, wash it, anoint it, wrap it lovingly in cloth, and place it in the tomb.They don’t proclaim the resurrection. They don’t yet understand it. It is beyond what they can hope for in this world, given their experience of it perhaps. But they love. And that love, John seems to say, is enough for now—because love is the ground in which faith and hope can grow again.That’s what I find so moving about these stories. They remind us that God doesn’t wait for perfect belief before showing up. The honesty of the doubter, the humility of the half-believer, the persistence of the one who loves even when they don’t understand—these are all holy things. Sometimes the most faithful act isn’t confident preaching, but quiet care for what feels lost.So, if your faith feels thin, if your prayers come out more as questions than answers, don’t give up. Keep showing up. Keep tending to love. Because when we dare to love, even through our uncertainty, God has a way of turning that fragile love into resurrection life.And if you need a place to practice that kind of love (no matter what or if you believe), find a community that makes room for folks like you. I’d naturally suggest the nearest Episcopal Church, but there are certainly other open communities and traditions around you. Here at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, we don’t ask for perfect belief—we invite open hearts and curious faith. We pray together, sing together, wrestle together, and try—however imperfectly at times—to love God and to love our neighbor. Some weeks your faith may feel like fire; other weeks, like smoke. Either way, you still belong and you always belong. Because in the end, the Church isn’t a club for the certain—it’s a home for the searching.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most persistent myths I hear in my office—especially from those walking through deep pain—is the idea that God sends suffering to teach us lessons. I’ve sat across from people who have lost a child, whose bodies are failing, whose relationships have shattered. They ask me through tears, Why is God doing this? What is God trying to teach me? And sometimes, in that sacred and sorrowful moment, the only honest thing I can say is, I don’t know.Because the truth is, Scripture never presents God as a cosmic teacher who assigns suffering like homework to shape us into better students. That image may give us a sense of control, a reason for the pain, but it also risks turning God into an abuser—someone who wounds us for our (supposed) own good. I don’t believe that’s the God revealed in Jesus Christ.When Job’s world fell apart—his children dead, his wealth gone, his body covered in sores—his friends tried to tell him his suffering must have a reason. They insisted he must have done something wrong or that God was trying to teach him something. But Job refused that narrative. He demanded an audience with God, not a tidy theological answer. And when God finally spoke, the divine response wasn’t an explanation but an invitation—to see the vastness of creation, to recognize that human understanding will never be enough to hold the mystery of suffering.The writer of Ecclesiastes echoes that humility: “Time and chance happen to them all.” The rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike. Life under the sun, he says, often makes no sense. But rather than despair, he urges us to eat, drink, and find joy in the simple gifts of existence—to live gratefully, even in the midst of what we cannot explain.The New Testament takes that mystery a step further. It tells us that God does not send suffering but enters into it. In Jesus, the Word made flesh, God takes on our pain, our loneliness, our grief. On the cross, Christ cries out the same question so many of us have whispered: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet even there, in that abandonment, God is present. The crucifixion does not explain suffering; it redeems it. It proclaims that nothing—not even death—can separate us from the love of God.The mystics of the Church understood this well. St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul,” not as punishment, but as the stripping away of everything that is not God. It is not that God causes the darkness but that God meets us in it, guiding us toward a love deeper than comfort, a faith that trusts even when it cannot see. Teresa of Ávila once quipped to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”—but she still kept walking with Christ through the shadows.So perhaps the lesson isn’t that God sends suffering, but that no suffering is wasted. The lessons, if they come, emerge not because God imposed pain, but because God refuses to abandon us in it. The wounds we bear may become, in time, the places where grace seeps through—where compassion grows, where we learn to walk with others in their darkness.I cannot tell you why you are suffering. But I can tell you that you are not alone. The God who hung on a cross walks beside you still, carrying your pain into the heart of divine love until the day when every tear is wiped away and all things are made new.Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Earlier this week, I joined a Rapid Response to ICE training in Grand Haven. We began by reviewing the principles that guide those who organize immigrant solidarity efforts. One statement especially caught the room’s attention: We reject the legality of ICE and the current immigration enforcement system.A few participants raised their eyebrows. One person said, “Wait—isn’t the problem that ICE violates the law and people’s constitutional rights? Shouldn’t we be saying ICE should obey existing laws?” The trainers acknowledged that concern but explained their stance goes deeper. They believe the entire legal framework—how we criminalize migration, how ICE operates with minimal accountability—is itself unjust and must be rejected on moral grounds.That conversation has stayed with me, especially as I read about protests in Chicago last week, where clergy and community members stood in the street to demand justice. One pastor was struck by a pepper ball as police moved in on demonstrators. The image of a pastor—collar on, hands raised in nonviolent protest and prayer, hit by a projectile fired by the state—reminded me how far we’ve strayed from understanding what faithful citizenship really looks like.Many people assume Christians are supposed to be law-abiding citizens. Romans 13 gets quoted a lot: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” Some use that verse to suggest obedience to civil law is a Christian virtue. But that interpretation ignores both context and history. Paul wrote those words to a tiny, vulnerable community in the Roman Empire that had no vote, no legal recourse, and no safety. His point was about survival, not blind obedience.If we read the Bible as a whole, it’s full of holy lawbreakers. Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh’s order to kill newborn Hebrew boys. The prophets routinely disobeyed kings. Daniel prayed when it was illegal. The apostles said to their rulers, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” And Jesus himself? He broke Sabbath restrictions to heal, challenged temple systems that exploited the poor, and was executed as a political criminal by the state.Faithful Christians have always wrestled with unjust laws. During the civil-rights movement, clergy and laypeople filled jails because they believed segregation was immoral even if it was “legal.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from his Birmingham jail cell, wrote that one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, defining justice by whether a law uplifts or degrades human personality.That’s why the training’s rejection of ICE’s “legality” struck me not as problematic but as profoundly Christian. Our immigration system didn’t always treat border crossing as a crime; it was once a civil matter. It wasn’t even that 100 years ago. ICE itself was created only in 2003, after 9/11. The idea that families fleeing violence and poverty should be detained, deported, or separated isn’t ancient law—it’s recent policy. Christians committed to the Gospel of welcome have every reason to resist it.Nonviolent resistance is not chaos; it is disciplined love in action. It refuses to mirror the violence of the oppressor yet also refuses to comply with evil. It’s the ethic Jesus modeled on the cross and the ethic that has powered movements for justice ever since.So the next time someone tells you “good Christians follow the law,” remember: our highest allegiance isn’t to Caesar or to a flag—it’s to the kingdom of God, where strangers are welcomed, captives are freed,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.For centuries, if you walked into a church in the West, you’d likely see stained glass or paintings of Jesus with pale skin, flowing light-brown or even blond hair, and blue or hazel eyes. He might look more like a Renaissance prince than a peasant from the Galilee. Those images have shaped the imagination of countless Christians, sometimes so deeply that people even get defensive if you suggest Jesus might have looked different. But here’s the truth: Jesus was a first-century, Middle Eastern Jewish man. He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, in the rugged land of Palestine under Roman occupation. His skin would not have been pale. His eyes and hair would not have been light. He looked like a Galilean Jew of his time: brown-skinned, dark-haired, Semitic features.So this week we’re breaking the myth that Jesus was a white, European-looking man.Why does this matter? Isn’t it just about art and symbolism? Well, it matters because how we picture Jesus shapes how we understand God. If we only ever see Jesus as white and European, we are subtly—sometimes not so subtly—encouraged to equate God with whiteness and Europeanness. And that has real consequences. It has reinforced systems of colonialism, racism, and exclusion. It has allowed Christians to imagine themselves in the image of God while marginalizing those who look different.This isn’t just about history; it’s about justice. Think about what is happening right now in our world. The war between Israel and Gaza continues to devastate lives, with brown-skinned men, women, and children paying the heaviest price. Here in our own nation, racial profiling continues to plague people of color. For a while now, it has been those who look Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim. Most recently it’s been explicitly allowed for people who are Latinx—even though Jesus himself would likely be mistaken for any of those by modern security officers. To insist on a white Jesus in this context isn’t just inaccurate; it is spiritually dangerous. It erases the real human identity of the God who became flesh and aligns him instead with systems of power he came to overturn.Scripture itself reminds us that God’s choice to become incarnate was not arbitrary. Jesus came into the world as part of a marginalized people, subject to the suspicion of empire and the oppression of the powerful. He lived under Roman occupation. He and his family fled as refugees to Egypt to escape violence. The one we follow knew the vulnerability of being brown and Jewish in a world dominated by whitened imperial ideals.Representation matters because it opens our eyes to where God is at work today. When we picture Jesus only as white, we risk overlooking him in the very places he promised to be found—in the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, the oppressed. But when we remember Jesus’ true Middle Eastern Jewish identity, it becomes harder to separate our love for Christ from our solidarity with those who suffer under racism, war, and exclusion today.Breaking the myth of a white Jesus does not mean rejecting the art of past centuries. But it does mean being honest about its limitations and refusing to let it shape our theology uncritically. We can still value those cultural depictions while also lifting up new images—icons, art, stained glass—that show Jesus as the Middle Eastern Jew he truly was. Doing so is not about political correctness. It’s about theological faithfulness. It’s about remembering that God’s incarnation was not in the image of empire, but in the body of a people pushed to the margins.Thanks for being with me.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most common claims I hear in our polarized culture is that religion and politics should never mix. “Faith,” people insist, “is a private matter. Believe what you want in church on Sunday, but leave it out of the public square.” On the surface, this sounds appealing—it promises a kind of peace where religion doesn’t intrude on politics, and politics doesn’t divide churches. But when you look at Jesus and the early Christian movement, the myth that faith is purely private quickly falls apart—so let’s try to break that myth today.Think first about Jesus himself. His teachings were profoundly spiritual, yes—but they were never only spiritual. When Jesus stood in his hometown synagogue and declared the words of Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed,” no one heard that as just a private, inward promise. Those words had radical social and political implications. They challenged the unjust economic and political systems of his day. And that’s why, at the end of that very sermon, the congregation drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff!Jesus consistently proclaimed a kingdom—not just an inward feeling of peace, but a new order where the last are first, the hungry are fed, the grieving are comforted, and the powerful are brought low. When he overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple, that was not a polite sermon illustration—it was a direct, public protest against corruption and exploitation and marginalization. He was executed, not for encouraging people to be more spiritual, but because he was seen as a threat to the political and religious establishment.The early church carried this same vision forward. When Christians declared, “Jesus is Lord,” they were making a political statement every bit as much as a spiritual one. In the Roman Empire, the expected declaration was, “Caesar is Lord.” To say Jesus is Lord meant Caesar was not. That conviction led Christians to resist unjust practices, to care for the poor, to adopt abandoned infants, to refuse to worship the emperor, and to stand against systems of domination—even when it cost them their lives.Now, does this mean Christianity tells you to join one political party or another? Absolutely not. Faith is political in the sense that it shapes how we live together in society. It gives us a vision of justice, peace, and human dignity that transcends partisan labels. The party you choose is more about the methods to get to the ends your faith envisions—and people can certainly have different convictions about what political party is best at getting to those ends. But your faith cannot be reduced to private opinions or personal morality alone.This is why the prophets of the Old Testament spoke so forcefully against kings and rulers who oppressed the poor. It’s why Jesus told parables about unjust judges, corrupt stewards, and rich men who ignored beggars at their gates. It’s why the Book of Revelation dares to picture the empire itself as a beast that must be resisted by those who follow the Lamb.In every age, Christians are called to ask: How does my faith shape the way I treat my neighbor, especially the poor, the marginalized, the stranger, the sick, and the oppressed? What does my commitment to Christ mean for how I use my voice, my money, and my vote? To pretend that faith is purely private is to domesticate the Gospel, to turn it into a self-help program instead of a movement that seeks to transform the world with God’s justice,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.I know when I was growing up as an evangelical Christian, I never really considered where the Bible I carried around with me came from. I knew that I was taught that it was the Word of God, divinely inspired, and I got a sense that the Holy Spirit whispered in the ear of the authors.  It was almost as though it fell from heaven, leather-bound and printed, with chapters, verses, and even gold gilding on the pages. But here’s the truth: that neat image doesn’t reflect the messy, human, Spirit-filled process through which the Bible actually came to be.The Scriptures weren’t handed down all at once as a miraculous gift. Instead, the Bible is the product of centuries of life with God, woven together from the testimonies, prayers, and experiences of God’s people.So this week I thought I might try to break the myth of how we got the Bible in the first place. The Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, grew out of Israel’s worship, history, and struggles. Some books are poems, others recount wars or defeats, still others thunder with prophetic calls to justice. The books often don’t even agree with one another, reflecting how Israel’s understanding of God and faithfulness evolved.The Torah—the first five books of Moses that tell the stories of the creation of the world and the most ancient history of Israel—was established by the 5th century BCE, likely during or just after the Babylonian Exile, when Ezra and other scribes emphasized its role in worship and community. The Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, were recognized by the 2nd century BCE. But the Writings—Psalms, Proverbs, Esther, Daniel, and others—remained fluid for centuries. By the late 1st century CE, Jewish teachers debated which texts carried scriptural authority. Some point to Jamnia around 90 CE, though modern scholars note that no single council “set the canon” of Jewish Scripture.  It was gradual, shaped by worship and teaching. So, when Christianity emerged, Jewish communities were not yet unanimous about their Scriptures, and that diversity shaped how the first Christians read them.Early Christians, in turn, produced new writings. Four gospels eventually rose to the center—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—but other gospels circulated. Some read the Letters of Clement (the fourth bishop of Rome, who served in the late first century. Others valued the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache. Letters attributed to Paul were copied, shared, and debated. It took centuries before consensus began to take shape. Leaders asked: Which writings bore witness to the apostolic faith? Which were used across the Church? Which aligned with the rule of faith, that early summary of Christian belief?Even then, agreement was never complete. In the East, Revelation was distrusted; in the West, it was affirmed. Hebrews took time to gain acceptance. To this day, Christians don’t all read the same Bible. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians include Tobit and Sirach, which many Protestants label “Apocrypha.” The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes still more. So the Bible you hold depends, in part, on which Christian tradition handed it to you.Some people find that unsettling. They want a book that is clean, simple, and certain. But the truth is better. Scripture grew through a very human process—and that’s part of its beauty.Because the Bible is not a flat, uniform text. It’s a library of voices, each with its own style and context. That diversity is a gift. It allows Scripture to speak across cultures and centuries.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.One of the most common modern misconceptions I hear is the idea that the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God.” That is, every word on the page is without error, historically accurate in every detail, and factually true in a literal sense. This view might feel like it’s always been part of Christianity, but in fact it is a relatively recent development in the history of the church. So, this week, let’s take a crack at that myth.If you go back to the earliest Christians and to the church fathers who laid the foundations of theology, you don’t find them treating the Bible in this rigidly literal way. Take Origen in the third century, for example. He believed that Scripture had multiple levels of meaning—literal, moral, and spiritual. And sometimes, he suggested, the literal sense wasn’t even the most important. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians of the Western Church, was very clear that when the Bible seemed to conflict with reason or with established knowledge about the natural world, then perhaps the text should be read metaphorically rather than literally. These early leaders of the faith understood that God’s truth could shine through human words in ways deeper than flat inerrancy.The very idea of inerrancy as we know it today is actually a modern invention. In fact, the technical doctrine of inerrancy only took shape in the late nineteenth century, at Princeton Theological Seminary, when theologians like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield argued that because God is perfect, Scripture must also be perfect and without error in every respect. That claim was new—and it was a human invention, their own attempt to defend the Bible against the challenges of modern science and biblical criticism. But for the vast majority of the church’s history, Scripture was received instead as a Spirit-filled witness through human authors, shaped by their cultures and contexts, to communicate divine truth.And here’s where the real problem comes in: it’s actually impossible to read the Bible as inerrant if you are being honest with the text. The Bible contains four Gospels, not one. Each tells the story of Jesus in a slightly different way. Sometimes details don’t line up—like whether Jesus cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry or at the end, or exactly how Judas died. In the Old Testament, the books of Kings and Chronicles sometimes give different versions of the same events. The book of Proverbs tells us to “answer a fool according to his folly” in one verse, and the very next verse says “do not answer a fool according to his folly.” These are not mistakes—they’re signs that Scripture is a conversation, a library of voices wrestling with God and with what it means to be faithful.When you force the Bible into the mold of inerrancy, you actually lose the beauty and depth of that conversation. You treat it like a rulebook dropped from heaven, instead of a Spirit-inspired record of human beings struggling, failing, repenting, and growing. You miss the texture of poetry, the power of lament, the wrestling of prophets who dared to argue with God, and the Gospel writers who tried in their own voices to capture the wonder of Jesus Christ.At its best, Scripture is not an answer key to every question. It is a witness to God’s ongoing relationship with humanity. It shows us how God’s people have sought to walk in faithfulness, and how God has continued to love and forgive them when they fall short. Reading the Bible this way—honestly, reverently, and with openness—frees us to encounter the living God,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.A couple weeks ago, before I went on vacation, we dug into the idea of belief—and whether faith is really about getting all the ideas in our head perfectly arranged. We looked at how fragile and complicated belief can be, and how faith is better understood as trust (in fact, that’s what the Greek word for faith is more accurately translated). Today, I want to explore what might actually lie at the heart of Christianity once we loosen our grip on belief-as-certainty and instead open ourselves to a faith that is curious and growing.Because yes, the idea that the heart of Christianity is belief in certain ideas is a myth. Many Christians assume that the center of our religion is a set of doctrines. If you can recite the Nicene Creed without crossing your fingers, then you’ve got the heart of it. And yes, creeds have their place—they safeguard important truths and keep us grounded in the story of God. In fact, one of the gifts of the creeds is that they keep us from believing too little. Most heresies through history haven’t been wild inventions, but narrow partial truths. So, some early heresies insisted Jesus was so divine he only seemed to be a human in flesh. Or others believed he was a human who was adopted by God at baptism, but not fully divine. The truly orthodox and catholic belief is to hold together too competing truths—that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine—even though that might be challenging to conceive!And there are numerous other examples of where the creeds (and good robust theology) push us beyond simplistic belief in one part of the faith to embracing tensions that baffle the mind even as they nurture the spirit: the idea that God is one being in a trinity or persons, or the idea that the bread that is pressed into your hands on Sunday is also the body of Christ, given for you. Far from being small checklists, the creeds widen the horizon of what we dare to believe.But when Jesus himself was asked what mattered most, he didn’t list doctrines. He gave a double commandment: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.That’s why theologians through the centuries have insisted that love is the interpretive key to the Christian faith. Augustine famously put it this way: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them” It’s love—not intellectual assent—that sits at the heart.And that’s why Christianity is best described not as a system of ideas, but as a way of life. In Acts, the earliest followers of Jesus weren’t called Christians yet—they were called people of “the Way.” A way is something you walk. Sometimes you walk with clarity, sometimes with questions, sometimes stumbling. But the point is not having perfect answers—the point is the journey of love.So if we move belief as intellectual assent off of the center stage, what remains is this: trust in God, practiced through love. Worship that turns our hearts toward God. Compassion that meets our neighbor’s needs. Justice that repairs what is broken in our world. Humility that leaves us open to growth. The heart of Christianity isn’t belief—it’s love.And maybe that’s the best news of all: you don’t have to have every question answered or every doctrine nailed down before you can live faithfully. You simply have to begin walking the way of love—trusting that God will meet you there.Thanks for being with me.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Are you familiar with the metaphor that a worldview is kind of like a fish in the water? The water is so constant, so all-encompassing, that it becomes invisible to the fish. Our worldview works the same way. We swim in assumptions we rarely stop to question. A good deal of Christian Mythbusters is trying to get at those assumptions… and then asking if they are actually faithful to the best understanding of Scripture and theology.One of those assumptions I’d like to try to break in today’s episode of Christian Mythbusters is the very idea of belief itself. We often treat belief like it’s the essence of faith—almost as though Christianity is a checklist of intellectual statements we either accept or reject. But the more time I’ve spent with scripture, with theology, and with actual lived experience, the more I’ve come to see that “belief” is a complex and often shaky thing. Faith, if it is real, has to be more than simply arranging the right ideas in our heads.The idea that the goal of faith was to “believe all the right things” really started to unravel for me when I studied epistemology in graduate school. Epistemology is the study of how we form our beliefs. Talk about a fish in the water—I had never explicitly thought about how I form my beliefs! Beliefs are just what happen when you study the Bible, I thought… but it’s actually more complex than that. Philosophers, when they study epistemology, often describe several different ways people form and justify their beliefs. Empiricism is the idea that we primarily form beliefs from our experiences. Rationalists affirm experience but also believe we form belief through reason (using mathematics and logic, for example). Foundationalists believe that you build knowledge like a house, with basic, self-evident truths at the bottom and everything else resting on top of them. Coherentism is the view that a belief is justified not by resting on a single foundation, but by how well it fits together within a consistent web of other beliefs… and so and so forth. Fundamentalist Christians, like myself, on the other hand, tend to approach knowledge through the foundationalist approach to belief. They begin with a bedrock claim—usually that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God—and then build every other belief on top of that foundation. The danger is that if one brick is questioned, the whole structure feels threatened. Progressive Christians, on the other hand, often lean toward a coherentist or even pragmatic way of knowing, where truth is measured by how well beliefs fit together with scripture, tradition, reason, and lived experience. In my own experience, this approach makes space for humility and growth: beliefs can be revised as our understanding of God deepens, while the central thread of faith—love, justice, and worship—holds the web together.So if Christianity isn’t mainly about belief, then what is it about? I’d suggest it’s about trust in God—with trust being what the Greek word for belief more accurately means. It’s about that and a willingness to give yourself to a way of life shaped by worship, compassion, and justice. Belief has its place, but it’s not the center. The center is love—love of God, love of neighbor, love that transforms the world. Next week I want to dig more deeply into where the heart of Christianity might lie, once we let go of the need for perfect belief and instead open ourselves to a sense of faith that is curious and growing. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.It’s been an interesting several days at my parish this week. At 1am early Saturday morning (or late Friday night, depending on how you think of these things) two young women stopped at the bottom of the stairs to the front door of our church. While one of them held up a phone to shoot a video, the other made her way up the stairs, unscrewed the wingnut holding the flagpole in place, and then removed the flagpole upon which hangs our parish pride flag. She carried it down the stairs and off the two women went.As this is not the first time this has happened to us, we do have security cameras all around our church. So, we reached out to the police and also posted the security camera footage to social media. Then, some local news networks picked up the story and also ran it. The end result was that word got back to the young woman, who apparently lives somewhere on the east side of the state. Her father brought the flag back, along with a card from her that included an apology and a gift to the church. I don’t want to get more into the details of the flag theft itself or the experience trying to get it back, but there is one part of the experience that was almost more disheartening than someone stealing the pride flag from our church—and that is the response of some Christians on social media to the whole situation. So, today, I’d like to break the myth about how Christians can and should disagree with one another and try to articulate a better way.While there were numerous Christians (and non-Christians) who reached out in support, and there were a small amount of more conservative Christians who acknowledged that they didn’t agree with our church’s theology but also said theft was not an appropriate answer, there was also a good chunk of Christians who cheered on the young women involved with the theft of our pride flag. They said things like:Good for them, now I hope they burn it.Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!!Beers on me. Doing the lords workThat's no church anyway, that's a sanctuary for the lost and confusedAlways made me sick to see that flag. And those are just the comments I’ll read on air. Another commentator responded to the whole social media uproar by writing, “The blatant hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ here is staggering. The loudest hate often comes from those who claim to follow Jesus.” As I read the comments, I kept thinking of a few different groups. I kept thinking of LGBTQIA+ people reading those comments, how the wounds they had already experienced from Christians were just being torn open again and again. I thought of those who have given up on the church reading those comments and feeling sure they had made the right decision. And I thought of non-Christians reading the comments and likely thinking that there was no good reason here to look into Christianity. I’m well aware that the stance my own church has taken with regard to our LGBTQIA+ siblings is not one the majority of Christians agree with… but I wish we could disagree differently. It certainly feels like many conservative Christians are hyper-fixated on their belief that homosexuality is a sin—so much so that apparently, they are comfortable with the sins of theft and destruction of property. I also want to be super clear about one part of our own response. Someone came against me for saying this young woman was hate-filled. That’s not something I ever said. What I said on WOOD TV8 for instance was, “even if this was a prank or joke,

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.Today is an odd and somewhat unsettling confluence of events. It is the 80th Anniversary of the day our country dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, bringing World War II to an end. At the same time, August 6 is also one of the major feasts of the church—the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ upon the mountain.As I’ve been preparing for a service my church is doing tonight at 6pm to commemorate both events, I keep returning to the disturbing juxtaposition of these two days. And so, today I’d like to step back from Mythbusting and instead just reflect a bit on the mountain and the mushroom cloud.The Feast of the Transfiguration commemorates the day when Christ ascended Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John and was transfigured before them, his face shining like the sun and his clothes becoming dazzling white. The ancient lawgiver Moses appeared with Jesus, along with the great prophet Elijah. They discussed Jesus’ impending departure in Jerusalem—his suffering and death. A voice came from the cloud, commanding the disciples to listen to Jesus. Then, just as suddenly, it was over, and the disciples were left alone with him.I can’t shake the curious similarities between the two events. In both the bombing of Hiroshima and the Transfiguration, blinding light blazed forth. The light of the bomb was profoundly destructive—immediately killing between 70,000–80,000 people, and eventually claiming up to 166,000 lives through radiation and injuries. Almost all of them were civilians, including an estimated 38,000 children.The light of Christ’s Transfiguration, in contrast, was meant to reveal the divine glory. But those who unleashed the horrors of nuclear warfare were Christians, those who follow the Jesus from whom divine light poured forth. President Truman was a devout Baptist. Secretary of War Henry Stimson came from a family of clergymen.Truman believed dropping the bomb was the only way to end the war and avoid even greater loss of life through a land invasion. Still, it haunted him. In a speech after the war, he said, “You know the most terrible decision a man ever had to make was made by me at Potsdam... to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings.”Many believed the bombing was necessary. But I don’t know how to weigh the lives of soldiers fighting in a war against those of innocent civilians. I don’t know how to measure the lives of those trapped in the machinery of war against the children who were vaporized in a flash.So even as I celebrate Christ’s Transfiguration, I must acknowledge that followers of Christ have often twisted divine light into a justification for destruction. The light meant to illuminate God’s love becomes consumed by the fires of war, hate, and violence.At Hiroshima, humanity revealed its capacity for unimaginable violence. On Mount Tabor, God revealed the Son—who chose the path of suffering love. Perhaps this is part of the divine mystery: that to save a violent and broken humanity, God descended into the depths of human violence. And as Christ carried the violence of our human race deep into the heart of God, somehow God’s love can perhaps heal our violent ways… if we will let him.Maybe what we’re left with is the voice—the voice from the cloud that said, “Listen to him.” The disciples didn’t understand it at the time. They expected glory and triumph (to Make Israel Great Again), not suffering and death. But eventually they came to understand. And when they did, they took up their own crosses and walked the same path.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith....