Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #306: Breakfast With Brian Zahnd

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames. RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm very glad that you could join me here today. This is going to be a great episode because this is one that I actually recorded in Kansas City. Well, truth be known, I didn't record it. It was recorded at a breakfast that I was at with our old friend Brian Zond. It was great to be able to spend some time with him at the Nazarenes United for Peace prayer breakfast. I was able to share some music at the prayer breakfast, and best of all, I got to spend some time with Brian and talk with him and his wife Perry. And this was the first time we had ever actually met face to face. A little-known fact is that Brian was the—

this—

well, I was the first podcast that he was ever on here on Voices in My Head. And since then, now he says he does about one a week. So I guess I was his initiation into the podcasting community. But it's always a joy to be able to visit with Brian. This time it was actually face to face. That was wonderful. We got to, you know, exchange hugs and handshakes on all the things that you do and talk about some serious matters together. I even got to share one of my new vinyl albums of Thunder with him, and he told me he was gonna take it home and listen to it that afternoon. So it was a great time. But last week I did not get to publish an episode of Voices in My Head because I was on the road and it was a very busy week. In fact, last night I drove all night to get home at the time of this recording. And here I am, uh, just a few days away from my Thunder release concert at the John Legend Theater. So it's going to be another busy week ahead. So for this week, it's not a conversation, it is actually a recording of Brian and what he brought to us at that prayer breakfast that day. So I hope the audio is going to be a good enough quality for you to hear. I know many of you wanted to be at the Nazarenes United for Peace breakfast with Brian and weren't able to be there. Well, this is a way for you to kind of be able to eavesdrop and listen in. There's also a video of this on Facebook on the Nazarene United for Peace site. But if you're like me, sometimes you like to have something you can just listen to in the car. So I asked permission if I could put this on the Voices in My Head podcast and was told yes, I could. So I am very pleased to be able to present to you Brian Zahnd and the talk that he gave to us at the Nazarenes United for Peace prayer breakfast on Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2019. I hope you enjoy it. This was right after the the M19, or the missions conference that I was at. And it was a great time together, and I think you're going to really enjoy what Brian had to say. He's promoting his new book, Postcards from Babylon, and I encourage all of you to buy it. We've talked about it with Brian on this show before. All right, thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. God bless you, and enjoy what you're about to hear.

You've heard of the Sermon on the Mount? This is the Sermon on the Balcony.

That's what this is.

I'm headed toward the text in Acts 17 where the Thessalonians complain that the world is being turned upside down by some people who say there is another king, a king named Jesus. I'm headed in that direction. That's not the text I'm going to start with. I'm going to start with, uh, I lived with them on Montague Street in the basement down the stairs. There was music in the cafes that night, revolution in the air. That's from Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan. I first heard that song the same day I became a follower of Jesus. So I say I became a Dylan fan and a Jesus follower on the same day. And that song has a special place in my heart. I love that song. It's a mesmerizing tale that always ends up with somebody or something tangled up in blue. Well, I had found Jesus in high school. That's not what happened. Jesus just crashed into my life and demanded that I follow him. That's really more what happened. Overnight I went from being a high school Led Zeppelin freak to the high school Jesus freak. Back then, everybody— nobody called me Pastor Brian. Everybody called me Fry. That was my nickname. Everybody called me Fry. And overnight Fry became a Jesus freak. And after a few Weeks went by and I was still maintaining this new presentation of "Fry" as a follower of Jesus. My friends would say, "Hey Fry, I can't believe what's happened." I would say, "Yeah, pretty crazy. I can't believe it either, but it's happened." And this was all during the heady days of the Jesus Movement. Now just for my own amusement, how many— when I say the Jesus Movement, how many of you know, at least have an inkling of what I might be talking about? Ah, that's good, that's good. That's reasonable. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad. Too often I'm encountering people that don't know about this phenomenon, this spiritual, cultural, social phenomenon beginning in Southern California that swept across the United States and into other parts of the English-speaking world in the 1970s. It was sort of a counter-counter-culture movement. I mean, you had the counter-culture movement with the hippies, and they are looking for a a better world, a world beyond the ways of war. But, uh, what I say about the hippies, I say they weren't wrong in looking for a world of peace beyond the ways of war. They were wrong in not finding a better messiah than the Beatles. And out of that then came the Jesus movement, said, hey, it turns out Jesus really has some cool things to say. And the Jesus movement was born. I was caught up in that. I was a part of it. I still to this day look back on it with a with a fond nostalgia. It had its problems, but there was also a peculiar emphasis on Jesus and especially taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously, which hadn't been done for a long time in many expressions of Christian faith. You might remember, you might not, that Augustine, his approach to the Sermon on the Mount, especially as it pertains to war and violence, was to say, well, yeah, because Augustine is following Constantine. I mean, I appreciate Augustine. I've read much of his work. He's a keen mind, but he also was a theologian employed by the empire. And he said, well, yeah, you can kill your enemy as long as you do it with love in your heart. I kid you not. I mean, that's what he's saying. And then finally, you reach— then you reach Luther, whose approach to the Sermon on the Mount is It's just law that we can't fulfill anyway. The whole point of the Sermon on the Mount was simply so that we would say, "I can't live this way," and abandon ourselves to the grace of God. So you see, the Sermon on the Mount completely being dismissed as any kind of way that we ought to attempt to live as followers of Jesus. Well, the Jesus Movement of the 1970s at least had the good sense to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. And I was part of that. And I was leading the, uh, well, in St. Joseph, Missouri, an hour north of here, the epicenter of the Jesus Movement was the Catacombs. And it was a coffeehouse ministry that met in the basement of a dive bar on 3rd Street. And we called it the Catacombs because we were subterranean, but we also wanted to have a sense of connection with those earliest Christians who were a subversive movement. Turning the world upside down. So that's in fact where Word of Life Church comes from. It comes from the catacombs. It just sort of turned into Word of Life Church. And so, um, that's where I come from. That's my roots. It was radical, but we were still very young. And it turns out that most of us were not very well equipped to resist the gradual slide toward materialism of the prosperity gospel and the militarism of the religious right and the individualism of American evangelicalism. In time, most of us ceased to be countercultural Christians at all, and instead we became conventional conservative Americans with a Jesus fish on our SUV. And then, I woke up. I was halfway to 90, as I tell them. You can say 45, but halfway to 90 puts the fear of God in you. I just woke up and I thought, "How did I get here?" I didn't start out to end up where I was, and I began to have this crisis of faith, not in Jesus, The Jesus who had captured my heart has always fascinated me. I just became deeply convinced that the Jesus I loved deserved a better Christian— Christianity than I was experiencing and knew and was familiar with. So, uh, in an astonishing way— one way of telling the story, there's many ways of telling it, but this also is true— in an astonishing way, I woke up and realized that much of American Christianity is tangled up in red, white, and blue. That's what I want to talk to you about. Um, I feel— I felt at that time, I felt like, how did we get here? It's like I got on the wrong bus somewhere, and I arrived at a place where I never intended to be. We didn't start out as radical followers of Jesus only to be duped by a cadre of Prosperity Gospel hucksters, selling the gospel of the golden cow, and religious right power mongers serving as chaplains to empire. So I revolted, and I rediscovered the counterculture faith of my youth that I'd first known as a teenager. And the journey away from American pop Christianity into a deeper, richer, the pearl of great price, it was worth it. So I want to talk about the predicament that we find ourselves in today. As people passionately committed to the cause of Christ being expressed through the local church. I'm going to talk about, uh, Tangled Up in Red, White, and Blue as an urgent call to resist Christian faith being hijacked by American nationalism. Put as succinctly and as clearly as I know how, I want to say that one of the most vital things an American Christian can do right now is resist the hijacking of Christian faith by American nationalism. It's all hands on deck. It's a desperate moment. We are suffering a crisis of fidelity, the fallout of which will be felt and experienced for generations to come. Last year I was returning from doing some speaking in San Francisco and Toronto. And when I got home, I was going through the stack of mail that was there, and I came across an envelope from a major evangelical minister. I'm not going to use his name, but if I did, you all would know it. A ministry that I had supported financially in the past. And so this was an appeal letter, and as a part of that, as a little gift, you know, for previous contributions. They'd enclosed 75 return address stickers, you know, had my name and my address, and I could, you know, stick it on envelopes and things like that. But the interesting thing was that this ministry would send this to me, and their motto— this is their official motto— to advance the gospel of Jesus and his kingdom into the nations. Great model. To advance the gospel of Jesus and his kingdom into the nations. In this appeal letter, with its 75 return address stickers, they were all, without exception, all of them were military-themed. And so they all had eagles and flags and the Statue of Liberty with pictures of American soldiers and slogans like, "Proud to be an American," "Let freedom reign," "Support our troops," "God bless our troops." et cetera. So that Christianity, with this ministry who says our whole goal, our telos, our ambition is to advance the gospel of Jesus and his kingdom into the nations. They were part of a Christianity where American patriotism and American militarism was forced together. In a Socratic union with how they understood the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So it was clear to me that yet another Christian ministry is tangled up in blue. Of course, getting tangled up in nationalism is nothing new. It's 17 centuries old. Uh, Rome, Byzantium, Russia, Spain, France, England, Germany, etc. Have all done it. It began, you know, with the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. So 17 centuries ago, the Roman Church got tangled up in imperial purple. In the 1930s, the German Evangelical Church got tangled up in Nazi red and black. The Anglican Church spent a long time tangled up in the Union Jack. And today the American evangelical church is tangled up in red, white, and blue. Stanley Hauerwas, who is a theologian that's influenced me as much as any theologian, famously has repeatedly said, "The task of the church is to make the world world." You understand what is meant by that. The task of the church is to make the world world. In other words, the church is to be something so pronounced and radically other that the church allows the world to see itself as the world in contrast with the church, which is something— which is something other, which is not this world. But when the church lacks the vision and courage to actually be the church, it abandons its high calling of proclaiming the subversive gospel that Jesus is Lord. You understand that the seminal Christian confession, Jesus is Lord, was the thing that got the early Christians, that is the Christians of the first 3 centuries, in trouble. The early Christians were not persecuted for what we would call religious reasons. The Roman Empire was remarkably tolerant of other religions. And if your gospel was, uh, we're going to tell you how to go to heaven when you die, the Romans would say, we don't care where people go when they die. They go anywhere they like. What we care about is acknowledging that Caesar is Lord right here and now. No, the gospel message of the earliest Christians was not postmortem. It wasn't about how to go to heaven when you die. It wasn't tickets to heaven. It was about the announcement that the world has a new emperor, a new king, a new lord. It's Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified Galilean, and we know this because God has raised him from the dead and exalted him to his right hand. So when Christians said Jesus is Lord, they were by implication saying, and Caesar is not. Because expressions or titles like Lord, Son of God, Savior of the World, King of Kings, Prince of Peace, were all imperial titles granted by the Roman Senate to the emperor. And so on the coins of the day, you would have the image of the emperor. So there's Tiberius, for example, and then below an image of Tiberius would be a would be a title that was officially granted by the Roman Senate. It would say, here's a picture of Tiberius, Emperor Tiberius, Son of God. So that when the early Christians began to talk about Jesus of Nazareth as Son of God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, Savior of the World, and most importantly, Lord. They were using terms that were already in circulation in the Gentile world of the Roman Empire. And it was a very provocative move. For Christians to say "Jesus is Lord" is what got them in trouble because it wasn't heard in a religious sense. It wasn't heard as a spiritual thing. It was heard as deeply political and subversive and dangerous. And that was the impetus for most of the persecution that Christians suffered. From Nero to Diocletian. We've lost that. Now Jesus is Lord should come with an asterisk. Jesus is Lord, asterisk, you go to the bottom page, of my spiritual life. But we still think somehow if we're going to change the world, we're going to do it through the apparatus of whoever occupies the office of our current Caesar. And so we continue to lust for proximity to political power because we don't think there's any other way of changing the world. That's what happens when the church lacks the vision and courage to actually be the church. It then abandons its high calling of proclaiming the subversive gospel that Jesus is Lord as it panders to the principalities and powers, offering its service as the high priest of religious patriotism. When the church colludes with the principalities and powers, it can no longer prophetically challenge them. And a church in bed with empire cannot credibly call the empire to repent. Okay, I've just thrown out two terms that I don't want you to hear as empty pejoratives, so I'm going to give them definitions. Principalities and powers and empire. By principalities and powers, I mean the very powerful, the very rich, and oftentimes the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the spirit that works through it all. You can see it personified in the days of Jesus with Pontius Pilate. This is all in play on Good Friday. Pontius Pilate representing the very powerful. He's the Roman governor of Judea under Tiberius Caesar. The very rich, King Herod. The billionaire King Herod, known as the richest man in the world at that time. And then, uh, Caiaphas. The very religious, but not transformative, truly spiritual religion, but religion in service to the empire. What do I mean by empire? Empires are rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. Now, God loves nations with their ethnicity and their diversity and their culture and their language. But God is opposed to empire— rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda because what empires claim for themselves are the very thing that God has promised to his Son. It is Jesus Christ who has a divine right to rule the nations. It is Jesus Christ who has a manifest destiny to shape history according to the redemptive agenda of God in Christ. So God loves nations, but empires always set themselves up to be an idolatrous rival to the living God. This is not a minor theme in the Bible. If you think it's a minor theme in the Bible, it's probably because you grew up in the current incarnation of an empire on the global scene, and you've learned to screen it out. You don't see it. But it's there. It's pronounced. It's in Genesis. It's in Exodus. It's in Isaiah. It's in Daniel. It's in all 4 Gospels. It's in the Book of Acts. And most importantly, it's in the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation can be the most important book in the Bible speaking to us in our time, in our context, in our situation, if—

if—

this is a huge if— we can learn to read it properly. Read improperly, it's a disaster. I would be in favor of requiring pastors to take out a special license before they can ever preach from the Book of Revelation. I would be in favor of that. I think the Nazarenes would consider this. What the Book of Revelation is, is a prophetic critique of the Roman Empire. And as such, a critique of all empires. And that's how it speaks to us today. If you read it as a futuristic prophecy of global events of the early 21st century, then you're going to read it wrong. But if you can keep it for what it is, a prophetic critique of the Roman Empire, creatively with wild metaphor, showing how Jesus is Lord now,, then it can be the most helpful book that we can use to speak to our present situation. Amen. So if Christianity is not seen as counterculture, countercultural, and even subversive within a military economic superpower, you can be sure it is a deeply compromised Christianity. A Christianity at home in an empire is the kind of compromised Christianity that the Book of Revelation passionately and creatively warns us against. A church in bed with a superpower is what Constantine unwittingly inaugurated when he believed that Christ and Roma could be wed. But Christ cannot wed Roma. Christ can only be wed to his bride, the church. You might, you might remember in the book of Revelation there's a scene with the great whore, the harlot, the prostitute who rides on the back of the beast. And you can imagine what all that is, and if you don't know, you're wrong. What it is is it's John of Patmos provocatively portraying Roma, the pagan goddess of Rome, as a bloodthirsty drunken prostitute. What it would be like— and you know, again, I'm One time I said, anybody heard me say this? It would be like— imagine somebody portraying the Statue of Liberty as a bloodthirsty, drunken prostitute. No wonder the guy was on Prison Island. I mean, he was asking for it. But that's the kind of thing that's going on. And the Book of Revelation says, no, Christ cannot be wed to that. Christ is only wed to his church. And so you cannot imagine a conflation of superpower national interest and the agenda of Jesus Christ. In his important book— I would recommend this book, you know, if you read any book this year, read Postcards from Babylon— but if you read two, you might want to read Migrations of the Holy by William Cavanaugh. And the theme of the book basically is he says, in some ways, yes, we're in a secular age. Yes, I understand that. That's true. But he said it doesn't mean that we're not religious. It means that the holy has migrated from that which we conventionally understood as religion now to the realm of nation-states that demand sacrifice and our ultimate allegiance. Well, in this book, Cavanaugh says we need an ecclesiology that is robust enough to counter the powers that be, but humble enough not to reproduce the exclusion and pride of those powers. If the church is not in some way a countersign to the powers, then it opens the way for other allegiances to take place, especially allegiances to the state or market. And indeed, other allegiances have taken hold, as seen with a Christian ministry, who is committed to advancing the gospel of Jesus and his kingdom simultaneously exhorting us to support our troops. As if the American military were the martial wing of the Church of Jesus Christ. And this is all done without any apparent sense of contradiction, but there are contradictions. To advance the gospel of Jesus and his kingdom is indeed the mission of the church. Couldn't say it better myself. But the kingdom of Jesus does not have troops. So what is intended by the possessive determiner "our"? I mean, I have seen churches in my city that have on the side of their building, and so everybody can see it, it says, "Pray for our troops." I'm gonna— I'll pray for everybody, and I do pray for I pray for the people that are in the military, that are in our church, that are deployed. I do pray for them. But I wouldn't put on my building, pray for our— what does the possessive determiner "our" mean? Does the church have troops? The answer is no, we do not. The early church was consistent in its insistence that Christians could not kill, even in war. It's a bit of a misnomer to say that the The patristic position of the early church was that you could not be a soldier and be in the church. You could if you were already in the legions when you became a Christian and when you were baptized. And they didn't force you to leave, but they did require you to take a vow saying you would not kill, even in war. Even in war you would kill. Because the— as it is really today, but in Rome the military was so vast, providing so many services, resources, infrastructure, et cetera, that the church understood that it wasn't easily— it wasn't easy for people to completely untangle them from that giant apparatus. But they did require those who were baptized to take a vow that they would not kill, even in war.

A book—

another book— I'll give another book recommendation. Brilliant book. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, subtitled The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, by Alan Kreider. Alan Kreider is a brilliant Mennonite Christic scholar. He passed away shortly after finishing this book. It's his magnum opus. He was in his 80s, a lovely soul. I really recommend that book. As Saint Cyprian said though, the hand that has held the Eucharist will not be sullied by the bloodstained sword. That is typical of the position of the church in the first 3 centuries. So the assumption that there's a seamless fit between the military objectives of the United States and the mission objectives of the church is an outlandish assumption that is blatantly false. The church is the vanguard of the Prince of Peace and body of his reign here and now, as evidenced when Jesus was Jesus before Pilate. Pilate is only interested in one thing: are you a king? That's it. That's the only thing he said. Are you a king? Are you a king? And Jesus says, it's as you say, but my kingdom is not from here. It's for here, but it's not from here. In other words, it doesn't come from the ways of war that you're familiar with. My kingdom is not from here because, listen, if my kingdom were from here my servants, my disciples, would be fighting. And they wanted to. Remember, Peter tried to, but Jesus disarmed him. I mean, if the question is, why did Jesus arm his disciples in the upper room on Maundy Thursday? So he could disarm them in the Garden of Gethsemane. Don't, don't end the story with Well, they had two swords. Yeah, and Jesus said, "Now put them away." So the idea of the church being a vanguard of the Prince of Peace instead of a chaplain of war is lost as the church willingly is conscripted into serving the nations military agenda. You see, why does an empire need a chaplain? Why does it need a priesthood? For this reason. Getting young men to go to war is easy. It's one of the more easily accomplished objectives that the human race knows anything about. You can get an 18-year-old to go fight a war. But what you also need to do in an empire is assure mom and dad that God is on our side. So that whether Johnny comes home marching home again or gets shipped home in a black box, mom and dad can be assured that God is on our side. And it was for justice, and it was for righteousness, and it was for the purposes of God. And so that's why— and what is today identified as the American mainline denominations supplied the role of chaplaincy to the United States, even though we don't have an official state religion. We've always had de facto state churches. And the mainline churches supplied that role from the Revolution, 1776, all the way up into the 1960s. But in the 1960s, America's engaged in the Vietnam War, and the mainline churches began to say, "I don't know, man. I'm not so sure that God's with us on this. This doesn't make sense to me." And the mainline church began to back off, or at least Enough of them did that it created a vacuum and national American evangelicals rushed in and said, "We're on your side. We'll bless your war. I mean, it's against Godless communism after all, right? Okay, let's go." And that's when you had the shift from American civic religion being expressed through what we today call mainline Protestant denominations to more conservative evangelical churches. So whether it's Crusaders with crosses on their shields or German soldiers with God on our side. On their belt buckles were American evangelicals fawning over the film American Sniper. Waging war and following Jesus have been combined in a way that seeks to erase the contradiction established by Jesus himself. So what about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then yes, of course, that is the kind of patriotism that poses no contradiction to our baptismal identity. Which, understand, baptism is— it does create the phenomenon of making us expatriates in the land of our birth. Because now we actually do belong to another kingdom. This is why Peter, when writing his first epistle to fledgling Christians in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, addresses them as exiles. They weren't literal exiles. They weren't literally foreigners. They were people that had been born and raised in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. But through their baptism, they are suddenly made be expatriates, forced to live as exiles in a strange land because now their entire allegiance has been pledged to King Jesus. So if by patriotism we mean benign pride of place, responsible citizenship, no problem. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of— any other allegiance. If we mean a willingness to kill others in the name of national allegiance, if we mean uncritical partisan support of political policies regardless of justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of our baptismal identity and is no-fly zone for Christians. Just keep in mind, patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel claims. Steal a little and and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king. That's more Bob Dylan. That's good stuff right there. So it's extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out the possibility of any conflict between baptismal identity and national identity. But it's precisely this kind of naïveté that is so often on display on church lawns. I see these things driving around Kansas City, St. Joseph, doesn't matter where I am, any city in America. Come upon these churches with their lawns, and apparently they like flags. They said that would decorate our lawn, let's have some flags. And so, uh, They're going to have an American flag, of course, because, you know, got to remember that we're in America, because we're going to forget. Then they're going to have the Christian flag, which, by the way, I don't like the Christian flag. It's not ancient iconography. It's obviously a conflation of Christian symbols and American symbols. But set that aside. Let's take it at face value. So, OK, the Christian flag represents our allegiance. But you know, budget constraints. We only have one flagpole. We got two flags, but one flagpole. How are we going to arrange them? Without exception, every single time, without any hesitation, American flag in supremacy, which is a little better allegiance to Jesus. Allegiance to the nation, Supreme allegiance to Jesus because he is Lord after all is next to supreme. Penultimate. Right there near the top.

Number 2.

But now if someone says to me, "Well, that's not what those mean. That doesn't mean that." I say, "Fine, reverse them. Just reverse them on Sunday." Oh, there'll be an elders meeting. Yeah, I mean, just— Somebody said to me, "Oh, well, you know, that's illegal." I said two things. Number one, it's not. Number two, so what if it were? But for the America First Christian, it would create too much cognitive dissonance to actually admit that their loyalty to Christ is penultimate, trumped by their primary allegiance to America, but there are moments when the truth seeks out. Which is why on a recent Fourth of July I wrote a letter to America. So I put it in my book here. I'd like to read you this letter. We're gonna come in for a landing fairly quick and open this up for some questions. Here's my— it's kind of a Dear John letter I wrote to America on the Fourth of July.

Last year.

Dear America, happy birthday. Today you're 242 years old. I've known you for almost a quarter of your life, so I know you well. You've always been my home, but lately I feel something has come between us. There's been some misunderstandings, and I would like to clear the air. First of all, I love you. Like I said, you're my home. I've been all over the world, but I've always come home to you. There's so much I admire about you. Your energy, your creativity, your entrepreneurial spirit. You invented the blues, jazz, and rock and roll. You've led the world for most of a century in science and technology. You even put a man on the moon. You came up with the idea of preserving vast tracts of your natural beauty through the genius of national parks. Some have suggested this is your best idea, and I agree. You've given us great artists like Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, and Bob Dylan. You provided refuge for great thinkers like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. You opened your doors to millions of immigrants from around the world, the poor looking for nothing more than safe haven and a new opportunity. You welcomed the Zahns from Switzerland at the beginning of the last century. Indeed, you're at your best when you live up to the lofty ideals of Lady Liberty. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Yes, America, I love you, but not like that. Not in the way of supreme allegiance and unquestioned devotion. You see, my heart belongs to another. I'm a Christian, and I confess that Jesus is Lord. The Savior of the world is the crucified and risen Son of God, not we the people. The Gospel is the story of Jesus, not the American story. I know your 16th president claimed that America was the last best hope of Earth, and nearly every president since has echoed this creed, but it's simply not true. The last best hope of Earth is Jesus, not you. Okay, brace yourself, I'm going to say some hard things. Sometimes you embarrass yourself when you get drunk on hubris. At times you display an arrogance that borders on blasphemous. I'm talking about the kind of religious patriotism that makes you an idolatrous rival to my faith in Jesus Christ. Your capital city is filled with none-too-subtle religious iconography. Take, for example, the Apotheosis of Washington in the Capitol Rotunda that depicts George Washington seated on the throne of glory in heaven. Obviously you know that apotheosis means to make a god of? Because that's clearly what you're attempting to do with Washington. You appropriated the Christian iconography of Christ ascended to heaven and replaced Jesus Christ with George Washington. Come on now, that's a bit much, wouldn't you say? Honored as the nation's first president, fine, but made a god? Do you mean to suggest that America is a divine creation with heavenly authority to rule the of nations? And if that's not what you mean, then what do you mean when you indicate— what do you mean to indicate with the apotheosis of Washington in the Capitol? And this is just one example. You know I could cite many others. That's what I mean when I say I love you, but not like that. If I loved you like that, I would betray my baptism. I am betrothed by faith and baptism to Christ alone. And Christ can have no rivals. Jesus told his followers, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple." Obviously Jesus doesn't want his disciples to actually hate their parents, but he is making a point about the requirement of unrivaled allegiance. So America, when people accuse me of hating you, please know it isn't true. I don't hate you, but I can't allow you to rival my allegiance to God. Jesus. I can't put you first. I have vowed to seek first the kingdom of God, and you'll just have to understand that. Now that we're this far into our difficult conversation, I feel like I have some other things to say. It's true that I love your energy, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit. I love your amazing contributions to science and art. I love you because you're my home. But there are things I don't love about you.

Here we go.

I know you hate to be reminded of what you call the past, but the truth is it's not past and you need to be reminded of it whether you like it or not. I'm talking about your twin original sins: the brutal enslavement of Africans for the sake of the economy and the ethnic cleansing of the land's indigenous inhabitants. You seem willing to acknowledge the sin of slavery, though you still have a long, long way to go in righting the entrenched the great wrongs of racism, but you appear incapable of acknowledging your other great sin, the sin of genocidal ethnic cleansing. You want to pretend it didn't happen and get mad when I bring it up, but you're going to have to face it. I don't know exactly how you can atone for this sin, but I do know that you have to face the ugly fact that you built your nation on stolen land atop buried bodies. In building your shining city upon a hill, you became Cain. You killed your brother. You can receive the mercy of God as Cain did, but you have to be honest about what you did to Abel, the Aboriginal people who first populated this land. America, you're my home, but my home is haunted by native ghosts. So please try to be more humble. You don't have to be great again. It's enough to be good. You don't have to be so obsessed with being number one. It's enough to be a moral citizen. Wisdom among the community of nations. You don't have to try to be king of the world. Jesus already is. And your obsession with possessing the means to kill, your trillion-dollar war machine, your 2,000 nukes, your billion-dollar bombers, not to mention your 270 million privately owned guns, scares me. Your money says "In God we trust," but your actions say "In guns we trust." It reminds me of something ominous that Jesus said: "All who take the sword will perish by the sword." Please think about that. America, I'm one of your citizens, and I do love you. I'll seek the common good. I'll gladly pay my share to help provide for education, infrastructure, healthcare, emergency services, and everything else it takes to live in a civilized society. I'd like for you to spend a lot less on bombs and killing machines Rick Lee James, but I understand that's not up to me. Yes, America, I do love you, but not like I love my Lord, not like I love God. I cannot love you like that. I cannot pledge unconditional allegiance to you. What I can promise is to be a good citizen by attempting to love my neighbor as myself. That will have to be enough. On the Fourth of July, I cannot worship you with the liturgies of civic religion. But I'll gladly eat a hot dog in honor of your birthday and listen to some Johnny Cash. And better yet, I can pray that you would become more peaceable and just, more humble and kind. America, you don't need to be great. May God bless you. Be good. With affection, Brian Zahn.

I wrote.

So, I've been a pastor for 37 years. One congregation for 37 years. And I can tell you the greatest challenge to making disciples is that most people are already thoroughly discipled into the rival religion of Americanism. America is a profound complexity. It's many things. It's a nation. It's a culture. It's an empire. It's a religion. As a nation and culture, it's a mixed bag, but there are many things that we can be proud of. There's many things to affirm. As an empire, it becomes a rival to our allegiance to Christ, and as a religion, it becomes idolatrous and blasphemous. There is a version of America that is a religion. I think we have to face that. A religion complete with creation myths, holy days, holy ground, founding fathers, canonized saints, canonical texts, revered hymns, hallowed temples, sacrifices, liturgical gestures, and sacred liturgies to dispute. The sacrosanct nature of any of these things is the core controversy and contempt, asks Colin Caperton. The attempt to reconcile Christianity and Americanism into a single religion is the kind of religious syncretism that most conservative Christians claim to be so alarmed about. But despite it all, I do have courage and hope to say that I believe we're on the verge of some things that are new. Though history doesn't repeat itself, sometimes history rhymes. So I'm looking for and praying for and preaching for and laboring for maybe a 21st century version of the Jesus Movement. Instead of being tangled up in red, white, and blue, I'm praying that we could be so immersed in the gospel, so enchanted by Jesus, so enthralled by the possibilities of God's kingdom that we, like our predecessors in the book of Acts, could be accused of turning the world upside down. As we read in Acts chapter 17, verse 6, these people have turned the world upside down. They all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, for they profess allegiance to another king, a king named Jesus.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Amen. Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.