Here we are on the brink of a supremely consequential national election, one that will help shape the next few years of our common life. I’ve already voted here in Hawai‘i. My ballot went in, and I got the reassuring text telling me it had been received.

Hawai‘i may not be the state everybody is breathlessly watching on election night, and our local races this time around haven’t exactly generated a frenzy. But the national stakes feel enormous. So let me get this out of the way right at the beginning: if you haven’t voted yet, please vote.

Funny thing is, voting wasn’t my only lesson in citizenship this week.

A few weeks ago, I received a jury summons for Circuit Court here on O‘ahu. I’ve probably received fewer than a dozen jury summonses over the years, whether in Georgia and Hawai‘i, and I’ve only actually served on one jury. That was a dozen years ago or more, in Atlanta. It was a civil case, a slip-and-fall at a shopping mall, and the trial only lasted a few days.

I remember finding those deliberations surprisingly sobering. Most of us felt sympathy for the plaintiff. He’d been hurt, and we wanted things to turn out well for him. But the evidence suggested that the mall had taken reasonable precautions. There had been signage and other warnings, and in the end we couldn’t honestly say the company was legally at fault. It was unsettling, because we wanted to help the guy. But that wasn’t our job. Our job was to listen to the evidence and reach the fairest verdict we could.

I remember thinking afterward: well, I suppose that’s what justice is sometimes. Not giving people the result we wish we could give them, but trying to give them the result the evidence requires.

Fast-forward to this month. When my new summons arrived, I didn’t see any real reason I couldn’t serve. And besides, I’ve learned from experience that most of the time you call the jury line the night before and learn you don’t need to come in anyway. The odds were in my favor. Until they weren’t. This time the call told me to show up at 8:30 a.m.

So, on Wednesday morning, I found myself driving toward downtown Honolulu in rainy rush-hour traffic, which is a particularly effective way of testing one’s commitment to civic virtue. The timing was terrible. On Thursday I was supposed to help host a gathering of Episcopal clergy from around the island. Then on Friday I’d been invited to offer the invocation at the Top Cop Hawai‘i Awards Banquet, an event honoring people in law enforcement, public safety, security, and related fields. A parishioner who’s a private investigator had invited me, and I considered it a real honor. I would hate to miss either event.

Still, I wasn’t too worried. There were more than three dozen prospective jurors, after all, and they needed only twelve jurors and two alternates. What were the chances?

If you’ve ever reported for jury duty, you know the routine. You sign in, fill out forms, watch an orientation video, and listen to more instructions from the court clerk. Then people who believe they have legitimate reasons to be excused can make their requests, which the judge must approve.

A number of us stayed behind after the orientation to do that. Some had medical appointments. Some were students. There were various conflicts. When it was my turn, I explained that I was an Episcopal priest and that I had responsibilities at two events over the next couple of days, including the Top Cop banquet. The clerk relayed the request to the judge.

A few minutes later, she called my name. “The judge denies your request.”

Well. Okay, then.

I hurriedly messaged the people involved in my Thursday and Friday commitments and told them I might not be there after all. They were gracious about it and said they’d figure things out. Meanwhile, the odds of my actually serving seemed to be getting higher.

Eventually we all went upstairs and waited outside the courtroom. A few people were called in individually for conversations with the judge. I wasn’t one of them. Then twelve names were selected at random. Not mine—whew.

Those twelve people were lined up along the hall, and the rest of us followed them into the courtroom. And that’s where something shifted for me.

The courtroom was quiet, almost solemn. Warm wood paneled the walls. The light was subdued. At an imposing bench at the front sat the judge. On one side were the prosecutor and an assistant; on the other were the defense attorney and the defendant. All of us prospective jurors stood, raised our right hands, and took an oath. Then the twelve selected jurors took their numbered seats in the jury box while the rest of us sat in the gallery.

The judge began explaining the process. She talked about the responsibilities of jurors, about the law, about the presumption of innocence, about the rights guaranteed to people who come before the court, and about the responsibility these ordinary citizens would carry.

And I’ll admit, something about it got to me. I almost had a tear in my eye.

Because suddenly I wasn’t thinking about traffic. I wasn’t thinking about Thursday’s clergy gathering. I wasn’t thinking about Friday’s banquet. I was thinking: This is America.

Not the America of campaign ads, social-media shouting matches, cable-news panels, angry rallies, or fundraising emails. Just a courtroom in downtown Honolulu where a group of ordinary people had stopped what they were doing for a few days because another human being was entitled to a fair hearing under the law.

The people in the jury box were simply citizens being asked to listen carefully, set aside assumptions, weigh evidence, and do their best to reach a just conclusion. There was something beautiful and moving about it.

The lawyers, who had certainly reviewed our juror questionnaires, began voir dire, questioning the prospective jurors about trust, honesty, reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence, spinning various hypothetical situations. Those of us in the gallery had to pay attention too, because any one of us could still be called.

After challenges for cause—there were none—the lawyers moved to peremptory challenges. Each side could dismiss up to three jurors without having to explain why. Two of the original twelve were excused, two replacements were called, and the questioning began again. Finally, the twelve jurors were settled.

I relaxed. I had escaped.

Except they still needed two alternates.

A name was drawn for Alternate No. 1. Not me. Whew.

Then came Alternate No. 2.

“Number 53, Peter Wallace.”

Welp.

I headed toward the jury box, and before I took my seat the judge called me up to the bench (a bit intimidating for this aficionado of the classic Perry Mason televsion shows!) I was surrounded by the attorneys. And whenever anyone approached the bench for a private conversation, this loud white noise filled the courtroom so nobody else could hear—kinda spooky. The judge noted that I’d asked earlier to be excused because of my responsibilities Thursday and Friday. Could I still serve if selected? I told her I had already contacted the people involved, that they could make other arrangements, and that yes, Your Honor, I could serve.

And by this point, something rather unexpected had happened. I actually wanted to. I had become invested in the whole thing.

I sat in the Alternate 2 seat in the jury box. The prosecutor asked me some questions. Then the defense attorney did. I thought I handled them well enough. Nothing dramatic, no great revelations, mostly variations on questions and scenarios they’d already asked the others.

Then the judge asked whether there were any further peremptory challenges.

The prosecutor stood. “Your Honor, we would like to thank and excuse Mr. Wallace.”

What?! After all that?

I whispered a “darn!” as I walked out of the box.

A few minutes earlier I’d been hoping desperately not to get picked. Now I was disappointed that I hadn’t been.

And just like that, I was free. No reasons given, just swiftly escorted out of the courtroom. So I could attend my clergy gathering. I could offer the invocation at the awards banquet. I’d get my fifty dollars, plus mileage and parking reimbursement, for my little field trip into the machinery of American democracy.

I drove back to my office, and then almost immediately made the mistake of looking at the news online. Anger. Accusations. Cruelty. Threats. Fear. Political leaders saying outrageous things about one another. People questioning the motives, patriotism, intelligence, or even humanity of people on the other side.

The contrast was jarring, because I’d just come from a courtroom where the whole system depended upon people restraining themselves. The judge restrained herself by applying rules rather than personal whims. The attorneys operated within procedures that gave both sides a voice. The accused was presumed innocent. The jurors were instructed to listen rather than assume. And a roomful of strangers had been asked to set aside whatever biases they could and make a decision based on evidence. All for the common good.

It wasn’t glamorous. It was slow, inconvenient, and even a little tedious. And it was deeply important.

Maybe that’s what democracy looks like most of the time. Not fireworks or stirring speeches. Not somebody riding in to save the country. No. It looks like people showing up. Voting. Serving on juries. Attending meetings. Learning what’s actually happening rather than just forwarding what someone posted online. Speaking up when something is wrong. Listening when somebody else speaks. Respecting rules even when the outcome isn’t the one we wanted. Accepting that our neighbors are still our neighbors after an election is over.

None of this guarantees that the system will work. Systems don’t work by themselves. They require people of good will, people with integrity, people willing to tell the truth, people willing to lose gracefully, people willing to exercise power with restraint, and people willing to defend the rights of someone they dislike as vigorously as the rights of someone they love.

That may be what worries me most right now. And it may also be what gives me hope.

Because for a few hours this week, I watched the system work. Not perfectly. Not magnificently. Just quietly. A judge did her job. Attorneys did theirs. Clerks kept things moving. And ordinary citizens sat in twelve numbered chairs and agreed to carry a responsibility none of them had asked for.

I didn’t end up serving, but I’m glad I showed up. And as this election approaches, that may be the most important thing any of us can do: show up, pay attention, care about the common good, and vote.

P.S. One more image from Wednesday morning has stayed with me. As I drove from my home toward the courthouse downtown, I turned onto Kamehameha Highway to get onto H-201. It was drizzling. And there, standing alone on the corner, was Congressman Ed Case, holding his campaign sign and waving at passing cars.

Just him, in the rain. I gave him a shaka as I drove past.

Whatever our politics, there was something about that little scene that struck me too: An elected representative standing on a street corner, asking ordinary people for their votes. No motorcade. No grand stage. Just one person out there in the rain, making his case to his neighbors.

Maybe there’s something very American in that too.

Public life at its best isn’t about people serving themselves. It’s about people showing up to serve one another.

A recent Washington Post article gave me quite a jolt.

The story was about Natalie Harp, an aide to President Trump who’s commented on frequently in social media for her apparent deep devotion to her boss. The Post article focused on the extraordinary political and personal divisions within her family. It revealed a good deal of intimate family history as provided by her estranged brother—and it was more than I really wanted to know. Whatever one thinks about Natalie, her politics, or the administration she serves, I found myself a little uncomfortable reading so much private pain laid out for public consumption.

And then suddenly the article became very personal: I learned that Natalie Harp’s father was Bob Harp. My old friend Bob Harp.

Bob and I had been friends back in the 1980s when we were students at Dallas Theological Seminary. He was outgoing, good-natured, funny, upbeat, the sort of person who seemed naturally to enjoy other people’s company. I was editor of the student newspaper then, and Bob contributed to it from time to time. After seminary our lives went in different directions, as I journeyed out of conservative evangelicalism and into the Episcopal Church. But Bob kept in touch with me occasionally through the years, with an email or a phone call. He even remembered my birthday sometimes.

Reading this newspaper article all these years later, I learned that Bob had died by suicide in 2020. I just sat there stunned. I did not know that; the family had, till now, kept that secret.

The article described a complicated family story and suggested that Bob, an extrovert by nature, had struggled deeply during the isolation of the COVID period. I don’t pretend to know what finally brought him to such despair. Human lives are far too complicated for easy explanations. But I do know that the cheerful young friend I remember so vividly had apparently carried burdens I knew nothing about.

And I couldn’t help thinking: I wish I’d kept in closer touch.

That realization has been lingering with me the past couple of weeks, especially because lately I’ve had several other experiences that have reminded me what an extraordinary gift friendship can be.

So perhaps it’s time for another “Gospel According to” piece. This time, the gospel according to our friends.

1. Friends Remember Who We Were

A couple of weeks ago, while I was vacationing in San Diego, I reached out to another Bob: my college dorm roommate for about a year and a half. We’ve kept in touch through texts and emails over the years. We call each other “BRE”—Best Roommate Ever (that was his title for himself, and I copied it). This continuing friendship is slightly ironic, because on paper we shouldn’t necessarily have been a match made in roommate heaven.

I was a West Virginia kid and a pretty conservative evangelical Christian in those days. Bob was a New Jersey guy, raised in another faith tradition but not religious himself. He was a partier. I wasn’t, really. We looked at lots of things differently.

And yet we got along well. Why? I think in large part because we gave each other room to be who we were. Neither of us had to convert the other into a copy of himself before friendship was possible.

Seeing him again recently reminded me of something wonderful about old friends: they remember versions of us that no longer quite exist.

They knew us before the careers, the titles, the accomplishments, the failures, the gray hair, the accumulated wisdom—and foolishness—of the decades that followed. They remember the young person who was still trying to figure everything out.

And somehow, when we’re with that kind of friend, that person is still there.

There is something grace-filled about being known across time like that.

2. Friendship Doesn’t Require Sameness

That old roommate friendship also seems especially important to me now because we live in a culture increasingly determined to sort us into categories. Left or right. Believer or unbeliever. Conservative or progressive. This tribe or that tribe. We learn someone’s position on one issue and think we now know the person.

Friendship resists that. Real friendship says: you can be you, I can be me, and there can still be an us.

That doesn’t mean convictions don’t matter. They do. Some disagreements are serious. Sometimes healthy relationships even require boundaries. But friendship reminds us that another human being is always more than a political opinion, a religious label, or a collection of positions on controversial questions.

Jesus managed to gather fishermen, zealots, tax collectors, doubters, and all sorts of people around the same table. I’m guessing they didn’t agree about everything either.

Perhaps one of the quiet disciplines of friendship is learning how to make enough room for another person to remain another person.

3. Some Friendships Somehow Defy Time

This week, back home on Oʻahu, I had lunch with another old friend who was vacationing here.

I hadn’t seen him in years—decades, really. He was a year behind me in elementary, junior high, and high school in Huntington, West Virginia, and was active in the church my father pastored. Our lives later followed some remarkably parallel paths: we both went to seminary, and we both eventually dealt with the ramifications of coming out as gay. Eventually we lost track of each other, until I happened to find him on Facebook around 2010 and we messaged back and forth about how we’d gotten to where we were.

But sitting down together this week after all those years was remarkable. It felt as though we’d seen each other yesterday.

How does that happen?

Some friendships seem to create their own kind of time. Years pass. Addresses change. Careers happen. Families grow. Hair turns gray or departs. Whole chapters of life unfold without the other person present. And yet somewhere underneath it all, the connection remains.

Then such a friend sits down across the table, smiles in that familiar way, and suddenly the decades collapse.

Not every friendship works that way, of course. Some relationships belong to one particular season and then naturally fade. That’s all right too.

But every now and then we discover a friendship that somehow endured while we weren’t even tending it very carefully. That feels a little like grace to me.

4. Other Friendships Grow Through Showing Up Again and Again

Then there are the friendships that are sustained not through long absences, but through steady presence.

Since the late 1990s I’ve been part of an email group that began because of our shared love for the comic books of our childhood. Apparently there was enough to say about old comic books to keep us talking for some thirty years.

But of course our online conversations quickly became about much more than comics. We’ve talked about politics, religion, popular culture, work, spouses, children, illnesses, joys, disappointments, books, movies, aging, and the thousand ordinary things that make up a life. I’ve eventually been able to meet all but a couple of these email friends in person, and what has always delighted me is how completely natural those meetings felt. We already knew one another. Those friendships were built one email message at a time.

Here in Hawaiʻi, I’m also grateful for clergy colleagues who have become close friends. Ministry can sometimes be a lonely calling. Having people with whom I can laugh, complain, compare notes, share coffee, ask advice, and occasionally say, “You will not believe what happened today,” is no small gift.

Friendship grows through presence. Sometimes that presence is a lunch after decades apart. Sometimes it’s an email every morning. Sometimes it’s simply knowing whom you can call.

5. Friends Hold Our Stories Gently

This is one reason the Post article about Bob’s family made me uneasy. Friends know things.

We know the marriages that are struggling, the children we’re worried about, the mistakes we regret, the embarrassing stories, the old wounds, the fears that wake us at three in the morning. Friendship gives us access to parts of another person’s life that aren’t meant for everybody.

And that knowledge brings responsibility. Not every true thing needs to be told. Not every weakness needs to be exposed. Not every private pain becomes public property simply because we know about it.

A good friend knows the difference between honesty and betrayal. A good friend can be trusted with someone else’s story.

That feels particularly important in an age of screenshots, social media pile-ons, public confession, celebrity gossip, and the strange idea that disclosure is always a virtue.

Sometimes love speaks. Sometimes love keeps confidence. Sometimes love simply sits beside somebody and lets the silence remain private.

6. Friendship Needs Attention While There Is Time

And here I return to my friend Bob Harp. I wish I’d stayed in closer touch.

I don’t say that because I imagine one more phone call from me would necessarily have changed the ending of his story. We should be very careful about telling ourselves that. Mental anguish can be profound and complicated, and none of us has the power to save another person simply by being a good friend.

But I still wish I’d called.

He had called me. He had emailed me. He remembered me. And somewhere along the way, as happens so easily, life filled up. Years passed. The distance widened.

Then one morning, six years after his death, I learned from a newspaper article that there would never be another conversation.

Maybe regret can become invitation. Send the text. Answer the email. Have the lunch. Tell somebody you’ve been thinking about them. Don’t assume there will always be another opportunity.

We cannot maintain every friendship we’ve ever had with equal intensity. Human beings simply don’t have that capacity. Friends do come and go. Some belong beautifully to a particular chapter.

But when someone matters, it may be worth letting them know. Today.

7. Friendship Helps Us Stay Human

There is one final reason I think friendship matters so much right now. We are living through a frightening and divided time. Politics can turn neighbors into enemies. Social media rewards anger and contempt. We are constantly encouraged to view other human beings as representatives of opposing camps rather than complicated people with histories, loves, wounds, families, hopes, and names.

Friendship interrupts that. A friend isn’t merely “a conservative” or “a liberal.” A friend isn’t simply “an evangelical,” “an atheist,” “a Republican,” “a Democrat,” or any of the other shorthand descriptions we use for one another.

A friend has a laugh you recognize. A story you remember. A nickname. A family. A terrible joke they’ve been telling for thirty years. A way of writing an email that you could identify without seeing the name.

Friendship restores particularity. It forces us to encounter an actual human being rather than a category.

And maybe that is one of the things our hurting world needs most.

A Final Word

Christianity talks a great deal about family, marriage, and church community. Sometimes friendship gets treated as something pleasant but secondary. But Jesus didn’t treat it that way.

Near the end of John’s Gospel, he says something extraordinary to his disciples: “I have called you friends.” And in the same passage he tells them, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Friendship is serious gospel business.

A friend accompanies us without owning us. Knows us without needing to remake us. Remembers who we were while making room for who we’re becoming. Laughs with us. Tells us the truth. Holds our stories carefully. Shows up.

And sometimes, after twenty or thirty or forty years, sits down across a table and somehow makes all those years disappear.

Yes, I wish I’d kept in closer touch with my friend Bob Harp. But I am profoundly grateful for him, and for that young friendship in Dallas so many years ago. I’m grateful for my BRE. I’m grateful for the old friend who turned up again this week. I’m grateful for clergy friends here in Hawaiʻi and for a quirky group of people who started talking about comic books over email in the last century and, incredibly, never stopped.

Maybe that’s the gospel according to our friends:

Make room for one another.

Stay curious about each other.

Hold each other’s stories gently.

Call when you can.

Forgive the long silences.

Have the lunch.

And don’t wait too long to tell your friends that their presence in your life has mattered.

Because in this divided, frightening, often lonely world, friendship isn’t a luxury. It’s one of the ways we carry one another home.

This Sunday at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in ‘Aiea, Hawai‘i, we will celebrate the Feast of St. Francis with one of the most joyful occasions in the church year: the Blessing of the Animals.

It’s always a little less predictable than the average Sunday service! There may be barking during the prayers, nervous scratching during the hymns, a cat expressing strong opinions (or saying Amen?) from inside a carrier, or a dog deciding that the passing of the peace should involve absolutely everyone in the chapel. Someone may arrive carrying a photograph of a beloved animal who cannot come in person. Someone else may bring a creature considerably smaller, quieter, or more exotic than the rest. And somehow, all of that feels exactly right.

The Blessing of the Animals reminds us that God’s creation is not an abstract theological idea. It’s alive and breathing and wiggling and occasionally slobbering beside us. The creatures we share our lives with are not merely possessions or accessories. They are fellow participants in this astonishing web of life God has made.

And if we pay attention, they may have a gospel of their own to proclaim.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and Everything Else

Saint Francis of Assisi is remembered not for accumulating much, but for letting things go. He renounced wealth, status, and privilege in order to live more freely in love with God, neighbor, and creation.

The stories about Francis have grown more colorful over the centuries. He preached to birds. He befriended the wolf of Gubbio. In his Canticle of the Creatures, he addressed the natural world as family: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Sister Mother Earth.

What matters in those stories is the vision behind them. Francis didn’t look at creation primarily as something to use. He saw relationship. Kinship. Gift. That’s a surprisingly radical idea.

Our culture often teaches us to imagine ourselves as consumers first. The world is a storehouse of things available for our comfort, convenience, pleasure, or profit. But the biblical vision is different. “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,” the psalmist says. We are not masters of creation. We belong within it.

Francis seemed to understand that in his bones. Perhaps our pets do too.

The Animals Who Have Shared Our Lives

I don’t have an animal family member these days, unless we count the occasional gecko who gets into our house and apparently assumes he’s been invited. But animals have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Growing up, there was Yinnypoo, our Pekingese; Billy the parakeet; and Hamlet the hamster. Later, my own children had Billy the terrier, Chrissie the Chihuahua, Toby the Lab-Shar-Pei mix, Callie the cat, and still more hamsters. Like many families, ours can probably trace parts of its history by the animals who were with us at the time.

That’s one of the remarkable things about pets. They enter the story of our lives.

We remember the dog who slept beside a child’s bed. The cat who seemed to know when somebody was sick. The bird who filled the house with joyous noise. The animal who drove us crazy and whom we missed terribly when it was gone.

They become part of the family mythology. And sometimes they teach us something.

Dogs and the Gospel of Delight

Dogs may be the great evangelists of joy. A dog can greet you as though your return from taking out the trash were the resurrection itself. You may have been gone seven minutes. It doesn’t matter. You’re back, and this is magnificent news.

There’s something wonderfully extravagant about that kind of delight. Dogs do not generally play it cool. They don’t worry that excessive enthusiasm might appear unsophisticated. Tail wagging begins. Bodies wiggle. Circles are run. Joy happens.

I sometimes wonder whether we human beings have become too restrained about joy. We analyze it. We mistrust it. We postpone it until conditions improve.

Dogs seem to understand that joy is often found in the person standing right in front of you. There is good news in that.

Cats and the Gospel of Sabbath

Cats, on the other hand, may be theologians of rest. They appear to have no guilt whatsoever about lying in a patch of sunlight at three o’clock in the afternoon. They stretch luxuriously. They nap. They wake up, inspect the situation, and sometimes decide another nap is warranted.

I suspect many of us could learn something from them. Our culture praises productivity relentlessly. We measure days by what we accomplished, crossed off the list, answered, built, cleaned, earned, or completed.

But Scripture gives us Sabbath. Rest is not laziness. It is part of the rhythm of creation. Even God rested. Cats, apparently, received the memo. Good news!

Birds and the Gospel of Song

Birds sing. They sing at dawn. They sing from telephone wires. They sing from trees outside our windows. Sometimes they sing when no one seems to be listening. There’s something almost sacramental about that.

We sing in church for some of the same reasons. Not because every life is going perfectly. Not because everyone feels joyful every Sunday morning. We sing because song allows hope, grief, praise, longing, memory, and faith to occupy the same breath.

Birds remind us that singing is itself an act of life. Perhaps that’s why Jesus tells us to consider them.

Small Creatures and a Large God

Then there are the smaller creatures: hamsters, turtles, fish, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs, and all the others who find their way into human households. They remind us of the sheer inventiveness of creation. Why so many shapes, colors, textures, movements, instincts, and personalities? A purely utilitarian universe would not need such variety. But creation seems almost extravagantly diverse.

Jane Goodall spent a lifetime helping human beings see animals differently. Her observations of chimpanzees helped dismantle assumptions that sharply separated human beings from the rest of animal life. Her later work became a global witness for conservation, animal welfare, and the interconnectedness of people, animals, and the environments we share.

Perhaps part of the spiritual task of being human is learning to notice that we are not alone here. We are surrounded by a lively creation.

A Park Full of Life

I remember one glorious Sunday afternoon walking through a busy park in Atlanta while listening to meditative piece of music called “Acceptance.” As the music quieted my mind, I began paying closer attention to what was happening around me.

There were dogs of every description walking their people — or perhaps people being walked by their dogs. Children were loudly playing touch football. A father carried a baby against his chest and pointed toward geese landing on the water as gracefully as surfers.

Students wandered through the park texting and laughing. A large family gathered around picnic tables for barbecue. An older couple walked slowly arm in arm. A houseless man rested on a bench.

Around me were people of different ages, races, bodies, backgrounds, and circumstances. Runners, walkers, athletes, dawdlers. Families and singles. Straight and queer. Young and old. And animals everywhere. Everybody seemed to have a place.

I have encountered scenes like that many times around O‘ahu, but for some reason that afternoon the beauty of it overwhelmed me. Tears came to my eyes. It felt, for a moment, like a glimpse of creation as God intended it: diverse, complicated, noisy, beautiful, and shared.

One world. One creation. One enormous family of life.

Pets and the Gospel of Presence

Perhaps the deepest thing our animals teach us is presence. Pets are very good at being where they are.

A dog does not spend much time worrying about whether next Tuesday will work out. A cat is not doomscrolling. A bird does not appear to be keeping a five-year strategic plan. They inhabit the moment.

We human beings have a harder time with that. Our minds are forever traveling backward into regret or forward into anxiety.

Animals gently call us back. This moment. This walk. This patch of sunlight. This meal. This person. This life.

Perhaps that’s one reason the companionship of animals can be so healing. They help bring us home to the present. And God, as it turns out, is always found in the present tense.

Love Without Many Words

Pets also remind us that love does not always require language. An animal cannot explain why it loves us. It simply stays near. It waits by the door. It curls beside us. It notices our mood. It rests its head against a leg. Sometimes, especially when grief or illness makes words difficult, that quiet companionship is exactly what we need.

People often describe beloved pets as though they somehow sensed pain before anyone told them. Perhaps they did. Or perhaps they were simply paying attention.

Either way, there is grace in being accompanied.

Blessing the Animals Means Blessing Their World

And this is where the Gospel According to Our Pets becomes challenging. We can’t bless animals on Sunday and ignore the world they inhabit on Monday. To honor St. Francis is to recommit ourselves to caring for creation.

Blessing a dog means caring about clean water. Blessing a bird means caring about habitat. Blessing a fish means caring about oceans. Blessing a cat means caring about the larger web of life of which that animal is part.

Loving our pets is wonderful. But Christian creation care asks us to widen that love. We are stewards not only of time, talent, and treasure, but of soil and sea, air and water, forests and reefs, animals and ecosystems.

The blessing travels outward.

The Gospel According to Our Pets

So what is the gospel according to our pets? Perhaps it sounds something like this:

• Love extravagantly.

• Rest without guilt.

• Sing when you can.

• Pay attention.

• Welcome delight.

• Stay curious.

• Be loyal.

• Forgive quickly.

• Do not underestimate the importance of a good meal.

• Stretch occasionally.

• Go outside.

• Enjoy the people you love while they are here.

• And remember that this world does not belong to us alone.

Our animals will never write theology books. They will never preach sermons or debate doctrine. But they live beside us.

And sometimes, if we are paying attention, they quietly point us toward truths we’ve made far too complicated.

On St. Francis Sunday, as dogs bark, cats protest, carriers rattle, tails wag, and perhaps a gecko somewhere sensibly keeps its distance, we will bless the animals.

But perhaps, in ways we do not fully understand, they have been blessing us all along.

NOTE: I will be traveling the next couple of weeks and will return to posting after that. Thank you for reading!

God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” —Exodus 3:5

A Place Set Apart

Years ago, a brother in the faith and I walked a hilly, wooded path toward a rock outcropping at Camp Mikell, the camp and conference center of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta outside Toccoa in northeast Georgia.

We had been participating in a weekend retreat for the men of our parish, and it had just ended. The other participants were heading back toward Atlanta, back to traffic and schedules and work and all the ordinary routines waiting for them. But my friend and I were not quite ready to leave. We wanted to linger for a little while longer, to stay in the quiet and simply be in God’s presence before getting back on the road.

So we followed the easy path through the woods until we reached this hidden place: a broad expanse of gray granite topping a hill and opening onto the lush green valley below.

It was sunny that afternoon, although enormous puffy clouds occasionally drifted across the sky and dimmed the blaze of the sun. A faint breeze moved around us. To the right, on another hilltop within the campgrounds, we could see the large wooden cross keeping watch over the valley. In the distance, we caught glimpses of a nearby llama farm.

Except for the occasional bleating of the llamas, the soft swish of leaves moving in the breeze, and scattered birdsong, everything was quiet.

This is a holy place, I thought.

I remembered Moses before the burning bush. And I took off my hiking boots.

My friend understood immediately and did the same. Then we stretched out on the sun-warmed stone and prayed for one another, for the people we loved, and for whatever God might be doing in our lives.

Nothing spectacular happened. There was no burning bush, no audible voice, no sudden burst of revelation. And yet I have never forgotten that afternoon.

Something about the place had become holy.

Ordinary Ground, Holy Presence

Maybe you have known a place like that.

Moses’ holy ground probably did not look particularly impressive at first. He was not visiting a temple or standing inside a cathedral. He was tending sheep in the wilderness when something utterly ordinary became extraordinary: a scrubby bush burned with fire and yet was not consumed.

God called his name. “Moses, Moses.”

And Moses answered, “Here I am.”

Then came the warning: “Come no closer.” And the invitation: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

What made the ground holy? Not the soil itself. Not the rocks. Not the geography. The ground was holy because God was there.

That may be one of the great spiritual truths we spend our lives learning. Holiness is not necessarily found only in the places we label sacred. God does not remain safely contained within church walls, behind altars, or beneath stained-glass windows. God has an unsettling habit of turning ordinary places into places of encounter.

A desert hillside. A rocky outcropping in northeast Georgia. A hospital room. A kitchen table. A beach at sunrise. A chair beside the bed of someone we love. Perhaps even the place where you are sitting right now.

Taking Off Our Shoes

There is something about Moses removing his sandals that has always moved me. He has to stop. He has to pay attention. He has to acknowledge that he is standing in the presence of something greater than himself.

Whatever else the gesture may mean, taking off his shoes makes Moses vulnerable. There is nothing between his feet and the earth beneath him. He cannot hurry away quite so easily. He has been interrupted by holiness.

Maybe that is what many of us need.

We move through life quickly, carrying responsibilities, plans, anxieties, appointments, disappointments, and expectations. We become so accustomed to managing our lives that we can easily miss the sacredness already beneath our feet.

Sometimes God has to interrupt us. Sometimes we have to stop long enough to notice. To take off the metaphorical shoes. To become quiet. To listen.

Returning to the Rock

A few years after that first experience, I returned to Camp Mikell for a personal retreat. It was the first retreat I had ever taken completely by myself, and once again I found my way back to that rocky hillside.

I sat in the same place where my friend and I had prayed years earlier. This time I brought a pad and pen and sketched the scene in front of me. I looked across the valley, listened to the wind in the trees, and simply tried to drink in the beauty and the presence of God around me. And again, I removed my hiking boots.

That weekend came at an important time in my life. I sensed God calling me to take fresh steps of faith, nudging me beyond the life I had carefully imagined for myself. Something in me needed to loosen its grip on certainty and control.

I did not know what the future held. I could not see where the path would lead. But sitting barefoot on that familiar rock, I knew I was ready to be led.

God broke through some of my complacency that weekend. My plans began to feel less permanent. My heart became a little more open to possibility. I began to imagine that the Spirit might be inviting me somewhere I had not expected to go.

And, as it turned out, that was exactly what happened. The path that stretched beyond that retreat eventually led farther than I could have imagined—to the island of O‘ahu in Hawai‘i, where I now serve.

When I sat on that rock, I could not see Hawai‘i from Georgia. But perhaps that is part of what holy ground does. It does not always show us the destination. Sometimes it simply makes us ready for the next step.

Holy Ground Is Closer Than We Think

I wonder sometimes whether we make encounters with God harder than they have to be. We imagine that holiness must feel dramatic. We expect some overwhelming spiritual experience, some unmistakable sign, some burning bush blazing in front of us.

But perhaps holy ground is often quieter than that. Maybe it is wherever we become aware that God is present. Maybe it is where our defenses soften. Where gratitude rises unexpectedly. Where grief becomes prayer. Where beauty catches us off guard. Where we suddenly know, even for a moment, that our life is part of something larger than ourselves.

The place itself does not have to be spectacular. Moses had a wilderness hillside. My friend and I had a slab of warm Georgia granite, a wooden cross in the distance, the rustling of trees, and a few noisy llamas.

God can work with surprisingly ordinary material.

Where Is Your Holy Ground?

Where is your holy ground?

Perhaps you already know. It may be a place you return to again and again: a garden, a shoreline, a chapel, a mountain trail, a favorite chair, a cemetery where someone you love is buried. Or perhaps you have not discovered it yet.

Maybe the invitation is simply to pay attention.

There may be holy ground beneath your feet right now because God is already there with you: in the silence, in the questions, in the beauty, in the uncertainty, in the ache, in the hope.

You may not need to travel anywhere at all. But wherever you discover it, do what Moses did.

Stop. Pay attention. Take off your shoes, if only in your heart. Listen for the Spirit wooing you.

You never know where the path from holy ground may lead.

This post is based on a meditation included in my book, A Generous Beckoning: Accepting God’s Invitation to a More Fulfilling Life (Forward Movement).

My beloved spouse is a very good cook, so one of the pleasures of most evenings at our house is sitting down together over whatever scrumptious dinner he has prepared and catching up on the day. We talk about what happened at church, what he’s been doing, what our family and friends are up to, who posted what on Facebook, what appointments are coming up, what our schedules are tomorrow. It’s one of those ordinary rituals of married life that I treasure.

And then, inevitably, the news comes up. One of us will mention something we saw that afternoon, and the other will say, “Do you believe that?” Then another headline comes to mind. Then another. Before long we are shaking our heads in disgust, frustration, disbelief, or simply exhaustion. Not the best way to digest a delicious meal!

Lately I’ve found myself thinking, Wait. Did we ever finish talking about that last thing? Apparently not. We’ve moved on. Before I have fully absorbed one ethically troubling story, another arrives. Then another. Something that once might have dominated public conversation for weeks or longer now seems to disappear within a day or two because something even more astonishing has shoved it aside.

The problem is not simply that disturbing things are happening. Disturbing things have always happened. The problem is the velocity. We are being asked to absorb moral shocks at a rate human beings were never designed to handle.

And I keep wondering: What does constant outrage do to the soul?

When Everything Becomes “Just Another Story”

There’s a peculiar danger in the sheer volume of troubling news. A story shocks us on Monday. By Tuesday there is another. By Wednesday, something else has displaced both of them. By Friday, Monday’s outrage feels as though it happened months ago.

We don’t necessarily decide that what happened was acceptable, we simply run out of emotional bandwidth.

That may be one of the most serious moral problems of our time. Conscience requires attention. We have to be able to stop, look, remember, judge, and respond. But if everything arrives as a relentless stream of alerts, clips, posts, breaking-news banners, and furious commentary, our capacity to pay attention begins to fail. Eventually even genuinely shocking things can become background noise.

The biblical prophets understood the importance of attention. Again and again they said, in effect: Look. Pay attention. Do not explain this away. Do not forget this outrage. Don’t forget the widow. Or the orphan. Or the stranger. Don’t forget the poor. Don’t allow injustice to become so familiar that you stop seeing it.

Their words were designed to wake people up. Our problem is that we are being awakened every five minutes. At some point, the alarm itself becomes noise.

Outrage Is Not the Same as Faithfulness

This is where people of faith need to be careful. Outrage can feel like moral seriousness. If I am sufficiently angry, informed, and appalled, then surely I am doing something. But outrage and faithfulness are not the same thing.

I don’t believe God requires me to be furious every waking hour in order to prove that I care.

Jesus was hardly indifferent to injustice. He confronted religious hypocrisy, challenged those who abused power, defended the vulnerable, and spoke hard truths. But he was not perpetually frantic. He withdrew to pray. He shared meals with friends. He noticed children. He attended weddings. He walked through fields. He rested. He told stories. He paid attention to the person directly in front of him.

That strikes me as increasingly important. We can care deeply without living in a constant state of agitation. In fact, if we remain agitated long enough, we may become less useful rather than more. Exhaustion doesn’t automatically produce wisdom. Anger doesn’t automatically produce courage.

And perpetual outrage can do strange things to us. It can make us impatient, contemptuous, suspicious, brittle, cynical. We can become so accustomed to seeing the worst in public figures that we begin seeing the worst in everyone. We can start treating entire groups of people as caricatures rather than neighbors. That’s not the transformation the Gospel calls us toward.

Stay Informed, But Set Some Boundaries

I’m not suggesting that we tune out. Democracy requires informed citizens. Christian discipleship requires attention to what is happening to our neighbors. Ignorance is not a spiritual discipline.

But neither is doomscrolling. There’s a difference between being informed and being saturated.

For some of us, that may mean choosing a few reliable news sources rather than consuming a constant stream from dozens of places. It may mean checking the news at certain times instead of every time the phone buzzes. It may mean reading enough to understand what happened and then giving ourselves permission to stop.

We don’t need to know every detail of every scandal in real time.

The modern information system is very good at convincing us that if we look away for ten minutes, something crucial will happen without us. But the world continued spinning before push notifications existed, and it will continue spinning while we take a walk, pray, eat dinner, call a friend, read a book, or go to bed.

Paying attention is important. Being consumed is not.

We Cannot Respond to Everything

Part of the helplessness many people feel comes from the assumption that if we know about a problem, we must somehow respond to it. But none of us has enough time, money, emotional energy, or influence to respond to every injustice we encounter. That’s just reality.

We can’t attend every protest, write about every issue, donate to every cause, contact every elected official, volunteer for every organization, read every investigation, and remain emotionally engaged with every crisis on the planet. Trying to do so is a recipe for paralysis.

The challenge is not to respond to everything. The challenge is to refuse to respond to nothing.

We can choose the places where our gifts, relationships, responsibilities, and opportunities allow us to act. One person may volunteer at a food pantry. Another may advocate for immigrants. Another may work on climate issues. Another may defend voting rights. Another may care for someone who is lonely or ill. Another may support investigative journalism. Another may teach children.

No one can do all of it. But everyone can do something.

Turn Anxiety Into Action

There are also basic civic responsibilities we should not neglect. We can make sure we’re registered to vote. We can know where and how voting happens in our jurisdiction. We can use official election resources rather than relying on social media rumors. We can learn who represents us at local, state, and federal levels. We can communicate with them. We can attend public meetings. We can support trustworthy journalism and public-interest organizations. We can help friends or neighbors navigate voting information when appropriate.

And then there is the work that never makes headlines.

We can feed someone. Visit someone. Listen to someone. Give money where it helps. Support a frightened neighbor. Stand beside someone who is being treated unjustly. Teach our children and grandchildren that truth matters. Refuse to repeat something we have not verified. Speak honestly in rooms where everyone else is pretending not to notice.

Those acts may feel small compared with the scale of national events. But most moral life happens at small scale. The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a mustard seed.

Remember

One of the most important things we can do in a firehose culture is remember. The speed of the news cycle benefits forgetfulness. Yesterday’s scandal disappears beneath today’s controversy. What seemed outrageous becomes normal simply because something new has arrived.

So write things down. Remember what happened. Support journalists and historians who keep records. Pay attention to patterns, not merely individual headlines. Talk with other people about what you are noticing.

Memory is a moral practice. The Bible understands this profoundly. “Remember” is one of its great recurring commands. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. Remember what God has done. Remember the covenant. Remember the poor. Remember who you are.

For people of faith, memory keeps us from accepting the unacceptable simply because it has become familiar.

Protect Your Capacity for Joy

There’s another danger in all of this: we can begin to feel guilty for enjoying anything.

How can I laugh when people are suffering? How can I go to dinner, watch a movie, read the comics, enjoy the beach, listen to music, or spend time with friends when the world is such a mess?

But misery is not a moral achievement. The forces that degrade public life do not become weaker because I am miserable all day.

Joy is not betrayal. Rest is not surrender. Beauty is not denial. Sabbath is not indifference.

If anything, we need those things because they help preserve the parts of ourselves that injustice would otherwise consume.

Maybe that’s one reason I enjoyed writing recently about comic strips. A laugh in the morning will not repair public life. But it may help make us human enough to care about repairing it.

We need meals with people we love. We need music. Worship. Walks. Beauty. Humor. Stories. We need moments when the nervous system is not being told that civilization may collapse before lunch.

These are not escapes from faithful living. They help make faithful living possible.

Don’t Let Them Take Your Soul

That may be the deepest challenge. The danger of a degraded public life is not only what happens to institutions, laws, norms, or elections. The danger is what happens to us.

We can become cynical. We can become cruel. We can begin to despise people. We can become so frightened that we abandon generosity. We can become so angry about dishonesty that we stop caring whether our own side tells the truth. We can become so exhausted that we surrender the very qualities we are trying to defend: compassion, decency, patience, courage, humor, tenderness, hope.

Christian resistance begins by refusing that transformation. We can’t control what every leader does. We can’t answer every outrage. We can’t carry every crisis.

We will miss things. We’ll become tired. Sometimes we’ll need to turn off the screen and walk outside.

But we can stay awake. We can tell the truth. We can remember. We can participate in civic life. We can serve. We can protect the vulnerable. We can refuse cruelty. We can keep our humanity. We can keep our capacity for joy.

And we can remember that the news cycle is not the same thing as reality. Beyond the headlines, people are still feeding neighbors, caring for children, visiting the sick, teaching students, making music, tending gardens, preparing dinner for someone they love, and doing countless small acts of goodness that will never appear beneath a BREAKING NEWS banner.

Maybe faithfulness in a time of constant outrage begins there. Not by pretending everything is fine. Not by looking away. But by refusing to let what is wrong with the world become what is wrong with us.

—-

P.S. I think this Sunday’s collect, which you will hear in my church and countless others that use the Revised Common Lectionary, is helpful and timely:

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Okay, this week’s column is a bit different, but I have some things to get off my chest.

First of all, I confess, I have loved comic strips for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I clipped Sunday installments of Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon from the newspaper and pasted them in a notebook, just because I really liked them. Those bright panels carried whole worlds: rockets, villains, cliffhangers, strange planets, capes, shadows, heroes, danger, and delight. A newspaper was not just something adults read over coffee. It was a delivery system for a kid’s imagination.

The Sunday comics felt like a gift tucked inside the grown-up seriousness of the then-big, fat newspaper. There were headlines, editorials, sports scores, obituaries, grocery ads, classified listings, and then suddenly, an explosion of color. Odd characters. Jokes. Adventures. Little windows into other realities. You could spread the comics section out on the floor, trace the panels with your eyes, follow the story, laugh at the punchline, or simply admire the art, or not.

I still read comic strips every morning. I do get my local newspaper, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, delivered, but I will admit I don’t read them there, though I scan them. Instead I get daily emails with all my favorite strips from the syndicates, GoComics and ComicsKingdom. Modest annual subscriptions to those services get my day started, and in those daily emails I find old favorites, newer voices, gag-a-day strips and panels, domestic comedies, adventure stories, soap-opera continuities, workplace absurdities, and vintage reruns from earlier eras. Some make me laugh out loud—and I love hitting the heart button and checking out the comments. Some just make me smile. Some make me roll my eyes. But almost every day, at least one strip gives me a small lift before the day gets too serious. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to all the news summary emails I also get in my morning email inbox.

Comic strips are easy to underestimate because they are small (oh yes, they used to be printed pretty big, don’t get me started on that). But their smallness is part of their genius. In three or four panels, a good strip can create a character, land a joke, tell a truth, brighten a mood, or make us feel accompanied by familiar fictional friends. At their best, comic strips are not filler. They are daily art.

Something for Everyone

There was a time when the comics page was one of the most beloved parts of a newspaper. Children read it, adults read it, grandparents read it, and families argued about which strips were funny and which had gone downhill. A comic strip did not have to appeal to everyone in order to matter. Part of the pleasure was the variety.

Some people love Peanuts. Some are devoted to Blondie or Beetle Bailey. Some follow the suburban chaos of Hi and Lois, the domestic absurdity of For Better or For Worse, the weird cat’s-eye view of Heathcliff, the hilarious wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes, the gentle oddness of The Far Side, or the sharp social satire of Doonesbury. Others keep up with serial strips whose plots unfolded slowly, sometimes glacially, day after day and Sunday after Sunday. (What! Mary Worth is being accused by a Charterstone snoop of canoodling with Ian??)

This variety matters because comic strips have never been just one thing. They can be silly, sentimental, mischievous, philosophical, slapstick, satirical, sentimental, adventurous, or quietly profound. They can give us a gag in the morning or a story that unfolds over weeks. They can speak to children and adults at the same time, sometimes for different reasons. A child giggles at Snoopy on top of the doghouse; an adult recognizes Charlie Brown’s melancholy and Lucy’s certainty in her psychiatry booth.

A good comic strip is a little miracle of compression. The artist has almost no room. A few drawings. A few words. Maybe a facial expression, a pause, a beat of silence, a final turn. Yet within that small frame a strip can capture a marriage, a friendship, a childhood, an anxiety, a cultural absurdity, or the whole tragicomedy of being human.

More Than Filler, a Ritual

Because comic strips are brief and accessible, newspapers have sometimes treated them as decoration, something to fill space around the “real” news. But loyal readers know better. The comics page has often been one of the reasons people formed an attachment to a particular paper in the first place.

A comic strip is not just content, it’s a habit, a daily ritual. You check in with characters over time. They become part of the furniture of your imagination. You know their houses, their pets, their recurring jokes, their moods, their habits, their limitations. You may not think about them all day, but when they disappear, you notice.

That’s because comic strips create continuity. In a world that changes too quickly, there is something oddly comforting about returning to familiar panels and familiar voices—e.g., Dagwood in the bathtub, Lucy jerking the football away from Charlie Brown’s foot at the last moment. A strip may take only twenty seconds to read, but the relationship can last for years. We grow older while some characters remain the same age forever (although some, like Gasoline Alley, age their characters, even though that means that Walt Wallet is around 130 years old now). We meet them at breakfast, at the kitchen table, in a newspaper box, on a phone screen, or in an email, and they greet us with a tiny appointment of joy.

They also create shared moments. Someone reads a strip and says to a spouse, child, friend, or coworker, “You gotta see this one.” I often share a strip with my siblings or friends. That simple act — passing along a laugh, pointing out a truth, sharing a panel — is part of the medium’s charm. Comic strips are social in a quiet way. They don’t demand attention, they just offer something easy enough to share.

A Medium Under Pressure

And yet, this modest and historic daily art form is under continual pressure for survival.

Part of the reason is obvious: newspapers themselves are under pressure. As print circulation declines, newsrooms shrink, print editions disappear, and budgets tighten, the comics page becomes vulnerable. Some newspapers have reduced their comics offerings to save money; ABC News was already reporting back in 2010 that papers were cutting comics and that newer strips were often the first to go. It’s only gotten far worse since then. In fact, today’s news brings a report that the Toledo Blade will shut down unless a buyer shows up.

More recently, large newspaper chains have standardized or reshuffled comics packages across many papers, cutting the number of strips offered. The Washington Post reported in 2024 that Gannett’s changes affected cartoonists’ print income and raised concerns about which voices were being included or excluded; the same report noted that comics are thriving online and in graphic novels even as newspaper syndication is caught in the contraction of the print business.

That’s one of the strange tensions of the moment. The comic strip as an art form is not dead. Far from it. Graphic novels, webcomics, manga, social media comics, and independent creators have helped the larger comics world flourish in new ways. But the daily newspaper comic strip — that particular form, with its rhythm, discipline, audience, and shared public place — feels fragile.

Some beloved strips have gone into reruns, or ended. Some continue after the original creators have died or retired. Newer strips struggle to find space. Some vintage strips are revived digitally, which is wonderful, but also reminds us of how much of the form now survives as mere memory. The comic strip is still alive, but its old home is shrinking.

And Then There Are Political Cartoons

Political cartoons deserve their own essay, and their own lament. They are cousins to the comic strip, but they carry a different public responsibility. A great editorial cartoon can do what a thousand-word column cannot: expose hypocrisy, puncture vanity, reveal absurdity, and make power look ridiculous.

That may be why political cartoons are often unpopular with the powerful.

Newspapers have been cutting editorial cartoonists too. In 2023 McClatchy let go three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists, and cited the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists’ estimate that fewer than 30 full-time staff editorial cartoonist jobs remained at newspapers. In 2025, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from The Washington Post after an editor rejected a cartoon she had drawn involving the paper’s owner and other media executives; AP reported that episode as part of a wider controversy over editorial independence. Thank God Mike Luckovitch is still around… for now, though last year his home paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, went all digital.

I don’t want to turn this gentle praise of and lament for comic strips into a full defense of political cartooning. But the connection matters. Newspapers are not only losing reporters when they shrink, they are losing visual wit, local character, satire, playfulness, and the ability to surprise readers into seeing the world differently. That’s a real loss.

Why Newspapers Should Lean In

I think newspapers should think twice before treating comics as expendable. I understand the economic pressures. I understand that news organizations are trying to survive in a brutal media landscape. I know that comics alone will not solve the business model of journalism. But if newspapers are asking why readers should return day after day, comic strips are part of the answer.

The funny pages build habit. They build affection. They give readers a reason to linger. They make a newspaper feel less like a grim consolidator of crises and more like a human companion. They say, in effect, that a newspaper is not only a delivery system for bad news, but a daily gathering place for information, memory, argument, imagination, and delight. And then there are the puzzles!

Instead of cutting comics, newspapers might ask how to make them more inviting. They could offer better curation (and more strips), more variety, more diverse creators, local cartoonists, digital archives, reader polls that genuinely expand rather than merely standardize, Sunday features, artist interviews, and ways for families to share strips across generations. A comics page could be a place of renewal rather than a relic.

The irony is that in an age of endless digital content, the comic strip’s limitations are part of its strength. It’s short. It’s visual. It’s habitual. It’s easy to share. It fits a distracted age, but at its best, it also resists distraction by rewarding attention to a single small moment.

A Minor Daily Mercy

I know comic strips will not save the world. They won’t end war, heal democracy, lower the price of groceries, or fix the economics of journalism. Most mornings, they won’t even be the most important thing I read. But not everything precious has to be grand.

A comic strip can lift a morning. It can start a conversation. It can give a young person a reason to read the paper. It can offer a laugh between spouses over coffee. It can remind us of childhood. It can make us feel that some familiar character somewhere is still standing at the edge of a panel, ready with a joke, a sigh, a pratfall, a complaint, or a small truth about life. And there is mercy in that.

In a world that gives us more than enough reasons to frown, sigh, argue, doomscroll, and despair, surely there is still room for a few panels that help us smile. Surely there is still room for artists who can compress a whole mood into one expression, one silence, one final frame. Surely there is still room in the morning for wit, whimsy, adventure, love, satire, tenderness, and delight.

So yes, I still believe in the comic strip.

I believe in the funny pages, even when they are no longer on paper.

I believe in the small daily appointment with imagination.

I believe in the humble genius of two or three or four panels.

And I hope newspapers, readers, syndicates, and artists will keep finding ways to preserve and renew this wonderfully peculiar art form. Because sometimes what keeps us going is not only the great truths, the solemn duties, or the urgent causes. Sometimes it’s a little square of newsprint — or an email in the morning — that makes us chuckle before we face the real-life day.

After Hurricane Lala hit the Hawaiian islands a couple of weeks ago, one of the stories that stayed with me was about low-income seniors in Honolulu left stranded when flooding damaged the only elevator in their apartment building. For many of us, a broken elevator would be inconvenient. For elders with walkers, wheelchairs, medications to pick up, doctor’s appointments to keep, groceries to carry, and limited strength, it can become something much deadly serious.

That is what climate disruption looks like up close. Not only charts, projections, policy debates, or distant warnings about future generations, but kupuna essentially trapped in their homes because a storm hit a vulnerable building in a vulnerable place. It’s the family watching floodwater rise around a home they thought was safe. It’s the rural road washed out, the bridge destroyed, the refrigerator full of spoiled food, the neighbor checking on an elder, the church member looking at the forecast again because another storm has formed in the Pacific.

Hurricane Lala did not have to become the worst-case scenario to cause real harm. Across parts of Hawai‘i, still dealing with the damage inflicted by the Kona Low storms this past spring, Lala brought destructive rain, flooding, power outages, damaged roads and bridges, and homes damaged or knocked from their foundations. Some communities were cut off or left waiting for power and access to return. And now even before the emotional weather has fully cleared, many of us are watching Lowell and Karina move across the Pacific, checking advisories, tracking cones, comparing forecasts, and wondering what would come next.

Here in Hawai‘i, we know that water, wind, electricity, roads, food, housing, and health are all connected. A storm is not just “weather.” It becomes a test of how well we have cared for land, infrastructure, neighbors, and one another.

This is what creation care looks like now. It’s not only about loving trees, beaches, birds, reefs, mountains, and sunsets, though surely we should love them. It’s about loving our neighbors whose lives become more fragile when creation groans. And creation is groaning.

Creation Is Not Background Scenery

One of the mistakes modern people often make is treating creation as scenery. Nature becomes the beautiful background for our lives, something to admire when convenient, exploit when profitable, and mourn only after it is damaged. But Scripture gives us a much richer and deeper vision.

In Genesis 1, creation is called good before human beings ever appear. Light is good. Earth and sea are good. Plants, stars, fish, birds, animals, and creeping things are good. Creation has value because God delights in it, not simply because it’s useful to us. Human beings are placed in the garden not as owners who may do whatever they wish, but as caretakers with a sacred vocation.

That matters. The earth is not ours in the ultimate sense. Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” We are tenants, stewards, gardeners, neighbors, and fellow creatures. We receive life from a world we did not create and cannot fully control.

Of course, ultimately, the archetypal Adam and Eve failed in their responsibilities in the Garden of Eden. That’s a warning for all of us.

The biblical vision does not separate spirituality from soil, water, animals, weather, and food. Sabbath applies not only to people but to animals and land. Gleaning laws require landowners to leave the edges of the field for the poor and the stranger. Jubilee imagines release from crushing debt and restoration of balance. The prophets condemn those who add field to field while the vulnerable lose their place. Jesus teaches us to notice lilies, birds, seeds, soil, bread, water, vines, harvests, and storms.

Creation is not incidental to faith. It’s woven all through it.

Climate Change Is a Neighbor-Love Issue

That’s why creation care is not a hobby for environmentally minded Christians. It is an essential part of discipleship.

When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, he does not allow us to define “neighbor” narrowly. Our neighbor is not only the person who lives next door, votes like us, worships like us, or speaks our language. Our neighbor is the person whose life is affected by what we do and what we fail to do.

Climate disruption does not harm everyone equally. Those with money, mobility, insurance, generators, air conditioning, flexible jobs, and strong social networks usually have more ways to adapt. Those with fewer resources are hit first and hardest. Children, elders, outdoor workers, people with disabilities, people in fragile housing, coastal communities, island communities, migrants, and low-income families often carry the heaviest burden.

Here in Hawai‘i, that’s not theoretical. We live on islands in the middle of the Pacific. Our food systems, energy systems, housing, roads, reefs, beaches, fresh water, and emergency response are all vulnerable. When a storm hits, it exposes the fragile connections that make daily life possible. If the power fails, elevators stop. If roads wash out, medicine and food may not arrive. If reefs weaken, shorelines and sea life suffer. If temperatures rise, elders and workers are placed at risk.

The same is true across the world. Heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts, rising seas, stronger storms, and shifting weather patterns are not only environmental problems, they are human problems. They are justice problems. They are spiritual problems.

If creation is groaning, then our neighbors are groaning with it.

Stewardship Means Limits

Christians sometimes use the word “stewardship” mainly when we are talking about church budgets. But stewardship is much bigger than money. It is about how we care for what has been entrusted to us. And real stewardship requires limits.

That may be one of the hardest truths for our culture to hear. We live in an economy that often assumes more is always better: more growth, more consumption, more convenience, more extraction, more speed, more profit. We are taught to treat limits as obstacles to overcome rather than wisdom to receive.

But Scripture takes limits seriously. Sabbath is a limit. The land must rest. Workers must rest. Animals must rest. Even the powerful are not allowed to extract endlessly from the weak. Gleaning is a limit on ownership. Jubilee is a limit on accumulated inequality. Honest weights and measures are a limit on greed. The command to care for the stranger is a limit on tribal fear.

A theology of endless extraction is not biblical. It is idolatry with a business plan.

That does not mean every environmental question is simple. Good people may disagree about specific policies, technologies, timelines, and tradeoffs. But Christians should be wary of any worldview that treats the earth as exploitable, the poor as expendable, and future generations as someone else’s problem.

We cannot claim to love the Creator while casually abusing creation. We can’t claim to love our neighbors while ignoring the conditions that make their lives unsafe.

When Leaders Move the Wrong Way

This is why the current policy direction in our country is so troubling. At the very moment when storms, floods, heat, and fires are becoming harder to ignore, national leadership seems intent on moving in the opposite direction from creation care. Environmental safeguards are being weakened. Climate science is treated as an inconvenience. Regulations meant to reduce greenhouse gas pollution are rolled back or eliminated. The very idea of public responsibility is recast as an enemy of freedom.

But freedom without responsibility is not Christian freedom. It is license.

Christians should be very cautious when “freedom” is defined as freedom from accountability, freedom from limits, freedom from concern for the vulnerable, or freedom from consequences. Biblical freedom is not the right to do whatever we want regardless of harm. Biblical freedom is ordered toward love of God and neighbor.

If public policy makes it easier to pollute, easier to ignore climate risk, easier to delay action, and harder to build a sustainable future, then people of faith have reason to speak. Not because creation care belongs to one political party, but because the earth belongs to God, and vulnerable neighbors are already paying the price.

The question is not whether Christians should be “political.” The prophets were political. Jesus was executed by political power. The question is whether our politics are being shaped by fear, greed, and denial, or by justice, mercy, humility, and love of neighbor.

Small Acts Are Not Nothing

This is where many of us begin to feel overwhelmed. The problem is so large, the systems are so complex, and the forces arrayed against serious climate action are so wealthy and powerful. What difference can one person, one household, one church, or one small community possibly make?

I understand that feeling. This year I bought a Chevrolet Bolt EV. The tax incentives were gone, but I bought it anyway because it seemed worth doing — and, honestly, because it was a good deal (and I enjoy driving it!). I do not imagine that one car purchase will save the planet. It will not. But I also do not believe faithful action has to be world-saving in order to matter.

That is true of many things. Turning off lights will not save the planet by itself. Eating less wastefully will not solve the climate crisis by itself. Installing solar panels, driving less, planting trees, reducing plastic, conserving water, supporting local food systems, voting with climate in mind, writing elected officials, and preparing our congregations for disasters will not, each by itself, repair the damage.

But faithfulness is rarely one grand gesture. More often it’s a pattern of life. Small acts become habits. Habits become witness. Witness becomes culture. Culture shapes policy. Policy affects lives. We should not despise small faithful actions simply because they are not sufficient by themselves.

In the Gospel, Jesus speaks of mustard seeds, yeast, lamps, salt, and cups of cold water. Small things matter in the Kingdom of God.

What Progressive Christians Can Do

So what can we do?

First, we can tell the truth. That means resisting denial, minimization, and despair. We do not have to become climate scientists to listen seriously to climate science. We do not have to know every policy detail to recognize that something is wrong when extreme heat, stronger storms, rising seas, wildfires, and floods are reshaping ordinary life. Telling the truth is a spiritual practice.

Second, we can connect creation care to neighbor-love. This matters because environmental issues are often framed as though we must choose between people and the planet. Scripture does not allow that separation. The poor need clean air. Children need safe water. Elders need protection from heat and power outages. Island communities need resilience. Farmers need stable seasons. Outdoor workers need breathable days. Creation care is human care.

Third, we can make changes where we live. Households can conserve energy, reduce waste, use less plastic, recycle, drive less or drive cleaner when possible, eat with more attention, plant native or climate-appropriate plants, and prepare for emergencies. None of this should become a purity contest. Many people have limited choices because of income, housing, health, work, or geography. The point is not guilt. The point is faithfulness with what is actually within our reach.

Fourth, churches can lead by example. Congregations can conduct energy audits, shift to LED lighting, explore solar where feasible, reduce waste at parish events, conserve water, care for church grounds thoughtfully, teach and preach about creation, include creation in the prayers of the people, support disaster preparedness, and connect food ministries with local food resilience. A food pantry is not separate from creation care. Feeding hungry neighbors in a changing climate is also creation care.

Fifth, we can engage public life. We can vote with climate and environmental justice in mind. We can support policies that protect air, water, land, and vulnerable communities. We can oppose rollbacks that place short-term profit above long-term survival. We can write representatives, testify locally, support serious environmental organizations, and encourage leaders who take responsibility seriously. Why not start a group at your church to focus on these issues, act on them, and share information with the whole congregation?

Finally, we can practice hope together. Climate anxiety is real. Many people, especially younger people, wonder what kind of world they are inheriting. The Church can offer lament without despair, truth without paralysis, repentance without shame, and action without illusion. We can remind one another that love does not require certainty about the outcome. Love simply asks us to act faithfully now.

Is It Too Late?

So is it too late? Well, it may be too late for innocence. It may be too late to pretend we didn’t know. It may be too late to avoid every consequence of what we have done and left undone. Some damage is already here. Some losses cannot be restored. Some communities are already adapting to a world they did not choose.

But it is not too late to love. It’s not too late to repent. It’s not too late to reduce harm, protect the vulnerable, change our habits, tell the truth, challenge destructive policies, strengthen our communities, and live more gently upon God’s earth.

Christian hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism says everything will turn out fine. Christian hope says God is faithful, and therefore we act. We act even when the outcome is uncertain. We act because creation is beloved. We act because our neighbors are beloved. We act because despair is not discipleship.

The storms may keep forming, the heat may keep rising, the policies may keep disappointing us. The problems may remain larger than anything we can fix alone.

But the earth is still the Lord’s. The neighbor is still our neighbor. The vulnerable still need protection. The garden still needs tending. And the call of Christ still stands: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Creation is groaning. The question is not whether Christians should care. The question is whether we are willing to hear the groaning as a call.

The world feels a little dimmer this week.

Dolly Parton has died, and people of all stripes seem to be mourning her. Country fans and pop fans. Church folks and theater folks. Progressives and conservatives. People who grew up with her on television and people who first encountered her through movies, Dollywood, the Imagination Library, or a song that somehow appeared at exactly the right moment in their lives. This kind of nearly universal affection is rare. Especially nowadays.

When I was a kid in West Virginia, my family often watched The Porter Wagoner Show after supper. I remember Porter, with his famous rhinestone suits and tall blond pompadour, and I remember Dolly as the young singer on his show. She was unmistakably herself even then. Porter Wagoner helped introduce her to a national audience, and their partnership became hugely successful before Dolly eventually stepped out on her own.

That professional split may have been painful, but it also gave the world “I Will Always Love You,” which may be the most gracious goodbye song ever written. Before it became a global power ballad in Whitney Houston’s voice, it was Dolly’s farewell to Porter: tender, grateful, clear-eyed, and free of bitterness. That’s no small thing. One of the hardest forms of love is knowing when to bless someone and go.

Whatever happened to Porter? Well, he remained an important figure in country music, a longtime member of the Grand Ole Opry, and a Country Music Hall of Famer.

But Dolly became something else altogether: not merely a star, but a cultural force. Singer. Songwriter. Actor. Businesswoman. Benefactor. CEO. Theme park visionary. Literacy advocate. Global icon. One of those rare people who may have been physically small (well, mostly!), but whose image and presence was larger than life, yet whose spirit somehow still seemed warm, accessible, and deeply human. And she did all of that while never appearing embarrassed by where she came from or what she believed.

Dolly Parton was never just a voice, though what a voice she had. She was a witness to something: the power of joy, the dignity of humble roots, the courage of self-creation, the discipline of hard work, and the holy mischief of refusing to let the world make you smaller.

So what might the gospel according to Dolly Parton teach us? Quite a lot, actually.

1. Let Your Light Shine

Dolly sparkled. Literally, of course. Rhinestones, big hair, bright colors, high heels, sequins, fringe. She once joked that it costs a lot of money to look that cheap, and part of her genius was that she was always in on the joke.

But the sparkle was never only surface. Dolly let her light shine in the fullest sense. She brought brightness into rooms. She lifted spirits. She made people feel welcome. She understood that joy can be generous.

Jesus tells his followers, “Let your light shine before others.” Not so we can show off, but so others may glimpse something good, something hopeful, something of God.

Dolly seemed to understand that light is not meant to be hidden. If God gives you gifts, you use them. If God gives you a voice, you sing. If God gives you a platform, you help others. If God gives you humor, you make people laugh. If God gives you sparkle, for heaven’s sake, sparkle.

There’s a faithful kind of brightness that doesn’t deny pain, it just refuses to let pain have the last word.

2. Remember Where You Came From

Perhaps no song captures Dolly’s gospel better than “Coat of Many Colors.” On the surface, it’s a song about poverty: a little girl wearing a homemade coat that others mock. But Dolly turns the memory into something luminous. The coat isn’t valuable because it’s expensive. It’s valuable because it’s stitched with love. The world sees lack; Dolly sees abundance. The world sees embarrassment; Dolly sees blessing. That’s a deeply Christian way of seeing.

Again and again, God takes what the world overlooks or ignores and reveals glory there: a manger, a cross, a handful of fishermen, a widow’s mite, a poor child’s coat. Grace has a way of changing the meaning of things.

Dolly never ran from her roots. Again and again, she returned in story and song to the mountains of East Tennessee, to poverty, family, faith, and the small places that formed her. She reminded us that poverty is not the same as shame, that humble beginnings can carry deep dignity, and that love can make ordinary things beautiful.

A faithful life doesn’t require us to despise where we began, it invites us to look back with honesty, gratitude, and compassion, trusting that God was at work even there.

3. Be Yourself on Purpose

Dolly created herself with astonishing intention. She knew exactly how people saw her, and she used that image without ever being reduced to it. People underestimated her at their peril. Behind the hair and humor was an extraordinarily gifted songwriter, a shrewd businesswoman, and a disciplined artist with a clear sense of who she was. There’s something wonderfully freeing about that.

So many people spend their lives trying to become acceptable to others. Smaller. Quieter. Safer. More respectable. Less noticeable. Dolly went the other way. She became more herself.

That doesn’t mean the Christian life is simply self-expression. Faith calls us to humility, service, and transformation. But humility is not self-censorship. God doesn’t ask us to disappear, God asks us to become authentic.

Dolly’s life says: know who you are, know whose you are, and don’t waste your one precious life pretending to be someone else.

4. Use What You Have to Bless Somebody Else

Dolly’s generosity was not ornamental. It was practical. Her Imagination Library began as a way to honor her father, who could not read, and it grew into an enormous book-gifting program for children. She supported education, health care, disaster relief, and other causes. She used fame not only to build a career, but to build things that helped people. That’s where faith becomes concrete.

It’s easy to talk about love in general. Dolly showed love in ways that arrived in mailboxes, classrooms, scholarships, hospitals, and hometown economies. Her generosity had addresses.

The Letter of James (2:15-16) asks what good it is to say warm words to someone who lacks food or clothing if we do not help meet the need. Dolly seemed to understand that kindness has to take form. A song. A book. A check. A job. A place to gather. A door opened for someone who needs one.

Faithful living means asking: What do I have, and how can I use it to bless somebody else?

5. Work Has Dignity

We can’t talk about Dolly without talking about “9 to 5.” It’s catchy, funny, and wildly singable, but it also has a sharp edge. It names the frustration of ordinary workers trying to make a living while powerful people profit from their labor. It’s a song with a smile on its face and a protest sign tucked under its arm.

That’s part of Dolly’s genius. She could make you tap your foot while telling the truth.

The Christian faith has always cared about work: honest labor, fair treatment, economic justice, and the dignity of people whose names may never appear on a marquee. Scripture does not treat workers as disposable. The prophets thunder against exploitation. Jesus spends most of his earthly life among ordinary working people.

“9 to 5” reminds us that faithfulness is not only about private virtue. It’s also about how we treat people in offices, kitchens, fields, classrooms, hospitals, hotels, warehouses, and stores. It’s about whether people can live with dignity. It’s about whether the workplace honors the humanity of the people who make everything run.

A faithful life does not look down on ordinary work. It blesses it, honors it, and fights for the people who do it.

6. Joy Can Be Resistance

Dolly was relentlessly positive, but not because she had lived an easy life. She knew poverty, grief, conflict, public scrutiny, and the long demands of a career that never seemed to stop. Her joy was not naïve. It was chosen.

That may be why “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” feels so powerful. It’s not a song from someone who has never known darkness. It’s a song from someone who believes morning can still come. The light matters because the night was real.

That matters in a time when cynicism can feel like the only intelligent response to the world. We confuse bitterness with realism. We assume that kindness is weakness, cheerfulness is shallowness, and hope is for people who have not been paying attention. Dolly proved otherwise.

Joy can be a form of courage. Humor can be a form of resilience. Kindness can be a form of strength. To keep singing, creating, laughing, and giving in a hard world is not denial. It is defiance.

The gospel calls this kind of joy deeper than happiness. It is the light that shines even when the room is dark.

7. Faith Should Make Us More Generous

Dolly spoke openly about faith, but she did not use it as a weapon. Her Christianity seemed to make her more expansive, not more narrow. She could hold onto her roots and still welcome people far beyond the boundaries others might draw. That’s part of why so many different kinds of people loved her.

There’s a lesson there for the church. Faith at its best does not make us brittle, suspicious, or mean. It makes us more loving. More generous. More able to see the image of God in people who are not exactly like us. More willing to bless than to condemn.

Dolly’s faith was not the kind that scolds from a distance. It was the kind that sings, gives, laughs, remembers, and welcomes. That seems pretty close to the heart of Jesus to me.

8. Keep Working While There Is Light

One of the remarkable things about Dolly was her astonishing productivity. Songs, albums, movies, books, businesses, musicals, charitable work, public appearances, collaborations. She did not seem to understand retirement in the ordinary sense. She kept creating. Kept dreaming. Kept building.

Not frantically, or at least not only frantically. But faithfully.

There is a line in John’s Gospel (9:4) where Jesus says, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” Dolly’s work was not all explicitly religious, of course, but there was something faithful in her sense of stewardship. She had gifts, and she used them. She had time, and she filled it with purpose. She had opportunities, and she turned them toward joy.

That’s a good question for all of us: What light have we been given, and what work of love is still ours to do?

A Final Word

Dolly Parton’s death feels personal to people who never met her, because she always made the world feel a little kinder, funnier, brighter, and more hopeful. She seemed to belong to everybody without ever ceasing to belong to herself.

She was not a plaster saint. She was too funny, too savvy, too sparkly, too fully alive for that. But perhaps she was a witness. A witness that you can come from little and give much. That you can take your gifts seriously without taking yourself too seriously. That you can be shrewd and tender, ambitious and generous, faithful and fun.

“Coat of Many Colors” may be the image I’ll carry with me most: love taking what is humble, patched together, and easily mocked, and making it shine. That was Dolly’s gift. She helped us see abundance where the world saw scarcity. She helped us see dignity where the world saw embarrassment. She helped us see light where the world saw only darkness.

So maybe that is the gospel according to Dolly Parton:

Shine brightly.

Remember your roots.

Be yourself on purpose.

Honor the dignity of work.

Give what you can.

Keep singing.

And never underestimate what God can do with a generous heart, a stubborn hope, and and some rhinestones.

Every few weeks lately, the rumor mill starts up again: Who will be the next James Bond?

Since Daniel Craig hung up the tuxedo after No Time to Die, speculation has become its own minor industry. As I write this, names like Jack Lowden and Callum Turner seem to be circling through the latest round of guesses, betting markets, entertainment chatter, and wishful thinking. The next Bond film is reportedly moving forward with Denis Villeneuve directing and Steven Knight writing, but as for who will actually order the martini, drive the Aston Martin, and introduce himself with that immortal line—who knows?

Still, I understand the fascination. When I was a kid in Huntington, West Virginia, I vividly remember going to the Keith-Albee Theatre and seeing a double feature: Dr. No and From Russia with Love, starring Sean Connery. Wow! My ten-year-old brain just about exploded. The music (and oh my, John Barry’s scores!), the danger, the suits, the gadgets, the exotic locations, the confidence, the coolness of it all—it was almost too much.

In hindsight, I’m a little surprised my parents let me go see these movies. Did they know? Was I by myself? With a friend? I honestly don’t remember. I was so taken by the character that the circumstances have disappeared into the mist. But Bond himself has remained.

I’ve seen every Bond movie numerous times, even that awful 1967 Casino Royale (though it had a great Burt Bachrach score!). I’ve read all of Ian Fleming’s books (even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and a good many of the continuation novels by other authors, with Anthony Horowitz’s among my favorites. I know the franchise has its ridiculous moments, its dated moments, its morally troubling if not shocking moments, and its sheer guilty pleasures. I know all that.

Which raises the obvious question: how in the world can I, as a Christian and an Episcopal priest, write something called The Gospel According to James Bond?

After all, Bond is in many ways a prime example of how not to live a Christian life. He kills with government-issued “license” to do so. He drinks way too much (“shaken, not stirred”). He uses people ruthlessly. He womanizes. He operates in a morally shadowy world where ends and means are constantly tangled. He is not exactly St. Francis with a Walther PPK.

And yet.

Cultural icons endure because they speak to something in us. Bond has lasted not merely because he is stylish, though he certainly is. He has endured because he touches some deep human longings: courage, purpose, competence, danger, sacrifice, justice, and yes, the fantasy of saving the world.

“Saving the world.” Now there’s a phrase that opens a door to the world of faith.

So what can we learn from 007 about faithful living—not by pretending Bond is a Christian role model, but by listening carefully to both the virtues and the warnings in his story?

1. Evil Must Be Resisted

Bond’s world is often absurdly heightened. Criminal masterminds. Secret lairs. Nuclear blackmail. Poisoned cocktails. Elaborate death traps that could have been avoided if the villain had simply done the obvious thing five minutes earlier.

But beneath the extravagance is a serious truth: evil is real, and it must be resisted.

Christian faith does not invite us into naïveté. Jesus tells his followers to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” The prophets rage against exploitation, cruelty, and falsehood. The gospel calls us to love our enemies, yes, but it does not ask us to pretend that there are no enemies of truth, peace, dignity, and human flourishing.

Bond appeals to us because he steps into a world where something is terribly wrong and refuses to shrug. That’s important. Faithful living requires moral clarity. We’re not called to be paranoid or combative, but neither are we called to float through life pretending that injustice is merely unfortunate background noise.

There are forces in this world that diminish life. There are systems that crush the vulnerable. There are lies that need to be named. There are people who need defending.

Most of us will not save the world from a hollowed-out volcano lair. But we are called, in our own places and relationships, to resist evil, tell the truth, and stand with those who are threatened.

2. Courage Is Not the Same as Invulnerability

Bond is almost absurdly brave. Bullets fly. Cars explode. Sharks circle. Lasers approach inconvenient anatomical targets. Someone is always trying to poison, shoot, drown, crush, stab, or seduce him into disaster. And somehow he keeps going.

But the best Bond stories, especially in the Daniel Craig era, show the cost of that life. Courage does not mean being untouched. Bond is wounded, betrayed, exhausted, and haunted. The armor cracks, the losses accumulate, the swagger begins to look less like confidence and more like a survival strategy.

That’s where the gospel gives us a deeper definition of courage. Christian courage is not macho invulnerability. It’s not pretending nothing hurts. It’s not the absence of fear, grief, or weakness. Courage is love in motion despite those things. It is showing up when we’d rather disappear. It’s telling the truth when silence would be safer. It’s standing with someone vulnerable when doing so may cost us.

Bond keeps moving because the mission requires it. The life of faith asks something similar, though usually with fewer explosions.

3. The License to Kill Is Not the Gospel

Let’s be clear: Bond has a license to kill. And, Christians do not have a license to dehumanize.

This is where the fantasy has to be named for what it is. Bond’s violence may work within the world of spy fiction, but it cannot be our ethic. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not bless the casual disposal of human beings. It does not allow us to divide the world too neatly into people who matter and people who don’t.

That does not mean Christians all agree on every question of force, war (just or otherwise), policing, or self-defense. We don’t. The tradition is complicated. The world is complicated.

But at the heart of the gospel is the conviction that every human being bears the image of God. That includes enemies, villains, the people we most fear and the people we most dislike.

This is one of the great dangers in our own time. We may not carry a secret-agent firearm, but we can still give ourselves little licenses to dismiss people, mock people, hate people, write people off, or imagine that cruelty is acceptable as long as it’s aimed in the “right” direction.

Bond reminds us how seductive that fantasy can be. Jesus calls us beyond it.

4. Charm Can Be Dangerous

Bond is charming. That’s part of the appeal. The tuxedo. The quips. The car. The perfect entrance. The “Bond… James Bond” introduction. The effortless confidence. The sense that he knows exactly what to say and when to say it. Or to keep his mouth shut.

But charm can be dangerous. Charm can hide selfishness. It can manipulate. It can excuse behavior that should not be excused. It can turn other people into accessories in our own story. And let’s be honest: the older Bond films in particular often treat women as prizes, props, or temporary amusements. We can experience the movies as cultural artifacts and still admit that much of that has aged badly, and for good reason.

Faithful living asks something better of us. The gospel does not call us to be humorless or dreary. There’s room for wit, confidence, style, and delight. But charm without mercy becomes manipulation. Charm without respect becomes exploitation. Charm without truth becomes a mask.

The Christian life is not about being impressive. It is about becoming loving. And love sees other people not as conquests, obstacles, or supporting characters, but as beloved children of God.

5. Vocation Can Be Costly

One of the reasons Bond fascinates us is that he has a mission. He knows what he is there to do. He is not drifting through life wondering what his purpose might be. When M calls, Bond goes.

A faithful life also requires vocation: the sense that our lives are not merely about comfort, consumption, image, or self-expression. We are here to serve something larger than ourselves. We are called to love God and neighbor. We are called to use our gifts. We are called to participate in the healing of the world.

But Bond also shows us the danger of vocation without wholeness, without balance. His work consumes him. Relationships break. Intimacy becomes difficult. His body is used up. His soul is battered. He keeps saving the world, but often seems unable to save himself from loneliness.

That’s a warning worth hearing, especially for clergy, caregivers, activists, teachers, parents, and anyone whose work involves responsibility for others. A calling can be holy, but even holy callings can become distorted when we lose our humanity along the way.

We are not only what we do. We are not machines for mission. Even Jesus withdrew to pray. Jesus rested. Jesus gathered with friends around tables.

The mission matters. So does the soul of the one sent.

6. Even the Guarded Heart Needs Love

One of the most moving threads in the later Bond films is his relationship with Judi Dench’s M. It begins with tension, suspicion, and mutual irritation. She sees him as useful but reckless. He sees her as demanding, controlling, and cold. Their relationship is hardly sentimental.

And yet, over time, something deeper emerges. Not romance, of course, but something almost familial. M becomes boss, handler, critic, protector, and finally a kind of fierce maternal presence. Bond, for all his swagger and detachment, clearly comes to love her.

That makes (spoiler alert!) her death in Skyfall so powerful. Bond has lost allies and lovers (and even a wife, played by the wonderful Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) before. He has watched people die because of the work he does.

But M’s death lands differently. It reveals the wound beneath the tuxedo. The man who often seems untouchable is, in fact, deeply touchable. He can be loyal. He can grieve. He can be changed by attachment.

There’s a gospel truth there too: We’re not made to live armored lives. No matter how competent, cool, or self-sufficient we try to appear, we need bonds of trust. We need people who know us well enough to challenge us, forgive us, send us, receive us, and grieve us. Love makes us vulnerable, yes. But without it, courage becomes cold and vocation becomes machinery.

Bond’s relationship with M reminds us that even the most guarded heart is still a human heart.

7. Resurrection Is Harder Than Rebooting

James Bond is always being reinvented. Sean Connery (my favorite), George Lazenby (did a creditable job), Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig (surprisingly good)—and now the great guessing game begins again.

New actor. New tone. New car. New gadgets. New title sequence (man, those Maurice Binder titles!) It’ll be a new Bond for a new age.

The franchise survives by changing while remaining recognizable. That’s part of its genius. Bond is always Bond, and yet each era discovers him differently.

There’s a playful theological angle here. The Christian life is not a Hollywood reboot, but it does involve transformation. We are called to die and rise, to shed false selves, to become more fully who God made us to be. Real change is not simply a new suit, a new soundtrack, or a new set of opening credits. It is deeper, harder, and holier than that.

Bond can change faces and still remain Bond. Grace asks us to become more truly ourselves as God has made us: less fearful, less selfish, less captive to old wounds and habits, more open to love, mercy, courage, and joy.

That kind of resurrection isn’t a change in branding or the casting of a new actor. It’s the slow, holy work of becoming a new creation in Christ.

8. The World Is Not Saved by One Man

Bond stories often center on the lone hero. One man. One mission. One villain. One final confrontation in which everything depends on his nerve, skill, and timing. It makes for great cinema. But it is not the gospel.

The world is not saved by one glamorous man in a tuxedo. The world is healed through love, mercy, justice, sacrifice, solidarity, forgiveness, courage, prayer, service, and ordinary people doing faithful things in unglamorous places.

Bond may save the world by defusing the bomb at the last second. Most of us will do our small part by showing up: Feeding someone. Listening to someone. Telling the truth. Forgiving a wound. Resisting cruelty. Teaching a child. Visiting the lonely. Welcoming the stranger. Refusing despair. Doing the next faithful thing.

The gospel does not give us a license to kill. It gives us a calling to love.

A Final Word

James Bond is not a Christian saint. He is not even, most days, a particularly healthy adult.

But perhaps his enduring appeal tells us something true. We long for courage. We long for purpose. We long for competence in the face of chaos. We long for justice. We long for evil not to have the last word. We long, in some deep place, for the world to be saved.

The gospel gives us that hope, but it strips away the fantasy that the world will be saved through violence, seduction, and sheer force of will.

In Christ, the world is saved not by the man with the license to kill, but by the One who chooses the cross, forgives his enemies, and rises with wounded hands.

So perhaps the gospel according to James Bond is both invitation and warning:

Resist evil.

Live with courage.

Know your mission.

Beware of charm without mercy.

Do not confuse violence with salvation.

And remember that the world God loves is not saved by stylish heroes alone, but by ordinary people who choose, again and again, the costly and courageous way of love.

For another faithful take on James Bond, I highly recommend a Bible study by my friend Dr. Benjamin Pratt, Ian Fleming’s Seven Deadlier Sins & 007’s Moral Compass (Front Edge Publishing).

When I was a kid in Huntington, West Virginia, most every Saturday morning I would ride my trusty bike about a mile from our home on the Southside all the way downtown. This wasn’t just boyish exercise, it was a pilgrimage.

My destinations were sacred in their own way. First, Nick’s News, where I got my weekly comic book fix. And then, the public library.

The library building itself was part of the wonder. It was housed at that time in a gorgeous stone Carnegie library on the corner of 9th Street and 5th Avenue, the kind of building that seemed to announce, before you even opened the door, that books and learning mattered. It wasn’t sleek or trendy. It had weight, dignity, history. It felt like a temple to curiosity.

That old Carnegie building no longer serves as the public library. It now houses a community college, while the newer Cabell County Public Library stands, with a lot less character and a 1980s design vibe, right cross the street. I have to confess I’ve never been inside the replacement library. And I still carry a small grudge that Nick’s News was torn down to make room for it. Progress is complicated.

But back then, I wandered into that old library and found a world so large and generous I could hardly believe it was available to me. There were adventure stories, biographies, strange old books, histories of comic strips, reference works, and all sorts of literary riches waiting to be discovered. I even remember looking through a rather bawdy collection of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, which was certainly educational, though perhaps not in the way the librarians intended.

I loved the library. I loved the quiet, the smell of the books, and the sense that you could walk in with almost nothing and leave with armfuls of possibility.

And the public library has remained a touchstone for me ever since. I even married a man who was a public librarian and later an academic librarian, so apparently I took this love rather seriously. He and I still make nearly weekly visits to the ‘Aiea HI Public Library, where we live now. The building is different, the technology has changed, and the card catalog has gone the way of the dinosaurs, but the wonder remains.

So what might the public library teach us about living a faithful life? Quite a lot, I think.

1. Grace Is Free, But Not Cheap

One of the astonishing things about a public library is that you don’t have to buy your way in. You don’t have to prove you’re important. You don’t have to be wealthy, polished, credentialed, or impressive. You walk in, get a library card, and suddenly worlds open before you. That feels like good news to me.

The library is one of the few remaining public spaces built around the radical idea that knowledge, stories, beauty, and imagination should be available to everyone. Not only to those who can afford hardcovers or subscriptions or tuition. Everyone! That sounds a lot like grace.

Of course, libraries are not actually “free” in the sense that they cost nothing. They require public funding (which seems to keep getting cut by short-sighted and foolish legislators). They also require trained staff, buildings, systems, maintenance, and care. Someone tends the shelves. Someone keeps the light on.

Grace, too, is free to receive but costly in its giving.

The library reminds us that a generous society does not happen by accident. It happens when we decide that some valuable things like knowledge should be generously shared.

2. Curiosity Is Holy

A library invites curiosity without demanding that we already know what we’re looking for. You can go in for one book and come out with five you never expected to find. You can drift from fiction to history to poetry to theology to cookbooks to magazines, discovering paths you didn’t know existed.

That says something about our faith. The life of faith is not supposed to make us shorter-focused. It should make us more curious, more attentive, more open to wonder. God’s world is vast, and human beings are complicated. Every good book is a doorway into another life, another place, another question, another way of seeing.

When I think of that boy in Huntington roaming the shelves, I recognize something I still need now: the willingness to be surprised. To learn. To admit I don’t know everything. To let my imagination be stretched.

A healthy Christian life is not afraid of curiosity. It welcomes it as one of the ways God keeps enlarging the soul.

3. Stories Teach Us Compassion

Libraries are full of stories, and stories are one of the great schools of compassion. When we read, we enter lives other than our own. We see through someone else’s eyes, walk in their loafers, high heels, sandals, slippas, boots, or bare feet. We hear another voice. We discover that people we might never meet are still deeply human.

That matters, especially in a time when so much of our public life trains us to minimize people to categories: ally, enemy, stranger, threat, voter, consumer, problem. Stories resist that reduction.

Jesus knew the power of stories. He taught in parables: a traveler beaten on the road, a father waiting for a lost son, a shepherd searching for one sheep, a woman sweeping her house for a coin. He did not merely hand out abstract principles. He gave people stories that worked on the imagination and opened the heart.

A public library does something similar. It gathers the stories of the world and says, “Here. Take. Read. Listen. Learn what it is like to be someone else.”

That’s good news.

4. Public Space Matters

The public library is not just a warehouse for books. It’s a community space. Children gather for story time. Students do homework. Job seekers use computers. Seniors read newspapers. People attend lectures, book clubs, classes, and programs. Sometimes people just sit quietly because they need a safe, calm place to be.

That is no small thing. We live in a culture where more and more spaces require us to buy something in order to belong. The library stands as a quiet witness against that. You can enter without purchasing anything. You can sit without being hurried along. You can ask for help without being shamed.

The church should understand this. At our best, we too are called to be a public blessing: a place of welcome, learning, rest, prayer, conversation, and care. Not a private club for the already convinced, but a community offered for the life of the world.

A library reminds us that belonging is not a luxury. It’s a human need.

5. Learning Is a Lifelong Calling

One of the coolest things about libraries is that they serve people across the whole arc of life. Babies at story time. Children discovering chapter books. Teenagers researching homework. Adults learning new skills. Retirees exploring history, travel, poetry, memoir, and mystery novels by the stack. There is no age at which we are finished becoming.

That is surely part of faithful living too. The Christian life is not a diploma we receive once and frame on the wall. It is a lifelong apprenticeship in love. We keep learning how to pray, how to forgive, how to listen, how to grieve, how to rejoice, how to serve, how to become more fully human.

The library embodies that kind of ongoing formation. It quietly says, “Come back. There is more to discover.” And thank God for that.

6. Libraries Need Our Support

Because libraries are so generous, it can be easy to take them for granted. But they need our support. They need funding. They need public advocacy, volunteers, Friends groups, donations, respectful patrons, and citizens who understand that a library is not an ornament. It is infrastructure for democracy, imagination, education, and community.

Supporting your local public library is not just a nice civic gesture. Just like supporting your church or house of worship, it is an act of commitment and hope. It says we still believe knowledge should be shared. We still believe children should have access to stories, and that communities need places where people can gather without having to buy their way in. We still believe the common good is worth tending.

In a cynical time like ours, that is a powerful thing to believe.

A Final Word

That boy riding his bike through Huntington on Saturday mornings could not have explained all of this. He just knew he loved the library. He knew the place felt full of promise. He knew he could walk among the shelves and find adventure, laughter, strangeness, beauty, and ideas bigger than his own little world.

All these years later, I still feel that way. When my husband and I walk into the ‘Aiea Public Library, I feel again the quiet generosity of it all: books waiting, people reading, children learning, librarians helping, community happening in small unglamorous ways.

The public library is not church. But it does give us glimpses of gospel truth:

• Grace should be shared.

• Curiosity should be welcomed.

• Stories should enlarge our compassion.

• Community should be tended.

• Learning should never stop.

• And the doors should be open.

Amen!

I haven’t yet seen Christopher Nolan’s new film version of The Odyssey. For that matter, I haven’t seen the new Spider-Man film either, so apparently I am slipping behind on both ancient Greek and contemporary superhero mythology.

But I’ve been intrigued by some of the discussion around Nolan’s Odyssey, especially his emphasis on something called “Zeus’s law.” In the ancient Greek world, this had to do with xenia, the sacred obligation of hospitality between host and guest. The stranger at your door might be powerless, vulnerable, hungry, and far from home, but that did not make the stranger disposable. In fact, the stranger might be more than he appeared. Zeus’s law warned that you might be entertaining the gods in disguise. The Bible, in its own tradition, says something remarkably similar: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). How you treated the stranger was not merely a matter of manners. It was a measure of your civilization — and perhaps of your soul.

Nolan has apparently described Zeus’s law as a version of the Golden Rule: treat people the way you want to be treated. I love that, whether or not Zeus himself would have put it quite that way. What strikes me is that this moral insight is not limited to ancient Greece, Judaism, Christianity, or any one religion. Some version of the Golden Rule appears in moral and religious traditions around the world and through the ages. Human beings seem to know, deep down, that no society can survive for long on greed, cruelty, contempt, lies, and domination. We may fail to live by that truth, we may rationalize our failures, but when we hear the truth spoken plainly, we recognize it.

And that has me thinking about a phrase I heard often growing up as a Methodist preacher’s kid in the 1950s and 1960s: “Judeo-Christian values.”

What Did We Mean by Values?

The phrase “Judeo-Christian values” has always been complicated. We use it less comfortably now, and for good reasons. It can be vague. It can flatten Judaism and Christianity into a kind of generic civil religion. It can imply that other religious and ethical traditions have nothing to teach us, which is simply not true. It can also be used as a cultural boundary marker, as though “our values” belong only to certain people, certain histories, or certain kinds of Americans.

Even so, when I heard that phrase as a boy, I think many people meant something real by it. At its best, it pointed to honesty, fairness, humility, mercy, care for the poor, concern for the vulnerable, respect for neighbors, faithfulness in family and community life, and accountability before God. It meant that character mattered. It meant that how you treated people mattered. And that public life should be shaped by some moral standard higher than winning, wealth, or power.

Of course, we never lived those values perfectly. No family, church, community, or nation ever has. The 1950s and 1960s were not some golden age of moral consistency. Segregation was still defended by many churchgoers. Women’s gifts were often limited or dismissed. LGBTQ people were forced into hidden silence and shame. Poverty was covered up or blamed on the poor. So I’m not interested in romantic religious nostalgia.

But I do wonder what happened to the basic assumption that faith should make us more honest, more merciful, more just, more humble, and more concerned for people who are easily pushed aside.

Because much of our public life now seems to reward the opposite.

The Bible Is Not Vague About Ethics

One of the strange things about our current moment is that religious language is everywhere, but biblical ethics often seem hard to find.

People invoke God while excusing lies. They quote Scripture while ignoring the poor. They speak of faith while practicing cruelty. They defend “values” while treating mercy as weakness, humility as failure, compassion as naïveté, and empathy as flat wrong. Religious language becomes a costume worn over behavior the prophets would have condemned.

The Bible is not vague about how human beings are meant to live.

The story begins with creation. Human beings are made in the image of God. That is the foundation of biblical ethics before we ever get to commandments, creeds, churches, or public policy. Human dignity is not earned. It is not reserved for the powerful, the wealthy, the respectable, the legal citizen, the healthy, the productive, or the people who agree with us. It is given by God.

That truth should unsettle every ideology, including our own. If every person bears the image of God, then no one is disposable. No one can be reduced to a talking point, a problem, a category, a vote, a threat, or a means to someone else’s power.

Then comes Torah, the law of Moses, which is full of concrete ethical demands. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not exploit workers. Do not mistreat widows or orphans. Do not pervert justice. Do not use dishonest weights and measures. Leave the edges of the field for the hungry. Welcome the stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt.

This is not vague niceness. It is economic, legal, social, and public. Biblical faith cares about prayer and worship, but it also cares about wages, courts, food, debt, land, truthfulness, and how a community treats the people with the least power.

The Prophets Weren’t Impressed by Slogans

The prophets make the point even more sharply (a few weeks ago I wondered what biblical prophets might say to us today). Amos thunders against those who “trample on the poor.” Isaiah says God is weary of worship when the people’s hands are full of blood, and then calls them to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Micah distills the calling into that famous and still-demanding sentence: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The prophets are especially hard on religious hypocrisy. They do not condemn people merely for private moral failures, though those matter too. They condemn societies that keep the appearance of religion while abandoning justice. They condemn rulers who bless themselves while the poor suffer. They condemn those who sing holy songs while building systems that crush the vulnerable.

In other words, the prophets are not impressed when powerful people use religious language to cover ethical rot.

That may be one of the most urgent biblical lessons for our time. Faith is not a brand. Prayer is not a photo opportunity. God is not a prop. Scripture is not a weapon to be waved at one’s enemies while conveniently ignoring its demands upon oneself.

If biblical faith means anything, it must shape how we treat people, especially when we have power over them.

Jesus and the Moral Center

Jesus does not set this tradition aside, he deepens it.

When asked to name the greatest commandment, Jesus says to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else hangs there. Not on winning or domination, not on appearing religious, and not on protecting one’s tribe at all costs. Love of God and love of neighbor are the moral center.

And Jesus is very clear that the neighbor is not merely the person like us, near us, useful to us, or agreeable to us. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the neighbor turns out to be the person religious insiders were least prepared to honor. In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. “As you did it to one of the least of these,” he says, “you did it to me.”

Then there is the Golden Rule itself: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). Or, Luke’s version (6:31): “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

We have heard that sentiment so often that it can sound like something printed on a classroom poster. But it is far more demanding than that. It requires moral imagination. It asks us to step outside our own fear, privilege, grievance, or ambition long enough to ask: What would this feel like if I were on the receiving end?

What if I were the hungry person? Or the stranger? Or the refugee? What if I were the worker whose ages were stolen, or the woman whose voice was dismissed? What if I were the child growing up afraid, or the person being lied about, mocked, excluded, or used?

The Golden Rule is simple enough for a child to understand and difficult enough to judge an empire.

When Faith Becomes a Cover Story

The scandal of our moment is not simply that some leaders fail to live by biblical values. All human beings fail. Every one of us falls short of the values we claim. The deeper scandal is that religious language is so often used to excuse, disguise, or bless the very behavior Scripture condemns.

Faith becomes a cover story. Cruelty is renamed strength. Greed is renamed freedom. Contempt is renamed courage. Lies are renamed strategy. Revenge is renamed justice. Fear of the stranger is renamed patriotism. Indifference to the poor is renamed responsibility.

Meanwhile, the actual ethical heart of the biblical tradition — mercy, justice, humility, truth, hospitality, care for the poor, protection of the vulnerable, and love of neighbor — is pushed aside as though it were optional.

This is not only a problem for politicians or public figures. It is a temptation for all of us. We all know how to use our highest ideals to protect ourselves from hard truths. We all know how to see clearly the hypocrisy of others while softening our own. We all know how to make exceptions when justice becomes inconvenient or mercy becomes costly.

That is why faith, at its best, must continually call us back to repentance, not just outrage. Outrage may be necessary at times, but it is not enough. We also need examination of conscience. We need humility. We need communities that help us remember what we are too tempted to forget.

The Values We Actually Need

I don’t think we need to revive the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” as a slogan. Slogans are part of the problem. They can become badges of identity rather than practices of life.

But we do need to recover the moral seriousness the phrase was supposed to name.

• We need honesty in a culture drowning in lies.

• We need mercy in a culture addicted to cruelty.

• We need humility in a culture that rewards arrogance.

• We need hospitality in a culture that fears the stranger.

• We need justice in a culture where wealth and power bend the rules.

• We need compassion in a culture that teaches us to blame the vulnerable.

• We need leaders, citizens, churches, and communities who understand that ethics are not optional decorations on public life. They are the foundation of any society worth living in.

Ancient Greeks knew something like this when they spoke of Zeus’s law. Religious traditions around the world have known something like this in their own forms of the Golden Rule. The Hebrew prophets knew it. Jesus embodied it. The early church tried, imperfectly, to live it. And we know it too, even when we would rather not.

The question is not whether we have heard the rule, it’s whether we still intend to live by it.

The Neighbor at the Door

In The Odyssey, the stranger at the door may be more than he appears. He may be a beggar, a guest, a test, or a god in disguise. That ancient world understood something we have nearly forgotten: how we treat the vulnerable stranger reveals who we really are.

Christian faith says something even more direct. The stranger at the door is not merely a test of manners or civilization. The stranger is our neighbor. The hungry are our neighbors. The poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the fearful, the foreigner, the lonely, the grieving, and the people we find difficult to love are all our neighbors.

And in the face of the neighbor, any neighbor, Jesus says, we encounter him.

So whatever happened to “Judeo-Christian values”? Maybe the better question is whether we are willing to reclaim the values Scripture actually teaches rather than the slogans people use for advantage.

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. Tell the truth. Welcome the stranger. Protect the vulnerable. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

These are not obscure teachings. They are not hidden in theological fine print. They stand at the center of biblical faith.

And if we have forgotten them, it is time to remember.

Simon Templar may be headed back to the movies. A new Saint reboot has been in development for some time now at Paramount, with Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page attached to star. Whether it actually makes it to the screen, of course, is anybody’s guess, Hollywood development being only slightly less mysterious than one of Simon Templar’s cases, but I’ll admit the news made me smile. I’ve been a fan of The Saint for many years, and it seems he still has a way of slipping back into the conversation.

When I was a kid in West Virginia, I’d often spend a weekend night at my buddy Dave’s home across the alley from the parsonage where I lived. We’d usually watch TV, and I especially remember those weird summer replacement series from the U.K. that entranced us. We were already fans of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek, along with a number of other American shows, but these quirky British imports captivated us with their style, wit, and vision.

There was The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan as a nameless government agent who is stripped of his identity and transferred to a delightful yet devilish community from which there was no escape. And The Avengers, with John Steed and Emma Peel solving mind-boggling mysteries under the authority of… whom, exactly?

But one that captivated me especially, and has stuck with me ever since, was The Saint, starring a pre-007 Roger Moore as the gentleman adventurer created in the late 1920s by Leslie Charteris. Smooth, tongue-in-cheek, and just a little nefarious, Simon Templar would involve himself in other people’s lives, then help them solve their problems and triumph over the reprobates who meant them harm.

The iconic stick figure with a halo over his head…. Simon talking directly to us at the beginning of the show, then someone revealing who he was, followed by his upward glance as the halo appeared above him…. the opening animated theme music…. the colorful characters, damsels in distress, villains, and his habit of thwarting—and then usually assisting—Inspector Claud Teal of Scotland Yard, or other local authorities around the world…. It all added up to a captivating hour for an impressionable kid like me.

I’m currently reading Roger Moore’s autobiography, My Word Is My Bond, and enjoying his behind-the-scenes reflections on his childhood, youth, and impressive TV and movie career. I’m also reading the very first Simon Templar book by Leslie Charteris, Meet the Tiger. Charteris more or less disavowed it later, since he wrote it in his early twenties and felt it wasn’t nearly as good as his subsequent Saint stories. Still, I’m finding it great fun to return to the beginning of this unusual and enduring character.

For years now I’ve watched the Moore episodes on streaming apps as a pleasant evening diversion, and I’ve also watched the 1930s movies with Louis Hayward and George Sanders—B movies for sure, but entertaining ones. The less said about the Val Kilmer motion picture of some years ago, though, the better.

So, for better or worse, my brain is rather full of The Saint.

The setup Charteris invented is ingenious: Simon Templar, initials S.T., short for “Saint.” A charming rogue with a halo who lives by his own moral code, serving justice to the ungodly and assisting the innocent and oppressed.

Sounds like a pretty good template for life to me. Well, sort of.

Disclaimer: Simon Templar is not exactly a Christian role model in any conventional sense. He’s morally complicated, legally flexible, vain, mischievous, and often far too pleased with himself. But that’s also what makes him interesting. He’s not a plaster saint, he’s a haloed rogue. A modern-day Robin Hood.

So what can we glean from this fictional adventurer’s escapades for our own lives of faith and service?

1. Justice Matters

I find Simon Templar interesting because he refuses to shrug off evil. When he sees corruption, cruelty, exploitation, and cowardice, he does something about it. That’s part of the appeal: he lives as though justice isn’t optional.

The gospel certainly calls us beyond vengeance, but it never calls us to indifference. The prophets rage against those who “trample on the poor.” Jesus blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Faithful living means we don’t make peace with cruelty simply because cruelty is powerful, profitable, or in charge.

That’s an important distinction. Christians aren’t called to go around imagining ourselves as private vigilantes, setting the world right according to our own whims. But we are called to care. We’re called to notice who’s being harmed. We’re called to ask who benefits from injustice and who pays the price. We’re called to resist the temptation to look away because looking away is easier.

The Saint reminds us that there’s something holy about caring whether wrongs are made right. What was it Micah the prophet said? “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”

2. Courage Requires Risk

The Saint doesn’t just admire justice from a safe distance. He steps into trouble. Sometimes recklessly, sometimes mischievously, sometimes with far too much confidence, but he steps in.

That feels like a useful corrective. Much of modern life trains us to protect ourselves first: our comfort, reputation, security, our routines. And of course some caution is wise. But love often requires risk. Speaking up, showing up, standing with someone vulnerable. Refusing to look away. Saying the thing that needs to be said, even when silence would be more convenient.

Christian courage isn’t swagger. It’s faithful action in the face of fear.

And yes, Simon may overdo the swagger. In fact, he nearly always does. But he does remind us that courage is meant to move us to respond to need.

3. Mercy Must Temper Justice

Yes, there’s some concerning moral complexity in The Saint’s adventures. Simon isn’t exactly a Sunday school teacher. He bends rules, deceives villains, steals from thieves, and sometimes seems way too pleased with himself. That makes him fun, but also dangerous.

The gospel according to The Saint can’t simply be, “Go out and punish the bad guys.” The Christian life calls us to justice shaped by mercy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are not God. We don’t always see things clearly. We don’t always know the whole story. We’re all capable of confusing righteous anger with ego.

That’s one of the dangers of any vigilante fantasy. It feels satisfying because the good guys and bad guys seem so obvious. The innocent are innocent. The villains are villainous. The hero knows exactly what to do.

Real life is much murkier. Real justice requires humility, listening, and compassion. It requires remembering that the person we oppose is still a human being made in the image of God.

The Saint’s adventures invite us to care about justice. But they also warn us not to become intoxicated by our own sense of righteousness.

4. Charm Is Not Goodness

Simon Templar is charming. That’s part of his power. He moves through danger with wit, style, and a ready smile. He often seems to be enjoying himself immensely, even when things are going badly.

Charm can be morally ambiguous, of course. It can manipulate people. It can conceal reality. It can make bad behavior look better than it is. Plenty of scoundrels have been charming, which is one reason they got away with being scoundrels.

But there’s also a redeemed version of charm: graciousness. Warmth. Open-heartedness. The ability to put people at ease. The capacity to bring lightness into heavy places.

Faithful living doesn’t require us to be dour. The gospel is serious, but it’s not joyless. Jesus was accused, after all, of eating and drinking with the wrong people, which suggests that his presence at a table was not exactly grim.

There’s room in the life of faith for wit, play, elegance, delight, and yes, laughter.

5. Respectability Is Not the Same as Faithfulness

The Saint is not respectable in any ordinary sense. He’s too independent, too unconventional, too willing to offend the right people… as well as the wrong ones.

And that may be one reason he appealed to me as a kid. He inhabited a world of manners and style, but he wasn’t trapped by it. He knew how to wear the tuxedo, but he also knew when to slip out the back door.

Which reminds me of Jesus in the gospels. He was often criticized by respectable people for eating with the wrong crowd, healing at the wrong time, challenging religious authorities, and refusing to behave as expected. Unconventional for sure.

Respectability can be a virtue. Courtesy, manners, and appropriate behavior, those are good and right things! But respectability can also become a cage. It can become a way of keeping things as they are, especially when “things as they are” benefit the comfortable and harm the vulnerable.

Faithfulness sometimes means disappointing the people who prefer order to mercy, politeness to truth, and safety to love.

6. We Are All Haloed Rogues

The halo over Simon’s head is funny because it’s not entirely deserved. He’s called “The Saint,” but he’s obviously no plaster saint. He’s brave and generous, yes, willing to stick his neck out for those who are oppressed by evil. But he can also be vain, manipulative, and morally slippery. Which makes the halo ironically perfect.

Most of us are not villains or saints in the simple sense. We’re mixed creatures: capable of both generosity and selfishness, courage and cowardice, mercy and judgment. We want to do the right thing, except when we don’t. We want to be loving, except when resentment feels better. We want justice, except when justice asks something uncomfortable of us.

The Christian life isn’t about pretending we’re pure. It’s about allowing grace to work through our complicated humanity. It’s about becoming more honest, more merciful, more courageous, more authentic, and more open to the transforming love of God.

Maybe we are all, in some sense, haloed rogues: beloved, flawed, called, and still becoming what God has made us to be.

Some Final Thoughts

Simon Templar is not a saint in the church calendar sense. There’s no feast day for him, and no collect to pray. Certainly no stained-glass window. But perhaps that little halo still tells the truth in its own mischievous way.

The gospel doesn’t call us to become charming rogues. But it does call us to resist evil, defend the vulnerable, risk ourselves for love, keep our joy, and remember that justice without mercy can become just another form of violence.

So maybe that’s the gospel according to The Saint:

Do not worship respectability.

Do not make peace with cruelty.

Do not lose your sense of humor.

And wear your halo lightly.

One of my favorite phrases in the Bible shows up time and again, usually right at moments when there is every reason to be afraid:

“Do not be afraid.”

Mary hears those words from an angel giving her some astonishing news. Shepherds hear it from some glorious angels in the night sky. The disciples here it from their Rabbi on stormy waters, and Mary hears it at the empty tomb from the risen Christ.

When people in the Bible are fearfully facing danger, awe, and upheaval, God’s messengers tell them “don’t.”

And you know, “do not be afraid” can sound almost insulting or ridiculous in such circumstances! It’s like telling someone who’s terribly upset to “calm down!” That doesn’t often go over well.

It can also sound like denial of a person’s pain, as though faith is supposed to make us pretend nothing is wrong or dangerous or about to break.

But that’s not what the Bible’s “do not be afraid” means. It doesn’t mean “nothing is wrong.” Or “there is no storm.” It doesn’t ask “Why are you so upset?”

It means that fear doesn’t have the final say. And that’s a word many of us need to hear right now.

Fear Is Not Failure

I’ve talked with many people lately who are carrying a quiet but very real anxiety about the state of the world. They are worried. About politics. About division. Violence. War. They’re worried about their children and grandchildren growing up in a world that feels more unstable and less kind than they had ever expected. It’s fear-inducing! And I feel it myself.

But as an Episcopal priest, I don’t think it helps to scold people for being afraid. Fear isn’t a moral failure. It’s a natural human response to uncertainty, threat, and loss. Sometimes fear alerts us to danger, wakes us from complacency and helps us pay attention. Denying our fear is not courage, it’s just avoidance.

The Bible is full of frightened yet faithful people. Moses is afraid to speak to the Israelites on behalf of God. Elijah runs away and hides. The disciples panic in the storm. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in overwhelming grief and fear. The first witnesses to resurrection are not serene religious professionals with everything figured out. They’re trembling, bewildered, and overwhelmed.

Being afraid doesn’t mean you have failed at faith. It may just mean you’re paying attention.

When Fear Becomes a Master

But fear can also become more dangerous. It can move from being a message to becoming a master. It can narrow our vision, harden our hearts, and make us easier to manipulate. Fear can make us suspicious of strangers, impatient with neighbors, contemptuous of those we disagree with, and willing to exchange compassion for a false sense of safety. We need to treat our fears with care.

Fear tells us that there is not enough to go around. Fear tells us that mercy is weakness. Fear tells us that the vulnerable are a threat. Fear tells us that cruelty may be necessary. Fear tells us that the only way to survive is to gather power, draw lines, build walls, and make sure we are protected even if others are not.

The Gospel tells a different story. Jesus never denies the reality of danger. He knew what religious and political power can do. He lived under the cruel occupation of the Roman Empire and the judgmental religious leadership. He saw the sick, the poor, the excluded, and the wounded. He understood violence. He faced betrayal, arrest, torture, and death.

And yet Jesus refuses to let fear define him. He touches the unclean. He welcomes the outsider. He eats with sinners. He forgives enemies. He tells his followers not to return evil for evil. He teaches them to love not only those who love them, but even those who oppose them. He walks toward suffering willingly, not because suffering in itself is good, but because love is stronger than fear. That’s the kind of courage Christians are called to practice.

Courage Is Not Certainty

We may think of courage as confidence. We imagine brave people to be those who are never uncertain, never shaken, never tempted to despair. But in real life, courage often looks a lot quieter than that.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is refusing to let fear decide who we become.

Sometimes courage is just getting up in the morning and doing the next faithful thing. Sometimes it’s telling the truth when keeping our mouth shut would be easier. Sometimes it’s refusing to pass along the demeaning joke, the dehumanizing rumor, or the convenient lie. Sometimes it’s just calling a friend, checking on a neighbor, showing up for worship, volunteering at the food pantry, writing to an elected official, praying for peace, or simply choosing not to surrender to despair.

In frightening times like these, courage may also mean staying open-hearted. That’s not easy. It’s much easier to become cynical, to armor ourselves with sarcasm, outrage, or detachment, and decide everyone is terrible and nothing matters anyway.

But Christian faith keeps calling us back to love. Not sentimental love, not passive love, and not a love that refuses to call out injustice. The love Jesus commands is clear-eyed, active, and costly. It stands with the vulnerable. It tells the truth. It seeks peace. It refuses to dehumanize. It keeps seeing neighbors where fear wants to see enemies.

“Peace Be With You”

After the resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples who are hiding in fear behind locked doors. They are afraid for good reason. They have seen what happened to Jesus. They know what power can do, and they don’t yet know what comes next.

Jesus doesn’t shame them for being afraid. He doesn’t say, “How could you not trust me?” He doesn’t lecture them on their lack of courage. No, he comes and stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.”

That peace is not a denial of what has happened or how they feel about it. The risen Christ bears the wounds of crucifixion. Resurrection doesn’t mean the violence was imaginary or the grief unnecessary. It means that violence and grief do not have the last word.

That is the peace Christ gives: not escape from reality, but a deeper reality. Not the absence of trouble, but the presence of God in the midst of it. Not a guarantee that nothing bad will happen, but the promise that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God.

This is why Christian hope is different from optimism. Optimism says things will probably get better. Christian hope says God is faithful even when we do not know what will happen next.

Optimism can be fragile. It depends on circumstances. Hope is deeper. Hope can sit in a hospital room, stand at a graveside, march for justice. Hope can pray for peace when war is raging. Hope can keep lighting candles even when the night is dark.

The Calm That Resists Cruelty

In anxious times like these, I think a sense of calm can be a form of resistance. I don’t mean the shallow calm of people who insulate themselves from suffering or remain indifferent to injustice. I mean the deeper calm of those who have placed their trust in something bigger than the crisis of the moment.

Fear makes us reactive. Faith invites us to become responsive. There’s a difference. Reactivity is immediate, frantic, and often harsh. It lashes out in panic and assumes the worst. Responsiveness takes a breath, listens for wisdom, remembers what matters, and chooses an action rooted in love rather than fear.

That kind of calm isn’t weakness, it’s spiritual strength. It’s the calm of people who know that their ultimate security does not come from domination, wealth, weapons, political success, or cultural control. It comes from God.

This doesn’t mean Christians should withdraw from public life. Quite the opposite. Faithful calm can make us more active, not less. When fear is not driving us, we are freer to act with clear purpose. We can seek justice and defend the vulnerable without hatred or rage. We can speak truth without losing our souls.

What Love Does When It Is Afraid

So what should we do when we are afraid?

Start by telling the truth. We don’t need to pretend everything is fine. It’s not faithless to say that the world feels dangerous, that political life feels bitter, that war frightens us, that division grieves us, that we are exhausted. Honest prayer has always made room for lament.

Remember who we are. We’re followers of Jesus. That identity comes before every other identity we carry. Before party, nation, ideology, tribe, or opinion, we belong to Christ. That means our lives are to be shaped not by fear, but by love of God and love of neighbor.

Do the good that is ours to do. We can’t control the whole world. We can’t fix every conflict or single-handedly heal our nation or stop every war. But we can refuse to add cruelty to the world. We can refuse to dehumanize. We can pray. We can serve. We can give. We can vote. We can listen. We can welcome. We can speak peace into spaces where fear is becoming contagious.

Keep gathering as the Church. That may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t. Every time we gather to pray, sing, break bread, confess sin, receive forgiveness, and pass the peace, we are practicing a different way of being human. We are reminding ourselves that the world’s fear-filled scripts are not the only ways available to us. We are being formed, slowly and imperfectly, into people who can live with courage, mercy, and hope.

Do Not Be Afraid

“Do not be afraid” isn’t a command to ignore reality. It’s an invitation to trust a deeper reality.

Yes, the storm is real. Yes, the darkness is real. Yes, the danger is real. Yes, the grief is real. Our faith does not ask us to deny any of that. But neither does it allow us to bow down before fear as though fear were God.

The angels still say, “Do not be afraid.” Jesus still says, “Peace be with you.” The risen Christ still comes through locked doors. The Spirit still breathes courage into frightened disciples. The love of God still holds when everything else feels uncertain.

So we don’t have to pretend that nothing is wrong. We only have to remember that fear is not Lord. Jesus is.

A Note About AI Usage:
The articles I post on Substack are my own work. I decide the subjects, themes, and concepts, and I write and edit every word. I do, however, use ChatGPT to proofread and create subheads for my articles, and sometimes I ask it to provide options for untangling a phrase or sentence or to clarify a point that I then revise. I also use ChatGPT to create the illustrations/memes for my articles. While I think AI can be a helpful tool in limited ways, I do not think it should ever replace the creative human process.

What if one of the old prophets were with us today?

Not a polite religious commentator. Not a chaplain to the comfortable. Not a consultant brought in to make our public life sound more spiritual than it is.

I mean one of the prophets of Israel: Amos with his basket of summer fruit, Isaiah with his burning coal, Jeremiah with tears in his eyes, Micah with his fierce simplicity about justice, mercy, and walking humbly with God.

We often imagine prophets as people who predicted the future. But biblical prophets were less interested in prediction than truth-telling. They looked at the world as it was and said, in God’s name, “This cannot stand.” They saw the gap between public worship and public cruelty. They saw songs rising from temples while the poor were trampled in the marketplace. They saw rulers blessing themselves while widows, orphans, laborers, and strangers were pushed aside.

The prophets were not impressed by religious performance when it was divorced from justice. They were not moved by solemn assemblies if the people singing hymns were also cheating workers and consumers, neglecting the hungry, exploiting the vulnerable, or turning away the stranger. They were not sentimental about nations that confused power with righteousness.

So I wonder what such a prophet would say if he stood among us now.

Perhaps something like this…

A Prophecy for a Tired and Troubled Nation

Thus says the Holy One, who made the heavens and stretched them like a tent, who formed the earth and filled it with good things, who hears the cry of the poor and does not forget the stranger:

I have seen your flags, says the Lord, but I have also seen your fear.

I have heard your songs, but I have also heard the weeping beneath them.

You say, “We are blessed,” while you close your hand against the hungry.

You say, “We are free,” while you bind the stranger with paperwork and send the refugee back into danger.

You say, “We are strong,” while you make war easy to imagine and mercy hard to afford.

Is this strength, says the Lord? To frighten children? To mock the grieving? To count the savings when the sick lose care? To debate the worthiness of the hungry while your tables bend beneath their abundance?

I showed Amos a basket of summer fruit, and the fruit was ripe. The season had come. The sweetness had turned. The people had sung their songs and sold the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They said, “When will the Sabbath be over, that we may sell grain?” They made the ephah small and the shekel great, and practiced deceit with false balances.

Have you not done the same in cleaner, more contemporary language?

You have made hunger a line item. You have made sickness a savings. You have made the refugee a threat, the mother a symbol, the child a talking point, the poor a burden, and the stranger an enemy.

You say, “We must be practical.”

But I ask you: practical for whom?

For the wealthy who need another shelter for their treasure? For the powerful who need another enemy to stir the crowd? For the comfortable who need not see the faces of those whose lives are shortened by their policies?

I desire mercy, not slogans. I desire justice, not speeches. I desire truth in the inward parts and righteousness in the city gates.

Your prayers rise, but so do the cries of those you have forgotten.

Your offerings come, but so do the unpaid bills of the sick.

Your anthems sound, but so do the footsteps of families running from war, hunger, persecution, and fear.

Woe to Those Who Make Cruelty Sound Wise

Woe to those who write laws with cold hands and call them necessary.

Woe to those who take food from the refugee and say they are protecting abundance.

Woe to those who take healing from the sick and say they must balance the books and pay the corporations.

Woe to those who separate children from those who love them and say they are preserving order.

Woe to those who make the stranger wait until hope dries up, whose forms multiply like locusts, whose offices close like gates, whose delays become chains.

You have made bureaucracy into a wall and called it prudence. You have made suspicion into policy and called it security. You have made compassion conditional and called it reform.

But the Lord asks: Did I not command you to love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt? Did I not tell you to leave grain at the edges of the field? Did I not hear Hagar crying in the wilderness? Did I not send ravens to feed Elijah? Did I not raise up Ruth the Moabite, a foreign woman gleaning in another man’s field, to stand in the line of David?

Do not tell me the stranger is outside my concern.

Do not tell me the refugee is outside my mercy.

Do not tell me the hungry must first prove they are worthy before they are fed.

The earth is mine, says the Lord, and all that is in it. The border is not higher than my throne. The passport is not older than my covenant. The nation is not greater than the neighbor.

Do Not Speak to Me of Life While You Neglect the Living

Do not tell me you are defending life if you will not defend the living.

Do not tell me you honor children if you will not feed them, heal them, shelter them, educate them, and protect them from fear.

Do not tell me you love families if you tear them apart.

Do not tell me you protect women if you do not trust them, listen to them, pay them, shelter them, heal them, believe them, and honor their full humanity.

Do not tell me you seek peace if you make violence your first action.

Do not tell me you love truth if you reward lies that flatter your tribe.

Do not tell me you love freedom if your freedom requires someone else’s suffering.

I have heard the cries of women whose bodies have become battlegrounds for power. I have heard the cries of parents choosing between medicine and rent. I have heard the cries of children who wake in detention when they should wake in bedrooms, who learn the language of fear before they learn the language of home.

I have heard the cries of the poor who are told to work harder by those who have never missed a meal. I have heard the cries of workers whose labor builds comfort for others while their own lives remain precarious. I have heard the cries of elders forgotten in rooms where no one comes. I have heard the cries of those made unsafe by hatred wrapped in righteousness.

Do you think I do not hear?

Do you think the Holy One has grown deaf?

Let Justice Roll

You have mistaken cruelty for courage and suspicion for wisdom. You have treated compassion as weakness and domination as peace. You have bowed before the idols of security, wealth, grievance, and power, and then asked me to bless the altar.

I will not bless what crushes my beloved.

I will not bless bread taken from the hungry.

I will not bless healing denied to the sick.

I will not bless lies spoken in my name.

I will not bless worship that sings of grace while practicing contempt.

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Let the hungry be fed before the banquet begins. Let the stranger be welcomed before the border is praised. Let the child be protected before the speech is written. Let the worker be paid before the profit is counted. Let the prisoner be remembered before the sentence is cheered. Let the sick be healed before the budget is balanced on their backs.

Let your worship become mercy.

Let your prayers become shelter.

Let your songs become bread.

Let your freedom become good news for someone besides yourselves.

Then your songs will be sweet again.

Then your prayers will breathe.

Then your strength will look like mercy.

Then your cities shall be called places of refuge, and your streets places where children can laugh without fear.

The Prophets Are Mirrors

That, perhaps, is what I imagine one of the old prophets might say.

But there is a danger in imagining prophetic speech too easily. The prophets are not weapons we use against other people. They are mirrors we dare to hold up to ourselves.

If Amos came to America, he would not belong neatly to any party or faction. He would not be impressed by our preferred slogans. He would not let any of us stand safely outside the judgment.

The prophets do not ask only, “What is wrong with them?” They also ask, “What is wrong with us?” What have we accepted? What have we ignored? Whose suffering have we explained away? Whose humanity have we made conditional? Whose hunger have we considered unfortunate but unavoidable? Whose fear have we found useful?

That is why the prophets are so dangerous. They do not let religion become decoration. They do not allow worship to become escape. They insist that our love of God must be visible in our treatment of the vulnerable.

For Christians, this should not surprise us. Jesus stands firmly in the prophetic tradition. He announces good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. He blesses the poor, feeds the hungry, touches the unclean, welcomes the outsider, and identifies himself with “the least of these.”

Whatever else Christian faith may mean, it cannot mean indifference to suffering.

It cannot mean contempt for the poor.

It cannot mean cruelty toward the stranger.

It cannot mean silence when policies harm the vulnerable.

It cannot mean blessing the machinery of fear.

Repairers of the Breach

Well, I didn’t mean to go off again. Or maybe I did.

The point of prophetic speech is not despair. The prophets speak so fiercely because they believe another way is possible. Judgment, in Scripture, is not simply punishment. It is the truth that clears space for repentance, repair, and renewal.

Isaiah imagines a people who will be called “repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to live in.” That is a beautiful phrase because it does not pretend the breach is imaginary. Something has broken. Something has been torn open. Something must be repaired.

That may be our calling now.

Not to become more outraged for the sake of outrage. Not to delight in condemnation. Not to imagine ourselves pure while everyone else is corrupt. But to become people of repair: feeding, welcoming, protecting, healing, speaking truth, resisting cruelty, and practicing mercy in public and private ways.

The prophets still speak because the poor are still trampled, the stranger is still feared, the widow and orphan are still neglected, and the powerful still prefer songs of praise to cries for justice.

But the prophets also speak because God has not given up on us.

There is still time to turn.

There is still time to repair.

There is still time to let justice roll.

When I was a kid growing up in Huntington, West Virginia, I heard the name Soupy Sales often. He had gone to the same high school I would attend, Huntington High, and the same college, Marshall University. (When I was features editor of the Marshall student paper, I sent him a letter asking if he’d write a story about his campus memories. I still have the note he scribbled back to me on brown butcher-paper stationery saying he’d love to do it—but it never came, alas.)

Soupy was a local legend who made it big in the world. Well, big for Huntington. Born Milton Supman, he eventually became Soupy Sales—a name that sounds less like something invented by a marketing department than something that wandered joyfully out of vaudeville and into your living room. And for a season of my childhood, that is exactly where he was.

I would run home after school to watch The Soupy Sales Show on one of our three local TV stations. Three stations! Younger readers may need a moment to recover from the primitive hardship of such scarcity. No streaming. No DVR. No endless scroll of options. If you wanted to see a show, you showed up when it showed up. And I showed up for Soupy.

I loved White Fang and Black Tooth and the strange knocks at the door. I loved Pookie the Lion, and Hippy the Hippo, and the whole odd little world Soupy created. I loved the silliness, the jokes, the voices, the sudden chaos, the pies in the face. I even bought foam cans so my buddies and I could have our own pie fights, no doubt convinced we were participating in a noble comic tradition.

Looking back, what I loved most was not simply that Soupy was funny. It was that he made me feel included.

He let me in on the joke.

And that, I think, is where the gospel of Soupy begins.

1. The Good News of Being Invited In

Soupy’s show had the feel of a clubhouse. Not a slick, professionally designed entertainment product, but a room you were invited into. A slightly crazy room, to be sure. A room where a giant paw might appear from offscreen, where a puppet might deliver a punchline, where someone at the door might interrupt everything, where the host himself might be hit in the face with a pie at any moment.

It was a room that welcomed you, and you felt it.

That matters. Children know, often more deeply than adults realize, what it feels like to be outside. Outside the conversation. Outside the circle. Outside the joke. One of the great gifts of childhood television at its best was that it could make a child feel seen and included. Soupy did that for me.

The gospel is also about being let in. Jesus was forever creating unexpected circles of belonging: fishermen, tax collectors, women, children, the sick, the poor, the odd, the overlooked, the socially inconvenient. He did not build a community around the polished and impressive. He gathered people who needed grace and then taught them how to become grace for one another. We try to follow that practice at the church I serve on O‘ahu—welcoming is a top priority, and people tell us they do feel welcomed.

Soupy’s little television world was not church. But it offered a faint echo of something holy: the joy of being welcomed into a place where you did not have to be ”important” to belong.

2. The Good News of Holy Foolishness

Soupy Sales did not perform not elegant comedy. He was not trying to be Noel Coward. He was not delivering carefully burnished literary wit from a velvet chair.

He was slapstick, puns, puppets, mugs to the camera, goofy songs, unexpected noises, and pies. So many pies.

And yet there is a deep spiritual tradition of holy foolishness. The Apostle Paul writes about the “foolishness” of the gospel—the upside-down wisdom of God that does not look like worldly power. Again and again, scripture reminds us that God’s truth often arrives in forms the respectable world does not take seriously.

A baby in a manger. A teacher on a donkey. A log in an eye. A crucified Messiah. A kingdom compared to mustard seed, yeast, and lost coins.

The world loves dignity, status, solemnity, and control. But grace keeps showing up in foolish places.

Soupy reminds us that we should be careful about dismissing silliness too quickly. Laughter can lower our defenses. Absurdity can reveal truth. A pie in the face can puncture pride more effectively than a lecture.

I love to have fun with my friends and parishioners. Faithful living may require many things—courage, compassion, perseverance, prayer. But it also requires the ability not to take ourselves quite so seriously.

3. The Good News of Play

One of Soupy’s great gifts was that he did not merely entertain children. He made us want to play.

My friends and I had foam-can pie fights because of Soupy. I suspect many other children did too, to the occasional distress of parents who had not signed off on living-room vaudeville.

And then there was “The Mouse.” “Hey, do the Mouse, yeah!”

Soupy somehow started a dance craze, or at least enough of one that children like me took it very seriously. I got pretty good at doing that dance, and really only that dance.

Play matters. Not because it accomplishes something measurable, but because it teaches us how to inhabit joy. Play teaches imagination, friendship, improvisation, and trust. It reminds us that human beings were not created only to produce, consume, compete, and worry.

Churches sometimes forget this. Adults often forget this. The news nearly always forgets this. But children know.

And Jesus seemed to know it too. “Unless you change and become like children,” he said, “you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). That does not mean becoming childish in the worst sense. It means recovering wonder, openness, dependence, delight.

Sometimes faithful living looks like prayer. Sometimes it looks like service.

And sometimes, perhaps, it looks like doing the Mouse.

4. The Good News of Welcoming the Weird

Soupy’s world was wonderfully weird.

White Fang, “the biggest and meanest dog in the USA,” was basically a giant white paw that appeared from offscreen. Black Tooth, “the biggest and sweetest dog in the USA,” was another enormous paw, more affectionate than fierce, known for dragging Soupy off-camera for loud kisses. Pookie the Lion popped up with hipster timing and sharp lines. Hippy the Hippo made occasional appearances. And then there was the mysterious “Man at the Door,” selling something, complaining about something, the unseen interrupter whose very invisibility was part of the joke.

It was a strange household, but it worked. That may be another gospel lesson.

The kingdom of God is not a showroom of perfectly adjusted people. It is full of oddballs, enthusiasts, eccentrics, saints-in-progress, and people whose gifts do not always fit neatly into respectable categories. The church at its best does not erase people’s uniqueness. It makes room for it.

Soupy’s show gave children permission to enjoy the strange. It suggested that the world might be more interesting, more surprising, and more generous than the grown-ups sometimes admitted.

Faithful communities need that same spaciousness. We need room for the shy, the loud, the funny, the wounded, the intense, the practical, the dreamy, the people who organize the kitchen, the people who sing off-key, the people who ask awkward questions, and the people who show up with casseroles at exactly the right moment.

In other words, we need room for one another.

5. The Good News of Resilience After Pie Hits

As we’ve noted, Soupy Sales was famous for taking pies in the face. Thousands upon thousands of them over the course of his career.

There is a sermon right there.

Life hits us in the face too. Not usually with whipped cream, though one should never rule anything out. More often life hits us with disappointment, embarrassment, failure, rejection, grief, illness, betrayal, or the simple absurdity of being human in a world that refuses to behave.

Soupy’s genius was what happened after the pie hit. He did not collapse. He did not turn bitter. He reacted, mugged, wiped his face, smiled, and kept going. The pie was not the end of the bit. The pie was part of the bit.

That is not denial. That is comic courage.

The gospel never promises that life will not hurt. It does not promise that faithful people will avoid humiliation, confusion, or loss. What it does offer is grace sufficient to keep going. Grace to wipe our eyes. Grace to laugh when we can. Grace to begin again when we must.

Sometimes resurrection looks grand and dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a man covered in shaving cream, blinking at the camera and somehow still smiling.

6. The Good News of Local Roots

Part of what made Soupy special to me was that he felt connected to home. Huntington was not New York or Hollywood. It was not the center of the entertainment universe. But Soupy had come through places I knew: Huntington High, Marshall, local radio, familiar streets and institutions.

That mattered to me as a child. It suggested that creativity did not belong only to distant glamorous places. It could grow in Huntington. It could begin in local radio. It could pass through a college campus, a high school hallway, a small stage, a regional station, a hometown memory.

The gospel also begins locally. Bethlehem. Nazareth. Galilee. Fishing boats. Kitchen tables. Village roads. The story of salvation does not begin in the imperial capital, but in places many powerful people would have overlooked.

We often underestimate the spiritual power of local roots. The people who shaped us. The teachers we remember. The streets we walked. The shows we watched after school. The hometown figures who made the world seem larger and more possible.

Soupy was a national figure, but for me he was also “one of ours.” And sometimes “one of ours” can help us imagine who we might become.

7. The Good News of Joy Without Cynicism

We live in cynical times. Much of our comedy now is sharp, bitter, exhausted, and understandably angry. There is a place for sharpness, especially when truth needs defending. Satire can be holy work.

But there was something refreshingly uncynical about Soupy’s comedy. It was anarchic, yes. Ridiculous, certainly. Sometimes chaotic. But not cruel.

He invited laughter without requiring contempt. That is rarer than it sounds.

Soupy’s optimism was not sophistication. It was something better: a stubborn confidence that the world was still funny, still playful, still livable, even when a pie came flying from offscreen.

Faithful living needs that kind of joy. Not naïve cheerfulness. Not denial. Not pretending everything is fine. But joy as resistance. Joy as oxygen. Joy as a refusal to let fear, bitterness, and despair have the only voice in the room.

The world is heavy. We know that. But the world is also strange, surprising, hilarious, and full of grace.

Soupy helped me learn that.

A Final Word

I still keep Soupy’s autobiography, Soupy Sez, on my shelf. That seems right. Some books are not merely books; they are little monuments to the people who helped make us who we are.

Soupy Sales helped make me laugh. He helped me feel included. He helped me understand that silliness can be generous, that play can be serious business, that getting hit in the face with life is not the end of the story, and that a strange little room full of puppets, paws, knocks, songs, and pies can become, for a child, a place of belonging.

Maybe that is the gospel according to Soupy Sales:

• Welcome people in.

• Make room for the weird.

• Do not fear foolishness.

• Keep playing.

• When the pie hits, wipe your face and keep going.

• And whenever possible, let the children in on the joke.

Amen.

As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one image from Washington, D.C., has stayed with me: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, meant to gleam in patriotic sky blue for the occasion, instead clouded by algae, peeling paint, controversy, accusations, and unfinished repairs.

There may be many explanations for how it got that way, and I am not really interested in turning that mess into one more partisan argument. What interests me is the metaphor. A reflecting pool can only do its work when the water is clear. When the water is murky, the monument is still there, but the image is distorted.

Perhaps that is where we are as a nation. The Declaration still stands. Its words still matter. Its ideals still shimmer across our national memory. But as we approach this milestone anniversary, we might do well to ask what is actually being reflected back to us.

Are we seeing those ideals clearly? Or have the waters of our common life become so clouded by fear, grievance, inequality, cruelty, and mistrust that the reflection has become hard to recognize?

A Noble Promise, Not a Perfect Beginning

The Declaration of Independence is not Scripture. America is not the Kingdom of God. Christians can love their country, pray for their country, serve their country, and give thanks for its highest ideals, but we must never confuse any nation with God’s reign. Nations are human creations. They rise and fall. They do justice and commit injustice. They inspire sacrifice and require repentance.

Still, the Declaration matters. It matters not because the nation fulfilled its promise in 1776, but because it articulated a promise powerful enough to judge the nation that made it.

That is one of the remarkable things about the founding ideals of this country. They were spoken by people who did not fully live them, yet the words themselves kept working. They kept expanding. They kept challenging. They kept calling future generations to take them more seriously than many of the founders themselves did.

That is why the 250th anniversary should be more than the “largest ever fireworks display,” more than patriotic music, more than speeches and flags and familiar phrases. It should also be an examination of conscience. Not because gratitude is wrong, but because mature gratitude tells the truth.

We can give thanks for what is good without pretending everything has been good. We can honor the promise without denying the failures. We can love our country without worshiping it.

“We Hold These Truths…”

The Declaration begins its most famous passage with a remarkable phrase: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” But history has proven that these truths were not self-evident to everyone. They have had to be argued, defended, expanded, and fought for across generations and around the world.

That may be the first thing worth noticing. Truth does not become less true because we fail to live up to it. The fact that equality was denied to so many people in 1776 does not make equality false. It makes the denial of equality a judgment upon the nation. The words expose the gap between what we have said and what we have done.

Every family, every church, every community, every nation has such gaps. We say we believe in love, then fail to love. We say we believe in justice, then ignore injustice when it benefits us. We say we believe in truth, then cling to falsehoods that make us feel safe.

The question is not whether there is a gap between our ideals and our behavior. There always is. The question is whether we are still capable of telling the truth about that gap.

That is part of what makes this anniversary important. It invites us to ask whether we still hold these truths, or whether we simply quote them.

“All Men Are Created Equal”

“All men are created equal” may be the most famous phrase in American political life. It is also one of the most morally demanding. In 1776, those words were magnificent and tragically incomplete. Enslaved people were not treated as equal. Women were excluded from political power. Poor people often had little voice. Indigenous peoples were displaced and dehumanized, and even called “merciless savages” in this very document. Many of the people who heard the promise of equality knew immediately that the country had not yet made room for them inside it.

And yet the words endured.

Abolitionists heard them and pressed the nation to confront the evil of slavery. Suffragists heard them and demanded that women be recognized as citizens with voice and vote. Civil rights leaders heard them and called America to become what it claimed to be. Labor organizers, disability rights advocates, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and countless others have drawn strength from the same unfinished promise.

That, to me, is one of the most hopeful things about the Declaration. Its words were larger than the world of the men who signed it. The promise kept escaping the boundaries they placed around it. The truth kept pushing outward.

For Christians, this is not surprising. We do not believe human dignity begins with citizenship, status, productivity, wealth, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or public approval. We believe every person bears the image of God. Every person is beloved of Christ. Every person is someone for whom Jesus teaches us to care. A government may recognize that dignity or violate it, protect it or threaten it, honor it or ignore it. But the dignity itself is not granted by government. It is given by God.

That means “all are created equal” can never be merely a slogan for us. It must become a discipline of seeing. It must shape how we see the poor, the prisoner, the immigrant, the political opponent, the child, the elder, the disabled person, the person whose life story we do not understand, and the person we would rather not have to love.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”

The Declaration names “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as unalienable rights. Those words are so familiar that we can almost stop hearing them. But perhaps this anniversary is a chance to listen again.

Life means more than mere survival. A society that honors life must care about whether people have food, shelter, safety, healthcare, clean air and water, meaningful work, and some reasonable hope for the future. If people are technically alive but abandoned to desperation, violence, hunger, untreated illness, or despair, then something in our national promise has grown thin.

Liberty means more than being left alone. Freedom is precious, but freedom without the conditions needed to flourish can become hollow. What does liberty mean for a child in an unsafe neighborhood, a family crushed by medical debt, a worker unable to make ends meet, a woman whose choices are controlled by others, or a community whose voice is ignored? Real liberty must include more than the permission to struggle alone.

The pursuit of happiness, rightly understood, is not a promise of endless personal comfort or consumer satisfaction. It is not the freedom to buy more things, curate a better image, or pursue private pleasure while our neighbors suffer. It is closer to what we might call human flourishing: the chance to live a meaningful life, to contribute, to love and be loved, to worship freely, to learn, to create, to serve, and to belong.

Measured by those deeper meanings, how are we doing?

That is not an easy question. In many ways, the American story includes real progress. We should not deny that. But neither should we ignore the fear, loneliness, anger, inequality, and exhaustion that mark so much of our public life. Many people are anxious about the future. Many no longer trust institutions. Many feel unseen, unheard, and disposable. Many have concluded that public life is mostly a contest for power rather than a shared search for the common good.

No, a reflecting pool cannot do its work when the water is clouded. And neither can a democracy.

“A Decent Respect”

There is another phrase from the Declaration that receives less attention, but may be just as necessary for our time. The opening sentence says that when one people takes a major step in the life of nations, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” requires that they explain themselves.

A decent respect. What a phrase!

It assumes that public life requires more than force, grievance, insult, and self-assertion. It assumes that others deserve reasons. It assumes that persuasion matters. It assumes that even when we disagree, we owe one another some measure of accountability and regard.

That feels almost radical now.

So much of our public life seems built on contempt. We mock before we listen. We label before we understand. We perform for our side rather than speak to the whole. We assume the worst of our opponents and the best of ourselves. We treat cruelty as strength and humility as weakness. We reward outrage and then wonder why we are exhausted by it.

But a decent respect is not weakness, it is moral discipline. It is the recognition that other people are not obstacles to be crushed but neighbors to be engaged. It does not require us to abandon conviction. In fact, true conviction should make us more careful, not less. If we believe human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with dignity, then even our disagreements must be shaped by that belief.

A nation cannot remain free for long if its people lose the ability to speak truthfully, listen seriously, argue honestly, and respect the humanity of those with whom they disagree.

Loving a Country Without Worshiping It

As an Episcopal priest, I believe love of country can be a good and honorable thing. Gratitude for one’s homeland is a good thing. Appreciation for those who have sacrificed for the common good is a good thing. The desire to see one’s nation become more just, more generous, more truthful, and more humane is definitely a good thing.

But Christian faith also teaches us that no nation deserves our ultimate allegiance. Our highest loyalty belongs to God. Our deepest citizenship is in the Kingdom Christ proclaims. That does not make us less responsible as citizens of this country. It makes us more responsible, because we are called to measure every earthly power by a higher standard.

Patriotism at its best is not blind loyalty. It is more like mature love within a family. We love honestly. We remember what is good. We tell the truth about what is harmful. We refuse to excuse abuse simply because it is familiar. We grieve what has been broken. We pray for those in authority. We work for healing. We do not give up on one another, but neither do we pretend that love requires silence.

That may be the kind of patriotism we need at year 250. Not a brittle patriotism that cannot bear criticism. Not a cynical detachment that sneers at every expression of national hope. But a truthful, humble, morally serious love that can celebrate the promise while working to repair the breach.

Clearing the Water

So we return to the reflecting pool.

The purpose of a reflecting pool is not to be admired for itself. Its purpose is to help us see. It takes the monument, the sky, the light, and the passing figures of human beings and gives them back to us in another form. When the water is clear, we see more deeply. When it is murky, the reflection becomes distorted.

The same is true of national memory. If our common life is clouded by fear, lies, resentment, greed, cruelty, and denial, we will not see ourselves clearly. We may still recite the words. We may still wave the flags. We may still light the fireworks. But the reflection will be blurred.

Perhaps the best way to honor the Declaration at 250 is not simply to quote it, frame it, or celebrate it once a year. Perhaps the best way to honor it is to keep asking whom we have left out of its promises, whose dignity we have failed to recognize, whose liberty we have neglected, and whose thriving we have treated as optional.

For followers of Jesus, the work goes even deeper. We do not believe human beings are equal because a document says so, however noble that document may be. We believe human beings are equal because each bears the image of God, each is beloved by Christ, and each is someone we are commanded to love. That truth is older than America, larger than America, and more enduring than America.

But when America remembers it, America is better.

So as fireworks rise, flags wave, and familiar songs are sung, perhaps we might also pray for clearer water: clearer truth, clearer mercy, clearer justice, clearer humility, clearer courage, and clearer love of neighbor.

The monument is still there. The promise still stands. The question is whether we will allow ourselves to see it clearly enough to live by it.

A few days ago, my spouse and I were driving around and got to talking about church life, as we often do. Somewhere in the conversation he said something that stayed with me. He wondered how people get through this life without the support of a church family.

He wasn’t claiming that church people have everything figured out, or that everyone outside the church is wandering helplessly in the dark. It was more honest and tender than that.

Life is hard. People get sick. Loved ones die. Families struggle. Marriages strain. Jobs disappear. Aging brings losses we did not expect. The world becomes confusing. And sooner or later, every one of us needs people who know our name, notice when we are missing, pray for us when we are hurting, and show up when life becomes too heavy to carry alone.

That may be the church’s secret superpower.

Not institutional power. Not political influence. Not cultural dominance. Certainly not the ability to win every argument or answer every question. The church’s real gift, at its best, is much quieter and deeper. It is the creation of a community where human beings can belong to God and to one another across all the seasons of life.

More Than Believing the Right Things

For a long time, many people thought of church primarily as a place where people went because they believed certain doctrines. Of course, belief matters. Faith matters. Theology matters. What we say about God shapes how we live with one another.

But I have come to think that many people remain in church, return to church, or cautiously approach church not because they have resolved every theological question, but because they are hungry for a community in which their lives can be held.

I know people who are not sure what they believe about every line of the Creed, but they know what it feels like to have someone bring food after surgery.

They may have questions about prayer, but they know what it means to hear their name lifted before God by people who care about them.

They may struggle with parts of Scripture, but they know the power of sitting in a room where ancient words are read, bread is broken, and human lives are gathered into something larger than themselves.

That does not mean belief is unimportant. It means faith is not merely an idea we carry around in our heads. Faith is embodied. It is sung, prayed, eaten, shared, practiced, doubted, questioned, renewed, and lived. The church is one of the few places left where people can bring their whole selves—not just their opinions, achievements, résumés, or carefully edited public image, but their grief, confusion, gratitude, illness, loneliness, hope, and need.

A Community That Notices

One of the most underrated gifts of church life is that people notice. When one of our long-time members missed a Sunday morning, I was asked by a dozen people, where is he? Is he okay? I happened to know he was out of town visiting family. And if I don’t know where someone is, I will find out how they’re doing.

Church people notice when you are not there. They notice when you seem tired. They notice when you are in the hospital, when your adult child is struggling, when you are grieving a parent, when you are carrying more than you can say out loud. In a world where so much of our interaction is transactional or digital, being noticed in this way can feel almost miraculous.

Many people today are surrounded by messages, notifications, and online connections, yet they remain profoundly lonely. They may have hundreds of contacts but few people who would bring soup, sit in a waiting room, or quietly ask, “How are you doing… really?”

Church at its best offers a different kind of connection. It is not based on shared hobbies, income level, age, politics, or personality type. It is based on the deeper truth that we belong to God and therefore belong to one another.

That kind of belonging is not always easy. Anyone who has spent time in a congregation knows that church families can be complicated. We misunderstand one another. We get impatient. We bring our wounds, preferences, anxieties, and opinions with us. Sometimes we disappoint each other.

But even that is part of the gift, because church is not a curated social circle of people we would have chosen for ourselves. It is a community where we learn, slowly and imperfectly, how to love the people God has given us.

Rituals for Joy and Sorrow

Another gift the church offers is ritual. That may sound formal or old-fashioned, but I think human beings need rituals more than we realize.

We need ways to mark birth, death, commitment, failure, forgiveness, grief, and hope. We need words to say when our own words run out. We need prayers that have carried other people before us and will carry others after us. We need songs that tell the truth when we cannot quite speak it ourselves.

I’m leading a funeral service Saturday at my church for a dear member who had been homebound for some time. When someone like her dies, the church does not have to invent meaning from scratch. We gather. We pray. We read Scripture. We commend a beloved child of God into the arms of mercy. We sing of resurrection even through tears. We do not pretend death is insignificant, and we do not pretend grief disappears quickly. But we place that grief inside a larger story of love stronger than death.

When someone is baptized, we do something equally profound. We do not merely celebrate a child or adult as an isolated individual. We welcome them into a household of faith. We promise to support them in their life in Christ. We say, in effect, “You do not belong only to yourself. You belong to God. And we belong to you.”

In a fragmented culture like ours, that is no small thing.

A Place Where People Still Sing Together

Another gift of church life is that it is one of the few places left where ordinary people still sing together in public.

That may sound like a small thing, but I do not think it is small at all. Most of us do not gather in neighborhoods or town halls or family parlors to sing the way people once did. Oh, we listen to music constantly, of course. We stream it in our cars, through our headphones, in stores, on television, and on our phones.

But listening to music is not the same thing as making music together. There is something deeply human, and deeply spiritual, about lifting our voices together in the same room.

The church I serve is blessed with a small but mighty choir, led by an enthusiastic and creative young musician, and each week they guide us into worship through song. They do not perform for us as much as they help all of us sing praises. They give courage to the musically hesitant, strength to the familiar hymns, and beauty to the beliefs we sometimes cannot quite say any other way. Week after week, they remind us that worship is not simply something we watch, it is something we join.

Singing together does something to us. It steadies our breathing. It softens our hearts. It joins our individual voices into something larger than any one of us could create alone. A congregation singing may not always sound polished in the way a professional performance does, but that is part of its holiness. The wavering voice, the strong voice, the child’s voice, the elder’s voice, the confident singer and the person barely mouthing the words all become part of one offering.

And often, the hymns carry us when we cannot carry ourselves. There are days when our faith feels thin, when our prayers feel uncertain, when the words of belief do not come easily. But then the congregation begins to sing: “How Firm a Foundation.” “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” “Here I am, Lord.” And somehow the song believes for us until we can believe again.

That too is part of the church’s secret superpower. We sing our grief. We sing our joy. We sing our memory. We sing our longing for justice and peace and hope. We sing because generations before us sang, and because generations after us will need these songs too.

In a lonely and anxious world, the simple act of singing together becomes an act of resistance, communion, and joy.

A Place Where Generations Meet

Church is also one of the increasingly rare places where multiple generations still come together.

In many parts of modern life, people are sorted by age. Children are with children. Teenagers are with teenagers. Working adults are with coworkers. Retirees are with retirees. Even entertainment and advertising divide us into carefully targeted categories. But in church, at least when we are healthy, generations overlap.

A child may be loved by elders who are not related by blood, and we have young children in our church who are doted over and cared for by their church aunties. A young adult may find encouragement from someone who has survived decades of hardship and still believes in grace. Older members may find joy and purpose in the presence of children, newcomers, and younger families. We learn that the church does not belong to any one age group, style, generation, or preference. It belongs to God.

That intergenerational life can be messy. Children make noise. Elders move slowly. Young adults ask different questions. Longtime members remember how things used to be. Newcomers wonder why we do things the way we do.

But the messiness is part of the miracle. The Body of Christ was never meant to be efficient. It was meant to be alive.

The Gift of Being Needed

One of the strange myths of modern life, especially in America it seems, is that the goal of life is to become completely independent, self-sufficient. We imagine maturity as needing no one and being needed by no one. But that is not a Christian vision of human life. We are created for communion. We are made to give and receive love.

Church gives people a place to be needed. Someone sets up tables. Someone prepares food or cleans up the kitchen after fellowship. Someone sings. Someone reads Scripture. Someone teaches children. Someone waters plants, folds bulletins, unlocks doors, counts offerings, fixes what is broken, welcomes the newcomer, or prays quietly for the parish every day.

Not all of these acts are glamorous. Most will never be noticed beyond the local community. But together they form a pattern of shared life. They remind us that each person has something to offer. In a culture that often measures human worth by productivity, status, wealth, or visibility, church says something countercultural: you matter because you are part of us. You matter because you are loved by God. You matter because the Body needs every member.

Not Perfect, But Precious

Of course, the church has failed many people. We should say that plainly. Some people have been wounded by churches that were judgmental, abusive, exclusionary, or cruel. Some have been told they did not belong because of who they are, whom they love, what they questioned, or how their lives unfolded. Those wounds are real, and the church must not minimize them.

But the failures of the church do not erase the beauty of what church can be. In fact, those failures make it all the more important for congregations to become communities of genuine welcome, humility, repentance, and care.

The answer to bad religion is not necessarily no community at all. Sometimes the answer is a better, truer, more generous expression of the Gospel. That is what many of us are still trying to practice.

We are not perfect. No congregation is. But at our best, we become a place where people can be known, loved, challenged, forgiven, fed, and sent back into the world with more courage than they came with. We become a community where faith is not merely explained but embodied.

We become a sign, however imperfect, of God’s stubborn love for the world.

Something the World Still Needs

So I keep coming back to my beloved spouse’s question: How do people get through this life without the support of a church family?

The truth is, many people do. They find support through friends, recovery groups, families, neighbors, coworkers, and other communities of care. That’s fine. God’s grace is not limited to the church. Love shows up in many places.

But I just could never live without the church myself. I believe church offers something profoundly valuable, something our lonely and anxious world still needs.

It offers belonging rooted not in achievement, agreement, or personal preference, but in grace.

It offers rituals deep enough to hold our grief and joy.

It offers a community where generations meet, where ordinary people serve, where the lonely can be noticed, where the weary can be prayed for, and where imperfect people keep learning how to love.

Even if you do not believe everything you hear in church, there is something here worth receiving. Even if you are uncertain, wounded, skeptical, or tired, there may still be a place for you at the table.

Faith does not always begin with having every answer. Sometimes it begins with letting yourself be part of a community where people are trying, however imperfectly, to follow Jesus together.

That may not sound flashy. It will not trend online. It probably will not impress the powerful. But when life falls apart, when grief comes, when illness arrives, when the future feels uncertain, when you need someone to pray, visit, listen, feed, remember, and hope on your behalf, the quiet strength of a church family can feel like nothing less than grace.

And in a world where so many people feel isolated, exhausted, and afraid, that may be one of the most powerful gifts the church still has to offer.

People. Are. Tired.

Lately, I have noticed a theme in conversations with my parishioners.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m talking with someone after worship, visiting a member in their home, chatting on our Zoom Bible study before we get into Sunday’s texts, or catching up over coffee in our fellowship hall. Sooner or later, the conversation often turns in the same direction. People tell me they are tired.

Hey, I’m tired too! I get it. Are you tired?

Oh, we’re not just physically tired, though many are certainly not getting enough rest. Not merely busy, though our schedules seem more crowded than ever. What I hear is something deeper. People describe feeling weary. Worn down. Drained. They are worried about children and grandchildren. They are caring for aging parents. They are navigating health concerns, financial pressures, and uncertain futures. And amidst all that, they are trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly divided, anxious, and unsettled.

More Information Than We Were Designed to Carry

One of the strange realities of modern life is that we now know about almost everything. Before breakfast we can learn about wars on the other side of the world, about so-called deals to end those wars, about political turmoil in Washington, dismal economic forecasts, horrific climate reports and forecasts, natural disasters, and a myriad of social conflicts unfolding in real time. Our phones and computers deliver an endless stream of information directly into our hands.

There is something good about being informed. There is something good about caring about what happens beyond our own neighborhoods and communities. Yet there is also a hidden cost.

We know more than any generation before us. But we do not possess any greater ability to solve all the problems we know about. Our grandparents often knew little about events occurring thousands of miles away. We know about them instantly. Every crisis, every controversy, every tragedy arrives at our doorstep within minutes. Corporations make millions providing this information.

Our awareness has expanded dramatically, but our capacity to act has not expanded at the same pace. As a result, many of us are carrying burdens we were never meant to carry.

Caring Is Not the Same Thing as Carrying

One of the most important spiritual lessons I continue to learn is the difference between caring and carrying. Christ calls us to care. He calls us to love our neighbors, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, pray for the suffering, seek justice, and work for peace. Compassion is not optional for Christians. It is part of our calling.

But somewhere along the way, many of us began confusing compassion with responsibility for outcomes. We carry the future of our nation. We carry the future of the church. We carry the future of our children and grandchildren. We carry the future of the environment. We carry every crisis, every headline, every looming concern as though the fate of the world somehow rests upon our shoulders.

No wonder we’re tired.

The Temptation to Fix Everything

One of the occupational hazards of being an Episcopal priest (or any sort of pastor) is the temptation to believe that if I just work a little harder, care a little more, attend one more neighborhood meeting, make one more phone call, or write one more sermon, I can somehow fix things. Most clergy eventually discover that this is not only impossible but spiritually unhealthy.

After more than four decades of ministry, the last 12 as an ordained priest, I have learned that there are some things I can do and many things I cannot. I cannot heal every illness. I cannot mend every broken relationship. I cannot solve every conflict. I cannot protect every person I love from disappointment, suffering, or loss. I cannot save every struggling congregation.

And neither can you.

At first glance, that realization may sound discouraging. In truth, it can be profoundly liberating.

Faithfulness Is Not the Same Thing as Fixing

One of the gifts of Christian faith is that it teaches us the difference between faithfulness and fixing. God never asks us to fix the world. God asks us to be faithful within it.

We are called to pray faithfully. We are called to love faithfully. We are called to serve faithfully. We are called to give generously, forgive freely, and hope stubbornly. We are called to do the good that lies before us each day. The results belong to God.

This truth runs throughout Scripture. Abraham was called to leave home and follow God, but he was never shown the whole journey. Moses led the people toward the Promised Land but never entered it himself. The prophets spoke God’s truth without knowing whether anyone would listen. Even Jesus, during his earthly ministry, did not solve every problem in first-century Palestine. He healed many, but not all. He fed thousands, but not every hungry person. He proclaimed the Kingdom of God, yet the Roman Empire remained in power, and ultimately put him to death.

And yet Jesus never seems frantic. He was compassionate. He was courageous. He was deeply committed to his mission. But he never appears burdened by the illusion that everything depended on him alone. Perhaps that is because he trusted that God’s work was larger than any one person’s lifetime. So he gathered twelve, and sent out seventy.

That may be a lesson we desperately need today.

Anxiety Disguised as Responsibility

Many of us secretly live as though the universe is being held together by our worrying. If we stop thinking about a problem for five minutes, perhaps things will fall apart. If we miss a news cycle, perhaps disaster will strike. If we take a walk, enjoy a meal with friends, sit quietly in prayer, or watch a sunset, perhaps we are somehow neglecting our responsibilities.

But that is not faith. It is anxiety disguised as responsibility. Faith trusts that God remains at work even when we are not.

What We Can Do

This does not mean becoming indifferent. It does not mean withdrawing from the world or pretending problems do not exist. Christians are called to engage the world, not escape it. We are called to care deeply. But caring deeply does not require carrying the weight of the whole world.

We cannot end every war, but we can support a food pantry. We cannot solve every political crisis, but we can treat our neighbors with dignity and respect. We cannot eliminate loneliness everywhere, but we can call a friend, visit a shut-in, or welcome a newcomer.

We cannot save the world. But we can participate in God’s work within our corner of it. And… that is enough.

A Different Kind of Rest

Perhaps the rest Jesus offers is not simply a break from work. Perhaps it is freedom from the illusion that everything depends on us. Perhaps it is the freedom to care without carrying, to love without controlling, to serve without saving, and to act without believing that we alone are responsible for the outcome.

The world was broken before we arrived. It will not be fully healed before we leave.

But God has not asked us to heal the whole world. God has asked us to love the people in front of us.

That is enough work for a lifetime. And perhaps that is where tired souls like ours begin to find rest.

Every morning begins the same way. Before the email. Before the headlines. Before the obligations of the day come knocking.

Coffee.

I suspect many of you understand this. Some of you are reading this with a mug in your hand right now. Others may be halfway through your second, or fifth, cup. A few rare and mysterious souls claim not to drink coffee at all. I wish them well, though I confess I do not fully understand their strange ways.

My siblings and a couple of priest friends and I text coffee memes to each other nearly every day, and apparently there is no bottom to that particular pot. Coffee before conversation. Coffee before work. Coffee before attempting to be a reasonably decent human being. The memes are funny because they are, at least for some of us, perilously close to doctrine.

At St. Timothy’s, the church I serve as vicar, our wonderful Sunday morning kitchen volunteers brew two great big pots of coffee every week, and most weeks we run out. That coffee fuels our fellowship time, but it does more than provide caffeine. It creates a place for lingering, laughing, checking in, welcoming newcomers, and having the conversations that often matter most.

So what might coffee teach us about faithful living? Quite a bit, actually.

1. Every Day Deserves a Fresh Start

One of the great gifts of coffee is that it arrives with the morning. No matter how yesterday went, the coffee pot does not judge you. Maybe yesterday was wonderful. Maybe it was a disaster. Maybe you said the wrong thing, missed an opportunity, or spent the evening doom-scrolling through enough bad news to power a cable network. The coffee pours anew anyway.

There is something gospel-shaped about that. The Book of Lamentations says, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Every sunrise is an invitation to begin again. Every cup whispers, “Let’s try this one more time.”

Of course, the coffee does not magically fix everything. It does not answer the emails, repair the relationships, solve the world’s problems, or turn us instantly into wise and patient people. But it does mark a beginning. It gives us a small ritual of hope to start with before the day gathers speed.

Sometimes that is exactly what we need.

2. Wake Up, Literally and Spiritually

Coffee wakes us up, which is no small thing. Spiritually speaking, we could use more of that. So much of modern life encourages us to drift along on autopilot, rushing from one obligation to the next without noticing the sacredness of what is right in front of us.

The gospel repeatedly calls people to wake up. Pay attention. Stay alert. Notice what is happening around you. Recognize the sacred hidden within the ordinary: A sunrise. A friend’s laugh. The smell of rain. The face of someone who needs encouragement. The wound in the world that needs our care.

I learned the importance of actual caffeine the hard way when I was very young and my then-significant other secretly switched us to decaf without telling me. At the time, I was the young editor of the West Virginia Hillbilly newspaper, driving all over the state selling ads or reporting stories. And every day around 11 a.m., I could barely keep my eyes open. Plus, headaches! This went on until I finally mentioned it, and the terrible confession came out: Decaf. Without consent. Outrageous.

But the spiritual point remains. We do need to wake up. To pay attention. To notice the world, the neighbor, the need, the beauty, the warning signs, the grace. Faithful living begins with becoming alert to the presence of God and the claims of love.

Coffee simply gives us a little assistance.

3. When the Pot Overflows, Clean Up and Start Over

Anyone who has made coffee long enough has had a coffee disaster.

You forget to put the pot back under the coffee maker, and suddenly the blessed elixir is pouring directly onto the counter. Or the filter collapses, and the whole pot is full of grounds. Or you push the wrong button before your brain is fully online, because—and this is the important theological point—you had not yet had coffee.

There are few frustrations quite like having to toss or clean up after an entire fresh pot first thing in the morning. It feels like a personal affront. It feels unjust. It feels like the universe has chosen violence before breakfast.

And yet, what do we do? We sigh. We curse. We clean up the mess. And then we make another pot.

Because coffee is worth it.

There is a life lesson there. Faithful living does not mean the morning never goes wrong. It does not mean our best efforts never spill all over the counter. It does not mean we never have to start over, mop up, apologize, repair, or try again.

It means we believe the good thing is still worth pursuing.

Grace is not the absence of mess. Grace is the strength to clean up, begin again, and trust that the day is not ruined just because the first pot was.

4. Community Happens Around Cups

Coffee is rarely just about coffee. It is about conversations. First dates. Long friendships. Church meetings. Family gatherings. Difficult apologies. Plans made on napkins. Tears shared across small tables. Laughter that arrives before you expected it.

Those Sunday morning pots at St. Timothy’s are not incidental to our life together. They help create fellowship. People pour a cup, linger a little longer, ask how the week has been, introduce themselves to someone new, and slowly become more than people who happened to sit in the same room for worship.

Sometimes we can’t get folks to leave even after a couple hours! That’s not a bad thing.

Jesus was forever sitting down at tables. Meals mattered to him. Conversation mattered. Welcome mattered. The kingdom of God often looks suspiciously like people gathered with food and drink, telling the stories of their lives and discovering they are not alone.

Coffee is not a sacrament, but it frequently creates the conditions where grace can appear. Which is indeed a sacred thing.

5. Transformation Takes Time

Coffee beans become coffee only through process: growing, harvesting, roasting, grinding, brewing. None of it happens instantly. And it all requires a lot of work by a lot of people.

Spiritual growth doesn’t happen instantly, either. We want wisdom on demand. Patience by Tuesday. Compassion before the next committee meeting. Courage without discomfort. Forgiveness without the slow work of letting go. As George’s pop on Seinfeld screamed, Serenity now!

But most real transformation is slow. It deepens through heat, pressure, time, and practice. It comes through daily choices, repeated prayers, honest conversations, mistakes made and repaired, grief endured, joy received, love offered again and again.

Like coffee, the richest things in life often require patience.

God seems remarkably unhurried about these matters. Perhaps we should be, too.

6. Some Habits Can Be Good for Us

Every now and then, a new study about coffee makes the rounds, and depending on the headline, coffee is either extending your life, ruining your sleep, protecting your liver, or making you jittery enough to hear colors.

As with most things, moderation matters. But the general direction of much of the research has been encouraging. Harvard’s School of Public Health notes that moderate coffee intake—roughly two to five cups a day—has been linked with lower risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and possibly even early death. The FDA also notes that most adults can tolerate up to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, though people vary widely in how sensitive they are and how quickly their bodies process it.

And my family proves the point about “people vary widely.” My dear mother could drink coffee any time of day, right up to bedtime, and sleep like a baby. My oldest brother says she got him “addicted to the brew” as a young teen, and he inherited the same supernatural gift: coffee morning, noon, night, no problem.

Not me. I didn’t discover coffee until I was a sophomore in college, when I moved from home into the dorm and stayed up way too late. And coffee first thing in the morning saved me. But I have to stop drinking around noon or risk staring at the ceiling at midnight, regretting both my choices and my biology.

There is a spiritual lesson in that, too. Healthy habits are not one-size-fits-all. Prayer, worship, service, silence, study, generosity, community, all the spiritual disciplines—these are good for the soul, but we do not all receive them or practice them in exactly the same way. Some people thrive with early morning prayer. Others meet God better on an evening walk. Some serve through committees. Others express their faith through casseroles, phone calls, music, or just quietly showing up when needed.

Faithful living means paying attention to what helps us become more loving, more awake, more generous, and more whole. It also means knowing our limits. Even good things need that wisdom.

So yes, coffee may be good for us. But knowing when to stop? That may be good for us, too.

7. Bitterness Is Not the End of the Story

Coffee is a little bitter. That is part of its charm.

Life can be bitter too: disappointment, grief, failure, heartbreak, betrayal, exhaustion. The gospel never pretends these things are not real. Christianity at its best is not a denial system. It does not ask us to smile brightly while the world burns or pretend everything is fine when it plainly is not.

But neither does the gospel allow bitterness to have the final word.

Good coffee contains bitterness, yes, but also depth, warmth, richness, and sometimes even sweetness. So can a faithful life. The bitter things we endure do not have to make us bitter people. By grace, they can make us more tender, more truthful, more compassionate, more able to sit with others in their pain.

Grace does not erase every hard thing. But it can transform what is bitter into hope.

8. Everyone Has Their Own Cup

Black coffee. Cream and sugar. Espresso. Latte. Cold brew. Flavored syrup in quantities that make the beverage technically a dessert. People have very strong opinions about how coffee should be consumed.

And yet, somehow, the world keeps turning.

There is a lesson here. Faithful living requires conviction, but it does not require uniformity. Not everyone has to receive grace in exactly the same way. Not everyone prays the same way, grieves the same way, serves the same way, or finds joy in the same places.

One of the gifts of spiritual maturity is learning how to appreciate differences without treating them as threats. The body of Christ has room for many gifts, many temperaments, many callings, and many stories.

Sometimes people simply take their coffee differently. That’s okay.

A Final Word

Coffee will not save us. But it can remind us of things that matter: every day is a gift, community is essential, attention is holy, transformation takes time, and even bitterness can become something rich.

And at St. Timothy’s, when the coffee is poured and people linger a little longer after worship, laughing and talking and checking in and talking story with one another, I see a small glimpse of the life God wants for us.

Not rushed. Not isolated. Not perfect. But gathered, awake, generous, and glad to be together.

Wake up. Show up. Pour generously.

And for heaven’s sake, do not switch someone to decaf without telling them.

Every Sunday morning, before anyone else arrives, I walk the grounds of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in ‘Aiea, where I serve as vicar. I unlock the gates, open the doors, and let the trade winds of Oʻahu move through the sanctuary. The sun is just beginning to rise over the mountains, the birds (including the occasional wild rooster) are waking up, and I join them in singing a little ditty I made up for the process: “Open the gates of the chapel, and let God’s people come in!” It is one of my favorite rituals of the week.

As I make my way around the property, I think about the people who will start arriving in a few minutes. Some will come carrying grief. Some are worried about their children or their health. Some are struggling financially. Some are lonely. Some are angry. Many are simply tired—tired of the demands of life and tired of the relentless noise that seems to surround us every day.

And yet they come. Week after week, they come seeking God, seeking community, seeking hope. There is, in that simple act, a kind of faith, not only in God, but in one another. It is a quiet belief that we are not meant to face life alone. It is a recognition that communities matter, that truth matters, that compassion matters, and that we are at our best when we bear one another’s burdens.

Lately, I have found myself wondering whether our nation has forgotten some of those truths.

We live in an age of extraordinary wealth and extraordinary inequality. We possess unprecedented access to information and yet seem increasingly unable to agree on basic facts. Public service often appears to have given way to self-promotion. Anger dominates our politics. Cruelty is rewarded. Cynicism is celebrated as wisdom. Many Americans look at our institutions and wonder whether they still deserve our trust.

I understand that concern. But I do not believe despair is the answer.

Nor do I believe the answer lies in some imagined golden age of American history. Every era has had its failures and blind spots. The America of Franklin Roosevelt still tolerated segregation. The America of John Kennedy had not yet secured full civil rights for all. The America of Lyndon Johnson struggled with the tragedy of Vietnam even as it expanded voting rights, Medicare, and the fight against poverty. More recently, some leaders have sought, however imperfectly, to recover a vision of government as an instrument for public investment, democratic stability, and the common good.

The goal is not to return to the past. The goal is to recover the values that helped move us forward: the conviction that government should serve ordinary people, that democracy requires active citizenship, that economic opportunity should be broadly shared, and that the measure of a society is how it treats those with the least power.

As a Christian and an Episcopal priest, I believe those values are deeply rooted in Scripture. Again and again, the Bible calls us to care for the vulnerable, welcome the stranger, seek justice, tell the truth, and love our neighbors as ourselves. The prophets condemned corruption and exploitation. Jesus spoke more about wealth, poverty, generosity, and human responsibility than almost any other social issue. The early church became known not because it held political power but because it was a place for healing and hope as they cared for widows, orphans, the sick, and the poor.

If Christians have something distinctive to offer American public life, it is not a quest for dominance. It is a moral vision. It is a vision grounded in the dignity of every human being, the importance of community, the pursuit of justice, and the conviction that we belong to one another.

This, therefore, is my manifesto for a more generous America.

Every Human Being Bears the Image of God

The opening chapter of Genesis makes an amazing claim: every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. That truth forms the foundation of all Christian social ethics. Human dignity is not earned through wealth, education, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. It is bestowed by God.

If we truly believed this, our public life would look very different. We would reject policies and rhetoric that treat people as disposable. We would ensure that children have enough food to eat and access to quality education. We would work toward healthcare systems that care for the sick without bankrupting families. We would honor the dignity of workers and protect those who are vulnerable. We would pursue immigration policies that balance security with compassion and recognize the humanity of those seeking a better life.

Jesus consistently identified himself with those on the margins. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” he said, “you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). A society that forgets the vulnerable ultimately forgets its own humanity.

“The Common Good” Is Not a Dirty Word

One of the dominant assumptions of our age is that freedom means radical independence, that the highest good is individual choice and that our obligations to one another should be minimal. The biblical tradition offers a different perspective. It teaches that human beings are created for relationship and that communities flourish when people share responsibility for one another’s well-being.

The common good is not the enemy of freedom. It is one of the conditions that makes freedom possible.

Strong public schools, libraries, roads, parks, public health systems, scientific research, environmental protections, international aid, and reliable democratic institutions are not signs of national weakness. They are expressions of a society’s commitment to future generations. They are investments we make together because some things are too important to leave entirely to the marketplace.

The great achievements of American democracy have often emerged when we recognized this truth. The New Deal, the GI Bill, Social Security, Medicare, civil rights legislation, environmental protections, USAID, and countless local initiatives were all rooted in the conviction that we rise or fall together.

Truth Must Matter Again

A democracy cannot survive without a shared commitment to truth.

Citizens do not need to agree on every policy question. Healthy democracies depend upon vigorous debate. But debate becomes impossible when truth itself becomes optional.

The Ninth Commandment forbids bearing false witness. The prophets repeatedly condemned deceit. Jesus declared that the truth would set us free. These are not merely personal virtues. They are civic necessities.

In recent years we have witnessed growing debates about the role of journalism itself. Is the task of reporters simply to present opposing viewpoints and let audiences decide? Or does genuine objectivity sometimes require saying clearly when a claim is unsupported, misleading, or demonstrably false? These are not easy questions. Yet the very fact that respected journalists and news organizations are wrestling with them reveals how fragile our relationship with truth has become.

Recent controversies involving major news organizations (looking at you, CBS) have raised difficult questions about whether journalism’s highest duty is neutrality or truthfulness. Christians should be clear on this point. Truth is not achieved by giving equal weight to fact and falsehood. Truth requires honesty, courage, evidence, and a willingness to speak plainly when reality itself is under assault.

We need independent journalism. We need civic education. We need leaders who are willing to tell uncomfortable truths rather than convenient lies. We need citizens who are humble enough to change their minds when presented with new evidence. We need media organizations that value accuracy more than access, integrity more than ratings, and public trust more than political favor.

Democracy depends not upon perfect agreement but upon a shared commitment to reality. Without truth, power becomes its own justification. Without truth, propaganda flourishes. Without truth, citizens become tribes shouting past one another rather than neighbors seeking the common good.

An Economy Should Serve Human Beings

The Scriptures have a great deal to say about economic life. The prophets denounced those who exploited workers and accumulated wealth at the expense of the poor. Jesus warned repeatedly about the dangers of greed and indifference. The early church sought to ensure that no one among them was left in desperate need.

A healthy economy is not simply one that generates wealth for the few. It is one that creates opportunity, rewards work, encourages innovation, and enables all people to flourish.

That means living wages, affordable housing, accessible healthcare, strong retirement security, quality education, support for families raising children, and protections for workers seeking fair treatment. It means recognizing that economic policy is never merely about numbers on a spreadsheet. It is about whether people can build stable, meaningful lives.

It means acknowledging a truth that previous generations understood better than we often do today: those who have benefited most from our society bear a greater responsibility for sustaining it. The roads, schools, universities, legal protections, scientific research, public infrastructure, and democratic institutions that make prosperity possible do not appear by magic. They are built and maintained by generations of citizens acting together.

A just society therefore asks more of those who have received the most. Common-sense progressive taxation is not punishment for success. It is an investment in the conditions that make success possible in the first place. At a time when vast concentrations of wealth coexist with crumbling infrastructure, struggling schools, housing shortages, and millions of working families living paycheck to paycheck, we should not be afraid to ask whether our economic priorities have become distorted.

The biblical tradition consistently teaches that wealth carries responsibility. To whom much is given, much is required. The purpose of taxation is not simply to fund government. At its best, it is one way a democratic people pools resources to build a society in which opportunity is broadly shared and no one is left behind.

Economic justice is essentially stewardship. It is the recognition that prosperity is most secure when it is widely shared, and that a nation flourishes not when a few rise to extraordinary heights, but when all have the opportunity to stand on solid ground.

Democracy Requires Participation

Too many Americans have come to think of democracy as something that happens every two or four years when we cast a ballot. Voting matters enormously, but citizenship requires much more.

Democracy depends upon participation. It depends upon volunteering, serving on community boards, mentoring young people, supporting local organizations, joining civic groups, attending public meetings, and investing in the life of our neighborhoods.

The church has a crucial role to play here. Not because it should become an arm of any political party, but because it teaches habits that democracy desperately needs: listening, cooperation, humility, forgiveness, and service. Congregations remain among the few places where people from different backgrounds gather regularly around a shared purpose. And churches can be neighborhood centers for outreach programs designed to help those in need in their midst.

The future of democracy will be shaped not only in Washington but in local communities where people learn how to live together.

Reject the Politics of Cruelty

One of the most troubling developments of our time is the normalization of cruelty. Humiliation has become entertainment. Mockery has become a political strategy. Public figures gain applause by belittling opponents and dehumanizing entire groups of people.

Christians should reject this without hesitation.

The Gospel does not forbid strong convictions. It does not require passivity in the face of injustice. But it does insist that every person is worthy of dignity and respect. We can disagree passionately while refusing to treat one another as enemies.

A nation cannot survive indefinitely on contempt. Democracy requires adversaries, but it cannot survive if it turns those adversaries into enemies. The health of a republic depends upon our ability to remember that those with whom we disagree are still our neighbors, still our fellow citizens, and still bearers of God’s image.

Hope Is a Civic Virtue

Cynicism is easy. Hope requires courage.

The biblical story is ultimately a story of renewal. Again and again, God brings life out of apparent defeat and possibility out of despair. That hope does not deny reality. It faces reality honestly while refusing to surrender to it.

The same is true in public life. Democracy has always been an unfinished experiment. It has survived wars, depressions, scandals, assassinations, and periods of profound division and incompetent leadership. Its future is not guaranteed. But neither is its failure.

The question is whether enough of us still believe that this country is worth the work.

The America We Could Become

I dream of an America where children are fed, workers are respected, truth matters, democracy functions, differences are tolerated, and public service is honored. I dream of an America where political leaders understand that power is a trust rather than a possession. I dream of an America that measures success not merely by economic growth but by the well-being of its people.

I dream of an America where no one fears bankruptcy because they become ill, where every child receives a quality education, where every worker receives a fair wage for honest labor, and where our democratic institutions are strengthened rather than undermined. I dream of an America that understands patriotism not as blind loyalty but as a commitment to help our nation become more fully what it claims to be.

Most of all, I dream of an America that remembers an ancient biblical command given to God’s people in a troubled age: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jeremiah 29:7).

That command is neither liberal nor conservative. It is moral. It calls us to invest ourselves in the flourishing of our communities and our nation. It reminds us that citizenship is not merely about claiming rights; it is also about embracing responsibilities.

The future will not be saved by one leader, one party, or one election. It will be shaped by millions of ordinary people choosing generosity over selfishness, truth over propaganda, service over cynicism, and hope over fear.

The work of renewing our democracy begins where all renewal begins: in the widening of the human heart.