I’ve found myself asking two questions at the same time: What kind of person is this candidate? And what kind of governing choices does this candidate actually support? For me, neither question is enough by itself.

The Character Question

The first question I ask a candidate is about character. Does this person demonstrate honesty, integrity, humility, accountability and a commitment to tell the truth even when the truth is inconvenient? This matters because political leadership is an exercise of trust. A candidate’s promises tell me what they say they’ll do. Their character tells me how they’ll handle pressure, power and responsibility.

I know I can’t be certain about a candidate’s heart. Campaigns are curated, public figures are complicated, and all of us are capable of presenting a better version of ourselves than the one we see in the mirror first thing in the morning.

So, patterns of conduct also matter. A candidate can borrow the language of our faith without possessing the character that makes that language believable. Character doesn’t answer every political question, but it tells me something important about the person asking for my trust.

The Convictions Question

The second question I ask: What does this candidate actually support? Character matters, but character alone isn’t enough for me. I also need to consider whether a candidate’s positions and proposed actions align with the principles Scripture calls me to live by.

I look beyond slogans and campaign branding. What policies does the candidate support? What have they actually done when they had authority? How do they talk about people with less power? What do they seem to believe government should do, and what should it not do?

Reasonable people can disagree about policy. A Christian moral principle does not automatically produce one detailed legislative solution. But let’s not pretend policy is morally irrelevant. If politics is about how we live together, then the consequences of political choices matter to real people.

Why I Need Both

This is where my own approach has become clearer. If I choose a candidate based only on character, I might choose a person I believe is trustworthy but whose governing positions don’t reflect the principles my faith calls me to support.

If I choose based only on policy alignment, I might choose someone whose stated positions sound compatible with my faith while overlooking serious questions about honesty, integrity or willingness to be accountable.

Neither feels like enough.

Character tells me something about whether I can trust the person of a political candidate. Convictions tell me whether I can support the direction they will take. For me, the challenge is to hold those two things together rather than allowing one to erase the other.

Don’t Confuse Christian Faith With Partisanship

This is also where I have to be especially careful with the word “Christian.” A political party can advocate for ideas that overlap with things I believe as a Christian. Another party can advocate for different ideas that also overlap with things I believe as a Christian. That doesn’t make either party the embodiment of Christianity.

My faith isn’t a party platform with a Bible verse stapled to the top.

Jesus didn’t ask me to find the political tribe that would make discipleship easiest. He asked me to follow him. That means I should be willing to recognize truth wherever I find it, challenge my own assumptions, and admit when the political tribe I might usually identify with gets something wrong.

No candidate is Jesus. No political party is the kingdom of God. That’s actually freeing. It means I don’t have to defend every statement made by the people I vote for. I can support a candidate in some areas and disagree with them in others. I can vote for someone without turning that person into a moral hero.

A Personal Application

So when I evaluate a candidate, I ask myself a few uncomfortable questions. Am I impressed by character, or merely by confidence? Am I attracted to conviction, or merely to rhetoric? Have I looked at what this person has actually done, rather than only what they promise? Am I giving my preferred candidate the benefit of the doubt while demanding impossible perfection from the other candidate?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question: If someone I already disliked said the same thing, would I still think it was true?

That’s a good test because confirmation bias is real. Mine, at least, seems to have a graduate degree.

Christian discernment isn’t just about finding the candidate who agrees with me on the largest number of issues. It is about considering the whole picture through the moral framework I’ve chosen to follow. That means character. Convictions. Consequences. Context. And humility about what I don’t know.

The Freedom to Vote Thoughtfully

Faithful voting doesn’t require pretending there is always a perfect choice. Usually there isn’t. Sometimes the decision is between competing goods. Sometimes it is between imperfect people. Sometimes the most important question is not which candidate mirrors every conviction I hold, but which candidate’s character and governing approach I can responsibly support given the choices available.

I understand the temptation to want a cleaner answer. But maybe mature faith isn’t always about clean answers. Maybe sometimes it is about faithful discernment in messy circumstances.

I can pray. I can study. I can listen to people I disagree with. I can examine a candidate’s record. I can question my assumptions. And then I can make the best decision I can while remembering that my ultimate allegiance belongs to God, and not a politician or party platform.

My vote matters. But it isn’t my savior.

That’s a pretty important distinction.

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We often talk about faith as though it belongs in certain rooms of our lives. Definitely the Church, Prayer and Family rooms. And sometimes the Work room for the way we treat a coworker who is driving us quietly insane. Politics, however, gets placed in another room, with a sign on the door that says, “Handle with care,” or “Danger. Thin Ice,” or worse “Road Closed. Do Not Enter.”

But if following Jesus is really a way of life, drawing lines around questions of politics and policy is not so clean. The ballot is not and should not be outside the reach of discipleship. Not because Jesus belongs to a political party. He doesn't.

And faithful Christians will not always arrive at the same policy conclusions. What I am saying is simpler. If Jesus shapes how I live, then Jesus has to shape how I vote too.

Politics, Morality and Partisanship

One reason political conversations become so tangled is that we sometimes treat politics as though it were separate from morality. But it isn’t.

Politics is about how we collectively exercise power, make laws, allocate resources, establish priorities and decide what responsibilities we have toward one another in a community. Morality asks what is right, good, just and loving. Partisanship is loyalty to a particular party or side, usually the vehicle through which people pursue their preferred solutions.

Those things can be related, but they aren’t the same thing.

Politics is rarely morally neutral.

Think about the questions hiding underneath almost any political issue: Who gets help? Who gets protected? Who bears the burden? Whose voice matters? What do we owe one another? What kind of community are we trying to build?

Those aren’t merely political questions. They’re moral questions.

Politics is where our moral convictions collide with the practical question of how we live together.

The follower of Jesus can’t avoid bringing morality into politics. So the question is which morality we’re bringing. And if we’re going to claim that Jesus shapes our lives, then his teaching has to shape the moral framework we bring with us.

Start With Jesus, Not a Party Platform

I want my political morality to start with the Greatest Commandments (Matthew 22:37-39), which give me a surprisingly practical starting point: love God with all that I am, and love my neighbor as myself. That changes how I read everything on the ballot.

If loving my neighbor is at the center of my faith, then my political decisions cannot be based only on what benefits me. My income, my taxes, my property value, my retirement account, my neighborhood or my preferred cultural outcome may all matter. But they can’t be the only things that matter.

Faith, even at the ballot, asks me to look beyond the question, “What’s best for me?” and ask, “What does love require of me toward other people?”

The People Jesus Put in Front of Us

Jesus makes “love your neighbor as yourself” concrete in ways that are difficult to reduce to personal preference.

In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus describes his mission using language about good news for the poor, freedom for the oppressed and release for those who are bound.

In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus describes a final accounting in which care for hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned and otherwise vulnerable people becomes central to the question of how people have responded to him.

Those passages on Jesus’ mission and who he sees as caring for the hungry, thirsty, sick and imprisoned don’t hand us a modern legislative agenda. But they do tell us something about the moral lens Jesus wants his followers to carry. The people with the least power don’t become less important because they have less power. Say that one out loud.

That’s a difficult standard for many of us because self-interest is remarkably persuasive. I can build an impressive moral argument around whatever happens to protect my own comfort. Conveniently, I can even convince myself I’m being principled while doing it. That’s one reason I need Jesus to both challenge and drive my politics rather than simply bless it.

Who Follows Whom

If I start with a political position and then go hunting through Scripture for support, I haven't followed Jesus anywhere. I've just recruited him to follow me. But if I begin with Jesus and ask what his teaching requires of me, my faith becomes a compass.

It may lead me toward positions I expected. It may also lead me somewhere uncomfortable. That discomfort can be useful. That means I have to notice when my preferred political position is rubbing against the character of Jesus.

If I have to bend, filter or dilute my faith to keep my politics intact, then it isn’t my faith that’s doing the leading.

A Personal Application

What does this mean when I actually fill out a ballot? For me, at the ballot following Jesus means slowing down enough to ask questions that don’t begin with my own interests.

• Who is affected by this policy or candidate besides me?

• Who has the least ability to absorb its costs?

• Who might be overlooked?

• Does this approach reflect mercy, justice, honesty and concern for my neighbor?

• Does the way I am thinking about this issue resemble the way Jesus treated people who had little status or power?

It also means being honest about the limits of my own understanding. Faithfulness doesn’t require pretending every political question has a simple answer. Sometimes reasonable Christians will disagree about how best to accomplish a shared moral goal. But disagreement over strategy is different from surrendering the moral framework altogether.

Policies have numbers attached to them. People have names. I need to remember the people behind the numbers, and be driven primarily by compassion for the people.

I can't keep Jesus in the Church room and leave him out of the voting booth.

A Different Kind of Calling

My goal isn’t to become less political, but to become less partisan and more intentional about voting my faith.

I'm permitted to bring my faith into politics, and I'd go further: I'm obligated to, the same way I'm obligated to give my time, money and effort to what Jesus cares about.

Practically, it means the following:

• If I believe life is sacred, I will care about it at every life stage, before birth and after. That means supporting pre-natal health for all women, new mothers, infant care, children's nutrition, equal educational opportunity, protection of young people from police and community violence, fair treatment of the marginalized under the law, and safety nets that reach people through their senior years.

• If I believe God made us all in his image, then I must oppose efforts to dehumanize people, whether individuals or entire ethnic and national communities, simply because they disagree with me, believe differently, have an accent, or look different.

• If I call Jesus Lord and God my Father, I will take seriously the repeated biblical calls to love, defend and protect the stranger and foreigner, whatever their paperwork says. I can support limits on immigration and still refuse to accept the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants: separating children from their parents, treating people as suspect because of how they look, or cancelling paths to asylum without notice or due process.

• If I expect integrity and fairness from myself and my leaders, I won't hand power over our resources, law enforcement, courts and political machinery to people known to lie, cheat, abuse or enrich themselves, just because they carry my party's label.

Some faithful Christians believe churches and private charity, not government programs, are the best way to care for the poor, and I take that argument seriously. What I can't accept is letting it become a reason to do nothing.

I accept that all this “love your neighbor as yourself” theology may cost me in practice: more giving out of my own pocket, a more crowded dinner table, a smaller retirement account, and sometimes higher taxes. But the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 paid out of his own time and pocket, and Jesus never suggests that was too much to ask. Loving my neighbor was always going to cost something.

For Christians, the full gospel should drive our politics, not just the part a particular party focuses on. Politics is important enough to require a moral foundation deeper than party loyalty.

Don’t make Jesus fit your politics. Make your politics answer to Jesus.

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For my subscribers, I now offer a paid subscription option.

But note that weekly articles will continue to be available to all subscribers whether paid or free.

As well, all paid subscription revenues will be donated by me to justice, equity, empowerment, or service oriented nonprofit organizations.

So, why do this? To give you an opportunity to support more closely some of the justice work this Substack is intended to promote.

To start, 100% of subscription fees paid will be used to fund donations or essential supplies to support REST, a faith-based organization offering survivor-centered, trauma-informed services for hundreds exploited in the Seattle area sex trade annually. Their mission is to expand pathways to freedom, safety and hope in order to end sex trafficking. Although a Christian organization, REST provides respectful services to individuals of all faiths. Their values focus on unconditional care, relationships, strengths, minimizing barriers, and walking with clients on their journey to freedom.

The standard paid option on Substack is $5 per month or $50 per year. Plus, there is an option to become a Founder at $150 per year. Here’s what those sums might mean to REST’s mission in terms of help.

$5 covers the assembly of a reusable, durable bag with 10 essential hygiene items given to REST clients and survivors to support their transition out of trafficking

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$150 pays for an emergency hotel room for a survivor fleeing their trafficker, providing safety during a risky escape

Again, 100% of subscription fees paid will be used to support REST, meaning I will cover any fees charged by Substack.

In the future as paid subscriptions grow, I’ll consider adding other nonprofit organizations, and will share that news as the list grows.

So, what will you get in return for becoming a paid subscriber? Continued receipt of a new articles each week to read and share, full access to the archive of older articles, plus additional resources like quiet times, study guides, small group discussion guides, ebooks and other justice-related resources to be added approximately once a month starting next month.

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’sdebut book turns a childhood divided between Chinese immigrant faith and white evangelical belonging into a case for a Christianity that does not ask anyone to choose. I started this book expecting an immigrant-church-versus-assimilation story with the pressure to fit in and the slow drift from whatever your parents practiced toward whatever the majority culture rewards. What I got instead was the argument that the immigrant church is not trying to help anyone assimilate in the first place. Its real gift is a place where people can meet God in a language and rhythm that already feels like home, without translating themselves into someone else’s version of faith first.

Lee grew up believing her Chinese American identity and her Christian faith were two separate and sometimes competing things. This memoir follows her movement through that split, borrowing from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, where the potter does not hide the crack or try to make the bowl look like it was never broken. Instead, the gold runs right along the break, so the fracture becomes part of its new beauty. Lee uses that image for the break during the years of feeling like her culture and her Christianity could not both be true at once.

The first half of the book describes the break itself. She writes about her journey to understand and navigate those two worlds and how that led to her eventual discovery that her heritage is a true gift to her faith. In the second part, Lee further describes the particulars of that gift as she breaks down the features of this Asian American theology.

I had read plenty of Black theology and liberation but had never come across Asian American theology, so that intrigued me and kept me reading. Through that lens I learned that marginality could become an avenue for empathy rather than a wound to hide and that exile teaches a kind of simplicity that assimilation avoids. And ancestral paradigms, the ways her family understood the world before Sunday school, can open ways of seeing God that majority-white spaces could not. Lee is also honest about how she got there, through studying Black theology and the Black church first, and only later through Asian American voices making a similar case from her own heritage.

Particularly moving are the closing chapters on choosing proximity to the marginalized and loving across divides. Lee unapologetically calls the readers to expand their faith to embrace other groups (particularly black and queer communities) to work collaboratively toward ministries of justice and compassion.

Readers who grew up trying to disappear into a white-majority church will recognize the tension she names. Those of us who spent our formative years in mixed or majority-white congregations may come away with a clearer sense of what immigrant churches actually hold in trust: the particularity, the cultural memory, the sense of belonging that gets lost when difference is treated as something to smooth out.

Some readers will resist the theological territory Lee explores. Inclusive, Scripture-rooted frameworks often get labeled as “progressive” or “liberal” before they are understood. But for anyone curious, even if the word “progressive” makes them hesitate, her reflections offer both challenge and reward.

What gives the book its weight is Lee’s refusal to choose between grief and gratitude. She names the cost of trying to vanish into whiteness, and she names what she found on the other side: a faith repaired, not replaced. Like the kintsugi bowl she returns to throughout the memoir, the fracture she found in her faith becomes the line of gold that now makes that faith shine.

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I met a woman who spent eleven years working with survivors of domestic violence. Eleven years of intake calls, protective orders, court dates that get rescheduled three times, and clients who sometimes go back anyway. When I asked her how she was kept up with it all, she looked at me for a second too long and said, “Honestly? I don’t remember the last time I felt anything besides tired.”

That’s a person who is worn down by exactly the kind of work we’ve spent the last three weeks asking you to do. Get close. Name it specifically. Do something about it consistently. Doing all that costs something and can easily lead to exhaustion and discouragement.

Somewhere in the mid-90s a song about letting loose on the dance floor became the kind of inescapable hit you couldn’t avoid at a wedding or a cookout, or in a car with the windows down. “Getting jiggy wit it" in that song meant losing yourself in the moment—no self-consciousness and no holding back. I’m borrowing the phrase for something a little more serious than a dance floor, but I don’t think the original meaning is as far off as it sounds. Losing yourself in a moment of pure, uncalculated joy turns out to be what Scripture has described before, just centuries earlier and with considerably higher stakes.

Now, picture David: the shepherd boy who grew up to be Israel’s greatest king, giant-slayer turned monarch, a man with an entire nation watching his every move. The actual scene in 2 Samuel 6 describes the ark of the covenant finally coming home, and King David is dancing in front of it with everything he’s got. He’s leaping and spinning in a linen ephod that left considerably less to the imagination than a king’s robes usually do. His wife Michal watches from a window and despises him for it. It’s too undignified, she thinks. Too much. And beneath the office.

David’s answer to his wife a few verses later amounts to: I’ll celebrate before the Lord, and I’ll get even more undignified than this if I feel like it.

That’s not a man taking a break from his calling, but a man whose joy was part of the calling.

Joy Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness

We need to be precise about this, since the two terms often get used interchangeably.

Happiness reacts to circumstance. Something good happens and you feel it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it rises and falls with the news cycle, the Supreme Court rulings, the election results, the diagnosis, and our specific experiences each day. That means happiness is completely unavailable in those darker, more challenging times that this series of articles has been referring to: the jail cell, the shelter, the courtroom, the family that’s still waiting on an asylum hearing three years in.

Joy, however, runs the other direction. Instead of being produced by circumstances, it’s asserted against them. That’s what explains Paul and Silas singing hymns at midnight with their feet still in stocks (Acts 16:25). Their joyful singing didn’t mean that jail was easy, safe or comfortable. It was a declaration that their conditions would not get the final word.

That’s what makes joy dangerous in the best sense. Happiness says things are good while joy says things are not good and I’m still going to sing. It shows perspective and ultimate confidence in God. And that is a far more threatening statement to anyone counting on despair to win.

A Pattern That Runs the Whole Length of Scripture

David isn’t alone in this. Miriam grabs a tambourine on the far shore of the Red Sea and starts dancing before Pharaoh’s army has even finished washing up on the beach, before anyone knows for certain the threat is really over (Exodus 15:20). Her dancing is part of how she processes what just happened instead of being a reward she claims once everything settles down.

Generations later, the exiles laying the new temple foundation in Ezra 3 shout for joy and weep at the same time, so loudly that onlookers couldn’t tell the difference between the two sounds. Joy and grief, coming out of the same voices over the same rubble.

And then there’s Paul and Silas, already mentioned above, beaten and imprisoned for doing something entirely faithful. They chose to sing rather than plot revenge or sink into despair. An earthquake eventually springs the doors open, but the singing came first while the chains were still on.

None of these people waited for the win to celebrate. The celebration showed up in the middle of the mess and the stress, and sometimes because of it.

Joy Has Always Scared the People in Charge

Enslaved people in the American South sang spirituals that carried two messages at once: genuine hope in God and coded instructions for escape, sometimes in the very same lyric. Plantation owners who overheard “Wade in the Water” or “Steal Away” mostly heard religious sentiment. In reality, though, they were hearing songs of resistance from people who longed to escape.

Freedom Riders and marchers in the 1960s sang on buses headed toward violence they knew was waiting for them. Nobody expected that singing would make the batons and the dogs disappear, but it kept people upright long enough to keep marching. Sheriffs who wanted the crowds to break and scatter got something they hadn’t planned for: people singing louder as things got worse.

And Juneteenth exists precisely because celebration and unfinished business can share the same holiday. Enslaved people in Texas got the news of freedom two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared. Even with full justice still being a long way off, they celebrated the news the day it arrived and just kept fighting for everything the news hadn’t yet delivered.

None of that was a distraction from the work. It was what kept the work alive.

Skipping the Party Is Not the Serious Choice

It’s tempting to think that premature joy is somehow frivolous or unearned. Or that celebrating a small win is disrespectful to the size of the problem still in front of you.

That belief may feel correct, but it can produce burnout. The exhausted and discouraged woman with the domestic violence hotline referred to above was losing her capacity to help despite not losing her compassion. After all, eleven years of grinding without moments of shared celebration will do that to anyone.

Micah 6:8 asks you to walk humbly with your God, not grimly.

What This Actually Looks Like

A few practices worth trying. None of them are complicated.

Say the win out loud in front of other people before you move to the next fight. An actual acknowledgment that this thing got better because people showed up for it. A small incremental win perhaps, but still a win.

Build celebration into the work itself instead of treating it as a separate reward. Share a meal after the shelter shift or include music at the fundraiser instead of just another slideshow. Let the work have a party attached to it, not just a debrief.

Let joy that belongs to communities who’ve been through the fire be visible in public. Celebrations of black heritage, recognition of disabled rights achievements, and successful resettlements of refugees. These can be their own kind of witness instead of being something that needs to wait for permission.

David danced until his own wife was embarrassed for him, and Scripture doesn’t record him apologizing for it. Maybe that’s the whole point of ending here. Three weeks ago we started with getting close to people’s pain, and now we end with getting loose enough to celebrate their progress, sometimes loudly, sometimes a little undignified, right in the middle of a fight that isn’t over yet.

Go dance about something this week. Not instead of the work but because of it.

That’s the whole walk for now: get messy, get specific, get busy, and get jiggy. Not as four separate assignments but one life lived a little closer, a little more honestly, a little more actively, and with a lot more joy than we usually give ourselves permission for.

Share The Micah Walk

For years whenever another news story broke over racial injustice in this country, my response was reliable and almost automatic.

Rodney King. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Emanuel AME Church shooting in South Carolina by a while supremacist gunman during a Bible study. Philando Castille. And the list goes on.

I’d feel that familiar burn of indignation and reflexively send money to a couple of organizations doing racial justice work. Sometimes it was a one-time gift after something particularly awful made the news. Sometimes it was just renewing a recurring donation I’d set up years earlier. Either way, I felt like I’d done something, and if I’m honest, I felt like a justice advocate.

Then George Floyd was murdered, and something in me finally caught up to what should have been obvious a long time before. I sat with that video, and with everything that came pouring out in the weeks after it. It forced me to review what my actual life looked like day-to-day and week-to-week when it came to racial justice. And the honest answer was that my concern for racial injustice lived almost entirely in my bank statement. It hadn’t meaningfully made its way into my neighborhood, my workplace, my church, or my ordinary day. I had built an entire identity as someone who cared, but the evidence for it was merely a string of transactions. Ugh.

The difference between performative justice and organic justice is not about intensity. A quiet and boring weekday can carry more justice in it than a march that makes the local news. The real question is whether it shows up when nobody’s watching and nothing’s trending in the news.

When the Check Is the Whole Thing

Giving money to good organizations doing hard work means something. It funds real lawyers and advocates, and it enables real programs that need real dollars to exist. Writing that check or setting up that recurring gift means moving resources toward something that matters. That is significant and deserves to be treated like a genuine contribution rather than dismissed as fake.

The trap is letting the giving stand in for the whole project. It’s feeling the sting of a headline, sending one hundred dollars to a legal fund, and quietly considering it handled for the month without asking what it would look like to actually live differently because of what I’d just read. That’s what I was doing. My money was doing something, but I wasn’t. And it took me embarrassingly long to notice that the donations should have been the start instead of the finish line.

What This Actually Looks Like When It’s Working

If performative justice is an event, organic justice is a habit. Unlike the individual activities you schedule alongside your other activities like medical appointments or times working out at the gym, it’s a set of defaults baked into and woven through your routine.

Two pieces we’ve already talked about in this “Let’s Get…” series set the stage for this present article. “Let’s Get Messy…” is about proximity; that is, letting your actual life connect with people whose situations are different from yours instead of managing justice from a safe, clean distance. And “Let’s Get Specific…” is about naming actual people, actual numbers, actual situations instead of gesturing vaguely at “the poor” or “the marginalized” like they’re merely a category rather than a human being. Organic justice takes both of those themes and just keeps them running in your current everyday life week after week after week.

The List

This is the part of the article you should bookmark, because it’s going to run long. On purpose.

What follows is a working list of ideas, gathered loosely by area of life, meant to give you practical and feasible options to consider as you figure out what it looks like to get busy doing justice in your life instead of just believing in it.

I don’t believe that it’s a lack of conviction that usually explains a gap between believing that justice matters and actually practicing it. It’s more likely the lack of specific, doable ideas or opportunities sitting in front of you on the day you finally have twenty minutes or a day off and the will to use them well.

So think of this as a long menu, not a syllabus. Skim it, argue with parts of it, delete what does not work for you, and add your own items in the margins. Let it give imagination something concrete to grab onto. Read the whole thing. Then pick one.

In your household and close relationships

• Stop letting a stereotype-laced joke go unchallenged among your friends or acquaintances without a word from you.

• Notice who gets left off your dinner invite list and ask yourself honestly why.

• Teach your kids the actual name of the family down the street instead of “those people.”

• This month, invite someone to your table who doesn’t look, vote, or worship like you do. On purpose.

• On Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas or another family-oriented holiday, invite an immigrant family to join you for the meal—like they’re part of the family. If they’re not family when you invite them, they’ll likely feel like it by the end of the meal.

• Correct yourself out loud in front of your kids when you catch your own bias, so they see the correcting and learn how to do it themselves. Because the learning and growing should never end.

• Ask your spouse or roommate what they’ve noticed about how you talk about people who are struggling. Do you tend to be judgmental, condescending, or empathetic?

In your congregation

• Ask your church leadership a direct question about where the benevolence fund actually goes, how decisions get made, and what community needs it’s intended to address and not intended to address.

• Volunteer for the ministry nobody wants, the one with the food pantry organization, the clothing drive sorting and distribution, or the shelter overnight shift.

• Request a sermon series on a specific justice topic instead of hoping one shows up eventually. And follow up and ask why if it doesn’t happen.

• Show up to the meeting where budget decisions get made and funds are prioritized.

• Offer to drive someone to church who doesn’t have reliable transportation, every week, not just once. If you don’t know who, ask your church leader for suggestions.

• Identify three or four local churches in your city with active justice ministries and set up a meeting with one of them for yourself and your church’s leader, elder or deacon to learn how and why they do what they do.

In your neighborhood and city

• Go to one school board or city council meeting this quarter, even if you don’t speak. Or, do speak up. Check the pre-published agenda so you attend when a compelling topic will be discussed.

• Learn one specific statistic cold about your own city, like the eviction rate or the average wait time for affordable housing and be able to say it without looking it up.

• Introduce yourself to a neighbor whose native language isn’t English and learn how to say their names correctly. And follow-up by greeting them by name or using their individual names in a follow-up card.

• Show up at a neighborhood association meeting and ask who’s being left out of the decisions. Those without notice of the agenda? Those with limited transportation options? Those who work at the usual association meeting times. Those without childcare (if not provided by the association)?

• Find out who your city council representative is (for local advocacy), not just your state senator.

• Donate your outgrown but good condition young readers books to a local public school library in a lower-income neighborhood. And volunteer to help organize or refresh that library if needed.

• Purchase the complete or partial list of books that received recognized awards for excellence, diversity, peace or justice in children’s books, and then donate a set of them to one or more local low-incomed or underfunded schools. Top recognized children’s book awards include:

  • The Coretta Scott King Book Award, given annually by the American Library Association, honoring Black authors and illustrators whose work reflects the African American experience.

  • The Pura Belpré Award, also administered through the American Library Association, honoring Latino and Latina authors and illustrators whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates Latino cultural experience.

  • The Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, given by the Jane Addams Peace Association, specifically for children’s books that promote peace, social justice, world community, and equality between the sexes and among all races.

  • The Newbery Medal, the oldest and most prestigious American award for excellence in children’s literature generally, given by the American Library Association.

  • The Schneider Family Book Award, given by the American Library Association, honoring an author or illustrator for a book that embodies the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.

  • The Stonewall Book Award, specifically the youth literature category, honoring books of exceptional merit relating to the LGBTQ experience.

• By yourself or with a group of friends, join an ethnic heritage celebration in the community to learn more about a community you’re unfamiliar with, for example:

  • Lunar New Year celebrations celebrated widely by Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean communities, often with parades, lion dances, and night markets.

  • Juneteenth celebrations marketing the end of slavery in the U.S., now held in most major cities with music, food and historical programming.

  • Diwali festivals, the Hindu festival of lights, celebrated by South Asian communities with lamps, fireworks and public gatherings open to anyone curious.

  • Black or other Heritage film festivals offering perspectives from the lived experiences of those communities.

  • Native American powwows, intertribal gatherings with dancing, drumming, and vendors, often open to the public and genuinely educational if you go with a spirit of respect rather than spectacle.

  • Oktoberfest and other European heritage festivals like Greek Fest or Scandinavian Days which are easy to overlook as “heritage” events since they’re mainstream.

In your money and time

• Move your banking to an institution with a documented community reinvestment record or ask your current bank what theirs looks like. Research first to learn and then act.

• Tip like the person serving you is trying to make rent this month, because they probably are.

• Turn one of your one-time donations into a recurring monthly gift, even a small one. And subscribe to that organization’s newsletter to keep up with events and developments.

• Give to a specific local organization by name instead of a general national fund. Ideas include: a food bank or pantry, the nearest low-income tiny home village, a transitional housing program in your community, a youth center or after school program serving low-income neighborhoods, a local crisis pregnancy center, an immigrant or refugee resource center, a domestic violence or suicide prevention hotline operating locally, or any others. If unsure, ask any local nonprofit for other suggestions.

• Set a recurring calendar reminder to check in on the same cause every quarter instead of only when it’s in the news or at the end of the year when considering tax deductible donations.

• Buy from a small, local, minority-owned business you’ve been meaning to try even if not the cheapest or not the most convenient location. And get to know the owner’s or workers’ names so you can use them every time you return.

In your voice

• Write a letter to a representative instead of reposting someone else’s outrage. Registering your local voice with local elected officials makes a difference.

• Comment under your real name and real face instead of hiding behind an anonymous account.

• Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding with the relative who says something you know isn’t right, instead of just muting or ignoring.

• Say something with friends or family when the dehumanizing joke gets made, even if your voice shakes a little.

• Ask a direct, specific question in a meeting where an unfair decision is being made, instead of bringing it up privately afterward where it’s safer and quieter.

• Correct a false claim you see repeated in your own social circle, even when it would be easier to scroll past.

Pick One

If you’ve gotten to this point of the article, it means you’ve read the full list. But a list read is not a list lived. Do not close this article having absorbed thirty-plus ideas and acted on zero of them.

But don’t pick five either. Pick just one to start. One specific item from this list that you can mark on a calendar and tell a friend you’re doing so they can ask you about it later.

Do it this week, while the article is still fresh in your mind.

Six Months From Now

Organic justice gets measured by whether it’s still there in six months, quietly, when nobody’s checking on you and nothing about it is interesting enough to post. My years of giving failed me because I let them stand alone, with nothing else in my week catching up to them.

Next week: after all that work, the “Let’s Get….” series closes with why the fight actually needs a dance floor. That’s “Let’s Get Jiggy Wit It...”. Check back for that, if even just to see what’s “jiggy” means.

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There’s a familiar, general prayer for “peace in our nation” that churches across the country pray every week, the same week a specific person got shot by a specific law enforcement officer or a specific family got separated at a specific border crossing.

Although a specific vote happened on a specific bill stripping hungry children of nutritional support, we recite a general prayer to “help the needy among us” over and over, week after week.

And when a specific child was orphaned from a specific bomb dropped on their specific town, the general “prayer for the Middle East” checks the box of concern without acknowledging the specific hurt, suffering, or tears of the real children in specific communities.

As a result, nobody in the room feels implicated, and everybody nods in reverence because the prayer covers the whole week without revealing anything specific or uncomfortable that actually happened in it.

And how about the sermon on “brokenness in the world” or “loving your neighbor”? The generalness of it makes it a very safe sermon to give. You can preach it in any decade to any congregation and never once risk identifying a name or offending anyone.

I’ve already written about churches and institutions doing this from a podium, choosing careful language so nobody has to be named or feel challenged by the sermon. This article, however, is closer to home. It’s about my own mouth and your own mouth. The prayers each of us prays, the conversations we have at dinner tables, the comments we leave, the way we talk about hard things with people we love. Because long before it’s an institutional church problem, vagueness was a personal habit.

Say “pray for the hurting” and you sound compassionate without picking a side, without risking the friendship with the person across the table who might disagree, without admitting you have no idea what you’d actually do about the thing you just referred to.

Say “there’s a lot going on in the world right now” and you’ve acknowledged something without committing to anything. Nobody does this to be dishonest. But it is self-protective by default. It’s the verbal equivalent of keeping your hands in your pockets.

Naming something specifically costs more because when you pray for a specific person by name, you’ve exposed what you believe about that situation and made yourself accountable to ask about it again next week. You might find out the person across the table or down the pew disagrees with you about what happened, and now you have to deal with that instead of retreating to the comfortable fog where you both just care about the general state of “brokenness.” Naming specifically buys something vagueness never can because it makes suffering real and prompts us more forcefully to act.

Look at Scripture and you’ll find specifics. When David needed to be confronted, Nathan didn’t walk in with a general sermon on integrity. He told a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb, let David get righteously angry at the story, and then said the four words that brought it home to the man sitting on the throne: “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). A specific accusation, aimed at a specific person, about a specific thing he’d done.

Jesus does something similar with the woman at the well (John 4). He doesn’t open with a lecture on sin in the abstract. He tells her, plainly, about the five husbands and the man she’s currently living with who isn’t one of them. As uncomfortable as that is to read, imagine the awkwardness of being called out by Jesus (or anyone for that matter) that specifically in person. For what it’s worth, that woman did end up running back into town saying that Jesus had told her everything about her life. And vague, general, non-specific compassion wouldn’t have produced that reaction in anyone.

In an ordinary week, the gap looks like “pray for the hurting” versus praying by name for the specific coworker who just lost custody of her kids. Or “there’s a lot going on in the world” versus naming, out loud, at dinner, the actual law that passed stripping nutritional benefits from needy youth or the actual shooting that happened three towns over. A sermon that mentions general injustices or the broad conflict in the Middle East in one sentence and moves on versus one that names the eviction rate in your own zip code or identifies the specific countries, towns and neighborhoods bombed.

These examples only require more courage than a normal conversation. They require us to stop reaching for the word or phrase that lets everyone off the hook.

So think back to the last time you prayed about something or brought something up at dinner. How about the public prayer or sermon at church that references only a vague version on purpose because naming risks looking political by some. Vague language isn’t neutral. It feels neutral, but in fact it is a choice made quietly enough that it can convince us no choice was made.

Next week: naming the problem is only step two. Step three is whether the naming specifically shapes how you live. That’s “Let’s Get Busy...”

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According to AP-NORC polling, most American adults who give to charity each year do it with money, not time or personal contact. Roughly three in four adults report donating money to a cause in the past year, while only about three in ten say they volunteered any time at all. The gap tells us that most of American generosity flows through channels that never require a face, a name, or a personal conversation.

I myself have leaned disproportionately on the recurring donations that show up on my credit card statement each month and the seasonal donations of canned foods, hygiene products or winter coats collected at work or in the church lobby. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small light goes on that says I’m doing good, and then I move on.

But if I never have to see a face, hear a story, or sit through an uncomfortable silence with somebody, have I actually done what Scripture keeps asking of me? Or have I just found an efficient shortcut to a much smaller version of the command to love my neighbor as myself?

Proximity

Scripture describes caring for the vulnerable using the language of proximity, not transaction. Proximity means nearness that costs you something: your time, your comfort, your carefully managed schedule. It extends the service beyond the event and keeps asking something of you the next week, and the week after that.

That's why Scripture keeps reaching for images of closeness instead of images of exchange. Widows and orphans absent from the table get noticed. The stranger arrives with a name you're expected to learn how to say correctly. And Jesus told his followers to visit the prisoner using the same verb you'd use for checking on a sick relative down the street. Proximity sees the people and recognizes their dignity.

Transactions

The transactional approach is easier: write the check, set up the automated donation, deliver the canned food, or add the name to the prayer list.

None of that is a bad thing to do because donations of money, food and clothing matter and the prayer of the righteous can accomplish much. It becomes a problem when we limit our giving, service, and care for the vulnerable to transactions and never have to actually look them in the eye, know their name, or connect with them. Don’t stop your donations and prayers, but let’s admit that those alone aren’t the same thing as loving your neighbor as yourself.

When Jesus encountered a man with leprosy in Mark 1, he could have healed him with a simple word spoken from several feet away. Instead, the text says he reached out and touched him first, which he had no medical or theological need to do. He did the same thing at Jairus's house in Mark 5, taking a dead girl's hand in his own after the mourners outside had already given up and moved on to grief. And when a funeral procession in Nain stopped him cold on the road in Luke 7, Jesus walked up to the coffin carrying a widow's only son and touched it, an act that would have made him ceremonially unclean, before he ever said a word to the boy inside it. Consider also Luke 19 when a short, despised tax collector climbed a tree just to catch a glimpse of him. Jesus didn't just glance up and offer a blessing, but invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus's house, turning a passing moment into an afternoon at somebody's table. All too often when the comfort and safety of distance was available to Jesus, he declined it.

This was the whole method. God didn't send a memo down to earth explaining what love looks like. Instead, God moved into the neighborhood via Jesus and let it cost him his life. If proximity was good enough for the incarnation, it's probably good enough for a morning at a shelter or driving someone to the DMV to fill out forms.

A friend from a small group I was part of years ago once described a service opportunity our church was organizing as an afternoon spent at the church building, playing games and just talking with a family that was going through a hard stretch. To get people to sign up, he pitched it to the room as a “very clean and comfortable” way to serve. No mess and no danger, he said. Nothing like the soup kitchen shifts or the shelter nights where things could get awkward fast.

That pitch for clean and comfortable service revealed that we had built a whole hierarchy of service opportunities ranked by how little they’d cost us emotionally, and the ones we called “clean” were the ones where real contact, real story, and real discomfort had been carefully engineered out of the experience. I don’t think anyone meant harm by it, and that friend indeed had a heart to serve. But to me it felt like we had accepted the idea that closeness to someone else’s pain is a risk to be minimized rather than an opportunity to lean into.

Perhaps the real reason we tend to default to the distant version is that it doesn’t cost us as much emotionally. A donation is an investment of money or things that neither disappoints nor involves the complexity, emotional friction, unpredictability, awkwardness, or other stuff of relationships that don’t always resolve neatly. But a relationship is an entanglement that might ask more of you next month than it did this one. It might even unsettle an opinion you were pretty confident about or might not resolve into anything tidy at all.

That cost is real, and pretending it isn’t only guarantees we’ll keep choosing the version that avoids it.

So here's the uncomfortable inventory. Think of the person, the family, or the cause you've been supporting: maybe a recurring donation charge, a can of soup, a name on a list you pray through once a week without ever hearing their voice. None of that is wasted. But is there anyone on that list you've quietly decided to keep at arm's length, not because you don't care, but because getting closer might ask something of you that a donation never will? Hold that person in mind, because the list below is aimed at them.

Twenty Messier Ways to Show Up

If distance is the default, here are some concrete ways to close it.

1. Eat a meal inside the food bank or shelter instead of dropping off food at the food drive and leaving.

2. Learn the names of the regulars at the food pantry table and use them the next time you see them.

3. Sit down next to the person outside the grocery store instead of walking past with a dollar and your eyes forward. Introduce yourself and learn their name.

4. Become a CASA volunteer rather than simply donating to a foster care organization.

5. Visit the nursing home resident whose family stopped coming years ago and ask about her life before that room. Then visit them again and again.

6. Drive a foster kid or senior to their doctor’s appointment instead of dropping supplies at the agency or facility.

7. Write letters to someone who’s incarcerated, rather than giving once a year to a prison ministry.

8. Hire someone recently released from prison, instead of writing a check to the nonprofit that helps people like him find work. And refer them to others to do the same.

9. Sit at a family’s kitchen table while they work through a lease or a form they don’t fully understand, rather than funding the agency that serves them.

10. Learn to pronounce a stranger’s name the way their own family says it.

11. Show up to someone’s immigration, custody, or benefits hearing or check-in so they aren’t the only face in the room without support.

12. Trade the annual toy drive drop-off for an afternoon actually spent with the kids who’ll open those toys.

13. Ask a single parent what her week actually looks like, then offer to take one specific thing off her plate instead of a general “let me know if you need anything.”

14. Invite someone recently released from prison to your table for a regular meal, not a one-time gesture.

15. Volunteer for the overnight shift at a shelter instead of the daytime slot where you never actually see who sleeps there.

16. Ride the bus or walk the route someone without a car has to take, at least once, to understand what their day costs them.

17. Drive an immigrant to the DMV and help them with the paperwork to get their ID or driver license (a first step for getting other benefits).

18. Skip the check to the youth tutoring nonprofit this month and tutor a kid yourself, in person, on a schedule you actually keep.

19. Ask an elderly neighbor to tell you about their life before you knew them and actually remember what they say. Arrange a follow-up conversation over coffee where they live or at your kitchen table.

20. Show up to the same soup kitchen or shelter often enough that people start recognizing your face, not just your donation.

None of these require a platform, a title, or a theology degree. They just require showing up somewhere you’d normally avoid and staying long enough for it to get uncomfortable.

I still make the same recurring donations I mentioned at the start of this article, and I'm not going to stop. The donation matters. The canned food matters. But between the monthly charge and the separation created between myself and the human need, I don’t want to lose the thread of what Jesus did with his own two hands.

Jesus walked toward the leper, the coffin, and the tax collector's tree when every social instinct of his day told him to keep his distance. Getting messy isn't the opposite of generosity; rather, it is what generosity was supposed to look like all along.

Next week is Part 2, “Let’s Get Specific”. Once you've closed the distance and gotten messy, the next question is whether you're willing to say out loud what you actually see.

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In 1807, a printer in London bound a book that looked exactly like a Bible. It had a leather cover, gilt lettering, and even a ribbon marker tucked in the spine, but the page numbers started skipping where whole sections were removed—the entire story of Israel walking out of slavery and the hopeful messages of liberation in the Psalms and Revelation simply gone. It is real and is commonly referred to as the “Slave Bible.”

An Anglican missionary society produced the Slave Bible for the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. The verses telling servants to obey their masters were left in, but the verses that might have told an enslaved person that God takes sides against the one holding the whip did not.

And that’s really part of a pattern that keeps showing up at least three distinct ways, each serving double duty as a warning to us.

The crudest version is the simplest to name: you just cut out uncomfortable parts. The Slave Bible is the bluntest example of the “cut it” strategy, but it wasn’t the only time someone took actual scissors to the text. In 1939, eleven German Protestant regional churches founded something called the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life with the stated purpose to “dejudaize” German Christianity. It produced a New Testament that removed Jesus’s genealogies that trace his Jewish/Davidic ancestry, stripped out Old Testament quotations, and recast Jesus into an Aryan figure at war with Judaism. Eighty years later in 2019, eight of those same regional Protestant churches (note that’s only eight of the original eleven churches) erected a public memorial of confession in Eisenach confessing their own guilt out loud.

Neither of those events is subtle because both required someone to physically decide which pages stayed and which ones would be cut. Very few of us will ever sit on a committee that literally cuts scripture, but how about when someone decides that a topic is off limits for a sermon, a Bible study, or a Thanksgiving table conversation because it’s “too political,” or “too controversial.” They may not be tearing the page out of the Books of Amos, Micah or Isaiah, but tacitly deciding not to accept or discuss accomplishes the same result.

The second version doesn’t need scissors at all if you just keep preaching the same fraction of the book, until the rest goes quiet from disuse. Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, a Presbyterian minister and plantation owner in Georgia, wrote a catechism (think of it as a doctrinal FAQ) used widely across the antebellum South to instruct enslaved people in the faith. In it he addressed how a newly religious enslaved person ought to behave toward their master: be honest, diligent, and faithful, and even when whipped for doing well, take it patiently and look to God for reward. Rev. Jones cited Ephesians 6 and Titus 2, “slaves, obey your masters,” and simply never got around to Exodus, or the prophets’ repeated indictments of landowners who took advantage of the poor. The scissors were replaced with merely narrowing the text down to the parts convenient for the person doing the teaching.

The same move shows up whenever “submit to governing authorities” from Romans 13 gets preached as a stand-alone command, unaccompanied by the repeated examples of prophets confronting kings to their faces, or by Peter telling the religious authorities in Acts 5 that he must obey God rather than men. Instead of getting cut out from the Bible, it just gets read in isolation from the parts of the same Bible that complicate it.

And consider how some Christian nationalist arguments cite 2 Chronicles 7:14, God’s promise to Solomon that if his people humble themselves, God will heal their land. One theologian called it “the John 3:16 of American civil religion.” Critics point out that the verse was spoken to Israel about Israel’s temple, and that lifting it into a promise about America requires quietly setting aside the fact that the passage never mentions America at all. Notice how that argument uses one convenient verse, repeated often, to stand in for a book that has a great deal more to say.

The third version doesn’t either remove anything or play favorites among verses. Instead, it takes an intact passage and reads it to mean something pretty close to its opposite. I call that interpretive contortionism.

The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in apartheid-era South Africa built an entire official theology on the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Those DRC theologians argued that God scattering the nations and confusing their languages proved that God intended permanent racial separation as a matter of divine design, and codified that interpretation in church policy in 1974. But if you actually read Genesis 11, the scattering looks like judgment on human pride and not a blueprint for keeping people apart by skin color, race or ethnicity.

We can do a smaller version of all three without noticing when we focus on personal piety, purity, devotion, and tithing, but ignore or minimize the parts on mercy and justice. Not because we cut Micah 6:8 out of our Bibles, but because we’ve quietly decided that justice is someone else’s assignment, contrary to what the Bible as a whole actually says. Or maybe we take entire categories like poverty, immigration, or the treatment of the imprisoned, and set them in a box marked “political” or “worldly” as though a subject the prophets addressed by name for eight straight centuries somehow stopped being God’s business the moment it showed up on a ballot.

We’ve slyly replaced the scissors with one of those same three habits the historical examples demonstrated: cut what’s inconvenient, keep circling the verses that already agree with you, and if a passage still won’t cooperate, reconsider its meaning until it does.

We don’t need an institute or a printing press to get a smaller Bible than the one we own. Just enough Sundays where the convenient parts get read out loud and the costly parts don’t.

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Let’s set those books aside and instead ask “what did Jesus actually ask of us.” He asked us to love God with everything we’ve got, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The rest of the New Testament fills in what that actually looks like day in and day out, and empathy is an integral part of that.

The second greatest commandment

According to Jesus, love your neighbor as yourself is in the top two of the greatest commandments (Matthew 22:37-39). And it doesn’t come with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. You must imagine your way into somebody else’s skin long enough to ask what you’d want and feel if you were the one standing where they’re standing. That’s empathy. Loving your neighbor as yourself requires first that you feel something like what your neighbor feels. Without the empathy, you’re left with a nice sentiment at best and a mechanical good deed at worst.

The one anothers assume it

You have likely heard of the “one another passages”—the approximately 60 commands in the New Testament to love one another, bear one another’s burdens, weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice, comfort one another, be kind and compassionate to one another, and so on, and so on.

Read that list slowly and notice that it is filled with relational, felt, embodied language. More than mere transactions like “provide financial assistance to one another” or “issue correct theological statements to one another.” The Apostle Paul says to bear each other’s burdens, suggesting there’s an emotional weight to share compared to just helping to manage those burdens from a safe administrative distance. You can’t weep with someone you refuse to actually see, and can’t rejoice with someone whose joy you’ve decided not to let touch you. Empathy requires close emotional involvement and active tears, hugs, or laughs as the case may be. It is part of the very definition of the one anothers.

Jesus modeled it

Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though he knew that seconds later he’d call his friend back out of it. He knew exactly how the story ended, and yet still let the grief and tears move through him.

When the crowds followed him, hungry and worn out, Jesus was moved with compassion (Mattew 9:36 & Matthew 14:14). The Greek word there, splagchnizomai, is a gut word that describes something that hits you physically and drives someone to take action.

At a widow’s funeral in the town of Nain, Luke says Jesus’ heart went out to the widow before he raised her son back to life. Jesus’ formula was to feel first, and act after. That required empathy.

It’s the same posture mental health advocate gets at in a piece worth reading, A Lack of Empathy, an Abundance of Apathy. As Pohlmann puts it, empathy works like a muscle: use it and it gets stronger. Neglect it, and apathy moves in to fill the space. Scary, isn’t it!

There are times I refused to feel someone’s pain or struggle in their situation, where I’d quietly stopped letting myself feel anything at all. No empathy, no feeling, no tears, and consequently no action. I had a co-worker I used to lunch with somewhat regularly until they went out on an extended leave. Blocking myself from feeling meant I wouldn’t have to make the follow-up call or send a message checking in.

There’s also a whole category of suffering in the news I’ve learned to scroll right past, because letting it land might require something more of me. And how about the family member whose experience I filed under “their own choices” or “it’s complicated” or “it’s none of my business” instead of trying to understand and share in the challenges of living through it.

None of those were failures of theology. They were failures of empathy. And I’m confident God knows the difference.

Loving mercy, as Micah puts it, was never meant to be information delivered at a safe distance. Hesed (Hebrew word for mercy) is that stubborn, sticks-with-you love that the word describes and requires getting close enough to feel the weight of what somebody’s carrying. Mercy that costs you nothing isn’t real mercy; it’s just paperwork with good intentions attached.

For Further Reflection

Consider the reasons that can tempt someone (or you) to refuse feeling empathy when someone nearby is clearly hurting or afraid or confused or overwhelmed. What would be the remedy for that according to Jesus’ words and example?

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Having grown up in church, I have heard the Palm Sunday sermons, the Good Friday reflections, the Easter morning celebrations. I thought I had a pretty solid grip on Holy Week, the eight days from Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his resurrection, at least until I read Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace Throughout Holy Week by Porterfield.

The whole book runs on one question: What if Jesus had a coherent strategy for making peace, and we’ve mostly missed it?

The central argument is that Jesus did not drift through Holy Week as a passive victim of circumstances. He walked straight into conflict, showing up for the people everyone else stepped over, and told truths he knew would get him killed. And he did all of it without violence or retaliation.

Porterfield structured Fight Like Jesus to be read during Lent, one chapter per week, tracking each day from Palm Sunday through Easter. In reality, it not a Lent-only book. The questions it raises about peacemaking, resistance, and the nature of power are not seasonal ones. It will hit you whether you read it in July, October or any darn month.

Here is a partial list of things I thought I understood that this book quietly rearranged for me:

• Jesus chose to ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey as a theological statement (really, the donkey was his choice?).

• When the crowd waved palms and shouted “Hosanna,” they were invoking a symbol loaded with military and nationalist meaning, drawn straight from the Maccabean revolt.

• Jesus clearing the Temple courts was a calculated, nonviolent act of advocacy for a group of people I never would have guessed (who do you think he cleared it for?).

• There is a direct literary connection between the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and the Seven Woes Jesus pronounced against the religious leaders in Matthew 23. These two passages bookend Jesus’ public ministry, and reading them alongside each other changed how I hear both. Do you know the connection?

• I was wrong about Barrabas. After Porterfield provided the historical context, I uncomfortably admit that I am not as certain as I used to be that I would have chosen to free Jesus over Barrabas the muderer.

• The early church, directly shaped by Jesus’ teaching and example throughout Holy Week, has not produced a single recorded instance in the first century of Christians accepting or advocating violence as a legitimate tool for resisting injustice. Really?

• Porterfield’s treatment of Holy Saturday, the day Jesus lay in the tomb while his disciples sat in grief and confusion, is quietly powerful.

• Forgiveness is an actual superpower. Read the book to discover why.

I had the privilege of joining a Q&A session with Porterfield after reading the book. You can tell within about five minutes that he is not performing a position. Porterfield is a theological scholar, yes, and a genuinely gifted writer; but he is also someone who has organized his actual life around the people Scripture keeps pointing to—the poor, the unrepresented and the imprisoned. Those are ones we tend to walk past on our way to something more comfortable. Porterfield advocates for the marginalized by showing up with energy, with presence, and with his actual time.

I will tell you what the book did to me, practically speaking, because that is the most honest review I can offer. I brought it to my home Bible study group and we spent back-to-back meetings working through it together using the discussion questions in the back of the book. I separately gave copies into the hands of a half dozen church leaders I respect, with a strong personal recommendation to read it. I also bought a small stack of extra copies to give away as I have opportunity in the coming months. I am not a person who does that with books, but was compelled to do it after reading Fight Like Jesus.

This book will leave you asking what you are doing with you know and where you are moving toward conflict rather than away from it. And who are the people in your community whose woes I have been too comfortable to hear?

Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace Throughout Holy Week by Jason Porterfield is published by Herald Press (2022). It includes discussion questions for group use and works well as a small group study. Highly recommended.

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This week I want to let four voices speak for themselves instead of writing about them. The four voices the Scripture keeps naming together: the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor. So here goes.

Read it slow. (And out loud, if you can stand it.)

I am the stranger. Do you see me?

I crossed a border and became a category.

Back home I had a name. I was also a son who was his father’s pride or a woman who made her mother laugh so hard all the time. When I fled, I had to fit my whole life into a backpack, discarding the familiar, the safe, the comfort, and the security I had before.

They call me a line item now. I’m a risk. And others get to write the headline without ever asking me what actually happened.

They ask where I’m from like it’s a crime or a verdict, and my nervous, shaky voice is used against me as evidence. I make myself smaller in rooms to feel safer. It’s something I’ve gotten very good at. You would too if you had to reduce and minimize yourself to be safe.

God, you were a stranger once. Not symbolically, but actually. You too traveled an actual road at night, spent time fleeing and hiding, and experienced the same actual moments when the only safe place on the map happened to be the wrong country.

So when I tell you I am tired of explaining myself to people who have never once had to, I believe you know that tiredness because you once felt it in your own body, not just in your book.

Please don’t let me become mere paperwork to the people who could help me. My accent shouldn’t be the only thing they hear before they decide who I am. It would be enough to be seen as already whole. I carry the image of God, but nobody bothered to acknowledge that at the border.

Let me be a name again. Just once. Let someone say it right, and see me.

Do you see me?

✶

I am the widow who wants to be heard.

I used to be half of a sentence. Now I am the whole thing, and shorter than it used to be. That reduction haunts me.

Nobody warned me that grief comes with paperwork. Bank forms and insurance calls. A voice on hold thanking me for my patience while my patience is the only thing left that I haven’t already given away.

I go to the store and buy one of everything, and it isn’t enough, and it’s also too much.

I sit at church where we used to sit together. The weekly church bulletin email is still addressed to both of us because nobody’s gotten around to changing it. Some days that feels like mercy and some days it feels like a wound that keeps reopening on schedule. Yes, that hurts.

Defender of widows, that’s what they call you in the songs. I need it to be true today. As a phone call that I don’t have to make by myself. As someone in the third pew who still remembers my name after the casseroles stop coming and after the sympathy cards turn into silence. After everyone else’s life goes back to normal, while mine doesn’t, and never will again.

A rescue doesn’t make sense anymore. I already buried the person who would have been that. What I need now is a witness, someone who won’t let me disappear into insignificance.

Do you hear me?

✶

Call me an orphan but still love me.

I have been the extra chair and the extra place setting at three different tables. The awkwardness of a house that is not really mine.

People ask if I’m okay in the same tone they use for the weather. Fine, I say. Fine is a word I learned early, because the true answer takes too long. Nobody has that kind of time for a kid who isn’t theirs anyway.

I have a whole map memorized identifying which chairs are safe to sit in, and which rooms go quiet when I walk into them. Nobody else knows about that map because naming it would make it real. It’s already real enough.

Father is supposed to be the easiest word in the book, easy enough for other kids to say without thinking twice about it. For me it’s the one I’ve had to build from scratch out of vague ideas and other people’s descriptions. Board by board, and room by room. Like building a house without ever once having stood inside one. Without a single memory of what a dad’s steady hands are supposed to feel like or what it’s like to ride on a father’s shoulders.

Pity doesn’t keep anyone warm at night, and I’ve collected enough of it to know. What does help, though, is someone who stays past the point where staying stops being easy. Give me an ordinary weekday where nothing happens except someone chooses to still be there.

Lord, I want you to be the one who doesn’t leave. The one who doesn’t need reminding that I’m still here, still waiting, still hoping someone will ask not just if I’m okay, but who I actually am.

Do you love me?

✶

Will you count me even though I am poor?

I am not lazy, nor a lesson for others to learn from. And don’t point me out when you want to feel grateful for your own good luck.

I have worked jobs that broke my body for money and still ended up with not enough. The math on rent and medicine is done in my sleep over and over, and it still doesn't add up. Standing in long lines that told me my worth without a single word. The particular shame of counting exact change while somebody pretends not to watch.

Jesus said the poor would always be with us. For a long time, I thought that meant the math had already been given up on. I don’t think that anymore. It meant I shouldn’t dare get used to this.

What the poor want is simple. We want a system that wasn’t built to grind us down. And people who notice and say something when it grinds anyway.

Do you count me? Or am I just the math nobody wants to do?

✶

We are the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor.

Will you see us. Will you hear us. Will you love us. Will you count us.

We are not the same story. But we are the same question, asked into the same silence, from four different voices.

Do you hear us. Do you see us. Will you say our situation out loud, by name, the way the prophets used to. Or will you just manage us with softer words and longer meetings.

We are not asking you to feel bad about the light you have. We are asking you to bring some of it in here.

Act justly. Love mercy. Walk into the room and stay long enough to learn our names and use them.

Will you see us, hear us, love us, and count us.

✶

If one of these four voices was yours this week, I hope this prayer found you.

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I am not writing this as a pastor or a scholar. I'm just a Christian who believes that loving the church means being honest about her, the way you would be honest with a friend headed down a bad road. So here are seven sins, recurring patterns rather than one-time incidents, that the American church has committed again and again across three centuries. Each one shows up more than once in our history, which is exactly what should worry us. I write this hoping each of us decides to do what we can to keep this history from repeating itself.

1. Dehumanization: twisting Scripture into a leash

Before the Civil War, plantation-region ministers did not quietly tolerate slavery. Many preached it. They took a badly twisted reading of Genesis 9, the so-called "curse of Ham," and built a theological engine that ran for two centuries, teaching enslaved people that obedience to their masters was obedience to God. That same instinct, using doctrine to decide who counts as fully human, resurfaced a century later at Bob Jones University, which barred Black students until 1971 and banned interracial dating altogether until the year 2000. They defended it as biblical conviction. It took a presidential campaign controversy, not a change of heart, to end the policy.

This is the sin of taking God’s Word, meant to set people free, and forging it into a leash.

2. Hatred: blessing racial terror with a cross

In 1915, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan restricted membership to white Protestant Christians, used a burning cross to symbolize “the light of Christ,” and was founded by William Simmons, a former Methodist minister. Pro-Klan pastors lectured congregations on the order’s Christian virtues. Meanwhile, public lynchings across the South were often treated as community outings, attended by families in their Sunday best, sometimes photographed and turned into postcards people mailed to relatives like souvenirs. This was not the fringe acting alone. It was churchgoing America, robed in its own symbols.

This is the sin of hatred so complete it borrows the cross to bless the very thing the cross condemns.

3. Idolatry: bowing to flag, heritage, and power

After the Civil War, many white Southern churches did not examine their complicity. Instead, they built monuments to it. Confederate flags hung in sanctuaries, veterans were memorialized as Christian gentlemen, and a mythology called the “Lost Cause” recast slaveholders as noble. That same fusion of nation and faith reappeared on January 6, 2021, when crosses and “Jesus Saves” banners were carried alongside Confederate flags into the U.S. Capitol during a violent attempt to overturn an election. It was the visible tip of a strain of American Christianity that has quietly merged national identity and political power with the gospel itself.

This is the sin of bowing to something other than God and calling it faithfulness.

4. Cowardice: choosing comfort over justice

Dr. King once said eleven o’clock Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, and he was not being clever. He was naming a wound. Writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, he aimed his sharpest words not at the Klan but at white clergy who called his methods "unwise and untimely." King concluded that the Black American’s greatest obstacle was not the outright racist but the white moderate, more devoted to order than justice.

That same silence repeated itself in 1942, when the government forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration camps and the overwhelming majority of American churches said essentially nothing, with many congregations instead helping the War Relocation Authority resettle families rather than asking why they had been rounded up. The Quakers notably broke from the pack.

This is the sin of mistaking a quiet conscience for a clear one.

5. Violence: crushing the vulnerable to "save" them

Starting in the 1800s, the federal government paid churches, per child, to run boarding schools built to strip Native children of their identity in the name of saving their souls. Kids lost their names, their languages, their hair, and often their families for years, all under a Christian banner. The U.S. Interior Department's 2022 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report documented physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at these schools, and has since identified at least 74 burial sites, marked and unmarked, on the grounds of institutions run by denominations who believed, sincerely, that they were doing good.

This is the sin of mistaking erasure for salvation, and force for love.

6. Self-protection: guarding the institution over the innocent

In 1845, Northern Baptist mission boards told Southern churches that slaveholders could not in good conscience be funded as missionaries. Rather than repent, roughly 293 Southern representatives met in Augusta, Georgia, and founded their own convention, the Southern Baptist Convention, still the largest Protestant body in the country, for the specific purpose of protecting the right to own human beings.

Nearly two centuries later, in 2022, an independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found SBC Executive Committee leaders had kept a secret internal list of more than seven hundred credibly accused abusers, stonewalling survivors rather than protecting them. It was a pattern that has played out in Catholic dioceses and independent churches nationwide, including my own church fellowship.

This is the sin of loving the institution’s reputation more than the people it exists to serve.

7. Materialism: selling blessing to the broke

A different corner of the American church has spent decades preaching that God’s favor shows up as bigger houses and fatter offering plates, often targeting the very people who can least afford to give. Pastors have flown private jets and traveled extensively to luxury locations, partly funded with tithes from folks skipping meals, all while quoting verses about seed and harvest. It’s a gospel that sounds like good news for the preacher and often bad news for the poor.

This is the sin of dressing up greed as blessing and calling it faith.

None of this is ancient history dressed up as a guilt trip. It is a mirror. Somewhere in my own church tradition, and probably yours, there is a version of "the reasonable pastor" who counseled patience instead of justice, and a version of "the faithful congregation" that just never got around to talking about it. The question isn't whether those churches back then were bad people. Most of them thought they were being faithful. The question is which of these seven sins (dehumanization, hatred, idolatry, cowardice, violence, self-protection, materialism) is quietly at work in my own church, or my own heart, right now.

History has a habit of repeating its sins in new clothes whenever nobody’s watching for them, which means an eighth sin could already be forming in a church that looks a lot like ours, waiting for someone later to write the paragraph. Where is your church silent right now that it should not be? Where are you? And what will you do today to make sure you land on the right side of history, and more importantly, the right side of God, when someone else is doing the remembering?

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The church watched, and split. A century later, both sides still believe they’re following Jesus. They just disagree about what that requires.

That’s the pattern. The American church has quietly swapped theological faithfulness for partisan consensus and started treating the swap as if it were the original. Conformity reads as soundness. Dissent reads as grounds for exclusion. Somewhere in there, we replaced Jesus’ actual test for belonging with a different one, an easier one to grade.

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Why we need to be right

The pull toward certainty isn’t wicked on its face. It comes from a real hunger to honor Scripture and stand on something solid. But when certainty about every contested question becomes the measure of faithfulness, something has shifted underneath us. It starts serving us more than it serves God. It sooths our anxiety and sorts who’s in from who’s out. It ends up turning a Spirit-led walk into a checklist we can manage.

Jesus never ran that test. He was surrounded by Pharisees who had precise answers for everything, and it didn’t impress him in the slightest. His sharpest words weren’t for people who lacked certainty. They were for people whose certainty had become a substitute for love.

The lines we’ve drawn

Here are a few examples from across the political spectrum. Not to settle who is right on any of them, but to show that the sorting has happened, and to ask whether Jesus would recognize the criteria being used to do it.

On the progressive side: women in leadership, where serious scholars land on both sides. Immigration, where 90-plus biblical references to loving the stranger make silence a choice rather than a neutral posture. Economic justice, where the prophet Amos and James the brother of Jesus, and Luke 4 aren’t asking anyone’s permission to be relevant.

On the conservative side: the dignity of earned labor, grounded in Paul’s instruction that those unwilling to work shouldn’t eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). That’s a serious theological conviction about self-sufficiency and the proper limits of charity. And respect for governing authorities, grounded in Romans 13, raises serious issues about civic order and the rule of law. Christians who hold these positions deserve to be engaged as offering a serious reading of Scripture instead of being dismissed as prejudice with a Bible verse taped to it.

And cutting across both: a consistent ethic of life that opposes or permits abortion, capital punishment, or unjust war does not map neatly onto either political party.

If a position makes both parties uncomfortable, that might be a sign it’s doing something right. It might even mean that theology is driving the conclusion instead of the other way around.

None of this means everyone’s equally correct. Instead, it means that sorting happening in our churches has become partisan sorting, not theological sorting. That is concerning because those are not the same thing.

Three Ways to Respond

Silence. It usually presented as the mature, unifying choice. It isn't neutral because silence always protects someone, and it's almost never the person with the least power. The God of Scripture sees suffering and is moved by it. Silence in the face of injustice doesn't reflect the character of a God who hears, who sees, and who moves, in his own timing and his own way. A church whose teaching never makes anyone uncomfortable has probably stopped saying anything that matters.

Bold, faithful conviction. A Christian wrestles seriously with Scripture and then speaks or acts, even at personal cost. Sometimes clumsily. Sometimes even wrong about the details. The prophets too were sometimes wrong about timing while dead right about the underlying claim. A church that makes room for this—from the pulpit, on difficult questions, and from more than one political direction—is doing something rare. A sermon that unsettles someone’s political assumptions isn’t a pastoral failure. That’s what preaching has always been for.

Partisan conformity dressed as theology. One party’s platform gets baptized in scriptural language and treated as the only faithful position available. Of the three, this is the most dangerous because instead of looking look like an evasion, it looks like conviction. And when neutrality, or consensus becomes the actual standard we’re living by, we’ve traded the real thing for something easier to manage and merely just given it a respectable name.

What Matthew and Simon must have talked about

By any reasonable political map of first-century Judea, apostles Matthew and Simon the Zealot had no business sharing a room, let alone a calling. Matthew worked for Rome, collecting taxes from his own people and presumably taking his cut. Simon advocated resistance to Rome, sometimes even violent resistance. Simon probably regarded Matthew with something between contempt and fury.

Jesus put them in the same inner circle anyway. Sent them out together. Fed them from the same table. There's no record in any of the four Gospels of the two of them quarreling, and no rebuke from Jesus toward either one for how he treated the other. Somehow the tax collector and the revolutionary managed to pray together, preach together, and follow Jesus together.

When Jesus sent the seventy-two out in pairs, we don't know who was paired with whom, but imagine Matthew and Simon assigned to the same road, dependent on each other to get the mission done. At the Last Supper there's no seating chart, but we do know they were at the same table.

There’s no record of Jesus telling Matthew that his collaboration with Rome disqualified him or telling Simon that his politics were too extreme. Neither one gets corrected for his convictions. Instead, Jesus calls both to love God and love their neighbor and expects their politics to serve that call instead of competing with it.

The test Jesus actually used

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness." (Matthew 23:23) The people most certain they had the right theology got the fiercest rebuke he had.

"By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:35) Disciples weren’t defined by holding the correct positions. They were defined by a love that cost something, stayed relational, and reached toward people they hadn’t chosen.

Silence, neutrality, and consensus are versions of the same evasion. Each one substitutes something manageable for what Jesus actually asked of us. He did not measure his disciples by the precision of their positions. He measured them by the texture of their love.

What this looks like for me

I’ll name injustice clearly. Sixteen Old Testament prophets named it loudly because God hears the suffering of the oppressed and calls his people to do the same. I won’t soften what I see clearly just to keep the peace.

I’ll extend grace across disagreement. I won’t call you faithless because you don’t yet see what I see. People are at different places on the road. I’ll try to hear where you are, and trust that the same Spirit working in me is working in you.

I reject the litmus test. Your politics are not my measure of your faith. Matthew and Simon shared the same table. So can we.

I will stay at the table. Real fellowship isn’t always comfortable. When a sermon challenges my political assumptions, the answer is to engage, not to find a church where that never happens.

And I’ll keep asking the harder question. Not "am I certain enough?" but "am I following Jesus?" Those have never been the same question.

For Further Reflection:

Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot sat at the same table. Opposite politics, opposite relationships with power, probably no agreement on a single policy question of their day. Jesus chose them both, corrected neither, and called them to the same thing: love God and love your neighbor. Is the church willing to stay at the table when the conversation turns uncomfortable? Or will it keep quietly engineering a room where everyone already agrees so the hard conversation never has to happen at all?

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I picked up How to Be a Dissident by expecting something clever like a winking handbook for troublemakers. What I found instead was something closer to a history lesson on dissidents. Beckerman, a staff writer at The Atlantic, excavates two and a half millennia of dissidents, from Socrates and Spinoza to Václav Havel and Edward Snowden, and from the Warsaw Ghetto to Tiananmen Square. He asks what holds them together, and his answer is both simple and demanding. Dissidents, he concludes, are people who, when the question Can I live with myself? pressed in close, discovered they could not look away.

Beckerman calls them people who “sit apart” because the word dissident comes from the Latin dissidere—to sit apart. Not to storm the gates or lead armies, but simply to refuse the comfortable middle position, to honor a principle their society is violating, and accept the cost of being pushed to the margins for it.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The prophetic tradition in Scripture is built on exactly this posture. Consider, for example, Amos interrupting the feast at Bethel. Or Jeremiah accused of treason for telling the truth. Or even Micah, our patron who gives this publication its name, confronting the powerful on behalf of those they were crushing.

These prophets didn’t have institutional backing or strategic communications plans. They had simply reached the point where silence felt like a betrayal of their convictions and identity.

Beckerman’s dissidents occupy the same space in secular history that the prophets occupy in sacred history. They are the uncomfortable ones who couldn’t pretend anymore.

Most useful in the book and most directly applicable to the kind of faith this publication is about is Beckerman’s distinction between pessimism and fatalism. The pessimist believes things will probably get worse unless someone acts, while the fatalist believes things will definitely get worse. In that single word, “probably” lives both urgency and possibility becasuefatalism produces paralysis while pessimism, rightly understood, produces motion. It is the posture of people who act not because they are confident of success, but because they cannot justify standing still.

That is a useful frame for this moment becasue while we are not short on reasons for despair, we are sometimes short on the courage to act without guarantees.

Beckerman also has a sharp chapter on humor as dissidence.; that is, on how parody, ridicule, and exaggerated imagery have long been tools of resistance because they force a moment of recognition that straight argument can’t produce. That’s worth remembering for those of us trying to bear witness in creative and unexpected ways.

This book doesn’t come from a faith framework although it does map cleanly to one. The dissident who keeps the record at great personal cost (like Emanuel Ringelblum, who organized a secret archive buried in milk canisters beneath the Warsaw Ghetto) is doing something the biblical tradition calls bearing witness.

Similarly, the movement that acts as if a freer future were already real (like the Solidarity movement in Poland) is doing something the New Testament calls living by faith.

And Havel’s insistence on “living in truth” as the foundation of all real resistance echoes what the Gospel means when it says the truth will make you free.

The dissident tradition and the prophetic tradition are drawing from the same deep well.

If you’re serious about faith beyond performance and about what it actually costs to live with integrity in a moment that rewards complicity, this book will give you both company and courage.

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There is a legal concept I work with regularly called the duty of care. The core idea is straightforward: the more knowledge or responsibility you have in a situation, the higher the standard you are held to. A bystander who witnesses an accident is treated differently than a trained paramedic who witnesses the same one. Someone who could not have known is treated differently than someone who knew and chose not to act.

The legal world did not invent this principle. It borrowed it, whether it knows it or not, from a much older source. The prophets understood it. God, apparently, has always understood it. And it is why the sharpest words in all of Scripture were aimed not at the nations who had never heard of the God of Israel, but at the people who carried his name, gathered in his temple, and sang his songs while the poor went unseen and the widow went unheard.

The walk, it turns out, does not grade on a curve.

— ✦ —

The Direction of the Sharpest Words

If you read the prophets expecting the harshest indictments to fall on Israel’s pagan neighbors—on Babylon, Assyria, the empires of the ancient world—you will be surprised.

Amos delivered his message to Israel. Isaiah’s devastating critique in chapter 1—the one where God says he hides his eyes during their prayers, that he has had enough of their offerings, that their assemblies are a burden—was addressed to Judah. Micah’s indictment of leaders who ‘hate good and love evil,’ who ‘tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones,’ was aimed squarely at the religious and political leadership of God’s own covenant community. (Micah 3:1-3)

Jesus reserved his sharpest confrontations not for Rome, but for the Pharisees and teachers of the law: ‘Woe to you... because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God.’ (Luke 11:42)

Woe is not mild disappointment. In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, it is lament fused with judgment. And Jesus aimed it at religious leaders who had reduced faithfulness to meticulous rule-keeping while the poor, the widow, and the foreigner went unseen and unnamed.

Why the Higher Standard Makes Theological Sense

It follows directly from the logic of covenant and calling.

To be called is to be entrusted. To know the character of God—his hearing, his sight, his refusal to name injustice vaguely, his movement toward the oppressed—and to represent him in the world is to carry a weight of responsibility that comes with the knowledge. Jeremiah makes this explicit when he contrasts the unjust King Jehoiakim with his father Josiah, who ‘defended the cause of the poor and needy.’ God’s commentary: ‘Is that not what it means to know me?’ (Jeremiah 22:16)

Knowing God, in the Hebrew sense, is not primarily an intellectual or even experiential category. It is a relational and ethical one. You demonstrate that you know God by doing what God does.

Which means that the church’s silence on injustice is not, in the end, a political failure or a cultural accommodation. It is a failure of faithfulness. A failure to know, in the deep biblical sense, the God whose name is being carried.

The Open Door of Micah 6:8

This is where the series began, really. Micah 6:8 is the axis on which The Micah Walk turns.

‘He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’

Notice what Micah does not say. He does not say: to perform the correct rituals, to hold the correct positions, to remain neutral on contested social questions, to prioritize institutional unity over prophetic witness. He says: act justly. Love mercy—hesed, the covenant faithfulness that refuses to abandon the vulnerable. Walk humbly with your God.

The walking image matters. It is not a sprint and it is not a monument. It is a steady, daily, forward movement alongside a God who is himself always moving toward the cries he hears, the suffering he sees, the injustice he will not stop naming.

Over this series we have traced that God across seven weeks of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. We heard the groan underneath the groan in Exodus (Article 1). We watched him see the people the world had rendered invisible (Article 2), the way he saw Hagar at a spring where no one else looked. We watched him name exploitation by its exact price point (Article 3)—a pair of sandals, unpaid labor, wages crying out from the ground. We watched him move (Article 4), three times in two verses, through prophets and servants and his own incarnate presence in the world. We sat with the cost of the silence his people sometimes practice in his name (Article 5). We looked at the compass the imago Dei actually is (Article 6).

And now we arrive at the final question. Not whether this is who God is. That has been answered.

What Will You Do With What You Know?

The duty of care, in law, is triggered the moment you have enough knowledge to act. You do not need certainty or a complete picture. You need enough to know that something is required of you.

By that measure, everyone who has read this series to Article 7 has a duty of care problem.

You know that God hears the groan underneath the groan — the accumulated cry of people crushed by systems designed to keep them there. You know that he sees the people power has rendered invisible, and that his sight is a form of advocacy. You know that he names exploitation by its actual name rather than dressing it in careful institutional language. You know that he moves, without exception, from attentiveness into action. You know that the silence his people practice in his name is a theological crisis — not primarily for the people who have left, but for the church that drove them out. You know that the image you bear is not a trophy but a compass, and that it only points in one direction.

That is not a small amount of knowledge. And knowledge, as Jeremiah’s God made unmistakably clear, creates obligation.

Maya Angelou put it simply enough to cross-stitch on a pillow and profound enough to actually mean something: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Seven articles ago, you may not have known what you know now. That was then. This is now.

What that obligation looks like will differ for every person reading this. It might look like the conversation you have been avoiding with your church’s leadership about why justice rarely, if ever, makes it to the sermons, congregational prayers, or activities agenda. It might look like immigrant family you help settle into their new community because that’s a hard difficult for anyone to make. It might look like finally going inside the food bank to volunteer with distributing food to patrons instead of dropping bags at the door. It might look like learning the name of the person outside the grocery store you have been walking past for months.

None of those require a platform, a theology degree, or a complete theory of social change. They require the willingness to be held to the standard that knowledge creates. To stop grading your own walk on a curve.

— ✦ —

Micah 6:8 is not a slogan. It is a life direction. Not a sermon—just a walk. A walk that hears, sees, names, and moves. That holds those who carry God’s name to the same standard he holds them to, without flinching and without cruelty.

The question is not whether this is who God is. That has been answered. The question is whether we will walk the same way he walks.

The door is open. The road is long. And the God who does not turn away from the suffering of the oppressed is already walking it.

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There is a Latin phrase that has been debated by theologians for centuries: imago Dei. The image of God. Genesis 1:27 is where it lives: ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’

Christian tradition treats that phrase as the most dignifying thing that could be said about a human being. You bear the image of God. Your life has worth that cannot be taken away by circumstance, by power, by what anyone else decides about you. That reading is true, and it matters enormously, and entire bodies of law and ethics have been built on it.

But there is a second reading that the church has been considerably less enthusiastic about. Because if you bear the image of a God who hears the groaning of the oppressed and moves toward it, who sees the invisible and refuses to look away, who names injustice by its exact price point, who acts through human witnesses when institutional silence has failed—then the imago Dei is not only a statement about your worth. It is a statement about your obligation.

A compass doesn’t tell you who you are. It tells you which way to go. Imago Dei, then, should show how to move toward the image of God.

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A Status and a Commission

Genesis 1:27 has been read primarily as a statement of status, and that reading is not wrong. The dignity it confers is real and non-negotiable. But the God whose image we bear is not static. He is, as we’ve spent five articles documenting, a God in motion: toward the cry, toward the visible suffering, toward the named injustice, toward the act that restores what exploitation has broken.

To bear his image is not simply to possess a dignity. It is to be oriented in a direction. Pointed toward the same things he is pointed toward. True north for the Christian life.

Romans 8:29 adds the layer that makes this uncomfortable: we are being conformed to the image of Christ. Not that we arrived in his image fully formed and are just maintaining it. We are being shaped toward it, pulled toward it, formed into it through the ongoing work of the Spirit. This is a process. And it has content. It means becoming more like the one who heard, saw, named, and moved. The series we’ve been walking through is not just a portrait of God. It is a portrait of what we are being formed into.

The Imitation Paul Actually Meant

When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:1, ‘Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ,’ he is not primarily talking about spiritual disciplines or personal morality, though those aren’t excluded. He’s talking about orientation. The direction of a life, the things it turns toward, the suffering it refuses to ignore.

The Christ Paul is imitating is the one who crossed social boundaries to eat with the excluded (Luke 15:1-2). Who stopped on roads for people others walked past (Luke 18:35-43). Who stood between a woman caught in sin and the crowd that had already picked up their stones (John 8:1-11). Who made the Samaritan the hero (Luke 10:25-37). Who turned over tables in the one space where the economically and ethnically marginalized were supposed to be able to worship (Mark 11:15-17).

To imitate this Christ is not to adopt a political ideology. It’s to develop the same attentiveness: to hear what he hears, to see what he refuses to unsee, to name what he named, to move when he moved. The imago Dei is the theological foundation for all of it. You were made to look like someone. And that someone has a very clear and consistent pattern of behavior.

What Transformation Actually Produces

The language of spiritual transformation in the New Testament is consistently oriented outward. We are not being conformed into the image of Christ so that we can have better quiet times, livelier services, or more engaging fellowship, though all those matter. We are being conformed into the image of a God whose character is inseparable from his response to injustice.

This means that a community being genuinely formed in Christ’s image will look, over time, more like a community that hears the cries of the oppressed and is moved by them. More like a community that sees what power makes invisible. More like a community that names exploitation by its actual name. More like a community that acts: not because it has a social justice program, but because it is increasingly inhabited by the Spirit of a God who has never once heard the groaning of the oppressed and turned away.

The imago Dei is not a status that exempts us from this. It is a direction that calls us into it. And a compass, it turns out, doesn’t care how long you’ve been standing still. The moment you look at it, it shows you north. The image of God works the same way. It doesn’t record our failures to move. It just keeps pointing in the direction we’re called to go.

What Does Your Image Look Like?

This is the question Article 5 left us with, rephrased: not what kind of God are you representing, but what does the image you’re bearing actually look like in practice?

Because we can hold an orthodox doctrine of the imago Dei and believe sincerely that every human being carries the image of God and has inherent dignity. While simultaneously crossing the street to avoid the person sleeping in the doorway.

We can affirm that we are being formed into Christ’s likeness while sitting in churches that do not consistently name specific injustices from the pulpit.

We can believe in the compass while never actually looking at it or following its lead.

What would it look like to take the imago Dei seriously as a commission rather than a status? It might look like the attorney who takes on a case no one else will because the person deserves representation regardless of their ability to pay. It might look like the congregation that decides the rezoning fight in a neighboring community is their business because the people affected bear the same image they do. It might look like the individual or family that decides to actually get to know the immigrant or refugee family that moved in nearby—not to welcome them from a comfortable distance, but to walk alongside them through the paperwork, the language barrier, the disorientation of starting over in a place that isn’t always glad they came.

None of those are programs. None require a platform or a megaphone or a theology degree. They require looking at the compass. Recognizing which way it’s pointing. And taking one step in that direction, because you were made in the image of a God who has never once stood still in the face of suffering.

The compass doesn’t grade your previous stillness. It just shows you north.

And the final article in this series asks the hardest question of all: what does God expect from the people who know exactly which way north is?

Next is Part 7, “Know Better. Do Better.”

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Every institution I have ever worked in or around has a version of the same meeting. Something has gone wrong. The people in the room know it. And then, one careful statement at a time, a consensus forms around not quite saying so. Concerns are noted. Complexity is acknowledged. The importance of not getting ahead of the facts is invoked. Someone mentions that there are perspectives on all sides that deserve to be heard.

By the end of the meeting, nothing has been named and nothing has been decided, and the people most affected by what went wrong are still waiting.

I have sat in those meetings as a lawyer, as a volunteer, as a congregant. And I’ve noticed something consistent across all of them: the people doing the careful not-saying always frame it as responsibility. As wisdom. As the mature, measured response to a complicated situation.

The people on the receiving end of it experience something else entirely. They experience abandonment.

This week I want to run a thought experiment, a “what-if” scenario. What if God operated the same way?

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A Thought Experiment with Real Stakes

Imagine, for a moment, that in Exodus God had adopted a posture of careful neutrality. That he had decided the Israelites’ situation in Egypt was complex, with legitimate concerns on multiple sides. That he had chosen not to get involved in what was, after all, a political situation. That naming oppressors and confronting systems was not his place. That his role was spiritual, not social.

Israel stays in Egypt (Exodus). For another generation, and another. The groaning continues. The cry goes up. And nothing comes back down.

Hagar (Genesis 16) collapses at the spring and no one finds her. Naboth (1 Kings 21) is murdered and the king keeps the vineyard. The wages are stolen and the workers (James 5:1-6) have nowhere to turn. The widow (Luke 18:1-8) comes to the unjust judge again and again and is turned away, and there is no parable about a God who hears—because this God does not hear, or if he hears, decides it is not his place to act.

The hungry stay hungry. The stranger stays unwelcome. The prisoner stays forgotten. And the religious assemblies continue, carefully, without disruption.

That is not a description of the God of Scripture. But it is, if we are honest, a description of something. And the resemblance to certain institutional postures we have all witnessed is not coincidental.

The Radical Nature of What We Actually Have

This what-if experiment isn’t frivolous. It’s designed to force a recognition we are in danger of losing: how radical God’s actual responsiveness to injustice really is.

We’ve spent four articles tracing a God who hears the groan underneath the groan, who sees the people the world has rendered invisible, who names exploitation by its exact price point, and who moves—in his own mysterious timing, but without exception—from attentiveness into action. That is not the portrait of a God who is neutral on suffering. That is the portrait of a God for whom the cry of the oppressed is among the most urgent things in the universe.

The contrast with contemporary Christian quietism on racial, social, and economic injustice is stark. When the church issues careful non-statements, when leaders avoid naming what is plainly visible, when congregations treat justice as political controversy rather than theological imperative, they are modeling something. But it is not the God of Scripture. It is the God of the what-if experiment. And the Bible does not recognize that posture as faithfulness.

The Silence Is Not Hypothetical

Here is where the thought experiment stops being a thought experiment.

For millions of people alive right now, the silence this article imagines is not hypothetical. It is their lived experience of the church.

They have cried out—about racial violence, about wage theft, about the treatment of immigrants, about housing, about the criminal justice system—and the response from many quarters of Christianity has been the studied silence of an institution trying not to offend anyone with power, or those who insist on maintaining congregational comfort and order and not become partisan or political.

They have watched churches fill on Sunday mornings and empty out on the question of justice. They have watched religious leaders parse and equivocate while the people Amos described (Amos 2:6)—those sold for a pair of sandals, those whose wages cry out to heaven—wait for someone to stand in the gap.

And many of them have concluded, not unreasonably, that the God those churches represent is the silent one. The neutral one. The one who hears the groaning and decides it is not his place to get involved.

The silent church is a theological crisis. Not primarily for the people who have left. For the church that drove them out with its silence.

What Kind of God Are You Representing?

This is where the what-if experiment becomes personal. Because institutions are made of people. And the studied silence of any church, denomination, or religious body is not an abstraction. It is the accumulated weight of individual decisions made by individual people—including people like us—to say nothing or do nothing, but call it wisdom.

Every time someone in a congregation decides that a sermon on justice would be ‘too political,’ the silent God gets a little more real to the people outside those walls. Every time a church board tables a discussion about racial equity because ‘this isn’t the right moment,’ the waiting gets longer for the people Amos described. Every time a person of faith shares a carefully worded social media post that acknowledges complexity without naming the injustice, the what-if experiment inches closer to actual policy.

I am not exempting myself from this. I have been in those meetings. I have chosen the careful word when a clearer one was available. I have framed my inaction as prudence and my silence as respect for different perspectives. I know what it feels like from the inside, and I know how reasonable it seems at the time.

Sometimes the silence is dressed in more sophisticated clothing. We tell ourselves we can’t respond to every injustice, so we have to choose our battles—which is true, and also sometimes a way of never choosing any. We invoke Jesus’s words that ‘the poor you will always have with you’ as if he were counseling resignation, when the full passage he was quoting from Deuteronomy was a command to open our hands precisely because the need would always be there. We have, as a church, become quite skilled at using Scripture to make peace with the very things Scripture was written to disturb.

But the God this series has been tracing doesn’t reason that way. He hears and moves. He sees and names. He is not careful in the way institutions are careful. He is not neutral in the way leaders who fear controversy are neutral. He is constitutionally, irreversibly, thoroughly on the side of the person crying out.

The question for those of us who carry his name is not whether we agree with that description of God. Most of us do, at least in the abstract. The question is whether the God we represent in our actual decisions—in our silences, our meetings, our carefully worded non-statements—is the same one.

What kind of God are you or your church representing? Not in your theology. In your choices.

The answer to that question sets up everything we’ll look at in the final two articles — what it means to bear his image, and the standard he holds those who know him to.

Nect is Part 6, “A Compass Doesn’t Care How Long You’ve Been Standing Still.”

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Researchers first documented it after a 1964 murder in New York City where dozens of neighbors reportedly heard a woman’s cries and did not call for help. The case became one of the most studied examples of how proximity to suffering does not automatically produce response. Seeing something and doing something, it turns out, are two entirely different decisions.

The God of Scripture, it appears, is immune to the bystander effect—even though his movement is sometimes slower and more mysterious than we’d like.

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He doesn’t look around to see who else might handle it. He doesn’t wait for a more qualified volunteer. He hears, he sees, he names……and then he moves. Not always on our timeline. Not always in the way we’d choose. But always, and without exception, toward the person crying out.

Which, after three articles tracing that pattern, brings us to the question this whole series has been building toward: When God’s people hear, see, and understand the injustice God does, what do they do—do they also move?

Hearing Is Never the End of the Story

There’s a moment in Exodus, Chapter 6 that could easily read as repetition. God has already appeared to Moses. He has already heard the groaning of Israel. He has already sent Moses to Pharaoh. The first trip to Pharaoh went badly. Pharaoh increased the workload, the Israelites blamed Moses for making things worse, and now Moses returns to God, discouraged and empty-handed.

God responds: ‘I have heard the groaning of the Israelites... and I have remembered my covenant. Therefore, say to the Israelites: I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.’ (Exodus 6:5-6)

Three times in two verses: I will. I will. I will.

Notice the context. Things had gotten worse, not better. The first attempt had backfired. The people were demoralized. And God’s response to all of that was not a revised strategy document or an expression of renewed concern. It was three unqualified declarations of intent. He had heard. He had seen. He had named it. Now he was moving.

The movement from attentiveness to intervention is the full arc of divine response to injustice throughout Scripture. The Exodus is its defining expression, but it is far from the only one.

Action Across the Full Sweep of Scripture

Elijah was sent directly to King Ahab after Naboth was falsely accused and murdered so the king could seize his vineyard. God didn’t comment on the tragedy from a distance or release a statement of concern. He sent his prophet with a pointed, specific message: ‘Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?’ (1 Kings 21:19) The confrontation was public. The accountability was personal. God moved through a human witness.

Jesus, entering the Temple and finding the outer courts—the only space reserved for Gentile worshipers—converted into a commercial marketplace, did not compose a thoughtful letter to the Temple authorities. He turned over tables. He drove out merchants. He quoted Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 in the same breath, naming both the exclusion of Gentiles and the exploitation of the poor: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers.’ (Mark 11:17)

The ethnic and economic dimensions of the injustice were inseparable in Jesus’s response. He didn’t choose one thread to pull. He named both, publicly, at personal cost, in the place where the religious establishment had the most to lose from the disruption.

God Moves Through Human Witnesses

There’s a thread running through nearly all of these stories that deserves to be named plainly: God doesn’t usually act in a vacuum. He acts through people. Moses. Amos. Jeremiah. Elijah. Jesus calling his disciples over to watch the widow and making it an assignment, not a private observation. The act of divine justice almost always has a human instrument—someone who heard, someone who saw, someone who named it, and then moved.

This is not peripheral to what it means to follow God. It is theologically central to it. The biblical picture is not of a God who acts while his people watch from a comfortable distance. It is of a God whose action flows through communities of people who have let his hearing, his sight, and his willingness to name injustice become their own.

So…..if God typically moves through human witnesses, what happens when those witnesses go still?

That silence has a cost. And it is not paid by the people in the pews.

Do You Move When God Moves?

We’ve spent four articles now tracing a God who hears the groan underneath the groan, who sees the people the world has rendered invisible, who names what he sees with the exactness of a prophet who knows a price point matters, and who moves—every time, without exception—from attentiveness into action. The pattern is as consistent as anything in Scripture.

And we’ve spent four articles quietly sitting with the same question underneath all of it: what does this mean for those of us who carry his name?

Because the bystander effect is not just a social psychology phenomenon. It is a spiritual one. And the church has not been immune to it.

We read about unhoused veterans sleeping in doorways in cities that have plenty of empty office buildings and no shortage of political speeches about supporting the troops, and we feel the irony without feeling the obligation.

We follow the story of a wrongly convicted person finally exonerated after twenty years in prison, share the article, and move on without asking what it says about the system that put them there or offering to assist them in find housing, get a job or otherwise re-integrate into a community.

We learn that suicide rates among rural farmers have quietly reached crisis levels for years—driven by debt, drought, and isolation—and we file it somewhere in the back of our minds labeled ‘complicated’ and leave it there.

None of that is moving in the sense that Exodus 6 describes. Three declarations of intent. An outstretched arm. Mighty acts. Actual change in the situation of actual people who were actually suffering.

I’m not suggesting that every follower of God is called to the same action in the same arena. Moses and Amos and Elijah were each sent somewhere specific, to do something specific, at a particular cost. The question isn’t whether your move looks like theirs. The question is whether you’re making a move at all.

Somewhere between hearing and acting, it’s easy to find a comfortable place to stop. We call it being informed. We call it caring. We call it praying about it. All of those things can be genuine. None of them are the move.

Acting is where it lands. And as we’ll see next, the cost of not acting is higher than we usually let ourselves think.

Next is Part 5, “What if Pharoah’s Best Friend Was A Quiet God?”

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There is an old story, told in various forms across many cultures, about a village that had a word for everything except the one thing everyone could see. When the river flooded because the upstream landowner had diverted it, they called it ‘difficult weather.’ When children went hungry because the landowner took the harvest before the families could keep their share, they called it ‘a lean season.’ When the elders gathered to discuss the problem, they chose their words so carefully that by the end of the meeting, nothing had been named and nothing had been decided, and everyone went home feeling that something important had happened.

The landowner, of course, slept very well.

Reminds me of the minutes from some church board meetings, or listen to carefully worded statements from religious leaders about situations everyone in the room can plainly see. We have developed, as institutions and as individuals, a remarkable fluency in the language of not-quite-saying-it, or more bluntly, hiding-the-ball.

The prophets did not share this fluency. And neither, it turns out, did God.

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The Precision of the Prophets

A striking characteristic of the prophets is their specificity. God doesn’t speak about injustice in generalities. He doesn’t offer carefully balanced statements acknowledging complexity on all sides. He names things.

Amos, an eighth-century BC shepherd turned prophet, delivered God’s message to the prosperous elites of Israel with the kind of precision that leaves no room for plausible deniability: ‘They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground.’ (Amos 2:6-7)

A pair of sandals. Not a metaphor. A price point. God named the transaction.

Jeremiah was equally concrete with King Jehoiakim, who had commissioned a palace built on the labor of workers he never paid: ‘Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor.’ (Jeremiah 22:13) God didn’t speak about the king’s general moral direction. He named the specific practice: unpaid labor, personal enrichment at workers’ expense.

James, writing after the resurrection, has not moderated the language at all: ‘The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.’ (James 5:4) Wage theft. God named it in the New Testament, in the same direct terms the prophets used centuries before. Apparently the intervening years did nothing to soften God’s position.

When Religious Language Becomes a Shield

Against this backdrop, Amos delivers one of the most striking passages in all of prophetic literature. God, speaking directly, tells Israel that their religious gatherings have become intolerable: ‘I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me... Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.’ (Amos 5:21, 23)

Then, in the same breath: ‘But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.’ (Amos 5:24)

That’s not God saying he prefers justice to worship. That’s God saying that worship offered by people who refuse to name and oppose injustice is not worship at all. It’s noise. The religious activity had become a way of maintaining the appearance of faithfulness while insulating the powerful from accountability.

Sound familiar? I’m not throwing stones here. I’m looking in the same window I’m asking you to look in. But the window is worth looking through.

The Theological Act of Naming

What emerges from all of this is a claim the church has largely avoided making out loud: naming injustice is a theological act. Not a political act dressed in religious clothing. Not an overreach by activists who have confused their agenda with the gospel. A form of faithfulness to a God who has been naming injustice since Genesis 4, when he told Cain plainly: ‘Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.’

The God of Scripture doesn’t use euphemisms. He doesn’t describe wage theft as ‘compensation challenges.’ He doesn’t describe the exploitation of the poor as ‘systemic complexity.’ He doesn’t balance his concern for the oppressed with equal concern for the reputation of the oppressor. He names what is happening, names who is responsible, and names what he requires.

There is a form of silence that wears the costume of wisdom. It goes by names like balance, nuance, and staying in your lane. It produces statements that carefully acknowledge suffering on all sides while naming nothing, committing to nothing, and leaving the status quo completely undisturbed. The village elders would have approved.

The God of Scripture does not model this. His prophets did not model this. Jesus did not model this.

Do You Name What God Names?

We’ve now spent three articles tracing a God who hears the groan underneath the groan, who sees the people the world has rendered invisible, and who names what he sees with an exactness that leaves no one wondering what he meant. The pattern is clear. The question, as always, is what it means for those of us who carry his name.

We have our own version of the village’s careful language, and it shows up in places we don’t always notice.

It shows up when a political leader uses language that dehumanizes an entire ethnic group and we describe it as ‘divisive rhetoric’ rather than what Amos would have called it. It shows up when a church quietly reassigns a minister credibly accused of abuse and we call it ‘ministry transition.’ It shows up when a policy strips nutrition assistance from hundreds of thousands of children and the most our institutions can manage is a statement expressing ‘deep concern’ or a request for a simple canned food donation to the food pantry.

It shows up, closer to home, when someone at work is being treated unfairly and we tell ourselves we don’t have enough information to say anything. When a neighbor is being pushed out of their housing and we frame it to ourselves as ‘complicated.’ When we watch something happen in our own congregation that we know isn’t right, and we dismiss it since ‘nobody’s perfect or we choose the word ‘unfortunate’ because it lets us acknowledge the thing without obligating us to do anything about it.

Naming things costs something. It risks relationships, comfort, and the social goodwill we’ve built up by being the kind of person who doesn’t rock the boat. The prophets knew this. Amos wasn’t from the professional class. He was a shepherd. He had nothing to lose by keeping his mouth shut, and everything to lose by opening it. He opened it anyway, because the God he served had already named the thing and expected his people to do the same.

The question isn’t whether we have the right words. We do. The question is whether we’re willing to use them.

Naming is where it gets specific. But as we’ll see next, it is never where God stops.

Next is Part 4, “God Didn’t Issue a Statement. He Moved.”

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