“Learn to hang naked upon the cross of Christ, counting all thou hast done but dung and dross. Apply to him just in the spirit of the dying thief, of the harlot with her seven devils! else thou art still on the sand; and, after saving others, thou wilt lose thy own soul.” – John Wesley,Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Sermon 33,  III.4.

The rains came down and the floods came up quite indiscriminately.  All of us feel the impact of life’s storms, whether natural disasters, illness, or the chaotic fight between one another.  To be human is to share in three things: to share in a common dignity of being an image bearer of God, to share in the common fallenness of every way we fail to live into that beautiful image, and to share in the common belovedness of a Christ who completely believes in our redemption.  When the storms meet the kingdoms and castles we’ve built, we will see just how firm is the foundation upon which we’ve placed our trust.

Last week, I was invited to preach a sermon exploring what it looks like to be a Christian engaged in American citizenship without succumbing to Christian Nationalism.  It was a doozy of a message, to say the least.
  In study and prayer to prepare for this sermon, I felt some pretty strong challenges to my own motivations, my own fears, and my choices in acting on those motivations and fears. God has a way of annoying me with simple moments where the mirror I tried to hold up to my enemy turns into a window where I simply see myself in them, and them in me.  Not cool, God!  I had prepared myself to name the things I hated about Christian Nationalism, but I had not prepared to name the things I hated about my own reaction to Christian Nationalism.  I was prepared to name a dogged need to defend God at all costs as the real problem of Christian Nationalism.  I was not prepared to recognize that I was doing the same thing in my stand against it.  I was prepared to fight fire with fire, to escalate alongside, and let another’s fear, anger and anxiety stoke the flames of my own.  If they thought they needed to save God from a culture war, I thought I needed to save God from God’s own followers.  And the truth is, none of us were really trying to protect God, we were fighting because we were scared that God’s cross wasn’t strong enough to protect us.

Today’s comic is page 2 in a short poem series I’m posting here called Kingdoms of Sand.  This series is intended as  a meditation on the closing words in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:24-27.  It is a parable of wisdom, with the wise building on a foundation of stone, and the foolish building on a foundation of sand. The storm hits everyone with equal indifference, but the devastation which follows the wind and rain bears drastically differing results.  The house of the wise stands firm, but the house of the foolish is completely destroyed.  We have typically interpreted this parable in highly individualistic ways, and so my interpretation here is intended to be more broadly communal.  What if the foolish builder is not one person, not just me or you, but something much bigger?  What if the foolish builder might be many working together under a foolish blueprint, building not one home but an entire kingdom on a sandy foundation?

When I participate in kingdom-building, even in God’s name, that requires or results in diminishing the dignity of my neighbor, my foundation is not nearly as solid as I thought.  Today’s poem is a reflection on my own experiences with privilege and marginalization, for I am not entirely one thing or entirely the other.  Depending on the situation, I am both kids in today’s comic.  I have taken for granted the ways I benefit from the diminishment of others, and I have definitely failed to see the ways my own privileges blind me to the real pain of those I don’t understand.  And I have also suffered a great deal of trauma as a queer person attempting to survive life in the American Church, leaving me silent and afraid more times than not.

There’s about two more comics to come out in this series, so I will not rush to its conclusion.  Instead, I invite you to meditate on the artwork and the words of today’s comic.  When in your life have you been each child that you see here?  How would you like to see yourself?  What do you believe about God’s intention for your journey as it relates to the larger community?  When you feel fear, anger, or anxiety about the state of things, what might it look like for you to trust that the cross of Christ has already done the work, already won the battle?