Christian Mythbusters

Fr. Jared C. Cramer
  • 0.0 (0)
  • CHRISTIANITY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Your Worth Is Not What You Produce

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Today I want to talk about rest. And why so many Christians are terrible at it. The myth I want to bust is one that runs so deep in American Christianity that most of us don't even recognize it as a theological claim. It's this: that your worth is determined by what you produce. What you accomplish. What you create, what you say, what you do. That busyness is next to godliness. This is often called the Protestant Work Ethic, and its roots go back to the Reformation — particularly to Calvinist theology, which tied disciplined, productive labor to signs of divine election. If you worked hard and prospered, it meant God was with you. Over time, especially in America, that theological framework got absorbed into the culture so thoroughly that it no longer needs a church to sustain it. It just is the water we swim in. Hustle culture. Productivity optimization. The glorification of busy. But here's what the Bible actually says: on the seventh day, God rested. Not because God was tired. Not because there was nothing left to do. God rested because rest is built into the fabric of creation itself. Sabbath isn't an afterthought. It's the crown of the creation story. The whole week points toward it. The Hebrew word is shabbat — to cease, to stop, to let be. And in the Torah, sabbath rest was not optional or aspirational. It was commanded. It was liberation theology in calendar form — a weekly reminder that the Israelites were no longer slaves in Egypt, no longer defined by their output, no longer subject to Pharaoh's endless demand for more bricks. And precisely because they were once slaves, God insisted that not only should they rest but that they must build a society in which everyone, down to the lowest and most vulnerable, was given a day to rest… a day simply… to be.  Which means that when we refuse to rest, when we feel guilty about stopping, when our identity collapses without our to-do lists, we are acting like people who have forgotten they've been set free. And this touches my own life. Starting tomorrow, I begin a sabbatical — what our church is calling a “Renewal Leave” — that will carry me through mid-September. (That means there won’t be any more productions of Christian Mythbusters for the next four months.) This sabbatical is a genuine gift, and I don't take it for granted for a single moment. I know that most people listening don't get sabbaticals. The rhythms of sabbath rest are not equally available to everyone, and that itself is a justice issue worth naming. When rest becomes a luxury only some can afford, something has gone badly wrong. But sabbath was always meant to be more than a perk for the privileged. The Torah extended it to servants, to animals, to the land itself. It was a social practice, not just a personal one. Which means the church should be asking hard questions about a society that makes rest impossible for so many — and should be working to change it. In the meantime, here is what I know from theology and from my own life: you can build sabbath into your days even without a sabbatical. Not by escaping your responsibilities, but by regularly, intentionally, ceasing. One evening a week away from the screen. One morning that belongs to something life-giving rather than productive. A walk where you are not also listening to a podcast or wor. A meal where you are just eating. Small sabbaths, practiced faithfully, can begin to loosen the grip of the myth that you are only as valuable as what you produce. Because here is the truth: God is saving the world. Not you. Not me. We each have our part to play — and those parts matter deeply. But the weight of making things right does not rest on our shoulders alone. That is God's work, and God will see it through. Which means it is not just permissible for us to rest. It is essential. It is an act of faith. I’ll try to live in that trust, to rest in that grace and love, until I talk to you again in September. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  2. 15 APR

    Christianity Isn't an Exit Strategy

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. This week I came across a video of retired Anglican Bishop and renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, and he was making a point that I think is worth sitting with: that Christianity is not primarily about your soul escaping this world and going to heaven when you die. Now, I know that might sound strange. For a lot of people, your soul going to heaven is Christianity. The whole point. Get saved, go to heaven. And that assumption runs so deep that most of us never think to question it. It's like being a fish in water. You don't notice the water. That means it’s definitely a myth worth breaking. I was reminded of just how deep that assumption runs when I was watching an old episode of Lost the other night. The subject of baptism came up, and John Locke explained to Claire that baptism was basically eternal insurance. A way to make sure the baby got to heaven if something happened to him. And when Claire later talked to Mr. Eko, the character who, theoretically, had the most Christian formation of anyone on the island, he didn't push back on that understanding at all. When she worried about being separated from Aaron, he essentially offered to baptize them both. An insurance double plan, apparently. Now, I don't want to be too hard on a television show. But that scene captures something real. It's the version of Christianity that enormous numbers of people have actually received. Baptism as a ticket. Salvation as an exit strategy. The point of faith is to get your soul safely out of this world and into the next one. But here's the thing: that's not what Scripture actually teaches. Wright points to the Lord's Prayer as a window into the heart of what Jesus was actually about. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, "Our Father, may our souls ascend to you in heaven." He says, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The direction of movement, if you want to put it that way, is not souls leaving earth for heaven. It's God's reign arriving here in our broken, beloved world. The healing of creation. The renewal of all things. This is why the resurrection matters so much. Jesus did not rise as a disembodied spirit finally freed from the physical world. He rose bodily, as the first fruits of a new creation. The great promise of Scripture is not that God will eventually discard the physical world and take faithful souls somewhere else. It's that God will renew, restore, and redeem this world. And that changes everything about what the Christian life is for. If salvation is an exit strategy, then your job is just to get yourself and maybe a few others safely through the door before things get worse. But if salvation is about God's kingdom coming, then you are called to be part of that renewal right now. To practice justice. To love your neighbor. To work for the healing of what is broken. Not because it earns you anything, but because that is what it looks like to live in the reality Jesus announced. Baptism, in this fuller picture, is not insurance. It's initiation into a people who are learning to live as if the kingdom is already breaking in. Because it is. So the next time someone asks what Christianity is really about, you might resist the urge to reach for the heaven-and-hell framework. Instead, try this: it's about a God who loves this world so much that he entered into it, and who is committed to setting it right and healing all things—a God who invites us to be part of that work. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  3. 1 APR

    The Betrayer is Beloved

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. This week, we're in the middle of the Holy Week and Easter observances, the most sacred time of the year. Some of you are hearing this closer to Easter, but the day I’m recording this (and the day the first version is being aired) is Wednesday itself, a day the church has long called "Spy Wednesday." This is the day we remember how Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. And whenever Spy Wednesday comes around, so do the myths about Judas. The biggest myth is this: Judas was uniquely evil, the worst of all sinners, the one man beyond redemption. Dante put Judas in the lowest circle of hell, frozen in the mouth of Satan himself. For centuries, Christian preachers have used Judas as a symbol of ultimate betrayal, of irredeemable wickedness.  But let's slow down and take a harder look at the story. First, the Gospels don't actually agree on why Judas did what he did. Mark gives no reason for the betrayal. Matthew focuses on the money. In Luke and John, we are told that Satan entered Judas, rendering his actions not his own entirely. There's no single, tidy explanation, which should make us cautious about building a whole theology of damnation on one man we barely understand.  And yet, across all four Gospels, Jesus shares the Last Supper with Judas, breaks bread with him, does not exclude him from the table. In John's Gospel specifically, Jesus even washes the feet of Judas. Jesus meets Judas with the same love and care he offers every other disciple, even knowing what is coming. The betrayer is also the beloved. Second, it's worth noting what Jesus himself says. In John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that none of them has been lost except "the one destined to be lost, so that scripture might be fulfilled." That phrase, destined to be lost, has troubled theologians for centuries. But the dominant interpretation among the early church fathers is that though Jesus foresaw the free choice of Judas to betray Jesus, even that freedom is harder to assess than we might think. Third, and maybe most importantly, we often forget that Judas felt genuine remorse. Matthew tells us he threw the thirty pieces of silver back at the priests, declared that he had betrayed innocent blood, and then went out and died by suicide. Whatever drove him to betray Jesus, he could not live with what he had done. That's not the portrait of a man who had fully rejected Christ. And here's where the Christian tradition, at its best, has something remarkable to offer: the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, the idea (expressed in the Apostles’ Creed) that Christ descended to the dead on Holy Saturday. A poet named Ruth Etchells imagined what that might be in a poem she wrote called "The Ballad of the Judas Tree."  In Hell there grew a Judas Tree / Where Judas hanged and died / Because he could not bear to see / His master crucified / Our Lord descended into Hell / And found his Judas there / For ever hanging on the tree / Grown from his own despair / So Jesus cut his Judas down / And took him in his arms / "It was for this I came" he said / "And not to do you harm / My Father gave me twelve good men / And all of them I kept / Though one betrayed and one denied / Some fled and others slept / In three days' time I must return / To make the others glad / But first I had to come to Hell / And share the death you had / My tree will grow in place of yours / Its roots lie here as well / There is no final victory / Without this soul from Hell"/ So when we all condemned him / As of every traitor worst / Remember that of all his men / Our Lord forgave him first. That last line is the theological punch: our Lord forgave him first. The myth says Judas is the exception, the one person even God's love couldn't reach. The gospel says there are no exceptions. We profess in the creeds that Christ descended into hell. We believe that the love of God pursues us into the very darkest places we can go, including the darkness we make for ourselves. Judas is a warning, yes, about the corrosive power of betrayal and despair, even more so about what happens when you so form Christ in your own image and expectations that you turn away from the real goodness God holds out to you. But if Etchells is right, Judas can also be a testimony to the relentless, pursuing love of Jesus Christ.  Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    5 min

  4. 25 MAR

    Neurospicy and Made in God's Image

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Recently, a lot of our conversations together have been about questions where people have confused what is common or dominant (cisgender identity, male dominance in culture) with the depth of the divine life. The results is that anyone who falls outside the boundaries of what is deemed “normal” is seen as an outlier to God’s intent for the world we live in. Today, I want to tackle one particular way that narrative plays out in an area of which we are only recently more aware—the concept of neurodiversity. Many people assume that there is one kind of normal brain, and that people who don't have it are somehow less than fully who they should be. This is a myth definitely worth breaking.  I want to talk about what the neurodivergent—or neurospicy, which is my own favorite term—can teach the rest of us. The term was "neurodiversity" was coined in 1998 by autistic Australian sociologist Judy Singer — and she was very clear that it wasn't a medical term. It was a political one. Her idea was simple: no two human minds are exactly alike, and that variation is not a defect. It is a fact about our species. Autism activists took that idea and ran with it, pushing back against what they call the "pathology model" — the assumption that there is one correct way for a brain to develop, and that every deviation from it is a disorder to be cured. Daniel Bowman Jr., a poet and English professor who is also autistic, puts it plainly: autism is his operating system, not a bug. He is not broken. He is different. And the neurotypical insistence that their way of being human is the standard makes the lives of neurodivergent people unnecessarily hard — not because their brains don't work, but because the world keeps telling them they don't fit. Now here's where the theology gets interesting. Christians have long wrestled with what it means to be made in the image of God — the imago Dei. Over the last century, a dominant answer has been: relationality. To be fully human, in the image of God, is to be in relationship — the I-Thou of Martin Buber, taken up by Barth and Bonhoeffer and half the systematic theologians of the twentieth century. The problem, as scholar Joanna Leidenhag has shown, is that when you define personhood primarily through the capacity for certain kinds of social and emotional relationship, you have — almost by accident — defined autistic people as less than fully human. Some churches have even used this framework to suggest that people with autism are incapable of genuine sanctification. That is a theological catastrophe, and it needs to be named as one. Here is what I think is closer to the truth: God, in Scripture, reveals a mind that is both deeply systematic and profoundly empathic. The orderliness of creation, the precision of the tabernacle instructions, Paul's declaration that God is not a God of disorder but of peace — these point to a divine mind that finds beauty and meaning in pattern and structure. But God also weeps. God notices Jonah's sulking over a withered plant. God is moved. Both modes of knowing and being belong to God, which means both modes of knowing and being belong to the image of God we carry. And here is what our neurospicy siblings can teach us: they often experience one or both of these modes with astonishing intensity. Bowman writes that his autistic friends are every bit as feeling, compassionate, and caring as his neurotypical ones — sometimes more so. What looks like emotional flatness from the outside is frequently a nervous system overwhelmed by the depth of what it is taking in. That is not a deficit. That is a different kind of depth. Scholar Lauren Calvin Cooke makes a related point about how the church has mistakenly equated deep faith with cognitive articulation — the ability to explain sanctification, to recite the creed, to answer the right questions in confirmation class.  But the Word did not become a proposition. The Word became flesh.  Embodied, sensory, particular human experience, that is what God entered. Which means knowledge of God lives in the body… in the bread on the tongue, in the knees that learn to kneel, in the hands that learn to receive. Our neurodivergent siblings, who often experience the world through their senses with extraordinary vividness, may have access to embodied, incarnational knowing that those of us who live mostly in our heads have been trained to overlook. To be clear: the neurospicy don't need to be fixed so they can participate in our church. Those of us who are neruotypical need to expand what we think participation looks like. We need to build communities where the fidgeter and the avoider of eye contact and the person who needs the same seat every week is not seen as a problem to manage, but as a bearer of the divine image — offering us a facet of God we might never otherwise encounter. The myth is that normal is the goal. The truth is that the image of God is far larger than any one of us — or any one kind of brain — can contain. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    5 min

  5. 18 MAR

    Saved by His Humanity, Not His Maleness

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week I talked about the myth that God is a man—and why Christian theology has always known that God transcends gender entirely. Today I want to go deeper, because some listeners pushed back with an obvious question: “But Jesus was a man, wasn't he?” And yes—historically, he was. So, what do we do with that? This brings us to today's myth: the myth that because Jesus was male, maleness must be closer to God, some key part of the divine inner life, or more capable of representing the divine. To untangle this, I want to introduce you to one of the most important theological principles in all of Christian history. It comes from St. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing around 382 AD: “That which he did not assume, he cannot save.” In other words, for Christ to redeem humanity, he had to take on full human nature—not just a body, but a mind, a will, emotions, and all the complexity of what it means to be a person. Gregory was arguing against those who thought Jesus only seemed human, or was human in only a partial way. No, Gregory insisted: the redemption of the whole person requires the incarnation of the whole person. Now here's where it gets interesting. If the saving power of the incarnation flows from Christ's humanity—from his taking on the full depth of human experience—then what follows? It follows that his maleness was a feature of his historical particularity, not the theological engine of salvation. Feminist theologians have been making this exact point for decades. While Jesus' male sex was as intrinsic to his historical particularity as were his Jewish race, his Galilean village roots, his class, and his ethnic heritage, it reveals nothing about the nature or gender of God, nor about the appropriateness of male images for the divine. Jesus was also a first-century Palestinian Jew who wore sandals and spoke Aramaic. We don't conclude from that that God is Aramaic-speaking—or that Galileans are somehow closer to the divine. As Elizabeth Johnson put it, “The heart of the problem is not that Jesus was male, but that more males have not been like Jesus.” The point is this: the incarnation saves because God entered fully into human life—into vulnerability, suffering, love, and death. The redemptive power is in the depth of that union, not in the gender of the vessel. And if that's true, then Gregory's maxim cuts in an unexpected direction. If the unassumed is the unhealed, then a Christ who only assumed male humanity would leave the rest of humanity—women, nonbinary people, anyone who doesn't fit the narrow category of male—somehow outside the full reach of salvation. Christian theology has sometimes dignified maleness as the only genuine way of being human, making Jesus' embodiment as male an ontological necessity rather than a historical option. But that's not the Gospel. That's a distortion of it. The good news—and it really is good news—is that what Christ assumed was humanity itself, in its full breadth and depth. And that means the healing of the incarnation extends to every human being: women, men, and people of every gender identity. All of it was assumed. All of it is being redeemed. This is why the diversity of human gender and identity is not a threat to Christian faith. It is, if anything, a reminder of the vastness of what God entered into—and the vastness of what God is saving. The mystery of human embodiment in all its variety doesn't shrink the Gospel. It reveals how wide the incarnation truly is. Gregory of Nazianzus wanted us to take the incarnation seriously. So let's do that—all the way to its most expansive, most healing conclusion. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  6. 10 MAR

    God is Not a Man

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Over the past few days, there’s been a good amount of controversy swirling around a comment from Texas politician and Presbyterian seminary student James Talarico. During a speech several years ago, Talarico said something that quickly went viral again this week: “God is nonbinary.” Critics pounced. Commentators circulated the clip as evidence that progressive Christians have abandoned traditional faith. But Talarico later said he was making a theological point that shouldn’t really be controversial—the idea that God is beyond human gender categories. Which brings us to today’s myth: the myth that God is a man… because apparently some people think that’s true.  And if you think about it for even a moment, that idea doesn’t make much sense. Christians believe God created the entire universe—space, time, matter, life itself. God is the source and ground of all being, the ultimate divine reality that exists beyond the limits of human biology. If God is the creator of gender, then God cannot be confined to a single gender. But here’s the thing: many people really do imagine God as literally male. I remember leading a Bible study early in my ministry, when I was still a brand-new priest. At one point in the discussion, an older woman in the group said something that genuinely surprised me. She told us that she believed God really was an old man with a long white beard—basically the same image you see in Renaissance paintings. And she didn’t mean that symbolically. She meant it quite literally. Now, to be clear, scripture often uses masculine language for God. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” But the reality is the Bible also uses feminine imagery for God—comparing God to a mother eagle protecting her young, a woman searching for a lost coin, or a mother comforting her child. The point is not that God is male or female. The point is that every human metaphor eventually falls short. In fact, the very first chapter of the Bible pushes us in this direction. In Genesis we are told that human beings are created in the image of God: “male and female he created them.” Notice what that implies. The fullness of humanity reflects the divine image. No single gender contains it all. And that insight has something important to say for how Christians think about gender today. If all people bear the image of God, then transgender and nonbinary people are not mistakes. They are not outside of God’s creative intention. They, too, reflect the divine image in the world. In fact, that might be a particular gift the trans community offers the rest of us. Because their lives challenge the assumption that gender must fit neatly into simple binary categories, they remind us of something theology has always known: God transcends the boxes we try to place around reality. And so why would we be surprised when humans do the same?   In that way, the existence and witness of trans and nonbinary people can help reveal something profound about the mystery of God, about the reality of gender not being one or the other but a multitude of diversity.  When Genesis described God looking at creation, Genesis said God declared it “very good.” That blessing extends to the full diversity of humanity—including those whose lives challenge categories we once assumed were fixed. And this is something the great mystics of the Christian tradition understood very well. They taught that the deepest path into the heart of God is what theologians call the apophatic way—the path of realizing that God ultimately surpasses every concept, every category, every image we try to use. The closer we get to God, the more we discover that the divine mystery is always larger than our assumptions. And when we learn to live in that mystery, something beautiful happens: our theology becomes humbler, our compassion becomes wider, and we begin to recognize the image of God shining in people we might once have overlooked. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min

  7. 4 MAR

    When Deconstruction Becomes Conversion

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the biggest myths many of us carry about faith is this: that if your beliefs change, your faith must be failing. For a lot of people—especially those of us who grew up in evangelical environments—faith was often presented as a kind of finished product. The right doctrines. The right interpretations. The right answers. Once you “arrived,” the expectation was that you would simply defend those answers for the rest of your life. But life and the Holy Spirit have a way of complicating tidy answers. You encounter new ideas. You meet people whose experiences challenge what you were taught. You discover parts of scripture you had never really wrestled with before. The Holy Spirit moves in your heart, asking you to reconsider something you’ve always believed. And suddenly the faith that once felt certain begins to shift. For many people, that moment can be terrifying. Because if faith is supposed to be a fixed set of beliefs, then questioning those beliefs can feel like the beginning of the end. But the deeper Christian tradition offers a very different picture of faith. In the Rule of St. Benedict—the sixth-century guide for monastic life—monks take three vows: stability, obedience, and something called conversatio morum. That Latin phrase is famously hard to translate, but it’s often rendered as “conversion of life.” Not conversion as a one-time event. Conversion as a lifelong process. Conversatio morum assumes something many modern Christians forget: following Christ means continually being changed. Your understanding deepens. Your assumptions are challenged. Your life slowly reshapes itself around the way of Jesus. In other words, change is not a failure of faith… change is faith. That idea was enormously important for me personally. I grew up in an evangelical world where certainty was often treated as the highest virtue. But as I encountered the wider Christian tradition—scripture, history, theology, and the sacramental life of the church—I found myself asking questions that my earlier faith didn’t always know how to answer. For a while, that felt like everything was unraveling. But discovering this older Christian wisdom from St. Benedict reframed the entire experience. What I thought was “deconstruction” w something far older: conversion of life. Conversatio morum. It reminded me that the goal of Christianity is not intellectual rigidity. The goal is transformation after the mind of Christ. And in many ways, that realization is what eventually drew me into the Anglican tradition. Anglicanism holds deeply to the ancient faith of the church—its creeds, its scriptures, its sacramental life—but it also carries a humility about our understanding. It recognizes that the Holy Spirit is still at work reforming the church ever closer to God’s intent. That means we hold tradition seriously, but we also remain open to asking whether some of the church’s long-held assumptions were shaped more by culture than by the heart of God. Questions about the roles of women in the church, or about LGBTQ people and their place in the life of faith, have forced Christians to wrestle deeply with scripture, tradition, and lived experience.  And in many parts of the Anglican world, including my own, that wrestling has led to the recognition that what once seemed like the “traditional” position may actually have been culturally conditioned by forces of patriarchy, discrimination, or marginalization… that the Spirit may be leading the church toward a fuller understanding of God’s love and justice than we previously held. That too is conversatio morum. The apostle Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Notice that word: renewing. Not once but again and again and again. A Benedictine writer once captured the spirit of this beautifully with a simple phrase: “always we begin again.” That’s what the Christian life looks like. We learn. We grow. We repent. We reconsider. And through it all, the Spirit keeps shaping us more and more into the likeness of Christ. Always we begin again—a truth of discipleship that sometimes might feel scary but that is actually a profound gift. The myth is that faith means never changing. The truth is that following Jesus means being willing to be changed—again and again—as we grow ever closer to God’s intent for us to be a people of love, justice, humility, grace, and mercy—particularly for ourselves. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    5 min

  8. 18 FEB

    Ashes, Grace, and the Ragamuffin Gospel

    This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Since most of you will be hearing this either on Ash Wednesday or sometime near the start of Lent, let’s talk about one of the most common myths surrounding this day. The myth is this: Ash Wednesday and Lent are about God wanting you to feel bad about yourself. I want to speak personally for a moment. Growing up in an evangelical context, I often felt like I never quite measured up. No matter how sincere my faith was, no matter how hard I tried, there was always this quiet sense that I was falling short—that real Christians were somehow stronger, purer, more certain than I was. Faith sometimes felt less like grace and more like a test I kept failing. And yet, strangely, when I encountered The Episcopal Church, Ash Wednesday became the day I first began to feel like I belonged. Because on Ash Wednesday, nobody is pretending. Nobody is polished. Nobody is performing spiritual success. We all come forward the same way—marked with ashes, named as dust, honest about our limits. Beat up, broken, and bedraggled… and still here. Still loved. Still called. Still held in grace. It was in the Season of Lent that I think I first began to understand what Brennan Manning called the Ragamuffin Gospel—the stunning truth that God’s love is not for the shiny and successful, but for ragamuffins: the bedraggled, the inconsistent, the ones who know they don’t have it all together. Manning wrote that “God loves you as you are, not as you should be, because none of us are as we should be.” That is the heart of Ash Wednesday. The ashes are not God saying, You are a failure. The ashes are God saying, You are human—and I am not done loving you yet . And if you grew up, like I did, with Rich Mullins somewhere in the background of your faith, you may remember how often he circled this same mystery. Mullins once said he wasn’t a good Christian—just a beggar showing other beggars where to find bread. That’s Ash Wednesday. Not the gathering of the spiritually impressive, but the gathering of beggars who know they need grace. In Scripture, ashes are never about worthlessness. They are about turning—repentance, reorientation, coming home. When people put on ashes in the Bible, they were not declaring, “I am nothing.” They were saying, “I want to live in what is real again. I want to return to God.” Ashes are not the mark of failure. They are the mark of hope—the sign that transformation is still possible. And notice this: everyone comes forward. The faithful and the doubting. The strong and the struggling. The certain and the searching. Ash Wednesday and Lent do not divide the worthy from the unworthy. They reveals something we all share—we are dust, we are fragile, we are unfinished… and we are loved anyway. Because “you are dust” is not the end of the sentence. In Genesis, God forms humanity from dust and breathes divine life into it. Dust, in the Christian imagination, is not trash. It is sacred material touched by God. To remember that we are dust is also to remember that we are beloved—created, sustained, and redeemed not by our performance, but by grace.. So if you have ever felt like you didn’t measure up—spiritually, morally, or personally—Ash Wednesday and Lent speak a different word. You do not have to pretend. You do not have to perform. You do not have to be impressive to belong. God meets us right here—in the ashes, in the honesty, in the ragamuffin truth of being human. And strangely, that is where freedom begins. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

    4 min
See All (139)

About

Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

Information

  • Creator
    Fr. Jared C. Cramer
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    139
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Christian Mythbusters
  • Show Website
    Christian Mythbusters

You Might Also Like