From the sermon: Who is my Mother? Who Are My Brothers?
In 1977, two archaeologists were working at an dig site on the Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania when one of them, in a moment of playfulness, picked up a piece of elephant dung and threw it at his colleague. As one might expect, the colleague picked up the dung and returned volley—and suddenly the dung fight was on.
Now we know how archeologists entertain themselves when they’re bored.
As the dung fight ensued, one of the archeologists dove out of the way to avoid an incoming dung patty when he landed on what turned out to be one of the greatest prehistoric discoveries of the 20th Century: a trail of hominid footprints about 3.6 million years old.
The footprints belonged to some of the earliest known humans to have lived: three barefoot hominids—likely a man, woman, and child—walking closely together across moist volcanic ash on a day about 3.6 million years ago. After crossing the plain, more ash covered their footprints and later hardened, leaving us with a record of that moment in time.
We have about 75 feet of that family’s footprints. It’s unclear where they were going or why, but as the Sadiman volcano erupted, they were likely fleeing in search of safer ground.
Wherever they were going, we know that as they walked, the woman paused, turned left, walked briefly in a different direction, only to turn back and rejoin her family.
Why did she turn away? Did she feel a sudden impulse to go it alone, only to reconsider? What was it that called her back to her family?
If we know anything about what it means to be human, it’s that we cannot go it alone in this world for very long. That’s not just a psychological truth, but a profoundly biological one. Those earliest humans knew what we know today: that the world is just too big and unpredictable, and we are just too small and vulnerable, to be able to survive without each other. There is strength and security in belonging to a community.
All the science today suggests that if we desire happiness, and desire to live longer and healthier lives, we need quality relationships—and more of them. The correlation between the quality of our relationships and our overall happiness and longevity is undeniable.
It’s always been this way for humans, which is why many biologists now believe that Darwin actually got it wrong—that it wasn’t “survival of the fittest” or competition that made us human. It was actually cooperation in communities of relationship. We made it this far not by out-competing others, but by belonging to others—in families, clans, tribes, and nations.
When we read the Hebrew scriptures, we see how important belonging was for our Jewish ancestors. Their survival depended on the quality of their relationships and their fierce commitment to their unique identity as the Chosen People. Between their exodus from Egypt and their arrival in the Promised Land, they had to learn how to live as the Chosen People in a big and hostile world: how to honor Yahweh above all other gods, preserve their fragile community, and protect it from pagan influences; how to deal with inter-tribal conflict, observe dietary restrictions, avoid disease, care for the vulnerable, mete out justice. It was so complicated that they created 613 laws—mitzvot—to order their collective life, shape their identity, and survive the wilderness.
And after arriving in the Promised Land, for the next 1500 years these commandments defined their way of life as a Chosen People—whom they believed God loved exclusively, above all other peoples. They understood themselves as special, exceptional.
But along the way, there were some cracks in their logic about their exclusive claims to God’s love—like the book of Jonah, which was a radical parable about how maybe God didn’t actually hate everyone they hated.
Jonah wasn’t just about a guy getting swallowed by a fish. It was really about how the hated Ninevites repented and were forgiven by God. No one at the time liked the story. It suggested that God believed the non-Jews were worthy of divine love too. But somehow this story found its way into the Jewish canon: a scandalous tale about how God forgave even those good-for-nothing, non-believing Ninevites—the enemies of the Chosen People.
Perhaps that story planted a little seed for what would come later. Fast-forward about 750 years. A Jew named Jesus enters the scene. Jesus is a rabbi who knows all 613 commandments but does not seem to follow them like a good rabbi should. Jesus actually breaks some commandments: he heals people on the sabbath, plucks grain on the Sabbath, touches lepers, chats with women, eats with the ritually unclean. Jesus belongs to the Chosen People, but he seems to have forgotten that chosen-ness is supposed to mean separateness. He parties it up with prostitutes, gentiles, tax collectors, Samaritans, even military officers in the Roman army—the actual enemy of the Chosen People.
It’s not supposed to work this way. The commandments demand that stick with our own family, clan, tribe, nation, and draw boundaries between our people and other people—especially the unbelievers, the unclean, the enemy.
And it all reaches a crisis in our story from Matthew. Jesus is teaching in someone’s home when he’s interrupted mid-sentence: “Eh, excuse me, Jesus. Your mom and brothers are outside—they’d like to have a word with you.”
And Jesus gives the most radical, unexpected response: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”
In that one question, Jesus not only dismisses the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and mother”—but violates the foundational assumption that the most important people in your life should be the people who share your blood, your DNA, your genealogy, your nationality.
Pointing to all his sketchy friends in the room, Jesus says, “These are my mothers and brothers.”
In that one statement, Jesus redefines what true family and kinship looks like. He subverts the Jewish understanding of the chosen-ness, the exceptionalism, of God’s people. No more is family simply defined by bloodlines, genealogies, nationalities, religions, or cultures. Jesus expands our circle of belonging, enlarges our sphere of responsibility, stretches our reach to include those outside all our boundaries that rooted in chosen-ness, exclusivity, exceptionalism.
“These are my mothers and brothers,” says Jesus.
And suddenly, there is no longer the “chosen” and the “unchosen”—no longer, as the Apostle Paul says, “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female,” American or Israeli or Palestinian or Ukrainian. We are all one family.
Jesus knows that when our circle of relationships contracts, so too does our heart, our capacity for empathy, our propensity for compassion.
For Jesus, everyone is a mother, a brother, a sister, and a father. No religion or nationality or any other identity can change that.
But in every age, there are powers and principalities working in fierce opposition to that vision of God’s beloved community.
And in our age, those powers and principalities are pulsing through our nation’s body like a deadly virus, threatening our churches, our country, our common life.
That deadly virus is the sin of Christian nationalism.
Never, in our 248 years as a country, have we witnessed the glaring conflation of radical Christian beliefs with the levers of federal government in an organized effort to erase the separation of church and state and merge the name of Jesus with the powers of Caesar.
I know we have this cultural assumption—an unspoken agreement—that when we gather in church, we don’t talk about politics.
And, as we know, there’s also a constitutional amendment—not an unspoken agreement but a codified law—that when we gather in the halls of government we don’t talk about religion.
But we know this constitutional boundary is fracturing in our current political context, and if we genuinely care about our country and truly love God, then the church is obligated to name the threat honestly, with humility—not to use the pulpit politically to steer us to the right or to the left, but to use it prophetically to lead us to the truth.
For weeks, many have asked: “Will you please speak about Christian nationalism? Will you help us understand what it is, why it’s dangerous, how we should respond to it?” How can we love God and follow Christ and care deeply about our country without conflating the two?
Can we talk honestly and humbly for a moment?
What is Christian nationalism?
It’s a toxic political ideology, cloaked in quasi-Christian garments, that claims that America should be a Christian theocracy, and that our government should take active steps to enforce Christianity through legislation and civil and criminal laws, that reflect a very narrow, distorted, and radicalized view of Christianity.
Christian nationalism is deeply invested in the concept of global spiritual warfare—the idea that Christians are called to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil, to be God’s “boots on the ground,” and to resort to violence, if necessary, to win that imagined conflict. In this way, Christian nationalism is alarmingly akin to Islamic extremism because it highjacks our deepest human instinct to belong to a tribe by promising divine blessing upon anyone who will crusade for it and defend it at all costs.
For Christian nationalists, apocalypticism, tribulation, and the end times are foundational themes. One member of congress who identifies as a Christian nationalist recently said in a campaign speech, “We know that we are in the last of the last days…and you get to have a role in ushering in the second coming of Jesus.”
The first insurrectionists to breach the Capitol on January 6 were self-avowed Christian nationalists. As they overtook the Senate chamber that day, they invoked the name of Jesus and prayed these words: “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Creator God, for filling this chamber with patriots…for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.”
Their actions took the lives of five Capitol police officers.
But Christian nationalism isn’t always so glaringly obvious. How do you know it when you see it?
First, Christian nationalism always whitewashes America’s history. It refuses to read our history honestly, to acknowledge that America has no doubt been an extraordinary force for good throughout the world, but it’s also been a force for some regrettable sins: slavery, the oppression of indigenous peoples, Jim Crow, racism. Christian nationalism whitewashes the sins of the past, rejects the need for genuine repentance before a loving God, and forgets that every nation on earth stands under the higher judgment of God.
So a “Christian nationalist” is someone whose Christian faith must always take second place and serve to justify an uncritical, blind patriotism in whose eyes the nation can do no wrong. Faith gets reduced to unquestioning obedience to a political idol, and patriotism gets reduced to mere submission to a political platform that opposes critical reflection and honest debate.
Second, Christian nationalism always needs an enemy to ostracize, otherize, or dehumanize in order to maintain the presumed moral purity of its adherents. Someone must always be perceived as a threat to the nation’s blood. While not all bigotry is fueled by Christian nationalism, all Christian nationalism invariably fuels bigotry and violence directed at a scapegoat: Jews, Asians, immigrants, Muslims, atheists, liberals, LGBTQ persons.
Third, you can usually spot Christian nationalism because most Christian nationalists publicly identify as such. “Christian nationalism” is not a pejorative term that the media have assigned to people with these extremist beliefs. It is a public creed that serves as a call to action. Currently, three members of congress openly call themselves Christian nationalists. They campaign on the belief that the church should ultimately control the levers of government. The question is: what church? The white evangelical church? The church that condemns non-Christians, or LGBTQ persons, or doubters or atheists?
About 29% of Americans identify as Christian nationalists, the majority of whom are evangelicals. It is a growing movement. But it’s both un-American and un-Christian.
Christian nationalism is un-American because the First Amendment’s free exercise clause allows a person to hold whatever religious beliefs he or she desires, and to exercise that belief freely. It grants the right to not believe in any religion, and to not participate in religious activities.
Its establishment clause prevents the government from creating a church, endorsing religion, or favoring one set of religious beliefs over another. It builds “a wall of separation between church and state”—a separation so respected today that even the Department of Defense recognizes 221 faith groups in our military, including agnostics, atheists, and those with no preference.
But Christian nationalism is not only un-American—it’s also profoundly un-Christian. By equating the kingdom of God with government, it violates the first commandment prohibiting idolatry; by using God’s name for political ends, it “takes the Lord’s name in vain”—violating the third commandment. Christian nationalism is absolute idolatry.
It weaponizes Christianity for political ends, and grasps after the same levers of power and government that Jesus rejected when he told Pilate, “You have no power over me…and my kingdom is not of this world.”
Christian nationalism is idolatry because it trivializes every Christian’s inherent calling to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit in all matters both personal, social, and political: to discern the purposes of God in the world and in our lives, to reject evil, oppression, coercion, violence in all its forms, to live out Jesus’ commandment to love others as ourselves, and to vote according to our own God-shaped conscience, regardless of what side of the aisle we are on.
Christian nationalism is idolatry because it’s an assault on the heart of Jesus’ teaching that every mother is our mother, every brother our brother—regardless of who they are, what they believe, where they live, or how they vote.
Christian nationalism is idolatry because, if it is true that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” he cannot be anyone’s handmaid or servant or political mascot.
So what can we do about it? First, we can better understand how Christian nationalism spreads. Consider the lesson of the Banyan tree.
Banyan trees are found all over the world, but they are native only to South Asia. The largest living banyan tree is growing in a botanical garden near Calcutta. It occupies five acres and is more than 250 years old.
How does a single tree grow to cover five acres, with branches 80 feet tall, over two and a half centuries?
Banyans belong to the fig tree genus. They are known as “strangler figs,” meaning they grow from seeds that fall from their fruit and land on neighboring non-banyan trees. Over time, those seeds germinate in neighboring trees, and then grow as vines that depend on that neighbor for structural support. But eventually, these banyan vines strangle their host tree. They subsume its structure—and then begin growing roots from the outwardly-extending branches of their host tree, until those roots reach the ground and become trunk-like.
The banyan tree does this over and over, gradually expanding its footprint.
This is how Christian nationalism grows. It plants its seeds in neighboring hosts—Christians, churches, groups with political grievances—and then it grows subtly, until it eventually subsumes the structure of every willing host around it.
How do we stop it?
We stop it by being better citizens who speak the truth about what our founders envisioned from our nation’s very beginning, and what so many who have served our nation have fought and died to preserve ever since. Be engaged. Reject complicity. Question. Vote for the common good.
We can also stop it by being the kind of Christians that Christian nationalism fears most: faithful followers of Jesus who embrace the kind of kinship Jesus taught and embodied—a kinship that transcends bloodlines, nationalities, religions, cultures, and politics. A kinship that says, whoever you are, whatever you believe, wherever you’re from, you are my mother, my brother, my sister, my father—even if you’re my enemy.
Maybe we can take our cue from another kind of tree: the aspen, which teaches us the secret wisdom of beloved community. Aboveground, aspen grow as individual trees, but belowground, they’re enlivened by one interconnected set of roots. They are one living organism and one living community at the same time. What happens to one tree happens to all the aspens in the grove.
As one living root system, the aspen grove treats each of its trees as a limb. When an individual tree dies, it’s as if the grove loses a limb. The grove will rush nutrients to the damaged area the way immune cells rush to the site of an infection. The huge root system depends on the limbs closest to a water source to absorb and send the nourishment to the other connected trees. This is true belonging, true community.
In Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, there’s an aspen grove named Pando, Latin for “I spread.” It’s the largest aspen grove in the world, more than 80,000 years old, containing 47,000 individual trees. How does it grow? How has it survived?
Shared roots. A lesson for all of us. We need an aspen grove wisdom that rejects separateness, exclusivity, exceptionalism—one that embraces instead a spirit of connection, collaboration, generosity, and a deep commitment to the common good.
One that says to every tree in this grove called America, “You are my mother, you are my brothers.”
Let’s pray:
God of all races, nations, and religions,
we cannot change others,
but we can change ourselves.
We can join you in changing our only future,
where Love reigns the same over all people.
Help us never to bow to any gods,
defend us from those who do,
as we worship the One God of all the earth,
and do God’s good thing for this One World.
Amen.