There’s a meme now circulating on social media of a guy in “blackface” on the left, and a picture of Dylan Mulvaney, a Transgender influencer, on the right. The caption reads,

“One is condemned to hell in our culture, the other is extolled to high heaven. Both are wrong because they offer a false and degrading representation of a real element of a person’s true identity.”

The image on the left is offensive in a way that this memer can never understand. He’s not black. None of us white folk can grasp the pain that comes from seeing a white man in black makeup, but I’ll guarantee you it goes far beyond any “false representation” or “identity” issue.

I saw this posted to one of my Seminary professor’s FB timelines, so I chimed in, asking where all these people who feel demeaned by Transgender females are. One of his followers replied, “We are many.”

I’m not entirely comfortable telling people how they should feel about something, especially given humanity’s long, painful history of men telling women to “get over” whatever painful thing that usually comes at the hands of men.

But I simply don’t trust this.

First, the people who feel demeaned by Transgender people most likely didn’t feel the same when they watched Robin Williams in his epic Mrs. Doubtfire, or in Pirates of the Carribean when two bad guys in a rowboat dressed like women to fool the English.

But one might say that it’s not the dress and the makeup that demeans women, it’s a man, claiming to have trans-formed into a woman, that gender is so cheap and easy that a man can comandeer one that’s not his own. Doesn’t that pose yet another threat to women? Like we needed another?

Some (many, I’m told) feel demeaned by people like Dylan Mulvaney because he allegedly

“prances around trotting out all of the most misogynist, ridiculous stereotypes of the past 50 years, which feminists have spilled oceans of ink and tears trying to reverse, and is rewarded with millions of dollars and media red carpet treatment…well yeah that DOES feel demeaning to many of us who have spent decades as actual women and all that comes along with womanhood and don’t become celebrities for it.”

I’m living in a cave on this one. I don’t know any women who feel this way, and I only know about Dylan Mulvaney from a cursory internet search. I have a hard time believing that this group’s numbers come close to the number of people who feel demeaned by blackface.

But comparing a Transgender woman – a natal male who harbors no known bias towards women – to a guy who most likely hates black people is an odd comparison. Why make it? How can we compare someone who self-declares as a woman with outright, blatant racism?

As a Christian who believes that Christians are very clearly commanded to unconditionally reach/serve the non-Christian world, I get uncomfortable every time we compare the exploits of non-Christians to some unthinkable sin. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, wants me to believe that Transgender people are pedophiles, as are the liberals who support them. Now, I’m supposed to believe that Transgender women are perpetrating some deed that’s on par with one of our nation’s oldest sins.

I have some questions.

First, Transgender women have been around for a long time, why get offended now? Sure, they are supported like never before in our world, and maybe this didn’t hit you until you realized that we’re mainstreaming it?

The disdain and disgust towards Trans people, however, is much older. So I need to ask, what came first, your disdain and disgust or the idea that women are being demeaned?

If any level of repulsion for Transgender people preceeded the idea that they are demeaning towards womanhood, the latter should be suspect. From where I sit, it seems that us Evangelicals were talking about the evils of Transgenderism long before the issue at hand surfaced.

If you could rid yourself of the disdain, would you still see Transgender women as a threat?

That’s certainly the problem with racism in America. What came first was the belief that “there’s something wrong with black people,” then the belief that they posed some kind of a threat to us white folk, then the atrocities.

In all of that lay the irrevocable idea that it’s bad to be black.

Transgender women don’t believe that it’s bad to be a woman, but Evangelical women who feel threatened by them believe that it’s bad to be Trans. Who should we be comparing to blackface, the guy who wants to be a woman or the follower of Jesus who’s convinced that Trans people are a) wrong AND b) a threat?

Regardless, I’m weary of Christians finding something they don’t agree with, then turning it into something it’s not so they can burn it down. To that, I’ll quote Jesus on how Christians should behave in a world they think is evil, or twisted, or losing its mind as so many of my anti-Trans Christian friends claim:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Jewish people in the first century looked at non-Jewish people like Christians look at the transgender world: twisted, unholy, repulsive, etc. But here’s Jesus, claiming to have the authority of God himself, commanding his disciples to go to the grossest people imaginable and somehow convince them to act like Jesus. There’s nothing in his commandment about condemnation, or resisting cultural movements, or burning shit down.

St. Paul would come along later and write his letters to a bunch of fledgling Christian churches. With very few exceptions, his advice is filled with critiques, calling out unholy behavior within the church so that these new Christians might live more inline with what it looks like to “act like Jesus.” There is very little mentioned about the sins of the outside world.

If we could somehown turn our focus inward, critiquing the many sins that exist inside the church – the ones that thrive on our failure to do so – we’d be much closer to what Jesus intended when he unleashed the first Christians into the world. With that, I’ll argue, would come much more influence in the way the world operates.

Though the New Testament is filled with these inward critiques, the modern church considers it anathema when a congregant asks questions about racism, greed, gluttony, idolatry, hypocrisy, etc. Bringing these up on Sunday morning only hurts people’s feelings. Besides, it’s the non-Christians who are the real problem.

And so we oppose, doing twisted things like comparing a guy in blackface to a Transgender woman, which is really demeaning.

 

Either it happened or it didn’t.

If it didn’t, there’s nothing wrong with believing that it did; humanity has entertained its myths for millenia, one more isn’t going to hurt anything.

But if a guy who believed that he was a human version of the Hebrew God actually crawled out of his grave, that’s different. Death no longer has the final say. Reality is bigger than it seems.

This earthly realm is only the beginning.

For me, there are too many who believe this – who claim to have encountered this “human” “god” in a personal way – to discount it as just another religious absurdity.

I’ll admit that it’s tricky, and I’m often tempted to stop believing altogether. If God wants buy-in on something so crazy, why not do it in a way that’s a little easier to believe? Nobody can prove a resurrection happened, not to mention the rest of Jesus’ alleged miracles.

To this, Martin Luther suggested that if God proved himself to us, it would be the “end and final judgment of unbelief.” Choice would be removed. We’d all be forced into faith.

That’s not the way of God as I understand it.

“Happy are those who believe without seeing” ~ Jesus in John 20:29

Instead of me, rambling through my own Easter thoughts, I’ve curated a few from thinkers who have much more profound things to offer, and maybe a bit more authority.

What follows isn’t intended to convince my non-Christian readers to think like me, or to become religious, or convert to some ‘ism. Ultimately, I’m writing for my own benefit this Easter morning; so much of what I believe – and how those beliefs translate to behaviors – revolve around and are dependent upon the idea that death, both physical and metaphorical, is not the end.

I forget, frequently, so reading/thinking about the resurrection of Jesus is an exercise worthy of at least an annual revisit.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have fit testimony that this earthly life is not the end, that death is just something of a turn in the road, that life moves down a continual moving river, and that death is just a little turn in the river, that this earthly life is merely an embryonic prelude to a new awakening, that death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life but a comma that punctuates it to more loftier significance.”

“Easter tells us that everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

“We find ourselves in the thesis of Palm Sunday [Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem] and then we move over into the antithesis of Good Friday [the crucifixion]. But Jesus Christ, with all of his beauty and all of his eloquence, rings out across the centuries and says, ‘There is a synthesis in Easter.’ And this means that life is meaningful, that life is not doomed to frustration and futility but life can end up in fulfillment in the life and the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“This is the Easter message, this is the question that it answers. It says to us that love is the most durable power in the world than all of the military giants, all of the nations that base their way on military power.”

Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.

quoting from “The Battle-Field” by William Cullen Bryant

Socrates

“Apart from man’s material body, something immaterial exists in him, which is immortal.”

C.S. Lewis

“Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.”

“The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits,’ the ‘pioneer of life,’ He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.”

Tim Keller

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

Martin Luther

“…one death devoured the other.”

“…an imprint of divine activity within history.”

“If even a few people were really to believe this, allowing this belief to move them in their earthly actions, much would change. To live from the perspective of resurrection: That is Easter.”

“Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!”

 

 

Photos by Gabe Pierce and Daniel Jericó on Unsplash

It’s one thing to change your mind, i.e., decide to go in a different direction, change your plans, to think one thing on one day, another on the next, etc. It’s an entirely different thing to change the way you think; the way you look at others, or yourself; the way you think about your world, about God, etc.

Changing your mind is not the same thing as having a changed mind, and there’s not a person on this planet that doesn’t need their mind changed, all of us dealing with thoughts, ideals, and values that are in need of a massive shift. Some of our brains, for example, are constantly sounding the alarm, warning us that danger is imminent, refusing to rest and enjoy life. Some only respect certain people while marginalizing too many others, marinating in a caste system of sorts, working endlessy to make sure its bearer lives somewhere towards the top.

Some simply refuse to engage things like mercy, generosity, respect, etc.

Those aren’t simply decisions that are being made, they are hard-wired into how the mind works.

Many of us believe that something so deeply ingrained can never change, especially in adults. But St. Paul, in his letter to the fledgling church in Rome, thought otherwise.

Actually, he didn’t talk about a changed mind, he talked about a renewed mind, as if the human brain is good, but the world that it swims in has a pattern to it, a way of doing business that can and often does twist our minds into something it was never meant to be. After awhile, a journey back to basics is required, and within reach.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Romans 12:2

The religious world – the one I’ve been swimming in most of my adult life – frequently takes passages like this and turns them into overtly religious statements, invitations to be even more religious than we were before we read them. So, we often say that the best way to “renew” ourselves is with religious activities like prayer, church attendance, “worship,” etc.

I wont argue that those things are good, but I’ve never seen them “renew” someone’s mind, or release it from the bonds of whatever might be keeping it from a fuller expression and a deeper freedom.

While Paul is arguably one of the most religious people the mind can fathom, he isn’t offering up some religious advice. He simply stated that, if our minds swim for too long in the ideals, perspectives, behaviors, and values of this world, they’ll need to take a step back.

If we can manage that, our minds will be renewed.

Following is my understanding of what Paul meant, and whether or not it’s true.

The Pattern of This World

Another thing that Christians love to talk about is how evil “the world” is. As things like mainstream gender and sexuality are challenged/questioned/revised like never before, many of us are convinced that the handbasket our culture is travelling in has almost reached its final destination. But when we talk about evil in our world, we’re not talking about the evil that exists inside the Christian world, we’re referring to the world outside our walls: that’s where all the evil is. We’re the holy ones. Everything that’s not us is unholy.

But Paul believed that Christians were just as bad as everyone else. He had no problem pointing this out and critiqued his Christian family much more often than he praised them.

In his letters it is clear that “the pattern of this world” that we’re to avoid exists within the church as much as it does without.

And so, he gave some specific advice on how we might avoid “the pattern of this world.” Each of these flies in the face of how the world, both inside and outside of the church, tends to operate:

• • • Do not think too highly of yourself
    • Be devoted to one another
    • Honor one another above yourselves
    • Be joyful in hope
    • If you’re afflicted, be patient, don’t play the victim
    • Faithfully interact on a personal level with God
    • Share with people who are in need
    • Practice hospitality
    • Do not repay evil for evil
    • Bless those who persecute you
    • Be willing to associate with people of “low” position
    • Live in harmony with others
    • Do not take revenge

Note that Paul’s list is focused on things that result in healthy relationships, peace, hope, joy, etc., while the “pattern” of our world is much more geared towards the individual, oftentimes at the expense of relationships, peace, hope, joy, etc.

If I were to create a list opposite Paul’s, i.e. the things we’re supposed to avoid, it would read something like this:

• • • Consider yourself before others
    • Make sure nobody runs over you
    • Be devoted to your success above everything else
    • Honor what is most important to you
    • Place great hope in money
    • Live as though God is in control of nothing
    • Don’t share your hard-earned money and resources, especially with people who don’t deserve them.
    • Practice hospitality only when you get something out of it
    • Take revenge so long as its within reasonable boundaries
    • Cut people off if they become too toxic
    • Avoid people of “low” position, pursue the best cliques
    • Blame, accuse, and villify those who don’t look/think/vote like you do
    • In certain cirucumstances, it’s OK to treat others in ways you would never want to be treated

The Renewing of Our Mind

What I hear Paul saying is that, if I had the perfect mind, then marinated it in the above activities for any length of time, it would change.

If that’s true, relationships would become more difficult, not to mention things like peace and hope. Relaxation would take much work. I would then turn to things like booze, vacations, sex, TV, food; whatever I can get my hands on to relieve the pressure and find some joy.

In Paul’s mind there’s only one path, and it’s not found in adding things, but in avoiding a certain way of life, in removing our minds from things that corrupt it.

Perhaps I’m completely misreading this short statement of his, or twisting the words/taking them out of context/avoiding his meaning/etc. so I can come up with a cutesy blog post. Regardless, what should stand out to the reader is Paul’s belief that the mind can be renewed. That it can be restored to a condition whereby it is characterized by peace, hope, and transformation.

If he’s right, that should excite us. Sure, we’ve got some work to do in figuring out the do’s and dont’s of mind-renewal, i.e., whatever it is that Paul meant by avoiding the “pattern of this world,” but if distancing ourselves from certain behaviors will restore our minds to something resembling their former glory, or at least move them in that general direction, why not give it a try?

The psychotherapeutic seems to agree with the idea that the mind rewires itself in response to certain habitual behaviors. That’s one reason why bad habits are so hard to break – we’re fighting a mind that’s wired itself to keep moving, resistant of change. If I spent most of my life angry and vengeful, for example, then suddenly tried to take up kindness, it would feel impossible – painful even – until I did kindness long enough for my brain to adapt.

According to Hebb’s law, neurons that fire together wire together. In other words, the simultaneous activation of neurons strengthens the connection between them. Hebb’s law is an attempt to explain how we learn and why a complex task becomes easier over time.

According to this, a mind dedicated to humility, compassion, service, peace, and hope will be wired differently than one dedicated to a more contemporary Western way of life.

When I compare Paul’s list of do’s and don’ts to the way our world operates, I see a “people first” emphasis in the former and a “me first” emphasis in the latter. If Paul is right, the best way towards a better mind is to reconsider the idea that others matter at least as much as we do, and that making others happy is at least equally important as our own pursuit of happiness.

I’ve certainly had my mind changed by sacrificing a previously unthinkable amount of time and resources for my children. I can’t say that it’s been a perpetual picnic, but it’s certainly changed my mind about what’s valuable and what’s required for my happiness.

If I managed to extend that beyond my children would my mind change even more?

Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu perpetrated an enormous sacrifice on humanity, arguably following Paul’s list without skipping a beat. Did she manage to divorce herself from “the pattern of this world?” Was she happy and full of hope, possessive of a restored/rewired mind? Consider the following quotes about life, love, and happiness from Mother Theresa:

• • • We fear the future because we are wasting today.
    • Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
    • A life not lived for others is not a life.
    • Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand.
    • Be happy in the moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.
    • If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
    • I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
    • If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.
    • Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier.
    • One of the realities we’re all called to go through is to move from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.
    • Poverty was not created by God. It is we who have caused it, you and I through our egotism.
    • People are unrealistic, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.
    • I know I am touching the living body of Christ in the broken bodies of the hungry and the suffering. Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.
    • We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved.
    • I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us, and we change things.
    • Yes, you must live life beautifully and not allow the spirit of the world that makes gods out of power, riches, and pleasure make you to forget that you have been created for greater things.

But she allegedly struggled with chronic depression that, according to her, “Surrounds me on all sides – I can’t lift my soul to God – no light or inspiration enters my soul . . . Heaven, what emptiness – not a single thought of Heaven enters my mind – for there is no hope. . . The place of God in my soul is blank.”

I’ll admit that I’m uncomfortable with the idea that if we follow some formula our minds will bask in a peaceful respite of sorts and automatically renew themselves. Chronic depression, anxiety, and, in general, poor mental health are realities for many of us, regardless of what pattern we might conform to.

At the same time I wonder if Paul wasn’t on to something, i.e., if I can manage to break my mind from patterns that drag it down, will I find freedom? I doubt that I’ll ever be completely free from my problems with depression, but is it possible to turn the dial up a bit here and there?

Nobody should argue that Western culture has many elements that are destructive, especially when it comes to money, future, relationships, identity, and so many others. I’ll leave it to you: what would happen to our minds if we adopted an entirely new way of thinking, one that committed itself to peace, forgiveness, hope, honesty, humility, and the unconditional well being of others.

If nothing else, I believe that a mind like that would be different than the one I have.