There is something almost too metaphorically perfect about a president tearing into the White House to build a ballroom while the nation argues over whether he has the legal authority to do it.

A ballroom.

Not emergency housing. Not a hospital. Not infrastructure necessary to preserve public safety.

A ballroom.

The significance of this moment has very little to do with whether one likes ballrooms, whether the proposed design is beautiful, or even whether future presidents might appreciate having such a space.

The question is much more fundamental: Can a president simply do whatever he wants until somebody manages to stop him?

Increasingly, that appears to be the governing philosophy of this administration.

And increasingly, the Supreme Court appears willing to accommodate it.

Donald Trump did not invent executive overreach. Presidents of both parties have tested the boundaries of executive authority. Our constitutional system anticipates that temptation.

That is precisely why power was divided.

The framers did not design an efficient government, they designed a restrained one. Congress legislates and appropriates. The executive executes. The courts interpret. And each branch is supposed to resist encroachment by the others.

That friction is not a flaw in American democracy.

The friction is the safeguard.

What we are witnessing now is something more dangerous than ordinary political disagreement. We are witnessing an administration that repeatedly treats constitutional procedure as an inconvenience rather than an obligation.

Act first.

Fire first.

Deploy first.

Withhold first.

Dismantle first.

Build first.

Then force everyone else to race into court while the machinery of government keeps moving.

By the time a judge determines whether the action was lawful, the people may have been removed, the employees fired, the agencies hollowed out, the money withheld, the institutions transformed or, in this case, the concrete poured.

This is more than executive aggression. It is civic disrespect. Disrespect for Congress. Disrespect for the judiciary. Disrespect for federal law. Disrespect for constitutional restraint. And ultimately, disrespect for the people from whom every branch of government derives its authority.

That is why the controversy surrounding President Trump’s White House ballroom matters.

Lower federal courts questioned whether the administration possessed the legal authority to proceed with such a substantial alteration without congressional authorization.

The Supreme Court nevertheless allowed construction to continue while litigation proceeds.

The Court did not definitively declare the ballroom lawful. This distinction matters, and so does the practical consequence, because concrete hardens while courts deliberate, and sometimes the legal system eventually announces that something should not have happened long after it has already happened.

There is a profound difference between saying:

“The president has the constitutional authority to do this.”

and saying:

“This plaintiff cannot stop him from doing it.”

Legally, those propositions are worlds apart.

In the life of a democracy, however, their consequences can become frighteningly similar because power does not grow only when courts explicitly grant it. Power also grows when courts repeatedly decline to restrain it.

This Is Not an Isolated Case

If the ballroom were the only example, perhaps we could dismiss this as an unusual dispute over presidential property and historic preservation.

It is not.

Again and again, this administration has pursued a remarkably similar strategy:

Act first. Push the boundaries of statutory or constitutional authority. Force those harmed to seek relief from the courts. And when a lower federal court intervenes, ask the Supreme Court to remove the restraint while litigation continues.

Again and again, the Supreme Court has obliged.

The Department of Education

Congress created the Department of Education.

Congress enacted laws assigning responsibilities to it.

Yet President Trump directed his Secretary of Education to facilitate closing the department to the maximum extent permitted by law, while the administration moved to eliminate nearly half of its workforce.

States, school districts and others sued, arguing that the administration was effectively dismantling an agency Congress created and incapacitating offices Congress had legally required to perform particular functions.

A federal district court intervened.

An appeals court declined to disturb that intervention.

Then the Supreme Court did.

The Court allowed the workforce reductions to proceed while litigation continued.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent went directly to the separation-of-powers issue: Congress created the Department, and only Congress can abolish it.

Think about the constitutional problem.

Congress can create an institution by law.

Congress can fund an institution by law.

Congress can assign responsibilities to an institution by law.

And yet an executive may potentially render much of that institution incapable of functioning before courts finally determine whether the executive possessed the authority to do so.

Again: Act first. Litigate later.

The Federal Workforce

The pattern appeared again when the administration pursued sweeping reductions throughout the federal government.

Congress creates agencies.

Congress assigns those agencies responsibilities.

Congress appropriates money for them to perform those responsibilities.

Yet the administration initiated plans for substantial reductions in force.

A federal district judge blocked implementation while challenges proceeded.

The Supreme Court lifted that restraint.

To be precise, the Court emphasized that it was considering the president’s executive order itself, not deciding whether every individual agency reduction plan produced under that order would ultimately be lawful.

That is an important legal distinction.

But employees can still lose their jobs while distinctions are litigated. Offices can still disappear. Institutional knowledge can still be lost. Government can still be transformed.

The law may eventually catch up. But what happens to the institution while everyone waits?

Birthright Citizenship

Then there is birthright citizenship.

The Fourteenth Amendment begins its Citizenship Clause with some of the clearest language in the Constitution:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens…”

President Trump issued an executive order seeking to deny automatic citizenship to some children born on American soil.

Multiple federal courts blocked implementation.

When the dispute reached the Supreme Court, however, the Court did not decide whether the president could constitutionally redefine birthright citizenship by executive order. Instead, the majority confronted the power of lower federal courts to issue what are commonly called universal or nationwide injunctions.

The Court substantially restricted that remedy.

Again, the underlying constitutional question remained unresolved.

Think about the inversion.

A president issues an order challenging a longstanding understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lower courts intervene.

And when the dispute reaches the highest court in the country, the immediate question becomes not:

“Can the president do this?”

but:

“How broadly can a lower court stop him?”

That shift should concern us.

The Alien Enemies Act

We saw another version of this dynamic when President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate removals of Venezuelan migrants alleged to be members of Tren de Aragua.

A federal judge in Washington temporarily stopped removals under the proclamation.

The D.C. Circuit declined to lift those orders.

The Supreme Court did.

Again, the Court did not simply declare the administration’s interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act correct.

Instead, it determined that challenges to removal under the Act had to proceed through habeas corpus in the judicial districts where detainees were confined.

The Court also recognized something critically important: people targeted for removal were entitled to notice and an opportunity to seek judicial review before being removed.

That protection matters.

But so does what the procedural ruling meant.

Rather than one lawsuit stopping a potentially unlawful governmental practice nationwide, detainees could be required to seek relief through proceedings tied to where the government confined them.

The courthouse door was not necessarily closed but it became harder to reach. And when the government possesses detention centers, immigration officers, airplanes and the ability to move human beings rapidly, time itself becomes an instrument of power.

Different Cases. The Same Rhythm.

The Department of Education.

The federal workforce.

Birthright citizenship.

Deportation.

And now the White House itself.

Different policies.

Different statutes.

Different plaintiffs.

Different legal questions.

I do not suggest that these cases are doctrinally identical.

They are not.

But step away from the individual doctrines long enough to look at the institutional pattern:

Executive action.

Lower-court restraint.

Emergency appeal.

Supreme Court intervention.

Government action continues.

And often the fundamental question: Did the president possess this authority in the first place?remains unresolved while the consequences of exercising that authority accumulate.

This is why the Supreme Court cannot regard itself as a neutral bystander to the expansion of executive power.

The Court does not always have to say:

“Donald Trump is right.”

Sometimes it only has to say:

“Donald Trump may continue.”

And in the exercise of governmental power, those words can have enormous consequences.

Procedure Cannot Become Permission

I want to be careful here.

Procedure matters.

Standing matters.

Jurisdiction matters.

The proper scope of judicial remedies matters.

Due process matters.

I do not want courts to abandon legal procedure simply because I dislike the outcome of a particular case. In fact, my argument is precisely the opposite.

I want constitutional procedure to matter everywhere, including at the White House. What concerns me is a system in which procedural limitations increasingly constrain those attempting to challenge executive power while doing far less, in practical terms, to constrain the executive action being challenged.

A president should not be able to accomplish through speed what the law would prohibit through deliberation.

A president should not be able to accomplish through firings what Congress has refused to accomplish through legislation.

A president should not be able to accomplish through executive order what constitutional change would require.

A president should not be able to accomplish through construction what federal law reserves for another branch.

And the Supreme Court must understand that when it allows potentially irreversible governmental action to continue while postponing the ultimate question of legality, it is not merely managing litigation.

It is shaping power.

There is another reason this troubles me as a person of faith. Scripture understands something about power that America continually struggles to remember:

Having the ability to do something does not give you the moral authority to do it.

The biblical prophets were not impressed by rulers who discovered technical mechanisms for accomplishing what justice prohibited.

Isaiah condemned those who made unjust decrees.

Amos confronted systems that maintained the appearance of religious and governmental order while justice was being crushed beneath them.

Micah did not ask whether rulers had discovered a procedural loophole. He asked what God required:

Do justice.

Love mercy.

Walk humbly.

There is nothing humble about a government whose operating assumption becomes: Stop me if you can.

And there is nothing healthy about a constitutional system that repeatedly answers: Perhaps later.

Democracies rarely disappear because somebody announces one morning that democracy has ended.

They erode through accumulation.

One exception.

One emergency.

One procedural maneuver.

One ignored norm.

One unreviewed action.

One more thing we are told is too small to worry about. Until one day we discover that what looked like a collection of isolated incidents was actually architecture.

And by then, the structure is standing.

Before governments change laws, someone changes the story.

Before rights are restricted, someone convinces us they are dangerous.

Before institutions are dismantled, someone persuades us they cannot be trusted.

The narrative always arrives first.

The policy merely follows.

We are living through one of those moments now.

For months, Americans have been told that our elections cannot be trusted. That fraud lurks around every corner. That those entrusted with administering our democracy are either incompetent or corrupt. That the system itself is broken.

The repetition is relentless.

But repetition is not proof.

It is persuasion.

It is an attempt to replace confidence with suspicion and neighbors with enemies.

And that should concern every one of us, regardless of whom we voted for.

Because democracy has never depended upon unanimous agreement.

It has always depended upon shared trust.

Not blind trust.

Earned trust.

The trust that comes from watching ordinary people faithfully perform extraordinary responsibilities.

Across this country, election officials rise before dawn on Election Day. They are Republicans and Democrats. Independents and people with no political affiliation at all. They are veterans, retirees, teachers, accountants, church members, and civil servants. Many have spent decades administering elections with little recognition and even less gratitude.

They test voting machines.

Train poll workers.

Verify registrations.

Secure ballots.

Count votes under public observation.

Certify results according to laws written by legislatures from both political parties.

Most Americans will never know their names.

Yet our democracy rests, in part, upon their quiet faithfulness.

When leaders tell us these people cannot be trusted, without credible evidence, they are asking us to believe something far larger than an accusation about ballots.

They are asking us to distrust one another.

And here is the contradiction that deserves our attention.

If the system that elected you is fundamentally corrupt…

If the election officials who counted your votes cannot be trusted…

If the process itself is broken…

Then what are you really saying about the people who elected you?

We cannot celebrate democracy only when it delivers our preferred outcome.

Trust cannot become partisan.

It either belongs to all of us, or eventually it belongs to none of us.

History has warned us about this.

After Reconstruction, Black Americans exercised political power in numbers the former Confederacy had never imagined. They voted. They held office. They helped rewrite state constitutions. They expanded public education and built a more representative democracy.

Many white Americans responded not by defeating those ideas in open debate but by constructing a different story.

They insisted elections were fraudulent.

They claimed Black political participation was illegitimate.

They warned that democracy itself had become corrupt.

The accusations became the justification.

Then came the policies.

Poll taxes.

Literacy tests.

Grandfather clauses.

White primaries.

Violence at polling places.

What began as a narrative about “election integrity” became nearly a century of voter suppression.

The story came first.

The restrictions followed.

History rarely announces itself by repeating the same words. It repeats the same patterns.

That is why truth matters.

Truth reminds us that no election system is perfect.

Mistakes happen.

Processes can improve.

Every credible allegation deserves investigation.

Every legitimate concern deserves to be heard.

But accusations are not evidence.

Suspicion is not proof.

And repeating a lie does not transform it into fact.

Our democracy has endured because generations of Americans, often imperfectly, often contentiously, trusted evidence more than rumor and facts more than fear.

That inheritance now belongs to us.

We are the people who must decide whether we will protect it. We should trust the election officials who have dedicated their lives to safeguarding our votes, unless evidence demonstrates they have violated that trust.

We should trust the process that has peacefully transferred power through wars, depressions, assassinations, pandemics, and political upheaval.

Most of all, we should trust that the American people are capable of making their own choices, even when those choices disappoint us.

That is the price of self-government.

And it is also its promise.

Scripture teaches us that perfect love casts out fear. Authoritarian movements reverse that order. They cultivate fear until it crowds out love: love of neighbor, love of community, even love of democracy itself.

Fear isolates.

Trust binds us together.

And every democracy depends upon citizens who still believe their neighbors are worthy of both.

There will always be voices that profit from convincing us our neighbors are the enemy.

There will always be leaders who find distrust politically useful.

But free people cannot surrender their confidence every time someone with a microphone asks them to.

So hold on to the truth.

Hold on to the evidence.

Hold on to one another.

Because before they change the law…

they will try to change the story.

And if they can persuade us to stop trusting one another, the rest becomes far easier.

Democracy is not sustained simply because we vote. It is sustained because, when the votes are counted, we trust that our neighbors have been heard. We trust the people who have sworn to count every ballot honestly. And we trust that truth, not fear, will have the final word.

I grew up in working-class Birmingham, but from the fourth grade through college I was educated inside some of the most exclusive schools in the South and, from fourth grade until college, I was the only Black student in all of my classes.   

Every weekday I crossed an invisible border.

At home, I learned confidence and resilience. At school, I learned how power speaks when it believes no one outside the family is listening.

People imagine that experience as lonely. It was.

But loneliness was not its only gift.

The education I received was exceptional. The expectations were high. The doors that education eventually opened changed the trajectory of my life.

The burden, however, was that those worlds met only in me. I became the intersection between my working-class Black neighborhood and a world of inherited privilege that rarely imagined or entertained outsiders.

My family was working class. Many of my classmates came from families whose names were etched on buildings, printed on law firm letterhead, listed on campaign signs, and engraved on courthouse doors. They inherited not only wealth, but relationships. They inherited access.

In my high school, college futuring questions did not center around “what do you want to be when you grow up?” That was the question at home, in my neighborhood, in my church.

But at school the question was “what are you interested in studying more deeply?”

This may seem like an insignificant decision, but it is not. One is able to consider choices differently when there is an carefully curated and funded succession plan for your future. And because I was the lone Black child in the room, the adults rarely lowered their voices around me.

They spoke freely.

I heard conversations about reputation.

About legacy.

About “our kind of people.”

About protecting family names.

About the polite disdain reserved not simply for poor people, but for the nouveau riche who threatened carefully cultivated social circles.

I learned something that no civics class ever teaches.

Justice does not operate the same way for everyone.

There are rules.

And then there are relationships.

When reputation is on the line, youthful crimes become “boys being boys.”

Drunken recklessness becomes an unfortunate mistake.

Charges become misunderstandings.

Records disappear.

Calls get made.

Judges are not simply judges.

Lawyers are not simply lawyers.

They are family friends.

Golf partners.

Church members.

College roommates.

People with access.

If you have never lived inside those circles, you may believe this sounds cynical.

It is not.

It is observational.

In full confession, I have benefited from proximity to that world more than once in my own life. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to know that situations capable of becoming serious somehow resolved themselves because someone knew someone.

I have never forgotten that.

Nor have I forgotten the quiet realization that had I not possessed that proximity, the outcome might have been very different.

That is what privilege often looks like.

Not extraordinary favoritism.

Ordinary intervention.

This is not unique to white America.

Power protects itself everywhere.

But America has spent centuries constructing a particular kind of power around whiteness.

It is not simply the color of one’s skin.

It is the accumulated weight of institutions built to assume credibility, innocence, and belonging before questions are ever asked.

I am reminded of this as I follow the heartbreaking story of Nolan Wells.

An eighteen-year-old young man having fun on an island with friends.

His friends returned home.

He did not.

His body was later found.

His family deserves every answer the law can uncover.

Perhaps the investigation will conclude that this was a tragic accident.

Perhaps it will reveal something else.

I do not know and I choose not to speculate.

What I do know is this:

Real friends do not leave friends behind without making certain they are safe.

And I know something else.

When someone connected to a story carries institutional authority: a judge, a prosecutor, a prominent attorney, an elected official, it changes the public conversation immediately.

Not because guilt has been established, but because power has entered the room.

This observation is not an accusation.

It is history.

History teaches us that institutions are rarely experienced the same way by those inside the network as they are by those standing outside it.

That is why trust, once broken, is so difficult to restore.

The Nolan Wells story is still unfolding. The investigation should be allowed to unfold wherever the evidence leads.

But long before this case, and long after it is resolved, another truth will remain.

“It’s not just the whiteness of one’s skin that changes the game. It is also the weight of whiteness on the scales.”

The scales of justice are tipped by the weight of inherited relationships.

By family names.

By phone calls.

By access.

By the quiet confidence that someone important will answer when you call.

We often say justice is blind.

Perhaps.

But too often it knows exactly who your parents are.

And until we are willing to tell the truth about that, we will continue confusing equal access to the courtroom with equal access to justice.

On this, the 250th anniversary of the American experiment, The New York Times published an article examining the architecture of the Statue of Liberty.

It was beautifully written.

It was historically informed.

And yet, it was profoundly incomplete.

You devoted considerable attention to the statue’s engineering, symbolism, design, and cultural significance.

But nowhere did you mention the broken chains at her feet.

Nowhere did you acknowledge that the monument was conceived in the aftermath of the Civil War by French abolitionist Édouard René de Laboulaye, who understood the abolition of slavery as one of the defining achievements of American democracy.

Nowhere did you tell readers that Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s earliest designs placed broken chains prominently in Liberty’s hand before they were ultimately relocated beneath her feet.

Those are not incidental details.

They are part of the statue’s historical record.

Whether one emphasizes the monument as a celebration of republican government, democratic ideals, or transatlantic friendship, its relationship to emancipation is neither speculative nor peripheral.

It is foundational.

Over time, Americans have come to associate the Statue of Liberty almost exclusively with immigration. Emma Lazarus’s words have rightly expanded her embrace. Millions arrived beneath her torch seeking refuge and opportunity. That story deserves to be told.

But immigration is not the only story she tells.

She stands upon broken shackles.

She is not merely welcoming the stranger.

She is announcing that liberty requires the breaking of chains.

When we fail to mention those chains, we unintentionally participate in a familiar American habit: remembering freedom while forgetting what freedom had to overcome.

The omissions matter because symbols shape civic memory.

What we choose to emphasize becomes what future generations believe.

What we leave unspoken slowly disappears from our national imagination.

There is another conversation that has persisted for years: whether Bartholdi’s earliest conception of Liberty was influenced by the image of a Black woman emerging from slavery before the design evolved into the figure we know today.

While historians continue to debate that claim and no definitive documentary evidence has settled the question, the discussion itself reflects a deeper truth about whose stories have too often been omitted from our national symbols.

But no such debate exists about the chains.

They are there.

Cast in iron.

Broken.

Beneath her feet.

The tragedy is not that they were forgotten by history.

The tragedy is that they have become so easy to overlook that even one of America’s finest newspapers can publish an extensive meditation on the Statue of Liberty without once inviting readers to look down.

Perhaps that is the metaphor for America itself.

We admire the torch because it reaches toward heaven. We ignore the chains because they lie at our feet.

Yet the torch cannot be understood apart from the chains.

The light means little unless we remember what had to be broken for that light to shine.

As we commemorate 250 years of this nation’s promise, may we resist the temptation to tell only the beautiful parts of our story.

A mature democracy is not strengthened by selective memory. It is strengthened by honest remembrance.

Only then can liberty ring, not as mythology, but as truth.

At a moment when some would prefer to celebrate our history with grand spectacle and uncomplicated patriotism, the Cathedral offered something far more courageous: an invitation to tell the truth.

For two brief hours, we reflected on who we have been, who we are now, and who we might yet become.

There were no harsh condemnations, only the hard truths of history. No demands that we choose sides, even though the divisions among us were undeniable. We simply became, for a moment, a small gathering that reflected the beauty and burden of a vast and complicated nation: a people who have gotten some things gloriously right, many things tragically wrong, and yet have never relinquished our longing to be free.

As I left the Cathedral, I found myself thinking about another American sanctuary just a few miles away, where one of our nation’s most treasured symbols sits in silence.

Perhaps no American symbol tells the truth about this nation more honestly than the Liberty Bell.

Most of us know the image. Even if we have never stood before it in Philadelphia, we have seen it in textbooks, on postcards, and in countless patriotic celebrations. We were taught to see it as the embodiment of freedom.

We also know it has a crack.

That crack matters because it prevents the Liberty Bell from doing the very thing it was created to do.

Ring.

The bell was cast in England’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry and arrived in Pennsylvania in 1752. On its very first test ring, it cracked.

Artisans tried to repair it. It cracked again.

They melted it down and recast it. For a season it functioned as intended. Then it fractured again. Historians still debate exactly how many times the bell split before the damage became irreversible, but by George Washington’s birthday celebration in 1846, the final crack had come. The bell has never rung since.

Why?

Because it lacked structural integrity from the beginning.

Structural integrity is the ability of something to bear the weight of its intended purpose without breaking. Engineers tell us the Liberty Bell contained too much tin in its bronze alloy. The very material from which it was formed made it incapable of enduring the stress of repeated use.

The bell was beautiful.

Its purpose was noble.

Its composition could not sustain either.

That is what arrests me.

Because inscribed across the bell are words from Leviticus 25:10:

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Originally, it wasn’t even called the Liberty Bell. It was simply the State House Bell, commissioned to summon lawmakers into legislative session.

But in the 1830s, abolitionists claimed it for another purpose.

Christian ministers, organizers, and writers looked at its biblical inscription and saw an indictment of the nation itself. America celebrated liberty while millions of Black people remained enslaved.

If liberty was to mean anything, they argued, it had to belong to all the inhabitants of the land.

For eighty-nine years after the Declaration of Independence, America proclaimed freedom while denying it to millions.

The bell carried the words.

But it could not bear the weight of its own inscription.

The promise exceeded the structure that carried it.

And I wonder if that is not the story of America itself.

We are a nation with magnificent language.

We speak of liberty.

We pledge justice.

We promise equality.

Yet generation after generation, we have lacked the structural integrity to sustain those promises for everyone.

That same question now confronts the American church.

I have come to believe that the greatest crisis facing Christianity is not that we have forgotten the words of Jesus. It is that we have too often built a theology incapable of bearing their weight.

Jesus announced his ministry with Isaiah’s vision of good news for the poor, release for the captive, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

He did not merely preach those words.

He embodied them.

He carried their full weight all the way to a cross.

Empire cracked.

The Gospel did not.

That distinction matters.

Because colonization has never been merely about occupying land.

It is about occupying imagination.

It is persuading people that the priorities of empire are the purposes of God.

Christianity becomes colonized whenever it measures faithfulness by influence instead of discipleship, dominance instead of service, nationalism instead of the Kingdom of God.

The Gospel has never lacked the structural integrity to bear the weight of freedom.

The question is whether we do.

Perhaps that is why the Church exists.

Not to become another patriotic symbol.

Not to baptize the ambitions of political parties.

Not to seek proximity to power.

But to stand in the cracks.

To tell the truth where others manufacture myth.

To proclaim Jubilee where others settle for charity.

To remind every generation that freedom is never measured by the liberty of the powerful, but by the flourishing of those whose names are easiest to forget.

The Church is not a bronze bell.

We are not fixed in metal or frozen in history.

We are a living body.

We are capable of repentance.

We are capable of reform.

We are capable of being remade.

As America marks 250 years of independence, perhaps the question is not whether freedom can still ring in this nation.

Perhaps the deeper question is whether the Church can become a people with enough structural integrity to bear the Gospel it proclaims.

Enough courage to tell the truth.

Enough humility to repent where we have blessed empire instead of Christ.

Enough love to proclaim liberty, not for some of the inhabitants of the land, but for all of them. Because if freedom cannot ring through the Church, I do not know where the world will ever hear it.

Today, for two brief hours beneath the vaulted ceilings of the National Cathedral, I caught a glimpse of what it sounds like when it does.   

There are days when the Supreme Court tells us what the law is.

And then there are days when it tells us who we are.

Today was both.

In one decision, the Court affirmed that a child born on American soil is an American citizen, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. It rejected an attempt to narrow one of the great promises of the Fourteenth Amendment, a promise forged in the ashes of slavery and the aftermath of the Civil War.

In another decision, the Court upheld state laws allowing transgender girls to be excluded from girls’ school sports.

One opinion widened the circle of constitutional protection.

The other allowed the state to draw a line around participation.

Both decisions came from the same Court.

Both interpreted the same Constitution.

Both invoked the Fourteenth Amendment.

That should give us pause.

Lawyers will rightly point out that these cases arise under different constitutional provisions, different statutes, and different legal standards. Birthright citizenship rests on the Citizenship Clause. The transgender sports case turned on the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX.

But theology asks a different question than law.

Law asks, What is permitted?

Faith asks, Who is my neighbor?

Those are not the same question.

The Fourteenth Amendment itself was born from a theological crisis.

The nation had declared millions of Black people to be property rather than persons. After emancipation, the question was no longer simply whether slavery had ended. The deeper question was whether formerly enslaved people belonged. Not merely in our economy or our neighborhoods, but in the moral imagination of America.

The Citizenship Clause answered with breathtaking simplicity:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens.

Not some persons.

Not the desirable.

Not only those with whom we agree.

Not those whose parents arrived with the right paperwork.

All persons.

The amendment was written to overturn the moral injury of Dred Scott, which insisted that Black people could never belong to the American political community.

Today’s decision preserves that Reconstruction promise.

For that, I am grateful, because citizenship is more than paperwork. It is a declaration of human dignity.

It says that a child enters this world already possessing something no politician bestowed and no politician may casually remove.

I am grateful.

And yet gratitude must never require silence.

For on the very same day, the Court concluded that states may exclude transgender girls from girls’ school sports without violating the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

Lawyers will debate the reasoning.

That is their work.

My work is different.

My work is to notice that every generation wrestles with the same temptation: deciding that some people belong fully while others belong conditionally.

History changes the categories.

The temptation remains.

Sometimes it has been race.

Sometimes religion.

Sometimes disability.

Sometimes nationality.

Today it is immigration.

Today it is gender identity.

The categories evolve.

The question does not.

Who gets to belong?

As a follower of Jesus, I cannot avoid another question.

Who do we become when our first instinct is to guard the boundary instead of tending the person standing at it?

The Gospel is remarkably consistent.

Jesus crossed boundaries that respectable people spent their lives defending.

He touched those others avoided.

He ate with those others rejected.

He expanded the circle faster than religious leaders could redraw it.

That does not mean every public policy has an easy answer.

It does mean Christians should be very careful whenever our first response to another human being is exclusion rather than encounter.

The Court’s job is not to write the Gospel.

Nor should the Church expect it to.

The Court interprets the Constitution.

The Church embodies the Kingdom.

Those are different assignments.

But citizens, and especially people of faith, must pay attention to the moral story unfolding beneath the legal arguments.

Today, the Court reminded us that birthright citizenship remains a constitutional promise rooted in Reconstruction.

It also reminded us that constitutional protection is not experienced equally by every community.

One decision said, You cannot erase this child’s citizenship.

Another said, The state may exclude this child from participation.

The law can hold both ideas simultaneously.

The question is whether our moral imagination should.

Because every generation eventually discovers that the true measure of justice is not how securely we protect those already inside the circle.

It is how prayerfully, carefully, and courageously we defend those who stand at its edge.

The Constitution tells us who belongs to the republic.

The Gospel tells us who belongs at the table.

If the Church’s table ever becomes smaller than the Constitution’s promise, we have misunderstood both the Constitution and the Christ we claim to follow.

In the fall of 2023, I spent my sabbatical in Cape Town, South Africa. Through the extraordinary generosity of my dear friend, the Rev. René August, I experienced not only the breathtaking beauty of her homeland, but also its history through the eyes of someone whose vision had not been shaped by curated stories or redacted histories.

René is an Episcopal priest whose family’s story is deeply rooted in Cape Town. She possesses a rare gift: the ability to illuminate not only history’s wounds, but also the extraordinary resilience that struggle so often reveals.

During my month there, she introduced me to the South Africa tourists come to see: the open-air markets, the dramatic coastlines, and the place where two oceans meet. She taught me to drive on the left side of the road before graciously handing me the keys to her car. She welcomed me into gatherings of family and friends, invited me to listening sessions in townships, took me to a young artist’s exhibition, and shared countless evenings over good food, good wine, and spectacular sunsets.

But the greatest gift she gave me was conversation.

History. Theology. Sociology. Soteriology.

Conversations that linger with me still.

One day, René pointed out Groote Kerk while we were riding through the city. Groote Kerk “The Great Church” is the oldest Christian church in South Africa, established by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century.

It is also the place where the theology of apartheid was first preached.

The architects of apartheid were not content merely to create a political system. They sought something more enduring: divine legitimacy.

They taught that racial segregation was not simply good policy but God’s will. Not merely a political preference, but a sacred obligation.

To give apartheid moral weight, theologians selectively interpreted Scripture until oppression appeared righteous. Forced removals, the denial of political rights, and the degradation of Black, Coloured, and Asian South Africans became, for many, not acts of cruelty but acts of obedience.

On my final Sunday in South Africa, I chose Groote Kerk as my place of worship.

René had kindly alerted the pastor that I would be attending, and his hospitality was warm. Still, I sat alone. As worship began, I realized I would understand almost none of the sermon being preached in Afrikaans.

The language barrier should have been the most unsettling part of the morning.

It wasn’t.

Instead, my mind drifted thousands of miles north to Elmina Castle on Ghana’s coast, a place I’ve visited several times.

Originally constructed by the Portuguese in 1482 and later occupied by the Dutch, Elmina became one of the principal slave-trading forts of the transatlantic slave trade. Above ground, Europeans conducted commerce and daily life. Beneath them, captured Africans were separated from their families, raped, tortured, starved, and imprisoned for weeks or months before being forced through the infamous “Door of No Return.”

In the middle of that castle sits a church.

The people who brutalized enslaved Africans gathered there to pray.

To sing.

To worship.

Not every slave fort contained a chapel. But many of the largest European forts built churches directly above, or beside, the dungeons where human beings were held.

The proximity of the sanctuary to the suffering was no accident.

It was theology.

The holy stood beside the profane until the profane came to be called holy.

History teaches us that before oppression is enforced by law, it is almost always justified by theology.

That is why the report released yesterday by President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission should concern anyone who loves both faith and democracy.

Not because religion has no place in public life. It does.

But because history teaches us what happens when governments begin confusing the authority of the church with the authority of the state.

The commission rejects the longstanding metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state, urging instead that America build “bridges” between them while recommending a significantly expanded role for religion in public institutions.

That language feels familiar.

Not because America has heard it before.

Because the Church has.

Every generation that has sought to sanctify domination has first wrapped itself in Scripture.

The theology of apartheid did not begin in Parliament.

It began in the pulpit.

The theology of American slavery did not begin in Congress.

It began in churches.

Long before legislators wrote laws, preachers preached sermons.

Before judges issued rulings, theologians wrote treatises.

Before governments enforced segregation, Christians declared segregation to be the will of God.

Law follows imagination.

And imagination is often formed by theology.

That is why Groote Kerk unsettled me.

That is why Elmina Castle broke my heart.

In both places, worship was offered while human dignity was denied.

The sanctuary stood only steps away from unspeakable suffering, not because the worshippers lacked compassion, but because their theology had taught them that domination could be holy.

That is always how it begins.

Not with hatred.

With hermeneutics.

Not with violence.

With interpretation.

Not with legislation.

With liturgy.

The most dangerous theology is never the one that announces itself as evil.

It is the one convinced it is righteous.

Less than a kilometer from Groote Kerk stands the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spent decades insisting that apartheid was not merely bad politics.

It was heresy, not because it separated races. But rather because it separated the Gospel from the God who gave it.

Tutu understood something the Church must remember again.

Whenever Christianity becomes useful to political power, political power eventually begins redefining Christianity.

Faith loses its prophetic voice the moment it becomes the chaplain of empire.

The Church’s calling has never been to rule the state.

Nor is the state’s calling to define the Church.

Religion is the work of faith communities.

Democracy is the work of the state.

One is sustained by invitation.

The other by obligation.

One forms the conscience.

The other protects the common good.

To weaken the integrity of either is to diminish the power of both.

Cape Town remembers.

Elmina remembers.

The question is whether America is willing to remember before history asks us to relive what others have already survived, because the distance between a sanctuary and a dungeon is often only a staircase.

The distance between faithful witness and baptized oppression is only a theology.

In 2013, audiences were introduced to a dystopian horror franchise, movies and a TV series, called The Purge. The premise was chilling. Once each year for twelve hours every crime, including murder, became legal.

The New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) is the fictional political party who has taken over the country and justify the purges as a necessary release valve, a ritual cleansing to save the nation.

But as the series unfolds, the truth emerges. The Purge was never really about reducing crime.

It was about protecting privilege.

The wealthy barricaded themselves behind elaborate security systems while the poor, the disabled, immigrants, people on the margins, and communities of color became expendable.

Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct. It was the mechanism. The annual ritual functioned as population control disguised as public policy.

It was fiction.

Until it began to feel familiar.

In April, the Supreme Court delivered what many voting-rights advocates describe as the final dismantling of the Voting Rights Act’s most powerful protections against racial vote dilution. The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais dramatically narrowed the ability of Black voters and other communities of color to challenge discriminatory electoral maps, continuing a years-long erosion of the landmark civil rights law.

This week, the Court again sided with the administration, allowing it to terminate Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians while also strengthening executive authority over restrictive immigration policies.

At the same time, the steady rollback of reproductive rights has stripped millions of women of autonomy over their own bodies, turning deeply personal medical decisions into matters of state control. What was once framed as settled law has been unraveled, leaving access to care dependent on geography, wealth, and political ideology.

Different cases.

Different laws.

The same direction.

One weakens the political voice of Black and Brown communities.

Another makes the lives of Black and Brown immigrants more precarious.

Another places women’s bodies under increasing surveillance and restriction.

One determines who gets counted politically.

Another determines who gets to remain physically.

Another determines who gets to decide their own future.

None of these decisions exist in isolation.

Together they paint a picture of a nation increasingly willing to define belonging by race, wealth, gender, and power.

This is not simply about immigration.

It is not simply about voting.

It is not simply about reproductive rights.

It is about demographics.

For years, demographers have projected that by 2045 the United States will become a nation in which no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority. According to a major analysis of U.S. demographic trends, white births have dropped to 49.6%, with all other racial and ethnic groups making up the remaining 50.4% of live births. The browning of America is inevitable.

Some have welcomed that future as evidence that America is finally becoming what it has always claimed to be.

Others have treated it as an existential threat.

History teaches us that when those accustomed to holding power fear losing it, they rarely surrender it voluntarily.

They redraw maps.

They rewrite laws.

They redefine citizenship.

They decide whose votes matter.

They decide whose presence matters.

They decide whose bodies are subject to control.

And when all else fails, they convince the public that exclusion is simply another word for security.

That is how purges work.

Not always with bullets.

Sometimes with ballots.

Sometimes with court opinions.

Sometimes with bureaucratic forms.

Sometimes with buses.

Sometimes with airplanes.

Always with the same objective: narrowing the definition of “We the People.”

The genius of The Purge was not its violence.

It was its honesty.

It asked whether a nation can maintain the illusion of democracy while systematically deciding whose lives are disposable.

It echoes an ancient warning: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees” Isaiah 10:1.

That question no longer belongs only to Hollywood.

It belongs to us.

The measure of a democracy has never been how well it protects those with wealth, citizenship, or political power.

The measure has always been how fiercely it protects those at the margins.

Because once a society decides some people can be erased for the comfort of others, it has already crossed the line from democracy into something far more dangerous.

The Purge is no longer just a movie script.

It is the warning of Project 2025.

The only question left is whether we will recognize this for what it is before they roll the credits.

Names that lodge themselves in the hollows of our hearts and refuse to leave.

Kohen Wiley is one of those names.

His name joins a sacred litany of Black babies whose lives have been measured by a world that has forgotten how to see the divine in Black flesh. A world that still calculates bodily worth. A world that still determines who is worthy of protection and who can be discarded.

And if we are honest, the discarding of Black babies did not begin with police reports, courtrooms, broken systems, or neglected neighborhoods.

It is as old as empire itself.

Scripture tells us that when Herod heard that a child had been born who might one day threaten his power, he ordered the slaughter of innocent children. He did not know which child carried greatness. He did not know where hope was cradled. He did not know which baby would change the world.

So he targeted them all.

The logic of Herod has never died.

Whenever power fears possibility, children suffer.

Whenever systems fear transformation, babies become expendable.

Whenever privilege fears justice, innocence becomes collateral damage.

Herod did not know which child would become great.

So he sought to destroy every possibility.

And two thousand years later, we still live among Herod’s descendants.

Not descendants by blood, but descendants of spirit.

The spirit that looks at Black children and sees threat before promise.

The spirit that sees danger before divinity.

The spirit that treats Black babies as disposable while proclaiming itself civilized.

The spirit that weeps selectively.

The spirit that protects selectively.

The spirit that loves selectively.

And so today, I write not only an ode to Kohen Wiley.

I write a lament for a world that keeps finding new ways to crucify its children.

I write a confession for all the times we have grown accustomed to grief.

For all the times we have accepted the unacceptable.

For all the times we have learned another child’s name only after their life was taken.

I write because Kohen deserved more.

Every Black child deserves more.

They deserve futures that are protected rather than threatened.

They deserve communities that nurture rather than neglect.

They deserve schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, policies, and people that recognize their sacred worth before tragedy forces recognition.

Most of all, they deserve a world that understands what heaven has always known: Back babies are born as miracles.

Each one.

Every single one.

Perhaps that is what Herod feared.

Not merely one child.

But the possibility hidden inside every child.

The revolution sleeping in every cradle.

The image of God breathing through every tiny chest.

The future waiting to be born.

Kohen Wiley was not disposable.

He was not collateral damage.

He is not an unfortunate statistic.

He is God’s beloved.

And as we speak Kohen’s name, we must also honor the woman who first carried him beneath her heart.

His mother.

The one whose body became his first sanctuary.

The one who knew his rhythms before the world knew his name.

The one who dreamed dreams for him before he ever took his first breath.

While we debate policies and analyze systems, a mother lives with an absence that cannot be explained away.

Her arms know what is missing.

Her home knows what is missing.

Her heart knows what is missing.

Her womb remembers.

The same womb that stretched to make room for his life now bears the ache of his absence.

There is no language sufficient for that grief.

No prayer that feels long enough.

No justice that can fully restore what has been taken.

And yet we must hold sacred the unbearable labor of a mother who now carries memory where she once carried possibility.

For every time Kohen’s name is spoken, we must remember that there is a mother listening for the sound of his voice.

A mother longing for one more embrace.

A mother whose love remains, even when the child she loves is no longer within reach.

May God be especially near to her.

May the God who gathered Rachel’s tears gather hers as well.

May the God who knows the anguish of a grieving parent hold her through the long nights and the impossible mornings.

And may we never become so accustomed to tragedy that we fail to see the sacred wound carried by the parents left behind.

The truth is that repentance is required.

Not performative sorrow.

Not momentary outrage.

Repentance.

A turning.

A reckoning.

A transformation.

Repentance for a society that has normalized the suffering of Black children.

Repentance for institutions that protect power more fiercely than they protect babies.

Repentance for silence.

Repentance for indifference.

Repentance for every policy, every prejudice, every practice that makes Black life more vulnerable and Black death more predictable.

Repentance for a world that still behaves as though some children matter more than others.

Because every time a Black child is discarded, we reveal how far we remain from the presence of God.

Every time a Black child is denied safety, dignity, opportunity, or life itself, we expose the distance between our declarations and our discipleship.

So today, I speak Kohen Kartier Wiley’s name.

I speak it as prayer.

I speak it as protest.

I speak it as promise.

May his memory disturb our comfort.

May his memory deepen our compassion.

May his memory awaken our courage.

May his memory call us to repentance.

And may we finally build a world where no child must die for us to recognize their worth.

A world where every Black baby is treated as heaven’s treasure.

A world where Herod’s spirit finds no home.

A world worthy of our children.

A world worthy of Kohen.

Some are honest. Some are aspirational. Some are carefully constructed myths that make violence sound like virtue and conquest sound like destiny.

The United States has never been comfortable telling the truth about itself.

It has built a practiced art of naming things what they are not.

Conquest became discovery. Theft became settlement. Empire became expansion. A continent already filled with nations was declared “empty” so it could be claimed without moral consequence.

The lie was never only in the act, it was in the naming. And once naming becomes distorted, memory follows.

The kidnapping of African people became commerce. Human beings became property under law. Even sacred text was edited in enslaver-produced “slave Bibles,” stripping away Exodus and the prophets in an attempt to cut enslaved people off from even the grammar of liberation.

But truth is never fully controllable.

It leaks.

It circulates.

It survives what tries to kill it.

And even when denied, it speaks.

The Civil War exposed what the nation refused to confess: that the foundation of its economy and order are built on human bondage.

But even that truth was quickly rewritten.

Reconstruction became failure instead of democratic experiment.
White terror became order.
Segregation became tradition.
Voter suppression became legitimacy.

America has always preferred renaming what it refuses to repair.

Juneteenth is not the story of delayed information.

It is the story of delayed embodiment.

By June 19, 1865, The Emancipation Proclamation had already been issued. The truth already existed on paper.

But truth on paper is not yet truth in the world.

Enslaved people in Texas were not simply waiting in ignorance. News moved through fragile but real underground networks of Black kinship, rumor, resistance, and hope.

Some knew in fragments. Some suspected. Some dared to believe what they could not yet fully live, because knowing truth and possessing the power to live inside it are not the same thing.

Freedom is not only an idea.

Freedom is a condition enforced.

So when Union troops arrived in Galveston, they did more than deliver news, they embodied authority.

They enforced what had been declared.

And in that moment, freedom became lived reality.

Not created, but delivered.

This is the theological weight of Juneteenth:

Truth is not complete until it becomes enfleshed.

In the beginning, Scripture says the earth was formless and void, and the Spirit moved over the waters. But creation does not remain at declaration, it moves into embodiment.

And in the fullness of time, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Truth, in Christian imagination, is never abstract.

It is always embodied.
Always visible.
Always lived.

Juneteenth stands in that sacred movement:

from proclamation → to presence
from promise → to flesh

There is a story lingering with me in this moment.

My friend Rebeccah Bennett once took her daughters to a native prairie in Missouri.

They expected fields of tall grass and wildflowers.

Instead, they found blackened earth.

The land had been burned in a controlled fire.

It looked like ruin.

Rebeccah asked the guide:

“How long before it comes back?”

“About three weeks,” she said.

Then she explained: the prairie must be burned every few years to prevent invasive species that seek to destroy its ecosystem. But beneath the soil, something deeper is happening.

You see, it turns out that what’s visible of a prairie is just the tip of the ecosystem. The strength of the prairie, up to three-quarters of its biomass, remains hidden underground.

The heat activates dormant spores and root systems, and what appears to be destruction is actually regeneration because the prairie is not destroyed by fire, it is revealed by it.

I think about that when I look at this American experiment called democracy.

What we are witnessing feels, in many ways, like collapse.

Institutions are strained. Truth is contested. History is rewritten.

Democracy, as we have known it, feels fragile, and the constitutional ground looks charred.

But what if this is also a prairie moment?

What if this moment is exposing ideologies and strategies that threaten the ecological balance of democracy itself?

And what if, in this exposure, something long buried is being stirred awake?

Because even now:

People are organizing.
Communities are mobilizing.
Young people are refusing apathy.
Neighbors are rediscovering one another.
Movements are forming where resignation once lived.

The fire is real.

But so is what it is revealing.

Juneteenth reminds us:

Truth does not disappear because it is delayed.
It does not die because it is denied.
It does not vanish because it is buried.

Truth has roots.

And roots endure what surface systems cannot.

That is why the old hymn still speaks:

“Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.”

Not because truth is fragile.

But because truth is rooted.

The danger has never been that truth disappears.

The danger has been that truth is ignored until it becomes unavoidable.

Juneteenth is the moment when what had been declared finally became embodied.

When what had been spoken finally became enforced.

When what had been true finally became real in the lives of those whose bodies had carried the weight of its delay.

And that is not only history.

It is Christology.

Because the Christian claim is not that God sent an idea into the world.

It is that God sent a body.

And the resurrection is not the triumph of abstraction over reality.

It is the insistence that what is true cannot be contained by death.

Juneteenth, then, is not only a historical marker.

It is a theological echo:

Truth becomes real when it takes flesh.
Justice becomes real when it is embodied.
Freedom becomes real when it is enforced.

And like prairie grass after fire, what looked like devastation may be the very condition of awakening.

Truth is not fragile.
Truth is patient.

And when it rises, it does not ask permission.

It simply becomes what it always was.

Real.

An Invitation for This Moment

So the question Juneteenth places before us is not only what happened in 1865.

It is what is happening now.

What truths are still waiting to become flesh in this country?

What freedoms are still declared but not enforced?

What histories are still buried beneath polite silence and political convenience?

And what will it take for us to stop mistaking proclamation for presence?

Because Juneteenth is not only a celebration.

It is a summons.

To tell the truth when it is costly.
To embody freedom when it is inconvenient.
To refuse the comfort of renamed lies.

To become, ourselves, the enforcement of what love and justice require.

If truth is to rise again in this generation, it will not rise as abstraction.

It will rise as bodies willing to live differently.

Communities willing to organize.
Churches willing to remember.
People willing to stop calling things by the wrong names.

Because truth is not waiting to be discovered.

It is waiting to be embodied.

I am writing a book. It should have been finished by now, but I have hesitated to call it done. I pray that when I am finished, you will consider journeying with me toward what it means to be Enfleshed.

There is a reason Scripture spends so much time warning us about false prophets.

Not because they always lie, but because they tell stories people desperately want to believe.

Jeremiah stood in the shadow of empire and listened as prophets promised peace when there was no peace. They wrapped catastrophe in patriotism. They baptized illusion. They transformed wishful thinking into national policy.

And the people loved them for it.

People often love stories that relieve them of the burden of truth.

I have been thinking about that as I watch our nation once again wrestle with war, power, and accountability.

For decades, Donald Trump has sold a story: that he possesses uncommon business acumen, that he is a dealmaker unlike any other, that he sees what others cannot see and negotiates outcomes others cannot achieve.

It is a powerful story.

Powerful enough that many people stopped asking whether it was true.

Atlantic City tells a different story.

The casinos promised prosperity but left behind bankruptcies, unpaid contractors, devastated investors, and a city that never experienced the renaissance it was promised.

Yet the story survived.

The facts became secondary.

Trump’s name remained on the buildings long after the people paid the price.

That is what stories do. They can become so powerful that reality struggles to compete.

The same thing can happen to nations, especially nations intoxicated by their own mythology.

Today we are being told another story.

We are told that military action against Iran was necessary.

We are told that constitutional questions are inconveniences.

We are told that congressional authorization is optional.

We are told that unilateral executive action is strength.

But the Constitution tells a different story.

Having lived under the whims of a king, the framers asked themselves:  “Who is speaking for the people when the nation goes to war?”

In response, they vested the power to declare war in Congress because they understood something we seem determined to forget: no single person should possess the authority to send a nation into war alone.

Yet here we are.

Months into a conflict Congress never authorized.

Months into a war lawmakers in both chambers have repeatedly sought to constrain through War Powers resolutions.

And now, after months of bombing, blockades, casualties, economic disruption, and escalating tensions, we are being told that the path to peace may involve reopening trade routes, lifting restrictions, and embracing arrangements that look remarkably similar to those available before the conflict began.

Do you see the irony?

This administration spent months sacrificing lives, consuming resources, and deepening instability only to arrive at a destination now being called victory that bears an unsettling resemblance to the place where diplomacy could have begun.

The prophet Isaiah asked, “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread?”

I hear a modern version:

Why do you shed blood for what wisdom could have secured?

Why do you sacrifice our young on the altar of political narratives?

Why do you surrender constitutional principles because a strongman promises strength?

The church must resist the temptation to become chaplain to the empire.

Our calling is to bear witness to the truth.

Truth is not partisan.

Truth is not Republican or Democrat.

Truth is not liberal or conservative.

Truth is sacred.

Truth asks difficult questions.

Truth asks who profits.

Truth asks who suffers.

Truth asks who pays.

Truth asks who dies.

And perhaps most importantly, truth asks whether we have become so captivated by the storyteller that we no longer refute the lies.

This question is larger than Donald Trump.

It is about the soul of a democracy.

Because democracies die when citizens lose the ability to distinguish between clever branding and costly reality.

Democracies die when image becomes more important than evidence.

Democracies die when constitutional guardrails are treated as inconveniences rather than protections.

Democracies die when war becomes easier to start than to question.

The biblical witness is clear.

God does not side with propaganda.

God does not sanctify deception.

God does not bless leaders simply because they are powerful.

The prophets measured leaders by justice, truth, and whether the most vulnerable were protected from the ambitions of the powerful.

That standard has not changed.

So the question before us is not whether this administration can tell a compelling story.

It can.

It has.

The question is whether the story is true.

Because eventually every nation arrives at the same reckoning.

The branding fades.

The slogans disappear.

The speeches are forgotten.

And all that remains are the consequences.

The graves.

The debt.

The constitutional precedents.

The families who must live with what was done in their name.

Stories are powerful but truth is sacred.

And whenever the two come into conflict, people of faith must have the courage to choose the painful truth over the powerful story.

There is a rhythm to the liturgical life of the church.

A holy cadence.

A sacred choreography that carries us through the story of God again and again, not because we have forgotten it, but because we are forever learning how to live it.

The church marks its time differently than the world does.

While the empire organizes itself around fiscal quarters, election cycles, and market fluctuations, the church tells time through seasons of waiting, watching, remembering, repenting, celebrating, and becoming.

Advent teaches us how to wait.

Christmas teaches us how to welcome God with us.

Epiphany teaches us how to recognize the divine in unexpected places.

Lent teaches us how to let go.

Easter teaches us how to hold on to hope beyond death.

Each season carries its own spiritual labor. Each invites us into a particular posture before God. Each arrives, does its work upon us, and then yields to the next movement in the story.

But Pentecost is different.

Pentecost is not a season.

Before someone accuses me of liturgical snobbery, let me assure you this distinction is not about proving who knows church language and who does not. It is not an exercise in ecclesiastical correctness. It is certainly not intended to shame those who were never taught the architecture of the church calendar.

The distinction matters because theology matters, and sometimes the smallest distinctions reveal the deepest truths.

Pentecost is not a season.

Pentecost is a day.

One day.

One irreversible day when the world changed forever.

Unlike Advent, Lent, Easter, or Christmastide, Pentecost does not stretch across weeks, inviting us into a prolonged spiritual experience. It arrives like a rushing wind. It erupts like fire. It disrupts the ordinary order of things and then refuses to leave.

The church calendar reflects this.

Pentecost is followed by what many traditions call Ordinary Time.

What a strange name, especially since there is nothing ordinary about what follows Pentecost.

The disciples who once hid behind locked doors emerge into public squares.

The frightened become fearless.

The scattered become a movement.

The silenced become witnesses.

The Spirit falls, and suddenly the world is no longer arranged according to the limits empire has imposed.

Languages become bridges instead of barriers.

Power moves from palaces into people.

The margins become the center of God’s activity.

History itself bends toward a new possibility.

Pentecost is not a season because Pentecost is not an episode. It is not an annual spiritual event that comes and goes. It is not a moment we revisit once a year before returning to business as usual.

Pentecost is an unleashing.

An irrevocable release of divine power into a world determined to organize itself around domination, hierarchy, and control.

The Spirit comes to the willing and waiting, with a sound like a mighty rushing wind. The fire falls and it is never extinguished. The church is born and history can never again pretend that empire is the only power operating in the world.

Perhaps that is why I find myself returning to this distinction. Because, at my core, I am pentecostal. Not because it is my denomination, but rather because pentecostalism is my orientation. It is my confirmation. And it is the vocational power I unleash in the spaces I am graced to occupy.

Too often we have treated Pentecost as though it were seasonal.

We celebrate it.

We wear red.

We sing the songs.

We remember the story.

And then we quietly place the Spirit back on the shelf until next year.

But that is not the witness of the Acts of the Apostles. The Spirit was not given for occasional inspiration. The Spirit was given for continual transformation.

Not for a day of celebration, but for a lifetime of disruption.

Not for private comfort, but for public courage.

The movement from Pentecost into Ordinary Time may be one of the most profound teachings the church has ever offered, because what follows Pentecost is not a return to normal. It is the practice of living as though Pentecost actually happened.

Ordinary Time is the opportunity to unleash resurrection power into routine circumstances. It is what it means to raise children, organize communities, confront injustice, care for neighbors, preach good news, resist empire, tell the truth, and keep believing that another world is possible because the Spirit has already been poured out.

And perhaps that is the challenge before us now. Empire is still doing what empire has always done.

It divides.

It hoards.

It exploits.

It convinces ordinary people that power belongs only to those who sit on thrones, occupy offices, command armies, or control wealth.

But Pentecost tells another story. Pentecost declares that God has already interrupted that arrangement.

The Spirit did not descend upon kings.

The Spirit did not descend upon generals.

The Spirit did not descend upon governors or judges. The Spirit descended upon ordinary people.

Workers.

Fisherfolk.

All people, irrespective of gender.

Young and old.

Citizens and strangers.

The Spirit fell upon a community and transformed them into a force capable of challenging the world as it was.

That is why Pentecost is not a season. It is a power that is unleashed wherever people dare to embody it.

Every time communities choose solidarity over division.

Every time truth is spoken in the face of lies.

Every time the vulnerable are defended.

Every time justice is pursued despite the cost.

Every time love refuses to surrender to fear, Pentecost happens again.

The same Spirit.

The same fire.

The same holy insistence that another world is possible.

So perhaps Ordinary Time is not ordinary at all. Perhaps Ordinary Time is the season of evidence: evidence that the Spirit still moves; that resurrection still matters; and that empire does not get the final word.

Pentecost marks one day, but the church is called to live Pentecost every day thereafter.

One rushing wind.

One blaze of holy fire.

One divine interruption.

And one enduring call to bear witness to God’s dream in the world. Pentecost is our invitation to live our faith out loud.

When I opened it, I discovered it contained a generous honorarium from a speaking engagement. The funny thing is that an honorarium had never been discussed. No one mentioned compensation. No agreement was made.

No expectation was set.

I had spoken for a worthy cause, hosted by a worthy institution committed to protecting and advancing the rights of Black people. I considered my participation part of my reasonable service.

In fact, I was so moved by the work they are doing that my contribution back to the organization makes the transaction, if one can call it that, an even draw.

But the unexpected envelope lingers with me.

Not because of the amount.

Because of what it revealed about how thoroughly we have come to understand human relationships through the lens of exchange.

We live in a transactional society. Every action is measured by return on investment. Every contribution is assigned a market value. Every relationship risks becoming a negotiation. We are taught to ask: What am I getting out of this? What is this worth? Who owes whom?

The language of transaction has become so dominant that the language of vocation often sounds foreign. Yet scripture offers another framework. In Romans 12:1, Paul urges believers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”

Reasonable service.

Not extraordinary service.

Not service reserved for saints.

Not service contingent upon recognition, reward, or reciprocity. Reasonable service.

The phrase suggests something deeper than volunteerism. It points toward an orientation of life. A way of moving through the world that understands our gifts, our labor, our witness, and even our very selves as offerings rather than commodities.

Paul is not suggesting that labor lacks value. Quite the opposite. Scripture consistently teaches that workers deserve fair compensation. Justice requires that labor be honored and exploitation resisted.

But reasonable service asks a different question. Not, “What can I get for this?”

But, “What is mine to give?”

There is a profound difference.

One begins with scarcity.

The other begins with purpose.

One sees every interaction as a ledger.

The other sees life itself as a gift.

The challenge, of course, is that transactional thinking often disguises itself as wisdom. We are warned not to be used. Not to be taken advantage of. Not to give away what others are willing to purchase.

There is truth in those cautions, yet there is also danger. Because eventually we can become so concerned with protecting our value that we forget our calling.

Not everything that matters can be monetized. Not every act of service should generate an invoice. Not every contribution belongs in the marketplace.

Some things belong to the realm of covenant. Some things belong to the realm of community. Some things belong to the realm of love.

The elders who marched before us did not always ask what they would receive. The church mothers who fed movements did not calculate billable hours.

The freedom fighters who risked livelihoods, reputations, and sometimes their lives were not operating from a transactional framework.

They understood something that feels increasingly countercultural today: there are causes worthy of our contribution simply because they are worthy.

There are communities worthy of our investment simply because they are ours.

There are moments when service is not a strategy but a sacred obligation.

Perhaps that is why the envelope struck me so deeply. It arrived as an unexpected gift.

A reminder that generosity still exists.

A reminder that gratitude still matters.

A reminder that compensation and calling need not be enemies.

But most of all, it prompted a question I cannot shake: In a society that teaches us to measure everything by what we receive, do we still know what reasonable service looks like?

Do we still recognize the joy of giving ourselves to something larger than ourselves?

Do we still believe that some offerings are valuable precisely because they cannot be quantified?

I deposited neither the check nor the question immediately. Both deserve reflection.

The check will find its way back into the work.

The question, however, may take longer.

Because in an age of transaction, perhaps one of the most radical acts of faith is remembering that not everything is for sale.

The trip was supposed to be a combination of rest and responsibility, a few days of much-needed respite wrapped around a non-profit board meeting. Before takeoff, I posted my intentions on social media, silenced my phone, and settled into my seat expecting an ordinary flight.

When we landed and I turned my phone back on, my screen exploded with messages.

There had been a mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub.

As a denominational leader, I knew I needed to show up for our congregations.

As a minister of the gospel, I knew I needed to show up for the hurting.

As a human being, I grieved the loss of lives I had never known.

I canceled my plans, made a few calls, and headed first to Pulse. The building was wrapped in yellow tape. Police vehicles still lingered nearby. The air itself seemed heavy with shock.

From there, I made my way to Joy Metropolitan Community Church, a congregation I’d been told was serving as a gathering place. I expected to enter a sanctuary filled with rage and lament.

I was angry that another mass shooting had been added to our nation’s growing liturgy of grief.

But when I entered the sanctuary, I found people singing.

They were hugging.

Praying.

Holding one another.

Offering snacks.

I wanted none of it.

I wanted people to be angry, and the fact that they weren’t made me even angrier.

So I left.

I sat alone in my rental car, nursing my outrage, when someone tapped on my window.

A woman stood there smiling.

I wasn’t interested in that either, but I cracked the window.

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“I’m too angry to stay,” I replied.

Then I asked her a question.

“What is there to sing about?”

I’ll never forget her answer.

She said, “Tonight someone who lost their love killed a bunch of people who had done nothing wrong to him.”

Then she paused.

“We’re not singing because we aren’t in pain. We’re singing because we are hurting, and we don’t want to lose our love too.”

Then she said something that has stayed with me for a decade: “Don’t let this hateful act take your love.”

I have never forgotten those words.

Ten years later, I think about them often.

Especially now.

Because hatred remains one of the most powerful forces shaping public life.

This is Pride Month.

A month born not from celebration alone, but from resistance. A month that reminds us that queer people should not have to fight simply to breathe, belong, worship, love, or live.

Yet many of our queer siblings encounter rejection long before they ever experience acceptance.

I remember a friend distancing himself from me after I shared my call to ministry. He told me, “The church taught me to hate myself before I knew myself.”

Imagine that.

Being taught shame before you learn joy.

Being instructed to fear yourself before you learn to love yourself.

The wounds from that kind of teaching run deep.

We know some things about the shooter.

We know he was consumed by grievance.

We know he was steeped in rage.

We know he turned his woundedness into a weapon and pledged allegiance to extremist causes during the attack.

And we know something else.

Hatred does not emerge from nowhere.

It grows where fear is cultivated.

It flourishes where human beings are turned into “others.”

It thrives wherever people are taught that someone else’s existence threatens their own.

For generations, LGBTQIA+ people have been made into “others.”

They have been mocked, bullied, excluded, legislated against, dehumanized, and yes, condemned in the name of God.

Pulse was not simply a mass shooting. It was an act of violence directed at a community that has long been told that their very existence is treated as an abomination.

Forty-nine people, most of them Latino, were murdered and dozens more wounded because a gunman had been groomed to hate.

It remains the deadliest act of violence against LGBTQ+ people in United States history.

Three days after the shooting, I found myself standing on a platform in Orlando embracing Rev. Betty Deas Clark, then pastor of Mother Emanuel AME Church.

Just one year earlier, on June 17, 2015, a white supremacist joined a Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and later murdered the nine Black worshippers gathered around scripture in what became known as the Mother Emanuel massacre.

I asked Rev. Deas Clark how she found the strength to come.

She replied that because of all the love shown to Mother Emanuel after Charleston, she couldn’t bear the thought of not coming.

So there we stood.

A Black woman pastor from Charleston.

A Black woman pastor from Ferguson.

Both of us invited to offer words of encouragement in the midst of unspeakable grief and to hold space for another city broken by violence.

And then something else happened that I have carried with me ever since.

When we stepped off the stage, a mother approached me through tears and asked if I would pray for her child.

The child was queer and being relentlessly bullied.

That night, they had told their mother they didn’t know if they wanted to continue to “live like this.”

When I opened my arms, they collapsed into them sobbing.

I remember holding them.

I remember their trembling.

I remember their despair.

And I remember what I told them.

I told them they were made in the image of God.

I told them they were loved by God.

Loved by their mother.

Loved by me.

Loved by countless others they could not yet see.

I told them that when the present becomes unbearably painful, it can be difficult to imagine a future.

Then I walked them back toward the stage.

Thousands of people stood before us holding tiny penlights in the darkness.

I asked them to look.

Really look.

And then I invited them to imagine every single light as a glimmer of love.

Every light a reminder that someone cared.

Every light a declaration that they mattered.

Every light a witness against despair.

I told them that all of that light was for them.

Then their mother grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “I needed to hear those words too.”

Today, ten years after Pulse, I find myself returning to that moment because we are once again living through days saturated with cruelty.

Across our nation, LGBTQ+ people are being targeted by policies, rhetoric, and campaigns that seek to erase, diminish, or deny their dignity. Battles over healthcare, identity, education, and basic belonging continue to place queer and transgender people in the crosshairs of political conflict.

And all of this unfolds in a nation where more than 44,000 people still die from gun-related injuries each year and where gun violence remains the leading cause of death for children and teenagers.

The temptation in moments like these is to surrender to cynicism.

To surrender to despair.

To surrender to hatred.

But that woman outside Joy MCC taught me something I desperately needed to learn.

We do not defeat hatred by becoming hatred.

We do not overcome darkness by joining it.

We do not heal a wounded world by surrendering our capacity to love.

The truth is that hatred can only fully inhabit hearts that have lost their love.

So today, if the news has exhausted you…

If cruelty has discouraged you…

If grief has found its way into your spirit…

Reach for the light.

Find the people who remind you who you are.

Find the communities that help you remember what is sacred.

Find the love that still survives beneath the rubble.

And then hold on to it with everything you have.

Because the God who created us fashioned us from the same elements found in the stars.

We are, quite literally, made of light.

So keep reaching for it.

Keep becoming it.

Keep reflecting it.

And whatever you do…

Never.

Ever.

Surrender your love.

On the surface, the change may seem innocuous. That is certainly the narrative being advanced.

But the erasure of identity is never innocuous.

Government records are not merely records. They are statements about who is seen.

When a Unitarian Universalist, Humanist, Pagan, Wiccan, Druid, or member of another minority tradition is no longer visible in the data, visibility is diminished.

And when visibility is diminished, recognition often fades.

What concerns me is not simply the policy. It is the spirit behind it.

Because this is not the first time we have seen this instinct emerge from Secretary Hegseth.

Again and again, we have witnessed a governing philosophy that appears to view disagreement as disloyalty, diversity as weakness, and exclusion as strength, a philosophy that approaches public life not as a shared project, but as a battlefield.

No quarter.

No compromise.

No room for complexity.

No room for people who do not fit neatly into a preferred narrative.

History teaches us to pay attention whenever people with institutional power begin deciding who counts.

Erasure is rarely administrative.

It is almost always ideological.

And it is almost always a warning.

As a Christian, I find myself returning to the words of Jesus:

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold…” John 10:16

The traditional interpretation is that Jesus is speaking to a Jewish audience and referring to Gentiles, the very people the religious establishment did not expect God to embrace.

But the power of the text extends far beyond its historical context.

Notice what Jesus does not say.

He does not say, “I have other sheep that I will force into this fold.”

He does not say, “I have other sheep, but first they must become exactly like you.”

He does not say, “I have other sheep, but they do not really belong.”

Instead, Jesus acknowledges that these other sheep already belong to God.

This is a profound theological distinction. Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly confronts the assumption that religious insiders have a monopoly on God. Again and again, he reveals a God at work beyond the boundaries people have constructed.

The question is whether those of us inside our folds can imagine a God whose love extends beyond our fences.

There is a growing movement in America that confuses dominance with discipleship.

It imagines that faith is strongest when it occupies every seat of power. It imagines that religious freedom means freedom for some religions more than others. It imagines that diversity is a threat rather than a gift.

And increasingly, it imagines that if certain people can be pushed out of sight, they can be pushed out of existence.

But government recognition does not create human dignity, it merely acknowledges it.

And when governments stop acknowledging people, they reveal more about themselves than about those being erased.

That is not leadership.

It is domination, and domination has never been a fruit of the Spirit.

Christians should know better than anyone that God cannot be contained by our categories.

The Bible is one long story of God showing up where the religious establishment least expects: among foreigners, outsiders, strangers, and those dismissed by respectable society.

Every time the people of God draw a circle, God seems determined to draw a larger one. Which raises a difficult question:

If Jesus acknowledges people beyond our boundaries, who are we to erase them from ours?

The deepest problem with efforts like this is not that they are bureaucratic. It is that they are spiritually malformed.

They reflect a failure of humility, a failure to recognize that none of us sees the whole of God.

A failure to remember that the Divine has always exceeded our institutions, our denominations, our doctrines, our nations, and our lists. After all, our faith begins with an executed Afro-Semitic Palestinian rabbi whose legitimacy was denied by every major institution of his day.

Which is why it is particularly heartbreaking when Christians become comfortable watching others be diminished, dismissed, or erased. This moment requires more than political analysis. It requires moral clarity.

A government may streamline databases, but it must never cultivate a culture of erasure.

A democracy may have majorities, but it must never become captive to them.

And Christians may proclaim Christ, but we should never forget that the Christ we proclaim is the one who said:

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold…”

The question facing America is whether we possess the wisdom and the courage to believe him, because whenever power begins narrowing the circle, people of faith have a responsibility to widen it.

Not because diversity is fashionable.

Not because religious pluralism is easy.

But because the God revealed in Scripture has always been larger than our boundaries, and every attempt to shrink the human family is ultimately an act of faithlessness.

But there is another reason this action troubles me.

Policies are often manifestations of deeper assumptions.

One assumption that periodically surfaces in American life is this: If a group becomes less visible in government data, it becomes easier to ignore its needs.

That is true whether we are talking about faith communities, racial groups, immigrants, rural communities, urban neighborhoods, or poor people.

The opposite of justice is not merely oppression. Often, it is invisibility.

Perhaps that is why this moment feels larger than a military personnel database.

In just a few years, this nation will undertake the 2030 Census. Every ten years, America asks a deceptively simple question:

Who is here?

But beneath that question lies another:

Who counts?

A census is never merely about numbers.

It is about visibility.

It is about recognition.

It is about whose existence is acknowledged and whose needs are considered.

The great struggles of American democracy have often been struggles over counting. Enslaved Africans were counted but not fully human. Indigenous peoples were erased. Immigrants, minorities, and the poor have repeatedly been undercounted, overlooked, or ignored.

The census has always been a contest over who belongs in the nation’s imagination.

That is why I pay attention whenever institutions begin reducing categories of recognition. Not because a military database and a national census are the same thing, but because they emerge from the same moral question:

Who counts?

And perhaps an even more dangerous question:

Who doesn’t?

A nation begins to lose its soul not when it forgets how to count people, but when it forgets how to see them.

And when a nation stops seeing people, it becomes far easier to decide they no longer count.

It sounds harmless enough.

Wise, even.

After all, patience is a virtue. We are taught to wait on God. To trust the process. To believe that good things come to those who wait.

But the longer I live, the more I realize that waiting is not experienced equally.

For some people, waiting is an inconvenience.

For others, waiting is a matter of survival.

Waiting is often a luxury afforded to those whose safety, dignity, and well-being are not hanging in the balance.

The person whose water is contaminated cannot wait.

The parent whose child is hungry cannot wait.

The family facing eviction cannot wait.

The worker earning poverty wages cannot wait.

The patient needing treatment cannot wait.

The community being targeted by violence cannot wait.

When your life is secure, waiting can feel reasonable. When your future is protected, patience can sound profound.

But when every day carries consequences, waiting becomes expensive.

History teaches us this lesson over and over again.

Those who benefited from the status quo have almost always counseled patience. Those suffering under the status quo have rarely had the luxury to embrace it.

Enslaved people were told to wait.

Women seeking the right to vote were told to wait.

Workers demanding safe conditions were told to wait.

Black Americans seeking equal protection under the law were told to wait.

Queer people seeking recognition of their humanity were told to wait.

Every movement toward justice has encountered those who believed the timing was not quite right.

Yet justice delayed has never magically become justice delivered.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a jail cell that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He understood something many still struggle to grasp: there is a difference between patience and postponement.

Patience is a spiritual discipline.

Postponement is often a political strategy.

One nurtures hope.

The other protects power.

The Bible itself is filled with people who refused to wait quietly.

The Hebrew midwives did not wait.

Moses did not wait.

Esther did not wait.

The prophets did not wait.

Mary did not wait.

Jesus certainly did not wait.

He announced good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom to the oppressed—not someday, but now.

Not eventually.

Not when it became comfortable.

Not when everyone was ready.

Now.

To be clear, this is not an argument against wisdom, discernment, or strategy. Every movement requires thoughtful timing.

But there is a profound difference between strategic waiting and privileged waiting.

Strategic waiting asks, “What action will bring the greatest good?”

Privileged waiting asks, “Can someone else bear the cost while I remain comfortable?”

One is rooted in wisdom.

The other is rooted in distance.

And perhaps that is the question before us.

Who is paying the price while we wait?

Who is carrying the burden while we debate?

Who is suffering while we deliberate?

It is easy to preach patience when the emergency belongs to someone else.

It is easy to celebrate gradualism when the pain is not your own.

But love has a way of collapsing distance.

Love refuses to let another person’s suffering remain theoretical.

Love moves us closer.

Love makes their urgency our urgency.

Love reminds us that justice is not simply about changing policies. It is about learning to care enough that another person’s pain becomes impossible to ignore.

I think this is why the prophets sounded so impatient.

Not because they lacked faith.

Because they possessed it.

They trusted that God’s vision for the world was too beautiful, too necessary, and too urgent to be endlessly deferred.

They understood that every day of unnecessary waiting meant another day of unnecessary suffering.

Perhaps the question is not whether we are willing to wait.

Perhaps the question is whether we are willing to notice who cannot.

And once we notice, what love requires of us next.

Because for those whose lives are on the line, waiting is not a virtue.

It is a cost.

And too often, it is a cost paid by people who never volunteered to bear it.

I have not been able to shake this question Sadie asked her mother during a recent transatlantic phone call.

While speaking across oceans and time zones, this precocious little girl already understood something many adults forget: darkness is not always the same. Night may signal the end of a day, or it may announce the breaking of a new dawn.

By the summer of 2023, the Spirit had already begun preparing me for the next phase of my ministry. One of the gifts I carry is the ability to illuminate the sacred often buried beneath the methodical, exhausting, and sometimes mundane labor of justice-seeking work. That summer, I was invited by an organization to do just that during a weeklong retreat in Buena Vista, Colorado.

My sole responsibility was to accompany a group of leaders as they reimagined their work at the intersection of heart and mind, strategy and spirit.

On our final evening together, we gathered at the base of Mount Princeton in an open field untouched by development. With the help of generators and an extraordinary team of chefs, the landscape had been transformed into a lavish farm-table banquet. A violin trio filled the air with music. A poet reminded us what it means to be human. There were no houses, no buildings, no traffic, and no artificial noise. Just mountains, sky, laughter, and the rare gift of simply being human together.

As darkness settled over the mountains, an astronomer joined us for a lesson beneath the night sky.

He invited us to silence our phones, settle into the blankets and pillows spread across the field, and watch as the moon slowly disappeared behind the mountain ridge.

At first, there was not much to see.

The last traces of daylight lingered on the horizon. The stars seemed faint and scattered.

But he urged us to be patient.

As our eyes adjusted and the darkness deepened, something remarkable happened.

One by one, then by the thousands, stars emerged.

Constellations appeared.

Planets revealed themselves.

The darker the sky became, the more there was to see. Then our guide said something I have carried with me ever since:

“You cannot see the fullness of the universe until it gets dark enough.”

I have returned to those words often over the last few years.

Especially now.

Because many of us are living through a season that feels increasingly dark.

Institutions we trusted seem fragile. Democratic norms are under assault. Truth itself is contested. Communities are weary. The future feels uncertain.

Our instinct is to resist the darkness. To escape it. To light candles as quickly as possible. And yet our faith tradition suggests something surprising:

God has always done some of God’s best work in the dark.

Creation begins in darkness.

Before there was light, there was darkness hovering over the face of the deep.

Seeds germinate in darkness.

Long before a sprout breaks through the soil, hidden work is taking place underground. Roots are forming. Cells are dividing. Life is organizing itself in ways unseen.

Every farmer knows darkness is not evidence that nothing is happening.

Sometimes darkness is evidence that the most important work is happening.

The psalmist writes of God knitting us together in the hidden sanctuary of the womb.

Life begins in darkness.

Dreams come in darkness.

Jacob wrestles in darkness.

The Israelites flee Egypt in darkness.

The Word becomes flesh in the darkness of a teenage girl’s womb.

And resurrection?

Resurrection happens in darkness too.

No one witnessed the precise moment Jesus rose.

By the time the women arrived at the tomb, resurrection had already happened.

The stone was rolled away in the night of the morning, as Sadie would say.

Because darkness is not always the same.

There is the darkness that announces the end of a thing. And there is the darkness that announces a beginning.

The challenge is that when we are standing in the middle of it, we often cannot tell the difference.

We simply know it is dark.

Perhaps that is where many of us find ourselves today.

Staring into uncertainty.

Watching truth unravel.

Feeling the ground shift beneath our feet.

Wondering whether what we are witnessing is decline or emergence.

Death or birth.

Tomb or womb.

Night or morning.

The astronomer at Mount Princeton taught us that darkness does not diminish the universe. Darkness reveals dimensions of reality that daylight conceals.

Maybe the same is true in our lives.

Maybe the same is true in this moment.

Maybe what feels like obscurity is actually revelation.

Maybe what feels like absence is preparation.

Maybe what feels like ending is germination.

Perhaps the question before us is not whether darkness has arrived.

It has.

The question is whether this is the darkness of night or the darkness of morning.

Whether what surrounds us is the closing of a chapter or the labor pains of something struggling to be born.

Whether we can remain attentive long enough to see what becomes visible in the dark.

Whether we can trust that God is still at work beneath the surface.

Whether we can resist the temptation to declare dead what may still be gestating.

Whether we can learn to look up and wait for our eyes to adjust.

Because sometimes the stars only appear when the darkness deepens.

Sometimes seeds only break open underground.

Sometimes resurrection happens before dawn.

And sometimes the darkness we fear most is not the darkness of the tomb.

It is the darkness of the womb, the place where God is preparing something new to be born.

“We can never overcome fear without a dream that is bigger than the fear. You need to reposition yourself in a story that is bigger than the fear so you can navigate your way through it.”
— René August, Black South African Anglican priest and anti-apartheid freedom fighter

This morning I listened to my friend René speak those words on The Five Hardest Questions, hosted by Dr. Gregory Ellison III.

There is a difference between seeing and being clear-eyed.

Most of us know what it is to look directly at something and still not perceive what is actually there. Grief can do that. Fear can do that. Rage can do that. Exhaustion can do that. Betrayal can do that. Sometimes pain becomes so loud that it drowns out possibility.

Hagar knew something about that.

For those less familiar with the story, Genesis 21 introduces us to Hagar, an Egyptian woman grafted into Abraham’s household as property in a patriarchal system that constrained the agency of both Hagar and Sarah in different ways. In the desperation born of Sarah’s infertility and Abraham and Sarah’s uncertainty about God’s promise, Hagar is drawn into a painful arrangement that was never truly hers to choose. She gives birth to Ishmael, and tension in the household grows for years afterward.

Eventually, Sarah tells Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham gives them bread and a skin of water and sends them into the wilderness.

Then the text says:

“When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, for she said, ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child.”

Imagine the weight of that grief.

Imagine carrying not only the terror of the present moment, but also the ache of everything that had been taken from her: home, security, dignity, belonging, and perhaps the future she imagined for her son.

Pain narrowed her vision.

Then the text says:

“And God heard the voice of the boy… Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.”

Notice what Scripture does not say.

It does not say God created a well.
It does not say God dropped water from heaven.
It says God opened her eyes.

The well was already there.

Provision had already been there.
Possibility had already been there.
The future had already been there.

What was absent was not the promise.
What was absent was her ability to see it.

Hagar became clear-eyed.

Clear-eyed enough to see beyond the terror of the moment.
Clear-eyed enough to recognize that despair had not told the whole story.
Clear-eyed enough to discover that what she needed to survive had been near her all along.

I keep returning to that story because we are living through our own wilderness season.

This political moment is loud with fear. Rights are contested. Histories are revised. Institutions strain under pressure. Communities feel threatened. Every day arrives carrying another crisis, another outrage, another headline demanding our emotional attention.

And exhaustion narrows vision.

Fear narrows vision.

Constant crisis narrows vision.

When vision narrows, we begin to believe there are only two choices: panic or surrender.

But are we seeing the whole story?

Because even in this season, there are wells.

There is resistance happening that rarely becomes the headline.

Across the country, legislatures continue introducing and passing laws that restrict voting access. Yet many states have also expanded access through measures such as early voting, easier registration, restored voting rights, and broader vote-by-mail opportunities. The story is not simply restriction; it is also resistance.

There are communities refusing to disappear quietly.
There are organizers still building.
There are people still registering voters.
There are legal challenges still moving through the courts.
There are coalitions still forming.

And there are moments that remind us history does not always move in predictable directions.

Political establishments continue discovering that certainty can be an illusion. Incumbents and presumed favorites have lost races many assumed they would win. Unexpected candidates continue reshaping the political landscape in ways conventional wisdom failed to anticipate.

There is also backlash against attempts to rewrite public memory.

Efforts to recast January 6 participants primarily as victims deserving taxpayer-funded compensation have generated strong opposition from lawmakers, Capitol police officers, and citizens who view such proposals as attempts to distort the historical record itself. Legal and political resistance to those efforts continues to emerge.

The wells are there.

And for Black communities in particular, this question of being clear-eyed carries another layer.

Because Hagar’s grief was not only about thirst.

It was also about inheritance.
About being put out.
About watching doors close around her child.
About wondering whether what had been promised had now been lost.

That language should sound familiar.

For generations, Black people in America have had to fight not merely for rights, but for access to what was already ours by birthright as citizens and human beings.

The ballot was never simply a mechanism.
It was inheritance.

It was purchased by blood on bridges and in jail cells. Purchased by people losing jobs, homes, safety, and sometimes their lives.

The franchise became one of the clearest manifestations of freedom itself: the ability not merely to survive the future, but to help shape it.

That is why the weakening of the Voting Rights Act feels like more than legal procedure to many communities.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not simply outlaw discrimination in theory. It created federal protections strong enough to prevent many discriminatory voting changes before they could take effect.

In the years since, key provisions of the Act have been narrowed through court decisions, especially beginning with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Critics argue those rulings shifted the burden from preventing discrimination beforehand to challenging it after harm has already occurred.

For many Black Americans, that feels painfully familiar.

Because the history of this country has often followed a cycle: progress, backlash, adaptation, and new barriers wearing different clothes.

Clear-eyed people tell the truth about that.

But clear-eyed people also refuse another temptation: believing the inheritance has already been lost.

Because if we see only dismantling, we miss the wells.

We miss states creating new protections.
We miss organizers building new pathways.
We miss communities increasing turnout despite barriers.
We miss young voters entering the process.
We miss unexpected victories emerging where conventional wisdom said none were possible.
We miss the ways struggle itself continues creating new possibilities.

Hagar looked at Ishmael and saw only loss.

God opened her eyes, and she saw future.

Maybe that is part of being clear-eyed in this political season.

To say plainly: yes, there are real attempts to narrow pathways to power.

Yes, there are efforts to diminish hard-won access and representation.

But inheritance is not only what someone tries to take from you.

Inheritance is also what remains yours to claim.

The wilderness has a way of making us stare at empty water skins while missing the well beside us.

Being clear-eyed does not mean pretending everything is fine.

Hagar was still in the wilderness.
The wilderness did not disappear.

Being clear-eyed is not denial.
It is not naïveté.
It is not refusing to tell the truth.

Being clear-eyed means refusing to let fear tell all of the truth.

It means looking directly at danger without surrendering to despair.
It means acknowledging what is broken while also recognizing what is being built.
It means understanding that the story is still being written.

And perhaps that is the question for this political season:

Not: Who are we angry with?
Not: Who are we afraid of?
Not even: Who will win?

But rather: Are we clear-eyed?

Can we see beyond the crisis of this moment?
Can we recognize the resources already among us?
Can we see the people still showing up?
Can we see the work already underway?
Can we see the possibility standing in front of us?
Can we see the wells?

Because Hagar teaches us something essential:

The promise of God does not disappear because we cannot presently see it.

Sometimes what we need most is not a new miracle.

Sometimes we need opened eyes.

God, make us clear-eyed.

Not blind to danger.
Not numb to suffering.
Not naïve about power.

Clear-eyed enough to see the wells already waiting in the wilderness.

Story.

Story is how we tell ourselves who we are. Story is how nations decide what is noble and what is shameful. Story is how children learn who belonged, who mattered, and who gets remembered. Story is how communities survive.

Story can also be weaponized.

Repeat a lie enough times, build enough monuments around it, wrap it in patriotic language, teach it in classrooms, remove competing accounts, and punish those who challenge it, and eventually people stop calling it a lie.

It becomes the story.

History rarely disappears in one dramatic act. It does not usually vanish with flames consuming books or soldiers carrying away records in the middle of the night.

More often, it disappears quietly.

A database becomes unavailable.

A press release disappears.

Language changes.

A record moves from the front shelf to the back room.

An event once described one way is reframed another way.

The story itself does not vanish overnight. It simply becomes harder to find, harder to access, harder to hold.

And eventually people begin saying, I don’t remember it that way.

There is evidence that some federal content and databases related to January 6th have been removed, altered, or made less accessible. Certain prosecution databases disappeared. Some case materials and releases have reportedly been removed or reframed, while archives and independent institutions continue preserving records.

The point is not that history itself has vanished. The point is the lie becomes the story, and the story is what we share.

If the public narrative shifts from unlawful insurrection, in which many were injured and some lost their lives, to a peaceful protest of patriots seeking to protect an election, then presidential pardons and reparations for reprobates are reframed as justified acts of compassion… and the lie becomes the story we tell.

The deeper question is who gets to curate memory.

Who decides which stories stand in the spotlight and which are sent into the shadows?

Because memory has always been political.

We have seen this before.

The Confederacy lost the war.                    It did not lose the story.

Years after the blood dried and the graves settled, another narrative emerged: not one centered on slavery, human bondage, or rebellion against the Union, but a more palatable story: a mythology of noble men defending “heritage,” patriotic heroes defending “states’ rights.”

A lie carefully polished until bronze and stone rose from town squares across America.

Many of those monuments were not erected immediately after the Civil War. They appeared decades later, during Jim Crow and during the Civil Rights movement itself, not simply to remember the past, but to shape the present.

They stood as storytellers in marble and granite, reminding some people who held power and warning others where they were expected to stand.

Monuments are never just monuments.

They are lessons.

Now we find ourselves wrestling over books.

Some want us to believe book bans are about protecting children. But I have learned that when people become anxious about books, they are rarely afraid of paper and ink.

They are afraid of competing stories.

Because books have a dangerous habit of  sharing truths from perspectives power would rather ignore.

Books ask inconvenient questions.

Books remind us that the heroes we carved in stone were often deeply flawed flesh and blood.

Books reveal that some victories came with violence hidden beneath celebration.

Books make room for voices long silenced, and that becomes unsettling when authority depends upon a carefully curated myth.

There is always panic when fabricated heroes begin to fall.

One need look no farther than the persistent efforts to preserve symbols and narratives dedicated to those who lost the Civil War.

But the collapse of false stories is not destruction.

It is freedom.

And perhaps one of the hardest acts of freedom is not declaring ourselves righteous. Perhaps one of the hardest acts of freedom is telling the truth about ourselves.

This week, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical and did something rare in the life of institutions. He looked backward before looking forward. He spoke of the evil of slavery, but also of the Church’s own complicity in helping justify and normalize systems that enslaved human beings.

He called it “a wound in Christian memory.”

A wound in memory.

I have been sitting with those words.

Because memory itself can be manipulated. History can be curated. Stories can be polished until nations forget what they did and institutions forget who they were.

This is one reason why books are banned.

This is why monuments are preserved while truths are neglected.

This is why some want us to discuss freedom without discussing bondage, democracy without discussing exclusion, liberty without discussing who was locked outside the door.

Because memory is dangerous.

Truth is dangerous.

But we do not need a nation built on mythology. We need a nation strong enough to tell the truth about itself.

Scripture says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Freedom has never depended upon controlling the story.

Freedom depends upon being brave enough to hear the whole story.

The question before us is not whether stories will shape us.

They already do.

The question is whether we will become people courageous enough to preserve truth, even when it unsettles us, or whether we will become architects of comfortable lies.

Because every generation decides what it will remember.

And every generation decides what it is willing to forget.

But Memorial Day is heavier than that.

It is a summons.

It calls us to remember men and women who laid down their lives not for a ruler, not for a political party, not for an empire of personality, but for an unfinished promise: a nation struggling toward liberty and justice for all.

Memorial Day is a day for asking what kind of nation the dead believed they were defending, and whether the living are honoring that inheritance.

And memory matters because people who lose memory become vulnerable to repetition.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recently described, in her Letters from an American substack, widening fractures within our current administration. There are growing concerns over extraordinary funding mechanisms, questions of accountability, the stretching of executive power, and unrest even among political allies.

Whether every proposal survives, whether the courts continue to act with prejudice, whether or not the Supreme Court continues to contradict its own prior rulings, the level of targeted malfeasance being executed by our current leadership is incompatible with the democracy we espouse.

My assertion of “our” in relationship to this current administration is not because of any shared values or views, but simply because I do not want the salacious headlines to obscure understanding of the power of ordinary organized people to stop this madness.

Whether one agrees with every interpretation, the deeper question beneath the headlines is older than any president:

What happens when power begins to imagine itself beyond accountability?

This question is not new.

Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller learned it painfully. Early in the rise of Hitler, Niemöller supported Hitler’s movement and German nationalism. He believed nationalism could restore something Germany had lost, until he discovered that hatred never stays contained.

Until he discovered that power without limits eventually turns on everyone, including those who once applauded.

Niemöller’s support turned to horror when he realized the machinery he tolerated for others would eventually consume everything in its path, including him. And from that awakening came a post-war confessional that continues to haunt history:

"First they came…"

Not because he saw evil from the beginning, but because he saw it too late.

Because greed never stops where greed begins.

Malice never remains satisfied with one enemy.

Hatred never says, “This is enough.”

It consumes outward until eventually it consumes itself.

Scripture has warned us about this for generations.

There is a spirit that always wants more territory.

More loyalty.

More exceptions.

More silence.

More obedience.

Now critics raise broader concerns: questions about special treatment under tax enforcement, unauthorized military actions and executive authority, aggressive rhetoric toward places like Greenland and Cuba, rising ire over U.S. weaponization of genocide in Gaza, the inability to contain a war that we never should have started, and ongoing distractions surrounding Epstein-related matters.

Some of these are documented actions; others remain accusations, investigations, or unresolved public disputes. But together they create a larger concern in the minds of many Americans regarding whether institutions can withstand a leader who wants more than institutions were designed to give.

And yet millions still support him.

Why?

Some support him because they want to live in the world Mr. Trump espouses.

Some support policy outcomes: immigration restrictions, judicial appointments, taxes, or economic arguments.

Some support him because they believe he fights people and institutions they distrust.

Some support him because politics increasingly function like tribal identity, and to abandon a political figure can feel like abandoning one’s community.

Some support him because fear is powerful. And some support him because strongmen have always offered a seductive promise: “I alone can fix it.”

But Christians should be cautious whenever political power begins borrowing messianic language.

The comparison some faith leaders make between Trump and Jesus misses something essential.

Jesus emptied himself of power. Herod clung to it.

Jesus washed feet. Herod protected thrones.

Jesus absorbed violence. Herod unleashed it.

Jesus spoke of the least among us.                         Herod feared losing what belonged to him.

Power desperate to preserve itself at all costs does not resemble Christ. It resembles Herod.

This distinction matters.

Despite vain attempts to drape Jesus around political power, Christ, the anointed one, does not belong to rulers.

Jesus stands with the vulnerable.

Jesus stands with the persecuted.

Jesus stands with the truth.

Memorial Day reminds us of something power hopes we forget: nothing decreed by human hands is beyond human change.

No administration is eternal.

No executive order is sacred.

No political dynasty is permanent.

No throne built by fear stands forever.

Empires have fallen.

Kings have fallen.

Movements have fallen.

And every generation eventually discovers that democracy survives only when ordinary organizing people decide it is worth defending.

The dead are asking something of the living.

Not panic.

Not despair.

Not worship of politicians.

Courage.

Moral courage.

The courage to tell the truth.

The courage to protect one another.

The courage to reject hatred before hatred decides it needs a new target.

Martin Niemöller woke up before history finished swallowing him.

May we wake up while there is still time to choose who we will be.

This Memorial Day, remember the fallen.

Then remember why they fell.

And stand.