It never occurred to me as a child, when we sang “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” that that might be used to describe the U.S. military.

It never occurred to me when I was being taught dispensationalism as a child and teenager that that interpretation of Revelation would ever be official U.S. military doctrine. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins didn’t seem to envision that possibility either in their Left Behind saga.

If recent reports are true, some in the U.S. military are being told they are essentially the army of the Lord and will usher in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

However true these reports may be, whether the reported comments are official doctrine or not, just the idea such an interpretation might be communicated by ranking military personnel to their subordinates raises concerns worthy of consideration.

What’s being reported

According to reports circulated the last few days, U.S. military personnel have been told the U.S./Israeli military campaign against Iran is a “signal fire … to cause Armageddon and mark [Jesus Christ’s] return to Earth.”

It is unclear if the reported statements were made by a single commander or were made more broadly.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is no friend of President Trump, claims to have received these reports from service members. As of March 2, the MRFF reported more than 110 complaints.

“The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department,” according to Jonathan Larsen, who covers the MRFF.

At the time of this writing, other outlets are trying to corroborate these reports. Some have contacted the U.S. Department of Defense and are awaiting replies.

If the reports are accurate, they raise real-time concerns. If the reports are inaccurate or simply untrue, we should still consider the hypothetical concerns they raise for biblical interpretation, religious liberty, and the separation of church and state.

Biblical interpretation

Of the possible interpretations of the book of Revelation—and there is more than one possible interpretation—the dispensationalist reading informs what was reportedly said.

According to the MRFF’s and Larsen’s report of an email, an anonymous non-commissioned officer said his commander said not to be afraid about “combat operations in Iran,” that troops were to be told “this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan.’”

The commander then reportedly said, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

According to a dispensationalist reading of Revelation, Armageddon is a future battle tied to Jesus’ return. Other interpreters believe Armageddon—and most or all of Revelation—refers to past events, such as the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in A.D. 70.

Regardless how a person interprets Revelation, there is nothing in any of the apocalyptic passages in the Bible to support the presumption our president and our military are God’s instrument to inaugurate Jesus’ return.

We ought to be concerned by such a hubristic assertion. And if a U.S. military commander really did instruct other officers to disseminate that claim, we ought to be concerned about how our military is being motivated to go into battle.

Religious liberty

Likewise, if a particular dispensationalist reading of Revelation is used to justify military action, a different interpretation might be designated unapproved.

What happens when the military or government decides what constitutes an approved reading of Scripture? We already know if we know our history. When the government determines the approved interpretation of Scripture, some Christians will be punished for understanding Scripture differently.

We should be concerned if a single interpretation of Scripture is elevated to the level of or privileged as official doctrine. It’s a small step from there to designating other interpretations as invalid, unpatriotic, or worse.

Furthermore, patriotism is not a legitimate criterion for proper biblical interpretation. Inasmuch as patriotism is loyalty to an earthly system, Scripture shapes patriotism. Never the other way.

Separation of church and state

From the beginning of the Protestant Reformation through the American colonial period, Europe was rocked by repeated wars between Christians. Millions of people were killed. The Enlightenment was, in large part, an effort to end religious wars by limiting the power of religion to start them.

The United States was founded in large part on those Enlightenment principles, religious liberty and the avoidance of religious war being primary among them.

If a U.S. military commander told subordinates the campaign against Iran is to cause Armageddon in service of Jesus’ return, that would be to blatantly return the United States to the kind of religious war we have tried to avoid, with mixed success, for centuries.

Indeed, to claim the U.S president and military are actively fulfilling apocalyptic Scripture takes the current abandonment of separation of church and state to a new level. If U.S. military personnel really have been told they are fulfilling Revelation, then we’ve blown past “In God we trust.”

If the reports are true, the U.S. military is no longer simply referring to a generic “God.” Instead, it is identifying a named president as “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire … to cause Armageddon and mark [Jesus’] return to Earth” (emphasis added, because Jesus is much more specific than the “God” of America’s civil religion).

Testing our principles

It may turn out the reports aren’t true, or they’re inaccurate, or they’re overblown. Even if any of that proves to be true, it’s a worthy exercise to examine our principles against their distortions.

If our principles really are grounded in Scripture, we must be cleared-eyed about them and embody them rightly.

Obedience to Christ is at the core of our principles and calls for repentance and faithfulness to him, whatever the time may be.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. … Speak up and judge fairly” (Proverbs 31:8-9).

What does it take to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, to be a voice for the voiceless? What is required?

For Christians to be a voice for the voiceless requires knowing our God, our God’s character, and our God’s commands, and then embodying through faithful obedience what we know about God and God’s commands.

To be a voice for the voiceless requires knowing who doesn’t have a voice. To know that, we must have ears to hear who among us isn’t being heard.

To be a voice for the voiceless requires remembering when we didn’t have a voice ourselves and longed to be heard.

To be a voice for the voiceless requires those with a voice recognizing and appreciating the privilege they have to be heard and to affect the world around them through their voice.

To be a voice for the voiceless requires enough courage to speak on behalf of those whose voices have been suppressed, quieted, discounted, or ignored.

What God requires

For Christians to be a voice for the voiceless requires knowing our God, our God’s character, and our God’s commands, and then embodying through faithful obedience what we know about God and God’s commands.

I could spend the rest of this editorial quoting Bible verses telling us what God requires of us in relation to the poor, needy, powerless, vulnerable, and foreigner. But I won’t do that.

Instead, I will point out that we tend to respond to those verses in the same way the expert in the law questioned the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Who’s my neighbor?” he asked.

“Lord,” we respond, “we want to obey your word. So we can, please tell us, who are the poor, needy, powerless, vulnerable, and foreigner?”

I picture Jesus, with a look on his face that says, “Seriously?” asking, “Are you kidding me?”

Our problem isn’t we don’t know what the Bible says. We know God defends the vulnerable—the fatherless, the widow, the poor and needy, the oppressed, the foreigner. And we know God’s law commands us, again and again, to do the same.

Our problem isn’t knowledge. Our problem is we want to qualify what we know or what it means to “defend.” Our problem is obedience. Most of us don’t want to be a voice for the voiceless, even if we do want to obey God.

Obedience is worked out in the other requirements I listed above.

Listening for the voiceless

To be a voice for the voiceless requires knowing who doesn’t have a voice. To know that, we must have ears to hear who among us isn’t being heard. The prevailing winds of our culture may deafen us to the voiceless.

In a country like the United States, we may assume everyone has a voice, that everyone has the opportunity to make themselves known. Those who believe that have never been in rooms where decisions are made. I’ve been in some of those rooms, and I’ve seen people who, even though they’re in the room, never get a chance to speak.

I’ve been in neighborhoods so purposely cut off and hidden by city planners as to make them invisible. Most of the residents in many of them don’t have enough money or influence to make city, county, or state governments maintain their communities as well as those same governments secure the value of affluent business and residential districts.

Given our penchant for distraction, we’re just as likely to be ignorant about the voiceless as we are to be willfully deaf toward them.

As with our knowing versus doing of Scripture, our problem is less likely one of knowledge than it is one of will. We probably have a good idea who the voiceless are. We just don’t want to hear them.

“What you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” Jesus said (Matthew 25:31-46).

Remembering our own voice

To be a voice for the voiceless requires remembering what it was like for us to be voiceless and longing to be heard. It may have been our childhood, but there was a time.

If we have a voice, we must understand its effect and make responsible use of it.

Jesus was born to a poor family among a poor people oppressed by the Roman Empire. Even so, as a man with religious understanding, he understood the authority of his voice, and he used it.

He corrected those who thought he couldn’t be bothered with children. He spoke with and spoke up for women. He healed, forgave, and redeemed—regardless of ethnicity and nationality.

Can the same be said about our voice? Do we use our voice in service of others or in service of ourselves?

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others,” Paul wrote, under the Spirit’s inspiration (Philippians 2:3-4).

‘Be strong and courageous’

To be a voice for the voiceless requires enough courage to speak on behalf of those whose voices have been suppressed, quieted, discounted, or ignored.

Fear is a significant obstacle. None of us want to suffer for speaking up or speaking out. And suffering can take many forms.

Perhaps the greatest part of that obstacle is our fear of losing the upper hand if we speak up for the voiceless or if the voiceless are heard. Scripture speaks to this fear also. For example: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life on my account will find it,” Jesus said (Matthew 10:39).

Throughout history, the voiceless have been women, children, and the poor. In the United States, voicelessness has lived along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, as well as the line between the abled and disabled. Speaking up for these voiceless ones has always carried a cost, even if only ridicule and loss of respect.

Might we who have a voice have the courage to follow our Lord’s lead, who even though he was equal with God, emptied himself, became a servant, and humbled himself, being obedient to the point of death?

Might we have the courage to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, just as Jesus spoke up for us to the Father?

Will we do so now? Or will we be as though we are voiceless ourselves?

*******

If you are ready and willing to be a voice for the voiceless but are unsure what to do or where to start, the following organizations are just a few that can help.

• Local ministries: food bank, clothing closet, pregnancy center, women’s shelter, or homeless shelter.
• Christian Life Commission
• WMU of Texas
• 21Wilberforce
• Evangelical Immigration Table

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

Ash Wednesday has a word for us as we vote in the primary elections this year. It’s a word we’d rather ignore in favor of the partying and feasting of Fat Tuesday. We ignore Ash Wednesday’s word to our detriment. Instead, we should heed its message and put it into practice.

What is Ash Wednesday?

We may not know much more about Ash Wednesday than the black “smudge” we see on people’s foreheads one day in late winter. We may assume Ash Wednesday is “a Catholic thing,” and if we’re not Catholic, think it has nothing to do with us. But that would be a mistake.

It is true Ash Wednesday has its roots in the Roman Catholic Church, being instituted as the beginning of Lent by Pope Gregory in A.D. 601. It’s also true Ash Wednesday is a more common observance in liturgical churches. However, some nonliturgical churches have also taken up the practice because of what it signifies.

Ash Wednesday is a reminder of our humanity, our finitude, our creatureliness. On this day, ashes are applied to a person’s forehead in the sign of a cross. The ashes are made from what’s left after burning the palm branches waved in celebration of Jesus the year before.

The one applying the ashes traditionally says some variation of, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).

The applying of ashes on the forehead is not merely a religious ritual. It is based on the Old Testament practice of sitting or covering oneself in ashes as a sign or expression of contrition, repentance, or mourning. No wonder we prefer to ignore it.

But we shouldn’t ignore it. The purpose of the ashes and the accompanying prayer, fasting, and meditation is to be honest about ourselves. It is intended to focus our minds on who we are in relation to God. God is our Creator. We are God’s creation. God is holy. We are prone to sin and are dependent on God’s grace. Ash Wednesday reminds us to be humble.

Elections don’t run on humility

This isn’t the first year elections have taken place in the early days of Lent. But this year, the dissonance of their juxtaposition caught my attention.

If you’re like me, your mailbox, inbox, text messages, and voicemail have been overflowing with political ads. If you’re receiving what I’m receiving, you’re not seeing or hearing much, if any, Ash Wednesday-type humility in any of it.

What we’re seeing and hearing is carefully researched messaging and marketing. Political campaigns study what is most likely to get us to vote for their candidates, and they message toward that end. Notice, humility doesn’t factor into their message. No one is selling us a humble candidate. And they won’t until we vote for humble candidates.

Instead, we vote for the boastful. So, each candidate or their campaign is trying to out-Republican or out-Democrat their same-party opponents. They tout their credentials as truer to the cause than the rest. Plenty of them brag and mudsling. Some of them call themselves Christian. From among them, we will reward our chosen candidates with our vote.

When was the last time a candidate was advised to “go out there and be humble?” When was the last time a contrite candidate, a humble candidate won an election? I’m not saying it has never happened, but it’s certainly not common. It might be more so if we voted for it.

Ash Wednesday’s word for us

Our elections are an expression of our culture, and ours is not a humble culture, even among Christians. Ours is not an Ash Wednesday, a fasting-and-repentance culture. So, a candidate can trumpet how uber-Republican or uber-Democrat he or she is, call themselves a Christian, and no one notices the dissonance.

We can “amen” the preacher who proclaims, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6), then turn around and throw our support behind the proudest candidate. Without noticing the dissonance … or by justifying it.

If we were to stop long enough to observe Ash Wednesday, to contemplate our human finitude and our dependence on God’s grace, we might come face to face with the dissonance between what we proclaim and how we vote. No wonder we want to skip it.

I want to skip it. I don’t want to face my creatureliness, and I don’t like fasting and repentance, either. I really don’t like fasting. I’ll do it for a medical procedure, but only because I have to. There’s some dissonance right there, my willingness to fast for a doctor and my reluctance to fast for God. I’d call that a digression, but it’s precisely the point.

It’s like I wrote last week and is apropos again this week: “I wish I was perfect so I could write this editorial without any hint of hypocrisy.” But I’m not perfect, and I don’t have a high horse to sit on and opine. I, too, need to hear Ash Wednesday’s word and put it into practice.

Practicing Ash Wednesday

I don’t know much or anything about the private religious practices of the candidates on the current ballot. I only know what I see and hear of them in public.

I don’t see or hear much in the flood of political ads in my mailbox, inbox, text messages, or voicemail to indicate the candidates are given to fasting and repentance. Including from some who identify themselves as Christian.

What I see and hear are people appealing to who you and I are privately and publicly. What these people see is we’ve been taught to sell ourselves by any means necessary and that humility is weakness, not strength. They see this even among Christians. Ash Wednesday has something to say about that.

Ash Wednesday opens the season of Lent—40 days of repentant preparation culminating in Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Even Better Sunday. How ironic it would be for us to give our minds to Christ and our votes to the world.

You and I may not have ashes applied to our foreheads today. Nevertheless, we can be people of prayer, fasting, repentance, and humility—people shaped by Jesus who reflect Jesus to the world.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

“God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness …’ So, God created the human in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27).

In the beginning, God created humans—us—in God’s image.

We’ve been qualifying “human” ever since. As if God’s image is so small a thing it can’t be found in all of us.

To qualify who or what counts as “human” is to diminish God’s image, which ultimately is to dishonor God.

If we call ourselves “Christian,” we must strive to honor God. Part of honoring God is honoring God’s image. The greatest commandment and its close second tell us how to do that: Love God with our whole being, and love one another as we love ourselves.

As I explained in my previous editorial, this love is agape. It is sacrificial love. It is not easy love, which I would qualify with quotation marks as “love.” Easy “love” is usually not love at all.

Agape is how God loved and loves us before we love anything else. It is not a love that comes naturally to us. Qualifying, and thereby diminishing, God’s image is as natural to us as breathing.

How we diminish God’s image

We diminish God’s image when we assign worth based on wealth, place of birth, heritage, intelligence, race, nationality, religion, gender, education, attractiveness, health, athleticism, or any number of other qualifiers. God’s image in us precedes and supersedes any and all of them.

If a person looks like this, sounds like that, lives there, wears this, believes that, votes the other way, we have a propensity to deem that person less-than-human, or at least worth less than us.

We may not say it in those words. Instead, we may say it in code, with euphemisms. Or we may not speak it at all. Instead, we may display it with our facial expressions, our body language, our behaviors. Or we may encode it in policy.

Many of us do not intend to minimize God’s image in the people around us. We may be unaware of what we are communicating. Those who care about people and do not want to harm them want to know when they have done wrong so they can do and be better.

Others of us do intend to diminish other people. Those who care most about themselves knowingly dehumanize and hurt others as a means of feeling superior, gaining or retaining power, or out of sheer hatred or disgust. They know exactly what they are doing and have no intention of apologizing for it.

Any who call themselves “Christian” must not be among the latter group. Any who identify themselves with Christ must be among those who receive correction and seek to set right the wrong.

I wish I was perfect so I could write this editorial without any hint of hypocrisy. The truth is, I’ve been a Christian and have worked on this very issue in myself for decades, and I still have so far to go.

How not to diminish God’s image

Over many years and through many lessons—some hard and embarrassing, some gracious and joyful—I’ve come to see every person bears God’s image. I see God’s image in every shade of skin. I hear God’s image in the many languages spoken, written, sung, and signed.

When I pay attention to the person in front of me, when I really see the person, I often encounter God’s image in the histories, heritage, and culture of people from around the world.

I’ve learned to question and reject stereotypes and caricatures of people unlike me. And I’m still learning.

One thing I know for sure: There is more joy in finding, seeing, and celebrating God’s image in each other than in disparaging one another.

We honor God and God’s image when we value each person as God values them. Racist memes, caricatures, and so-called jokes don’t honor God or God’s image. Ethnic slurs and profiling don’t either. Christians are not above reproach here.

We can acknowledge none of us alone displays the whole of God’s image, and what portion of God’s image each of us conveys is marred by sin.

The color of our skin is not sin. The sound of our language is not sin. Our gender is not sin. Sin is when we violate God’s law. Sin is when we disobey what Scripture clearly commands.

We are constantly presented with the opportunity to see God’s image in the people around us. Too often, however, we allow God’s image to be obscured by our differences, disagreements, and disputes.

We’re not likely to be free of our differences, disagreements, or disputes any time soon. Even with them, we are free to set them aside to look for God’s image in each person and to honor it as the sacred thing it is.

Some suggestions

To honor God and God’s image in each other requires us to regard one another with agape, the love God demonstrates toward us.

To practice that love, to practice seeing and beholding God’s image in others, I’ve found the following helpful:

♦ Go to a restaurant featuring food from another culture or country and ask for a traditional dish made in the traditional way. And eat it. You can go a step further by asking about the significance of the dish. Often, it is a comfort food or a celebratory food. Comfort and celebration are gifts from God. What a gift to find new comfort and celebration.

♦  Attend worship at a church of another culture, language, ethnicity, or nationality. Don’t worry about understanding or liking everything. Watch and listen for how God is worshipped in that place.

♦ Read books and watch movies by people different from yourself. For this exercise, don’t be concerned with verifying the truth of every statement. Instead, look for what is important to those people and why. Jesus did this when he interacted with people.

♦  During Black History Month (February), determine to learn something new about the contributions of Black men and women. Focus on one person, one topic, or one period of history, and give your attention to it. You can do the same during Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15) and Native American Heritage Month (November).

In the beginning, God created humans—us—in God’s image.

We’ve been qualifying “human” ever since, as if God’s image is so small a thing it can’t be found in all of us. God is not so small.

When we start to see God’s image carried in each person we meet, we won’t be able to diminish it. We will only be able to magnify the God whose image we see everywhere.

*******

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

Fellow Christians are afraid to go to church. The Christians I’m referring to aren’t in Nigeria, India, Iran, Burma/Myanmar, China, parts of southern Mexico, or any number of other places around the world. They’re here in the United States.

And they’re not only in Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Chicago, or other places where federal immigration enforcement is in the news. They’re here in Texas. They’re among our fellow Texas Baptists.

Our fellow Texas Baptists are afraid to go to church. Do we care? The Scripture we call authoritative and the “supreme standard” for all human activity commands us to care, and to do so in the same way Scripture’s God cares for us.

Love—agape love—is a synonym for the kind of care I’m talking about. This love is much more than a feeling. This love acts, sacrificially. This love casts out fear.

Our family is afraid to go to church, Texas Baptists. In agape love, we need to stand by them and stand up for them. To do that, we need to face the fear—theirs and ours.

What’s happening in Texas

Jesse Rincones—executive director of Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas, a Lubbock-area pastor, and a member of the Baptist Standard board—reported the following to me:

“A church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has had three families deported.”

The pastor of a Texas Hill Country church “took a family to their legal check-in, and the family was deported. That was the second time it happened to a family in his congregation.”

Pastors tell Rincones church attendance is affected, because people “won’t leave their homes. … Even with legal status they are afraid.”

Christians from all over the world have come to Texas, the vast majority of them legally. They are well represented among Texas Baptists. From conversations with some of their ministry leaders, I have heard concerns about such things as:

• knowing the difference between local police officers and ICE agents and how to appropriately interact with them,
• being unsure what official documents need to be carried and what good it will do to carry them, and
• whether their children, homes, and money will be taken from them.

What’s happening in one church

In an opinion article we published Feb. 4, Pastor Pablo Juárez reported attendance at his church is also affected.

In the last year, “fear of detention has led … families [to] avoid public spaces. Several members have been detained during routine traffic stops when local law enforcement contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement instead of following due process.”

“Some [congregants] were deported within days,” Juárez wrote, “while others remain detained for months despite expressing a willingness to return voluntarily to their home countries. Detained individuals have reported administrative failures, missed flights, and prolonged uncertainty.”

“In some cases, older adult congregants with medical needs remain confined without clear timelines for release or deportation. The emotional, spiritual, and financial toll on families has been significant,” Juárez continued.

It bears repeating: Love casts out fear. In agape love, we need to stand by them and stand up for them.

Acknowledge the fear

Whatever an immigrant’s status—citizen, or legal or illegal noncitizen—fear is a common denominator for many at present.

Regarding those in the United States illegally: People enter the United States illegally for various reasons. Many times, it’s to escape greater fear in the places they left. Far too often, some are brought here on false pretenses or against their will. Some aren’t here illegally by choice.

Whether these individuals should continue to be afraid while in the United States is a discussion broader than this editorial. So, I will focus on those immigrants in the United States legally.

Legal U.S. residents—citizens by birth or naturalization, or legal visa holders, refugees, asylees, or others with legal status—who have not committed any crime should have no reason to fear federal immigration enforcement. Yet, many of them do right now. And many of them are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Their fear is not unwarranted. What is reported above is just a summary of why many legal U.S. residents are afraid—because of their direct experience with federal immigration enforcement during the last year.

I’ll state it again: Love casts out fear. In agape love, we need to stand by them and stand up for them. As Christians, we are obligated to do no less.

Address the fear

Texas Baptists, before we are Texas Baptists, we are Christians. Christian is not a label, a social identity, or a political affiliation. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus, to lay down our lives for others as Jesus laid down his life for us. To be a Christian is to be obligated to Jesus and to live in obedience to him.

In obedience to Jesus, we strive to live righteously before all people. Part of living righteously is acknowledging the law and the consequences of breaking the law. Yes, there is legal and illegal immigration, and immigrating illegally carries consequences. How those consequences should be carried out should square with God’s justice.

In obedience to Jesus, we seek justice for all people. Part of seeking justice is holding injustice to account through appropriate action. Appropriate action in our context includes pressing lawmakers to address injustices in immigration law and enforcement. Texas Baptists, we have the right resources among us for just such action.

Also in obedience to Jesus, we live righteously and seek justice when we see our brothers’ and sisters’ struggle as our own. Instead of discounting the reports, turning a blind eye, washing our hands of it, instead of demonizing “them,” we need to come alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ and share their burden—including their fear of going to church.

Our family is afraid to go to church, Texas Baptists. Love casts out fear. In agape love, we need to stand by them, stand up for them, and let love cast out fear.

*******

Data and resources

Data

Consider the following data points:

• Pew Research finds Christians make up about 47 percent of all international migrants globally as of 2020, and the United States is their most common destination.
• A report by Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders found “more than 10 million Christians are vulnerable to deportation accounting for roughly 80 percent of all of those at risk of deportation.” Put another way: “One out of every 12 Christians in the U.S.—including one out of 18 evangelical Christians” could be deported or have a family member deported.
• A report estimates “about 80 percent of all of those at risk of deportation are Christians.”
• Children are also affected. According to a report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “federal immigration officials have detained U.S. citizen children and treated children with reckless disregard for their safety and wellbeing.”

Resources

The following resources provide guidance on federal immigration law and enforcement, as well as how to appropriately interact with federal immigration officials. The links below contain information current as of this writing (Feb. 5, 2026).

Immigration enforcement in Texas is complex, varying by county. Texas Baptists’ Christian Life Commission has prepared a brief explaining the complexity and how to navigate it. The brief includes links to further resources.

In short, 287(g) is a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing the Department of Homeland Security to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement to conduct federal immigration enforcement activities.

The CLC is also maintaining a county-by-county chart of 287(g) agreements.

Other resources include:

• Texas Immigration Law Center provides a guide to Texas’ 287(g) agreements.
• Immigrant Legal Resource Center provides several resources, including a Know Your Rights FAQ.
• To locate a detainee, you can search on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

Whatever followers of Jesus may think about the most pressing issues of our day, we ought to be able to lament our current state of affairs.

I know that’s a vague statement, but I want to start where we ought to be able to agree. I’ll be more specific soon enough.

I do believe our current state of affairs is lamentable. That may be where some of us start to disagree, at least in so far as which specific state or states I find lamentable. You and I may not find the same thing(s) lamentable. So, let me go back to where I think we can agree.

The world is broken. Christians agree on that. A broken world is lamentable. Again, we can agree. Brokenness is a result of sin. Sin and its resulting brokenness hurt and harm all of creation. It complicates life in compounding ways. It even kills—body, mind, and spirit. I believe we’re still in agreement.

Brokenness requires a response. Jesus responded by giving himself for us. Jesus broke sin’s power and set restoration in motion, so brokenness will be no more. I lament that it took that, and I rejoice that he did it.

…

Sorry, I had to stop for a moment to be still with what I just wrote, to hold lament in one hand and rejoicing in the other. To sit in awe of Jesus.

…

We want to skip lament, or better yet, ignore it. We want to go straight to rejoicing. But we must not skip lament. You see, our lament is our agreement with God that this world is not as God created it to be. Our lament witnesses to our hope in the reality of wholeness. No, we must not skip lament.

Lament is a proper response to brokenness, but only a first response. There is more we as Christians are to do in response.

A specific example

Yes, brokenness requires a response. We, not just Jesus, must respond to brokenness, and we who follow Jesus must respond as he commanded and in his character.

Too often, our responses either come out of brokenness or generate more brokenness. We’ve seen and experienced this to be true. I lament our contribution(s) to brokenness by how we respond to brokenness.

I will give a specific example. Here is where we are likely to disagree, perhaps mightily, on some, many, or all points.

U.S. immigration policy is broken. Why and how is it broken? Since decades of debate, opinion, and ink have been poured out in failed attempts to answer those two questions, I’m not going to try here. I’ll just say the system is broken.

U.S. immigration enforcement is broken. It has been and is spotty, overwhelmed, and confused all at the same time. This is a natural outgrowth of broken policy. Sadly, U.S. immigration enforcement is broken to the point of violence. This is lamentable, and I don’t say that flippantly.

Lament, don’t condemn

We have good reason, too many reasons, to lament. Here is one.

I see yet another video of federal immigration officers shooting and killing a U.S. citizen, and I lament. Why? Because it didn’t have to come to that. We can argue about how exactly it came to that, but none of our arguments, none of our facts, none of our being right (or wrong) makes it OK that a human being was shot to death.

God didn’t create people to be shot to death. Every time, it’s to be lamented. Every time.

Millions, and maybe billions, of people saw the same video, and if our social media feeds are any indication, most skipped lament and jumped straight to condemnation. We are primed for condemnation. This is lamentable.

Whether out of lament or condemnation—often both—countless people have called for U.S. immigration enforcement to be brought to heel. Since the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers, the call has grown to include a host of Republican officials voicing their criticisms, however qualified.

Right here, we can break into that mighty disagreement with each other. We can call each other names, impugn each other’s motives, question each other’s understanding of Scripture, and even doubt each other’s salvation. We’ve seen and experienced all of this, this perfect example of brokenness, this lamentable condition between fellow Christians.

But we must not give in to brokenness, to the sin that so easily entangles us. Instead, we must see past the surface and all its details. We must see into where things are broken, including in us, and we must grieve that so much in us and in our world is not as God intended. We must lament the pervasiveness of sin and sin’s effects.

And we must not stop there.

And then …

For lament to be legitimate, for its hope to be realized, we must move to redemption, restoration, reconciliation. Christians are duty-bound to do so.

I’m certain many will want me to spell out how followers of Jesus are to move into redeeming, restoring, reconciling. I won’t. The list is too long. The details are too many. And we will be tempted to argue over whatever is said or not said.

I can hear some asking, “What does redemption, restoration, reconciliation look like?”

In the short term, it looks like a lot of work from a lot of people for a long time. It looks like missteps and great leaps, failures and successes, going backward and forward, giving and receiving. It looks like wondering if things can or will get better and being glad when it does get better.

In the long term, it looks like so many ways of wholeness. Vague? Yes. But no less true.

The most concrete suggestion I can make, the best place I know to start on redeeming, restoring, reconciling is to submit ourselves to Jesus, to his teaching, and to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. They will lead us to what to do and where.

They will also show us, when Jesus took in the state of the world, he lamented.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

Are you prepared for protesters to come to your church? Am I? I don’t want it to happen, but “want” is a different question.

There are different ways to be prepared and one that matters most. Amid the tension of our time and the prevalence of protest, we would do well to prepare in various ways for protesters to come to church. And we should do it before they arrive.

But whatever we do, we should prepare to communicate the gospel through both our words and actions. The gospel is the good news we are all looking for. It’s the good news we need.

Opinions about Sunday

Anti-ICE protesters interrupted a Sunday morning worship service in Minneapolis, Minn., Jan. 18. I doubt this is news to you. Social and traditional media have been flooded with the story, its repercussions, and people’s opinions.

You’ve probably already formed your opinion about the situation and those involved. You may have formed your opinion weeks before Jan. 18. Whether you support ICE or the protesters, or some mixture of the two, I’m not likely to change your opinion here, nor will I try.

I also am not making any judgement about Cities Church, the worshippers, the protesters, or the protest itself. Nor am I seeking to excuse or justify any of them, nor assess the truth of anything they said.

Rather, my aim is to challenge us to keep one thing primary—communicating the gospel through our words andactions should we find or put ourselves amid protest.

The gospel above opinions

Before going further, I know I am expected to say something about the rightness or wrongness of what happened inside Cities Church Sunday morning. Those who know me know I don’t have a simple one-or-the-other response to this.

To get into the weeds of who or what was right or wrong is to be distracted from the most important thing Christians need to focus on in a situation like this.

The most important thing Christians need to do amid protest is communicate the good news about Jesus through our words and actions.

From a purely legal standpoint, three great freedoms collided inside the sanctuary of Cities Church on Jan. 18. The First Amendment guarantees (1) the free exercise of religion, (2) the freedom of speech, and (3) the freedom to peaceably assemble. From a legal standpoint, this is a fascinating case, and the law is already responding.

But Sunday’s incident wasn’t a purely legal event. It was a moral and religious event with moral and religious implications. Again, I won’t get into the weeds of those implications. My focus here is on our need to be ready to communicate the gospel through our words and actions in whatever situation arises.

Prepare by practicing the gospel

As wonderful as the gospel is, it is an uncomfortable thing. The gospel is both the comfort of salvation in Jesus Christ and the discomfort of turning the other cheek. It is both the comfort of grace and the discomfort of denying ourselves. These are just two among many uncomfortable truths of the gospel.

The uncomfortable parts of the gospel don’t come easy to us. They require practice. Yes, the Holy Spirit lives in us and empowers us to speak and live out the gospel. And we still have to train the vocabulary and behavior of the gospel into ourselves.

What comes easy is clenching our jaw, pointing our finger, judging each other. It’s easier to belittle and berate one another, to question the other person’s commitment to the gospel. We don’t have to practice that. We do have to practice Christlikeness.

To prepare for protest, we must engage in the Christian life. The Christian life isn’t just gathering to sing hymns and spiritual songs, read Scripture, and hear a sermon. It is also engaging in active spiritual formation—discipleship—together, helping each other become more and more Christlike.

To learn the gospel, we need to study the Gospels. We need to study Jesus’ teachings and commands, meditate on them, and practice them. We need to study and practice how he interacted with all the different people he encountered. Some were protesters. Some were protested. Jesus offered good news to them all. He still does. It’s our duty to communicate it.

Practical considerations

The gospel’s primacy does not mean there’s nothing else churches need to do. There are practical ways churches should prepare themselves for protest. These ways should be consistent with the gospel.

Churches need to figure out how they will respond to protests on, around, or inside their facilities before those protests ever happen.

Protests can easily escalate. What begins as a peaceful, though disruptive, protest can take a violent turn quickly and without warning. For this reason and others, churches need a safety and security plan, and they need to develop it and practice it before it’s needed.

Some things have changed since 2018 when we published guidance for church safety and security teams. One thing hasn’t. Churches need to make sure their safety and security measures are on the right side of the law before those measures are implemented.

Should a situation arise calling for the deployment of these measures, churches also need to be prepared to respond to questions about how their measures square with the church’s proclamation of the gospel. Don’t wait until something happens to try to figure that out.

Likewise, churches should assume something will happen at some point involving their ministry or facilities that will draw media attention. Churches need to prepare for that also before it happens.

All the while, churches need to engage their participants in actively becoming more and more like Christ.

For all situations, the most important thing churches need to do is be ready to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ through our words and our actions. To be ready, we need to practice now.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

The Baptist Standard has been around a long time. Long enough to know things don’t stay the same. Not even the Baptist Standard.

Here’s a look at the Baptist Standard in 2026. Some things are new. Some things are not going to change.

New reporters

Ken Camp retired Dec. 31, 2025, after decades in Texas Baptist communications and journalism, a couple of those with the Baptist Standard, where he was named managing editor in December 2003.

In the months preceding Ken’s retirement, Kendall Lyons joined our team as our newest reporter. He started July 1 in an unexpected baptism by fire, of sorts, as Ken, Calli Keener, and I left for Australia just a couple of days later to cover the Baptist World Alliance 2025 World Congress.

Kendall covered the horrific flooding in the Texas Hill Country while we were away. The earliest reports were coming in as we landed in Los Angeles on our way to Australia. Kendall also helped Ken and I cover the Baugh grant controversyat Baylor University that hit the news soon after we arrived in Australia.

Just before 2025 ended, Faith Pratt became our newest reporter. Her official start date was Jan. 5 of this year. Like Kendall but with a different metaphor, Faith’s first week was a jump into a fast-moving river.

Faith is a recent graduate of East Texas Baptist University and started appearing in Baptist Standard bylines last week.

We are grateful for Kendall and Faith and for how they will grow and develop in 2026. We think you will be, too.

New features

Around the State has been a weekly column in the Baptist Standard for years. It carries press releases from educational, human care, and other institutions related to the Baptist General Convention of Texas. It also has included minister and church anniversaries.

Last week, we began testing a short video version, or reel, of Around the State presented by Kendall, who has a background in broadcast TV news. Keep an eye out for these segments on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and give us your feedback.

You may have noticed I mentioned Around the State “has included minister and church anniversaries.” We now publish those anniversaries, along with other things churches are celebrating, in a new feature titled Celebrating Churches.

Celebrating Churches features BGCT-affiliated churches and highlights the good things God is doing in and through them, things like baptisms, evangelism and missions, events for children, youth, and adults, musical productions, new construction, debt retirement, and more.

BGCT-affiliated churches are invited to send items they would like included in Celebrating Churches to Kendall Lyons at kendall.lyons@baptiststandard.com.

Like with Around the State, we are also testing Celebrating Churches reels on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Heather Davis, our digital communications manager, is the presenter.

Since Celebrating Churches is a new feature, we also would like your feedback on it.

Our Equip column isn’t brand new, but it is new enough you may not have seen it. You will find resources for all aspects of church life in Equip. A favorite is how to be prepared for the media if, or when, the media shows up at your church.

Same foundation

The Baptist Standard started as a privately owned print newspaper in 1888, originally named The Baptist News. The name was changed to Baptist Standard in 1892. We remained a print newspaper until the early 2000s, when we began publishing the print content online also.

In 2012, finances dictated we discontinue the print newspaper, though we continued reporting and publishing news in the same traditional format online right up to today. Today, we no longer have any print publication. We are completely digital.

While our news may look or feel a little different in 2026, while we are delivering news through different platforms, the key things are unchanged.

We are still and will continue to be a gospel-centered, fact-based source of news by, for, and about Baptists. Most of our content will focus on Texas Baptists. The rest of our news, opinion, and resources, though by, for, and about other Christians, will be of significance to Texas Baptists.

Our core commitments are unchanged. We are committed to the redeeming and reconciling work of Jesus Christ, to historic Baptist principles, and to responsible journalism. We don’t fulfill our commitments perfectly, but they are our foundation, our guardrails, and our North Star. When we miss the mark on these core commitments, let me know.

New era

In some ways, it’s a new era for the Baptist Standard. But not in every way. And that’s important.

None of us know all of what 2026 holds in store, but we can know how we’re going to step into that unknown and who’s going to be with us before, during, and after it.

My hope is the Baptist Standard, rooted in our core commitments and filled with the hope of God’s good provision in our past and present, will be a faithful companion and maybe a guide in some of the unknown ahead. And I hope we will step into that adventure together.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

As editor of a Baptist news publication, I find myself processing the news more than the average person. The news over the last couple of weeks has been jarring to process, disorienting, even.

A question that came to my mind as I tried: “How are Christians supposed to carry the gospel in a world like this?”

Spoiler: The answer is in the question. When we know the gospel, we know the answer.

Let me explain.

Military actions

After reporting many times over several years on the insecurity of Christians in parts of Nigeria, we received news just before Christmas that remaining students kidnapped in Nigeria were reunited with their families. Good news, indeed, right before Christmas.

Then, on Christmas Day, the U.S. military struck Islamic militants in far northwest Nigeria. Despite U.S. threats in the preceding weeks about conducting such action, the timing was a surprise—if not shocking.

Many in the U.S. either paid little attention to the Christmas strike in Nigeria or quickly forgot about it. The U.S. military action in Venezuela during the early morning of Jan. 3, removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, almost ensures Nigeria is overshadowed.

These are serious events that deserve serious attention. In addition to the geopolitical concerns involved, each event directly affects our Christian brothers and sisters in Nigeria, Venezuela, and beyond, including among Texas Baptists.

Such news is challenging enough to process, but wait. There’s more.

AI ‘love’

Like most people, I need a break from such serious news. So, I decided to listen to a podcast while running errands. I landed on an episode of The Daily by the New York Times released Dec. 31 as a follow up to a previous episode.

The title: “She Fell in Love with ChatGPT: An Update.” It was available without a subscription at the time but may require a subscription now.

The story is about a woman who lived in Texas and then moved to Europe, without her husband, to pursue further education. She became lonely and created a ChatGPT bot named Leo to be her companion. And then she became attached to Leo. Very attached.

She told her husband about her ChatGPT “boyfriend.” Her husband wasn’t concerned. At some point, and I don’t remember the order, they divorced, she dumped Leo, and she ended up in a new relationship with another man, a real human man.

As bizarre and troubling as the story is to me, I was equally troubled by the hosts’ commentary on the present status of the woman’s relationships. The hosts said they were very happy for her, seemingly without irony and maybe without really meaning it.

I listened to this story while also still trying to process back-to-back U.S. military interventions in Nigeria and Venezuela.

How are Christians supposed to carry the gospel in a world like this?

The gospel in a world like this

For Christians to carry the gospel in a world like this, we must know what the gospel is. We also must know who we are. And we must be rooted in that knowing.

We must know what the gospel is: the good news available to all in and through the body, the blood, the teaching, the living, the rising from the dead, the eternal reigning of Jesus Christ. We must know this gospel, ratified in this world, is for this world.

We must stay in prayer, confessing and repenting of our own wrongdoing, and seeking God’s guidance. We must stay in Scripture, committing it to memory, getting it into our bones as a firm foundation, allowing it and God’s Spirit to clothe us in Christ’s character.

We must carve out space for this praying and meditating on Scripture. That space won’t be given to us.

A metaphor: I’ve had my feet pulled out from under me by a strong current on the beach while simultaneously having my head slammed into the sand by a crashing wave. At a minimum, that’s disorienting. This world can hit you like that.

In that kind of world—and we live in that kind of world—Christians must keep their wits about them. Often, that requires staying connected to other Christians whose feet aren’t being pulled out from under them, whose heads aren’t being pounded in the sand.

For Christians to carry the gospel in a world like this, we must find our co-laborers in Christ, and we must work together. We must listen for the Spirit sending us to do our part. And in Christ’s Spirit we must do our part, doing no more or less than what the Spirit sends us to do.

Carrying the gospel

This year is starting with disorienting news. It confronts us locally, nationally, and globally. The gospel, good news in all circumstances everywhere, reorients the disoriented.

To carry the gospel in a world like this, we must do more than pray and meditate. We must do more than gather with other Christians. The gospel is a claim on the whole of our lives. We must carry the gospel wherever we go as living witnesses of it.

Why? Because the gospel is for this world, not just to carry us in this world.

And also because the hard news just keeps coming before we can fully process the last reports.

Many in our country are still reeling from Jan. 6. Its fifth anniversary occurred this week. We need to carry the gospel there.

Yesterday, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good in her vehicle on a Minneapolis, Minn., street. The protests were immediate. The details are being debated. We need to carry the gospel there.

Also yesterday, news broke of Philip Yancey’s disclosure of an eight-year extramarital affair leading to his full retirement. The gospel is needed there, yes, even for one who carried the gospel for so many of us.

Lord, it’s a new year. We want to celebrate, and yet, the news takes us the other direction. Remind us that the gospel lives in us, that you live in us. May we ground ourselves in you amid the deep troubles of these days so to carry the gospel for this world in this world.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

We don’t really want a perfect Christmas. We think we do. We think we want everything just so—all the decorations, the music, the weather, the travel, the food, the presents, the time with family and friends. But we don’t. Not if we stop and think about it.

Decorating for Christmas this year made me stop and think about it.

Imperfect lighting

I thought we were doing good. I thought we were ahead of the game. We got all of our Christmas decorations out and up on Black Friday. All of it.

And then, half a string of lights is out in the front yard, which I only saw after dark. Then, a string of soft white lights on our pre-lit Christmas tree went brilliant white and then out.

These should be simple fixes, but I know it will become like giving a mouse a cookie, and I don’t have the time or energy for that. After all, I need the time it would take to remove the strings of lights and replace them with new ones to write this editorial about the problems I’m having with Christmas lights.

Do you see the problem? Of course, you do. We often see other people’s problems better than we see our own.

The problem isn’t the lights. I mean, they are a problem, but of such minor significance. Prioritization is the greater problem.

*******

I wrote the preceding paragraphs a couple of weeks ago, thinking I would get a head start on a Christmas editorial. Two weeks later, I can report: I tried fixing the outside lights … without success. I didn’t bother with the lights on the tree.

I thought the lights being out was a problem, though one from which I could make an editorial. Now, I see they’re not a problem at all. Not after they got me thinking more deeply about Christmas.

Imperfect Christmas

Allowing the lights in our front yard and on our Christmas tree to be less than perfect enabled me to consider the fact so little was perfect about Jesus’ birth. From our perspective, anyway.

I mean, Mary wasn’t married, but she was going to be. Yet, she was pregnant … with someone else’s baby. Joseph was going to do what only made sense to him—call off the wedding. But he was going to do it quietly. He wasn’t going to make a stink of it.

Late in pregnancy, Mary had to travel under less-than-ideal conditions—compulsion by a foreign power and days on a dusty road, all while ready to deliver at seemingly any moment.

Joseph and Mary got where they were going only to find no room available. Whatever the actual accommodations were, they weren’t what guests were supposed to be given.

Jesus was born there and put in a manger. Not exactly a Sealy, Beautyrest or Tempur-Pedic.

I could list the other less-than-perfect details of the story, but by now you probably get the point without me needing to. The first Christmas—Jesus’ birth and the circumstances surrounding it—was not perfect. And that’s part of Christmas’ significance.

The significance of Christmas is Jesus was born into a less-than-perfect world under less-than-perfect circumstances to save less-than-perfect people—including you and me. An airbrushed, Photoshopped Christmas won’t do for that. Why? Because a perfect world is make-believe. At least, for now.

We think we want a perfect Christmas, but we really don’t. The imperfect one we have is the one that connects with all the imperfect places in our lives, as is true of the rest of Jesus’ life.

Perfect Savior

Jesus’ birth wasn’t the only less-than-perfect part of his life. Herod tried to kill him when he was a toddler. His family had to flee to Egypt to avoid that. When they moved back, they settled in Nazareth of all places. Nothing good came from Nazareth, so they said. Sometime later, Joseph disappeared.

As an adult, the devil harassed Jesus in the wilderness. His mom outed him to a wedding party. He didn’t have anywhere to call home. People seemed to want him only for his miracles. His closest friends didn’t understand him. The authorities stayed after him.

And the end? The end was a full-on dumpster fire. What part of being betrayed, arrested, beaten, mocked, “tried” by a kangaroo court, beaten and mocked some more, stripped and crucified in front of God and everybody amounts to our idea of a perfect day?

The only thing perfect about any of it is Jesus did all of it perfectly—from beginning to end.

*******

I’d like all the lights to be shining in my front yard and on our Christmas tree. But these literally and figuratively are tiny problems.

Much more, I’d like all that is wrong in this world—and there are monstrous wrongs in this world—to be made right already. No amount of airbrushing and Photoshopping will make that happen, though. The sooner we let go of that lie, the better.

What will make that happen is the Savior born to us who will return to us to make all things perfect.

Let us not ignore or pretend away the imperfections. Instead, let us allow them to point our attention to Jesus. That is the Christmas we want. That is the Christmas we need.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

The news of recent days gives yet more evidence that too many in our world have given up the low bar of common decency in favor of sheer disregard for one another.

The irony is the horrible events of the last few days occurred during a season we associate with … increased acts of common decency.

These horrific acts began long before they happened. They each began as a thought, with disregard for the life of another. They serve as evidence of a world in need of the redemption to which Christmas points.

As we become further inured to indecency through regular violent actions—often spurred on or followed by violent rhetoric—we become less able to reach the higher bar signaled by Christmas.

Amid the indecency of our day, Christmas points us beyond acts of kindness to laying down the whole of our lives as Jesus did for us. May we be so bold.

Horrific news

The following events depict what can happen when we do not lay down our lives for others but, contrary to Christ, assert our superiority over others. The result is horrific.

The killing of two students and injuring of nine in a Brown University classroom Dec. 13 shows the depth of disregard for life. Despite Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s asserting “the unthinkable has happened,” such occurrences are all too thinkable, even in a place called Providence.

The slaughter of 15 people celebrating Hanukkah, Dec. 14, at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, shows the persistent disregard for particular lives—Jewish lives. Fifteen lights were extinguished during this Festival of Lights.

That same day, Dec. 14, we received news Rob and Michele Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. Rob and his father Carl being giants of American entertainment, this news hit many particularly hard. Harder still is that the Reiners’ son Nick has been charged with their murder.

As we were coming to grips with these three horrific events occurring in short order, a further indecency was launched into the news: Donald Trump’s Truth Social post blaming Rob Reiner for his own death. I won’t link to the despicable post or Trump’s shrugging it off the next day.

Decency—common or otherwise—seems in short supply these days. If we could reach even that bar, we would do well. Yet, Christmas points us further. Christmas points us to laying down the whole of our lives for those with whom we differ, disagree or worse.

As much as I’d prefer to write a warm, fuzzy Christmas editorial, I cannot turn away so easily from our troubled times and what Christmas points to amid them.

Where Christmas points

Christmas is our celebration of God the Son being born as a human baby in fulfilment of centuries of prophecy and longing. Jesus didn’t have to go through with it. Jesus didn’t have to be born into this world, much less at the time of his birth. Neither Rome nor Herod were known for their decency, and the Jewish people had their own challenges.

And yet.

Jesus looked at this world and may have said: “Those are some messed up people. I’m going to go live with them.”

Jesus didn’t just live with us; he committed to the bit. He started as an embryo, then grew inside his mother, was born, went through childhood and puberty, became an adult, and experienced ridicule, misunderstanding, brutality and death—not vicariously, but firsthand. He took our indecency. All of it.

While he was facing ridicule and misunderstanding, he told us to love those who revile us, to bless those who persecute us, to lay down our lives even for those who hate us. Jesus commanded us not to meet indecency with indecency, but to lay down our lives in the face of it.

Anyone who says we should do any different is a false witness.

Jesus’ choice to live among us, despite knowing how messed up we are—because he knows how messed up we are—is our call to surpass the low bar of common decency associated with Christmas, a bar too many of us find too hard to meet, and to lay down our lives even for those who disregard us to the point of brutalizing us, who just as soon would see us dead.

A bracing truth

How’s that for a “Merry Christmas?” But isn’t that the truth within the warm fuzzies of the season?

I’d rather write a feel-good editorial, but I can’t make us feel good about the times we’re in. So, instead, I’m calling us to protest the way of this world by following how Jesus lived and told us to live in it. And that is to lay down the whole of our lives like Jesus did so others may be redeemed.

We live in a troubled world during troubled times. If I was old enough, I might say it feels like 2,000 years ago. In a general sense. The details are different.

If I was old enough, I definitely would look like I carried the immense weight of two millennia of disappointment and disillusionment about the state of the world. Trouble, terror and turmoil are a recurring theme in our history books.

If I was a Christian all that time, I probably would be overcome by our collective and consistent inability as Christians to live up to what Jesus called us to do.

But one thing I could not and cannot deny: Jesus knew all about the state of this troubled world and chose to live in it with us anyway.

Think about that as you read the news today—the heart-breaking, stomach-churning news of today so often devoid of even common decency.

While you mull that over, keep in mind it gets better than Jesus choosing to live with us. Christmas is part and parcel of Good Friday, which is part and parcel of Easter, which is part and parcel of where all of this is going—the redemption and restoration of all things.

Christmas is just the beginning, pointing us far beyond. May we be so bold.

*******

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.

I realize Advent has moved on to peace, but I’m stuck at hope. It won’t sound like that at first, but keep reading.

I’m a bit of a Grinch about the holidays—any holiday. I humor the holidays, but I don’t really get into Christmas until a couple of days before Dec. 25.

Part of humoring the holidays is understanding we will start singing Christmas hymns the first Sunday after Thanksgiving and will sing them through the first Sunday after Christmas. The same songs. Every year.

And those same songs will play. Everywhere. Sometimes as early as October.

Maybe this Grinchiness started when I worked retail in college and had to listen to canned pop Christmas tunes nonstop for hours on end for days on end. Some things are hard to get over.

Or maybe it happened while I was a pastor. Most people don’t realize how much work Christmas is for a church staff and volunteers. The staff would love to celebrate with you, but they’re likely busy and exhausted from all the extra events and all that goes with them. So, even their celebration can be … sleepy.

Anyway. Some people love this time of year. I humor it. Grinchy, I tell you.

So, I wasn’t prepared to be moved by “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” while we sang it during the modern worship service at our church this last Sunday morning.

I had a similar experience last year when our choir sang a particular arrangement of “O Holy Night.”

I really don’t expect this to become a holiday habit.

A holy hope

Last year, I wrote that “O Holy Night” has “long been one of my favorite Christmas hymns.” That’s true. Once Dec. 22 rolls around, I really like it. But I may have given the impression I appreciate the song at any time. So, I will clarify: “Let’s not get carried away. The song should inhabit it’s proper setting—Dec. 22 through 24.”

Or maybe just Dec. 24.

“Boy, he is Grinchy, isn’t he?”

“O Holy Night” seized my attention last year because of the arrangement, which I’d heard before but really heard that particular moment in that service.

The same happened this last Sunday morning with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” this ubiquitous song of longing for the Messiah.

Sunday morning, we sang a modern arrangement of this old Latin hymn, translated bit by bit into English centuries later.

Words of woe: “O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here.”

Met with the hopeful chorus: “Rejoice! Rejoice! E-ma-nu-el shall come to thee, O Israel!”

To this, the modern arrangers added: “Rejoice, again I say rejoice, For unto us is born, The savior of the world; Take heart, O weary soul take heart, For Heaven’s on its way, And holy is His name.”

And we sing it loud.

Sunday, I saw the words on the screen, and I sang them as I saw them, but the lingering echo wasn’t, “Take heart, O weary soul take heart,” but “Take heart, O weary world take heart.”

Why should it? Why should this weary world take heart?

Because Emmanuel is on his way. Better still, because Emmanuel is here.

A hollow hope

My jaw tightens at so much of the news. It’s hard to rejoice amid the news of this world. It’s wearying and disheartening. It’s hard to hold out hope, or at least to believe there’s much substance to hope. Hope really can ring hollow here.

It’s also disappointing to see so many people—especially Christians—putting their hope in worldly solutions. Even Christians place undue hope in policies, money, power and material things.

There is no policy that will make everything all right, no political party, no amount of money, no accumulation. We know this intuitively. Yet, we maintain hope in the world, or we give in to hopelessness, hiding it in hedonism or despair.

“Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”

This is the substance of a world and a people who don’t know, don’t see or who refuse to believe: “Heaven’s on its way, and holy is His name.”

A ‘foolish’ hope

What we hope for is foolishness to this world. What we hope for actually is an inversion of this world. What Emmanuel taught, what he came to do was to turn this world inside out, and nothing will be all right until it is turned inside out.

We can cease firing and sign the treaties, we can cross the aisle and make deals, we can sell all we have and give it to the poor, but until our hearts are inverted—read: converted—by the One whose name is holy, all that activity won’t satisfy the true substance of our hope. Until Jesus is Lord and we quit being pretenders, our hope will be hollow.

We can do all the worldly things right, but doing them won’t mean everything will be all right. Because the problem isn’t in our politics, policies, social positions or pockets. The problem is in us. To fix the problem, we must be turned inside out.

The substance of our hope is beyond the power and money and stuff of this world. The substance of our hope is not dependent on who wins the war. Yes, it would be easier—so we think—if our side wins—whatever side that may be. And we do hope our side wins, thus the fight.

To this world, saying Jesus guarantees what we hope for is abdicating the fight. Or it’s militarizing Jesus. Talk about polarization.

But what we really long for, what we really need, is not guaranteed by our side winning. It is guaranteed by Jesus and is kept in his kingdom. To this world, that’s hopeless, irresponsible, stupid, weak, naïve, foolish.

A hope fulfilled

Back to peace: Scripture warns against proclaiming peace when there is no peace. This world warns against proclaiming hope when this world thinks there is no hope.

But Jesus really was born. Jesus really did live and teach and heal. Jesus really did die. Jesus really did rise again to live and reign over all things for all eternity. And Jesus said he will come back and restore all things.

No, there may not be peace on Earth right now, but there always is hope—a hallowed hope.

And that will make any Grinch’s heart grow.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.