This Fourth of July, somewhere in America, a church will drag the American flag over to the altar and call it worship.
A preacher will stand in a pulpit built for the gospel and preach nationalism instead, and no one will notice the difference because we stopped teaching people what the difference sounds like.
And a Christian — maybe you, maybe me — will scroll past a child in a cage, a trans kid who didn’t make it to Monday, a Black man shot in his own driveway, and reach for a sparkler instead of a lament. That is not patriotism. That is idolatry wearing red, white and blue.
Braxton Wade
I love this country. I’m not writing this to talk you out of your cookout. But love that will not tell the truth is not love. It is decoration. And decoration is exactly what American Christianity has become good at.
Jesus never put his head in the sand. He put his hands in the dirt. That is not a nice sermon illustration. It is a verdict on how most of us — myself included — are about to spend this weekend.
From the beginning, God has worked through dirt. In Genesis, God kneels down, gathers dust, breathes into it, and humanity opens its eyes. When religious men drag a woman caught in adultery into the street, ready to kill her with rocks, Jesus does not lecture them. He kneels. He writes in the dirt. He lowers himself into the same ground they threw her onto — before he ever opens his mouth about her dignity. When a man born blind is stepped over at the edge of the road, Jesus spits into the dust, presses mud into his eyes, and gives him sight using the same material God once used to make him.
Only Jesus would treat dirt as sacrament. Only Jesus keeps choosing to do his best work exactly where the rest of us have already walked past.
“Whose head is in the sand, and whose hands are actually in the dirt?”
So ask yourself the question the church keeps avoiding: Whose head is in the sand, and whose hands are actually in the dirt?
Most of us are doing neither. We are not ignorant of the wounds, and we are not healing them. We are watching from a safe distance and calling the watching prayer. That is the most comfortable form of complicity Christianity ever invented.
Putting your hands in the dirt is not a metaphor for holding the right opinions. It is specific. It costs something. And most of us will not do it.
It looks like tutoring the kid in the school your district gave up on, not posting about educational equity.
It looks like standing in the room at the ICE check-in so the family isn’t alone, not sharing the article.
It looks like a congregation actually voting to ordain its LGBTQ members, not hiding behind a “welcoming” banner while the vote never reaches the floor.
It looks like a white church giving up real budget, real staff time and real pulpit space to reckon with how it has profited from racism, not scheduling one sermon a year so the guilt can go back to sleep.
It looks like housing someone, not just writing the check to the shelter and calling it done.
None of that fits on a flag. None of it fits into 90 minutes of anthems and fireworks. And if I’m honest, most of it doesn’t fit into my week either — which is exactly why this is a word for me before it’s a word for you.
“Baptists inherited a confession we’ve sanded down into a bumper sticker.”
Baptists inherited a confession we’ve sanded down into a bumper sticker: Jesus alone is Lord. Not Caesar. Not the president. Not a party. Not a nation, no matter how many candles are on its cake. We didn’t inherit that so we could sit out of public life. We inherited it so we would stop mistaking public life for the Kingdom.
Vote. Organize. Show up. Do all of it. Just don’t let any of it become your alibi.
Because no matter what side of the aisle you’re on, no matter who you vote for, no matter if you identify as an elephant or a donkey, the question never was who wins in November. The question is what happens when we put our hands in the dirt.
Will we look up and give dignity back to our neighbor, the way Jesus knelt in the dust before he ever spoke a word to the woman they meant to stone?
Will we help our neighbors see one another, the way Jesus pressed mud into blind eyes until a man who’d been stepped over could finally see the ones stepping over him?
Will we breathe new life into humanity, the way God once knelt in the dirt of Eden and breathed until dust opened its eyes?
It doesn’t matter if we put our hands over our hearts for the National Anthem if our hearts don’t break for what breaks the heart of Jesus.
Celebrate the Fourth if you want. I probably will too.
But on July 5, when the flags are folded and the grill has gone cold, none of Saturday will have answered the question that’s still sitting there: Where are your hands?
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.