The Gospel According to Jelly Roll
This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.
It is good to be back with you after having just concluded a four month sabbatical from ministry. Those four months of rest, renewal, and study have invigorated my ministry. I also did significant work on a book I’m writing, tentatively titled Revelation Unbound: Inspiring a Community of Resistance. Today, however, I find myself drawn to Jimmy Kimmel and Jelly Roll.
Now, I don't often find myself citing Jimmy Kimmel Live as a source for a segment on Christian theology. Same thing for Jelly Roll. True, he is a country music star, three-time Grammy winner, a man who by his own count has been arrested around forty times. He is a man covered with tattoos, including on his face, and someone who has been clear about the scars in his life. So, he’s someone a lot of people know, but that doesn’t mean he’s generally a go-to for theology.
However, Jelly Roll recently spent a couple of weeks guest hosting Kimmel’s show. On his final night hosting, after a week of Trump jokes had gotten him raked over the coals by conservative media, he took a break from the monologue and just… talked. For several minutes. A few times through tears.
No, that’s not it. He didn’t just talk. He preached. And he preached against one of the strongest myths of American Christianity—that it’s all about you being right and others being wrong.
Jelly Roll dismantled that myth better than most seminary-trained preachers I know. He talked about the experience of people having previously assumed he was MAGA and now assuming he is a mouthpiece for the liberal media.
He talked about his sense of calling to be a voice for the voiceless, because he knows those people. He grew up and lived his life as one of those people. And then, holding back the tears, he said, “My daddy always told me it is never too late to do the right thing. So I am going to try to do the right thing right now because human dignity isn’t Republican nor Democrat. Compassion isn’t left wing, and mercy isn’t right wing. Pain and healing knows no partisanship. Hurting hearts are more important than poll numbers, and there are no boundaries or borders for broken families.”
He went on to talk about being a person of second chances and how that has shaped who he is. He insisted that second chances and the American dream cannot just be for people like him. He insisted that though he cusses and tells jokes he truly is a man of faith and that he cannot read the Gospels without being confronted by the words of Jesus himself in Matthew chapter twenty-five: when I was hungry, you gave me food; when I was thirsty, you gave me a drink; when I was a stranger, you welcomed me in.”
He then drew our attention to what Jesus said are the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And reminded us that there is no asterisk after neighbor. In his words, “There wasn’t a political party exemption. It did not require us to know what country you were born in. There wasn’t a sentence afterward that said, ‘Unless you’re afraid of them.’ It just said, ‘Love your neighbor.”
This is, of course, exactly what the tradition of the church has always taught, even when the church itself has failed to live it. Augustine and Aquinas both wrestled with what it means to love rightly—not by drawing tighter and tighter circles around people like us, but by letting the love of God push us outward, past our comfort, into love of stranger and even enemy. Jelly Roll didn’t need a doctorate in theology to get there. He needed a hard life, an honest reading of the Gospels, and the nerve to say it on network television.
He also said something else worth sitting with: while we’re fighting monsters, we have to be careful not to become monsters ourselves. That’s not a bad one-sentence summary of about half the New Testament. And there’s not much more I could say that’s better than that. So, thanks Jelly Roll. You basically wrote my first Mythbusters back for me.
Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.