The Gospel According to Jelly Roll, Part Two

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.

Last week I talked about the Gospel according to Jelly Roll, how a country star with forty arrests and a face full of tattoos ended up preaching a better sermon on Jimmy Kimmel Live than most seminary graduates, busting the myth that Christianity is about being right while everyone else is wrong. He did it by reminding us there's no asterisk after the word “neighbor.”

This week, I want to tell part two of that story. Near the end of his monologue on his final night hosting Jimmy Kimmel, he shared a story of his dad when he was on his deathbed. I’ll quote him here:

“My father, Buddy DeFord, God rest his soul, was a blue-collar Democrat, and his brother was a red-hat Republican. And this might be hard for people out there to understand, but they were absolutely best friends. And when my father was in hospice on his deathbed and I had the opportunity to ask him everything I wanted to know, I said, 'Dad, how are you and your brother so tight when y'all didn't agree about anything?' "And he looked at me and said, 'Son, we agreed about hundreds of things. We only didn't agree about a few things, and we were not going to let the few things we didn't agree about define our entire relationship.'”

Now, if you’ve listened to me at all, you probably know that I have some strong feelings about what’s facing our country right now, what’s facing the church, what’s facing us as humans on this fragile blue ball in space. But I think Jelly Roll is saying something important here. It connects to the other quote I used at the end of last week’s episode, “While we are fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become a monster ourselves.”

That quote is actually a paraphrase of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche (talk about unlikely preachers), but it speaks to a real and true danger each of us face—especially those of us who are the most passionate.

Here's the myth I think Buddy DeFord’s deathbed wisdom busts: that conviction and relationship are somehow opposites, that the more strongly you believe something, the less room you have left to love the person across the table who believes differently. Buddy and his brother apparently never got that memo. They didn’t pretend the disagreements weren’t real. They just refused to let a handful of disagreements be bigger than the hundreds of things that actually held them together.

That's not moral relativism, and it’s not indifference to what matters. It's something the desert fathers and mothers understood deeply… that the person in front of you is never reducible to how they first appear to you. Saint Anthony didn’t retreat to the wilderness because he’d stopped caring about truth. He went there to learn how to see the image of God in every person he met, including the ones who’d wronged him. That’s hard, disciplined work, and it’s the opposite of the algorithm-fed outrage that tells us the person who disagrees with us is an enemy to be destroyed rather than a neighbor to be loved.

I don't think Jesus is calling us to stop fighting monsters. There are monsters worth fighting—injustice, cruelty, misogyny, heterosexism, transphobia, the systems that grind down the poor and the stranger and the immigrant… But he is calling us to fight them as people who still remember how to sit at a table with people who think differently than us, how to engage them with mercy, gentleness, kindness, and a bit of curiosity, to remember that the goal was never to win the argument but to love the neighbor. Buddy DeFord figured that out somewhere along the way. I hope the rest of us can figure it out before it's too late.

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.