Jordan Paul

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles for a bachelor party. In what was a strange activity for most bachelor parties, all thirteen of us spent one morning outside Paramount Studios supporting the Writers Guild of America strike. We spent four hours outside of one of the studio’s “neutral gates,” which meant instead of picketing, we were tasked with recording details about anyone who came in or out. It was a lot of fun—we got to meet other supporters and writers, got to know everyone better, and even argue the merits of the strike with a less than friendly passerby. It was also, in my opinion, holy work.

“Mammon” has long been used by Christians as a pejorative—think materialism, unjust gain, greed, etc. In the middle of today’s Gospel, Jesus ends the Parable of the Dishonest Manager with a statement that shows why it has been used as such for so long: “You cannot serve God and mammon.” You only needed to spend a short time there standing with the writers and their other supporters—some young, some old, some bringing along their young children, some joining before or after their second job—and then compare everything that you learned from them with the types of cars crossing the picket line onto the studio lot to see what side mammon was on.

The group of people I was with was emphatically not a religious one. Being able to explain my support of what we were doing in religious terms was my small contribution to dispel the caricature of American Christianity. A caricature that is, unfortunately, often true: a faith doing all it can to cling to power, no matter what theological truths it must jettison along the way. In the face of rising Christian Nationalism, love for mammon, and fraying social bonds, may we all continue to make our own contributions:

O Holy Spirit—the fire shut up in our bones, bestowing prophetic utterance out of the overflow of overwhelmed hearts—awaken us! Let the cries of our siblings’ blood rise from the earth in a whirlwind, catching us up in divine fury. Reveal to us, and divest us from, the deeply evil narratives and systems which underpin our collective life. Let thy word filter the ideas, images, and experiences through which we are destabilized, reeducated, and re-formed as those who are ready to be led in a radical exodus by our Lord Jesus Christ, who reigns with thee and our Father, one God, in power made perfect by love. Amen.

In Christ,

—Jordan