Looking Toward the Promise

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

Serving a Promise We May Never See Fulfilled

Way back in Exodus times Moses disobeyed God. While the Israelites were wandering in the desert, they ran out of water. Moses asked God for help and was told to speak to the rock, which would give them water. But Moses was frustrated with the Israelites. Out of that frustration, he struck the rock twice with his staff. For this, God told Moses that he would not be allowed to enter the promised land. Moses had served God faithfully for many years, but his faithfulness did not make him free to replace obedience with anger. This is one of the uncomfortable parts of the story. We might expect a long record of faithful service to cancel out one moment of failure. We might think that someone who had carried such a responsibility for so long had earned the right to make one mistake. But Moses was not judged only by his past. He was still responsible for what he did in that moment, just as we are still responsible for the choices we make when we are exhausted, disappointed, or angry.

In the Book of Deuteronomy we learn the conclusion to this story. Moses is allowed to see the promised land, but not enter it. In some ways this could be seen as cruel. Why would you dangle the ultimate prize in front of someone you had already told could not have it? That would be cruel, and as we know God does not do cruel things, perhaps we need to revisit that idea at some point, but not today. Perhaps seeing the land was not merely a punishment. Perhaps it was also a gift, allowing Moses to see that God’s promise was real and that the work would continue even without him. Moses had spent his life leading the Israelites toward a future he would not personally possess. To see the land was to see that the journey had not been pointless. The promise had not failed simply because Moses would not be the one to enter it. Instead I want to draw our attention to the larger message, which is that what we do now in service to God shapes the future, even when we are not there to see the results.

Moses did not get to finish his task. He did not get to bring his people into the promised land. But he did prepare Joshua and the next generation of leadership to continue the work of serving God’s kingdom on earth.

Moses’ work was not meaningless because Joshua completed what Moses could not. In fact, Joshua’s success was partly evidence that Moses had done his work well. A leader who believes that everything depends on them will try to hold on forever. A leader who trusts God can prepare someone else to take responsibility. Moses had to learn that the people belonged to God, not to Moses, and that the future of the Israelites did not depend on him remaining at the center of the story. Joshua was not a replacement who made Moses unnecessary. He was the person Moses had helped prepare.

This is vitally important because it is not our job to complete God’s kingdom. We neither have the skills nor, most importantly, are we God. Our task is to serve faithfully, to prepare those who come after us, and to trust God with the part of the work we will never see finished.

This can be difficult because we typically want visible results. We want to know that our effort mattered, that our prayers were answered, and that the people we helped will remember us. But faith does not always give us that kind of evidence. Sometimes faithfulness means doing the work without receiving the conclusion. Sometimes it means teaching someone else, encouraging someone else, or handing over responsibility before we feel ready.

As a teacher, I am acutely aware of the familiar language about teachers being heroes who shape the young minds of the future, language I personally cannot stand. Teaching is often a thankless job, and it is only occasionally rewarding. Teachers deserve respect and fair treatment, but the work should not be oversold as though every lesson produces an inspiring transformation.

The more ordinary truth is that teachers rarely get to experience the fruit of their labor. A student may understand something years after leaving the classroom. A habit, a question, or a piece of advice may become useful in a life the teacher never sees. Often the teacher receives no message, no thanks, and no evidence that the effort mattered. The lesson is taught, the grading is finished, the class moves on, and the teacher is left to begin again with someone else.

That can be discouraging, but it is also close to the position Moses found himself in. He spent 40 years leading the Israelites, yet he did not enter the land toward which he had led them. Teachers may spend years helping students acquire knowledge, confidence, or discipline, but may never see what those students eventually do with it. The point here is that the teacher does not get to claim the whole result. They simply offer what they can and trust that some of it will take root. That is not a heroic story, and it is not always a rewarding one. It is, however, a form of faithful work.

The same is true of faithful people in every kind of work. A parent may not see the full effect of what they teach their children. Someone who cares for a neighbor may never know what that kindness made possible. A person who prays may not see the answer. Someone who gives time to a church, a community, or a cause may leave before the work is complete. We may plant something whose shade will shelter people we will never meet. That does not make the planting less worthwhile.

Faithfulness is not measured only by whether we reach the end of the road or receive credit for what follows. Sometimes it means doing the work entrusted to us, even when another person carries it further. Sometimes it means accepting that the future belongs to God and that our part is smaller than the whole. We are not required to complete God’s kingdom. We are required to serve within it, to prepare the way where we can, and to trust that God can use what we leave behind.

Moses did not enter the promised land, but his life was not wasted. The teacher may not see the fruit of their labor, the parent may not know the full effect of their care, and the faithful person may never witness the answer to their prayer. Yet none of these acts is lost simply because the person who began them does not see the ending. God remains at work beyond the limits of our lives. Our task is to be faithful with what has been placed before us, and to leave the future in God’s hands.

What Belongs to God? Rethinking Rights, Control, and Utopia

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

Understanding “What Belongs to God” in a World of Human Constructs and Political Control

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

My English class has just finished reading the book 1984, and as a thought exercise I asked them to pick a problem, propose a utopian solution and then explain how that solution would evolve into a dystopian society because that is the danger we face whenever we attempt to achieve utopia. They chose a variety of topics including homelessness, racism, and poverty. All of their solutions were some form of communism, socialism, or controlled capitalism. In all of them there was a genuine desire to solve the problem and in all of them they recognized that the systems would quickly breakdown due to lack of resources or lack of will on the part of the citizens to follow through with the vision. In 1984, Orwell envisions a central government, known as “Big Brother” who attempts to stamp out opposition by monitoring everyone’s movements, thoughts, and actions along with the continued rewriting of history and over simplification of language to force everyone to believe the same things. If you have not read 1984, you should because it is not just a dystopian novel about the threat of authoritarianism in the wake of the second world war, it is a commentary on humanity and our insatiable desire to be in control.

We have all heard the story of Jesus telling the Pharisees and their buddies to give God the stuff that belongs to God and the emperor the stuff that belongs to him and I suspect we all feel relieved when we hear this story because it is so simple. The emperor’s image is stamped on the coins, so we can return them to his sphere of authority and turn our attention back to God. Simple, right? Except, what exactly belongs to God?

Identifying the coin as belonging to the emperor is easy because his face is on it and everyone knows that it is his government that made the coin. Likewise, in the 21st century we know who the dollar bills belong to, we know who the roads and the bridges belong to, but when we add modern concepts of liberty and individualism to the equation things begin to get messy.

We claim that we have a God-given natural right to life, liberty, and happiness, but where in scripture does it explicitly say so? That does not prove these rights are incompatible with scripture, but it does mean we should not present our modern formulation as a direct quotation of creation. Genesis does not say that God created the birds and then granted them a natural right to live. It says that God saw creation and called it good. That suggests that life is good because it comes from God, not that life is ours to define or dispose of as we please. It says nothing about freedom or happiness, though one could argue it is implied because presumably every creature was created to freely roam the earth as it pleased. Here’s my point, we cannot claim that God intended our concept of equality, which is the word we generally use to describe the demand that people receive equal rights to life, liberty, and happiness, as a part of creation because there is no evidence of that, what we can claim is that God created life and therefore life is accountable to God. The same is true of love: scripture presents God as love, and therefore our obligations concerning love are accountable to God.

I am by no means attempting to shatter our belief in natural rights, I am a firm believer in them and will continue to teach and defend them until my dying day; my purpose here is to caution us against the assumptions many seem to make when applying faith to the modern world, which is that because we believe equality is a good thing then it must stem from God; but its modern formulation is a human construct. That does not make equality worthless or opposed to God, but it does mean we should be careful about calling it a direct feature of creation. It is something we created to combat the millennia of poor treatment of large groups of people by other people.

If you are confused, I understand, so let me attempt to be clear. If life and love are from God, then what we owe God is to honor life and practice love, toward God and toward the people whose lives God has created. If we wish to claim that equality is something that God would want us to pursue then we have to connect it to either life or love. Equality becomes a matter of life when unequal systems deny people the conditions necessary to live, and it becomes a matter of love when we recognize that no person’s life is more valuable than another’s. In that sense, equality need not be understood as a command handed down from heaven in its modern vocabulary. It is a human principle that follows from taking God’s gifts of life and love seriously. To deny another person equal dignity is to deny the value of the life God created and the love God asks us to give.

And this brings us back to where we began. We read 1984 and recognized the danger of placing too much faith in our ability to design a perfect society. We saw how easily the desire to protect people becomes a desire to manage them, and how the desire to create order becomes a desire to control every thought, word, and action. We are capable of doing the same thing with God. We take our own ideas about liberty, equality, justice, and order, then attach God’s name to them as though our convictions came directly from heaven. In doing so, we may not be giving God what belongs to God. We may be trying to make God belong to us.

The question, then, is not simply whether our politics are compassionate or whether our systems promise equality. The question is whether we are honoring the life and love that come from God, or using God to bless our own desire for control. We cannot build heaven by force, and we should be wary whenever our attempt to serve God begins to look like an attempt to speak for God. Perhaps giving God what belongs to God means surrendering our certainty, practicing life and love, and admitting that the line between faithfulness and control is one we must continually examine.

Imperialism Isn’t Dead—It Just Drives Climate Change

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

The Theological Imperative to Cancel Climate Debts and Confront Global Inequality

Imperialism is a word we do not hear much anymore outside of history, but it is very much alive in the world. At its core, imperialism is a system in which powerful states and institutions extract wealth, resources, land, and labor from other peoples and places in order to sustain their own power. Imperial powers consume what they can and often call that consumption progress.

History offers many examples of this pattern, though no two empires operated in exactly the same way. Egyptian, Roman, and Mongol expansion relied on different combinations of conquest, tribute, labor, resource control, and trade. Yet each built a political and economic order that benefited the imperial center at the expense of subordinated peoples and places. European powers later colonized much of the globe through intertwined economic, political, and religious ambitions, forcing colonized societies into unequal relationships that enriched European companies and treasuries. In the modern era, the United States has repeatedly used its military and political power to advance its economic and geopolitical interests abroad, often framing those interventions as the defense of democracy.

The details differ across these examples, but the underlying logic remains recognizable: empire depends on endless accumulation, the subjugation of human bodies, and the aggressive manipulation of natural resources. What harms people also damages the places that sustain them. Imperial power therefore has consequences not only for human communities, but for creation itself.

climate

Climate change is driven by this same imperial logic. Corporate and state entities extract fossil fuels, clear forests, and pollute waterways in pursuit of continued growth, treating long-term survival as less important than immediate accumulation. The consequences fall first and worst on frontline communities, including the poor, Indigenous peoples, and the marginalized. These communities are treated as “sacrifice zones,” places whose health and survival can be exchanged for the comfort and prosperity of the imperial center.

Exodus offers a radically different vision of power. God says, in effect, “enough,” and uses the wind, cloud, and sea to disrupt Egypt’s military machine. The waters open a path for the enslaved people and then close over the pursuing army. Creation is not passive background to liberation. It becomes an instrument against imperial domination, physically breaking the machinery of exploitation. In Exodus, God does not merely save souls from an oppressive system. God brings the enslaved out of that system and dismantles the power that pursues them.

The Egyptian war chariots were the pinnacle of ancient technology. They were fast, heavy, terrifying, and built for one thing: domination. Today, our extractive economy is like a high-speed freight train fueled by coal, oil, and gas. It powers our modern comforts, but it has no brakes. It is barreling down the tracks, and the people riding in the luxury cars at the front, namely wealthy corporations and affluent nations, are enjoying the ride. But the people at the back of the train, and the communities living right next to the tracks, are breathing the toxic smoke, dealing with the derailments, and watching the bridges collapse beneath them. When God parted the Red Sea and clogged the wheels of Pharaoh’s chariots, God was throwing a wrench into the gears of a runaway machine. Climate justice isn’t just about tossing trash out of the train window; it is about standing with God to pull the emergency brake on the entire system.

Empire looks at a mountain in West Virginia and sees a giant pile of coal to be blown apart for cash. It looks at a river and sees a convenient sewer line for chemical runoff. Empire behaves like a ruthless landlord who treats a house like dirt because they don’t have to live in it. But Psalm 114 completely shatters this worldview. The Psalmist says the sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back, and the mountains skipped like rams. The earth isn’t a dead object we own; it’s a living participant in God’s cosmic choir. When we treat the earth as mere raw material for human profit, we aren’t just mismanaging resources, we are committing a theological crime. We are vandalizing a sanctuary. We are gagging a choir that is trying to sing praises to its Creator.

In Matthew, the unforgiving servant is handed a clean slate for an astronomical, unpayable debt, yet he immediately turns around and chokes a fellow servant over a pocketful of change. This is a powerful picture of climate debt. For the last 150 years, wealthy industrialized nations have thrown a massive, fossil-fueled party. It built our skyscrapers, filled our supermarkets, and created incredible wealth. But the bill for that party, in the form of rising sea levels, extreme heat, and crop failures, has arrived. Instead of paying for the cleanup, the nations that threw the party are turning to the Global South, to countries that contributed comparatively little to global emissions, and saying, “You figure out how to pay for the damage.” When we demand that the poorest nations bankrupt themselves to survive a climate crisis they did not create, we act exactly like the unforgiving servant. God’s economy demands that we acknowledge what we have received, cancel unjust debts, and pay our fair share for the restoration of the world.

The parable is not a prediction of divine wrath so much as a warning about what happens when mercy received never becomes mercy practiced. My fear is that this warning is falling on deaf ears. Much of humanity remains too attached to its creature comforts to accept that lip service, thoughts, and prayers about the climate will not change anything. If we think we are innocent in regard to the climate, we are no better than the servant who, after receiving mercy, refused to extend it to someone else. The question before us is not whether we have benefited from the system of empire. We have. The question is whether we will continue choking those who have been given the least room to breathe.

Climate justice requires more than acknowledging the debt. It requires changing the economy that created it. Wealthy nations must reduce emissions rapidly, provide meaningful resources for adaptation for loss and damage, and stop asking vulnerable countries to choose between surviving the climate crisis and paying debts they cannot reasonably afford. The gospel does not leave us with private guilt or empty concern. It calls us to repair what we have helped break, to release burdens that keep others from flourishing, and to join God in the restoration of the world.