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

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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

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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.  

5 Practical Ways Churches Can Bridge the Gen Z Baby Boomer Divide in the Pew

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

Bridging the Gen Z–Baby Boomer Divide in the Pew

We live in a culture that sorts us by age almost without thinking. Children gather with children. Teenagers stay with teenagers. Adults build friendships with people who share their stage of life. Even our online spaces often place us inside age-based circles.

Two women reviewing community outreach materials in a church pew
Two women review community outreach materials together during a church gathering.

That arrangement can feel comfortable, but it also leaves us with a problem: many of us rarely build meaningful relationships with people who grew up in a different decade. We may share a neighborhood, a workplace, or a church building and still remain strangers.

American churches have a unique opportunity here. We can bring generations together in ways that much of modern life does not. The church can become one of the few places where a Gen Z Christian and a Baby Boomer Christian worship, serve, learn, and grow alongside each other. That is more than a pleasant idea. It is a powerful gift.

Here are a few concrete ways we can start: pair older and younger members for weekly prayer partnerships, organize joint service projects like neighborhood cleanups or food drives, create mentoring pairs where a Baby Boomer shares life experience and a Gen Z member brings fresh questions about faith and culture, and simply schedule regular shared meals or small-group discussions that mix the generations on purpose.

The pew can be a meeting place

When we sit in the same worship service, we begin with something important in common. We may disagree about music, technology, politics, or the proper temperature for the sanctuary, but we gather around the same faith. That shared center gives us a reason to know one another rather than simply make assumptions.

A younger person may see an older believer as out of touch. An older person may see a younger believer as impatient or uninformed. Usually, those judgments become less certain once we hear one another’s stories. A conversation after worship can reveal the sacrifices someone made, the questions they carried, or the faithfulness they practiced when life was difficult.

The same thing happens in the other direction. Older adults may discover that younger Christians are not careless about faith. They may be trying to follow Jesus in a world shaped by pressures previous generations never faced. Younger Christians may discover that Baby Boomers are not merely defenders of old habits. Many have endured loss, doubt, change, and disappointment while continuing to show up.

Relationships give us what arguments rarely can: context. They help us replace caricatures with actual people.

We can make that happen on purpose. Start a monthly “story swap” after worship where a Gen Z member and a Baby Boomer each share a short faith journey. Form prayer triplets that mix generations. Invite younger adults to help older members with tech for online giving while the older members teach practical skills like budgeting from a faith perspective. These small, repeated actions turn the pew into a place where we actually know one another.

More than sitting in the same room

Being in the same sanctuary is a starting point, not the finish line. Cross-generational relationships grow through shared work and ordinary time together.

We can pair older and younger members for service projects, prayer partnerships, Bible study, mentoring, and informal meals. We can invite people from different generations to tell their stories, not as museum pieces or lectures, but as fellow disciples. We can create space for both practical wisdom and fresh questions. We can also form intergenerational small groups that study Scripture together, organize joint outreach events like neighborhood cleanups or meal deliveries, and set up skill swaps where younger members teach phone apps for daily devotionals while older members share how they navigated faith during major cultural shifts.

The exchange should go both ways. Older Christians may offer patience, perspective, and a long memory of God’s faithfulness. Younger Christians may offer curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to experiment. Neither generation has everything the church needs. That is precisely why we need each other.

A healthy relationship is not built by pretending our differences do not exist. We do not need to agree on every preference before we can listen well. We can ask honest questions, explain why something matters to us, and resist turning every disagreement into a verdict on someone’s character.

What we gain from one another

When generations worship and serve together, the church becomes a place where faith is not only discussed but observed. Younger believers can see what perseverance looks like over decades. Older believers can see the courage it takes to live faithfully amid rapid cultural change.

We also gain a wider understanding of belonging. A church family should not be a collection of age-based groups that happen to meet under one roof. It should be a community where people at different points in life recognize their responsibility to one another.

That kind of community takes intention. If we leave everything to convenience, we will usually choose people who are most like us. So we may need to change how we organize events, whom we invite to lead, and what we consider a successful ministry. A program that brings together three generations may look less polished than separate age-specific gatherings, but it can produce deeper relationships. We can start a quarterly “faith story night” where pairs from different generations interview each other and share highlights with the group. We can run a tech-and-tradition swap where younger members teach apps for daily prayer while older members demonstrate handwritten prayer journals. We can plan short mission trips or local service days that require mixed teams. These concrete steps turn intention into habit.

We should also be patient. One meal will not erase decades of misunderstanding. One conversation will not settle every dispute between generations. But repeated contact, shared service, and honest listening can slowly build trust.

A superpower worth practicing

The church cannot solve every difference between Gen Z and Baby Boomers. We should not pretend that generational tension is simple. Still, we possess something many parts of society have lost: regular opportunities to meet across age, experience, and background around a shared purpose.

That is our superpower, but it only matters if we practice it.

We can start small. Sit beside someone from another generation during worship. Ask about their faith journey over coffee after the service. Invite them to lunch and share a short Scripture reflection. Form a monthly prayer text chain with one older and one younger member. Volunteer together for a single service project like sorting donations at a food pantry. These tiny, repeated steps turn strangers into fellow travelers.

In a divided culture, these ordinary choices become a quiet witness. They show that Christian community is not built on sameness. It is built on love, patience, humility, and a shared commitment to follow Christ together.

The pew can be more than a place where we sit near strangers. It can become a bridge. And when we cross it, we may find that the people we were tempted to dismiss have wisdom, questions, humor, and faith that we need.