We may not even be aware how our attitudes about the flag and its display in houses of worship conflates our faith with our positive feelings about the country. One of the ways we can assess our own hearts on this issue comes when we consider what happens when we relocate the flag or remove it altogether. In this episode, we examine how the flag becomes commingled with our Christian faith, often representing a belief that God has blessed the United States in a way that He has not blessed other countries. Even a majority of pastors believe that patriotic elements should be incorporated into the worship services on certain holiday weekends, while those same pastors report that their congregations sometimes love the country more than they love God. We ask whether American Christians have a unique fondness of flags and pledges, creating new ways to praise Christians flags and the Bible, and how these well-intentioned but misplaced allegiances can take us from the person of Jesus.

We respond to a listener’s question and wrestle with the fact that the Old Testament did not abolish slavery, but actually endorsed the slavery of foreigners. While most of the slavery described in the Old Testament was debt-servanthood, and the Old Testament law provided protections and limitations around the practice that included the forgiveness of all debts and the six-year redemption of those in bond servanthood, the Old Testament also endorsed the chattel slavery of neighboring countries and foreigners living temporarily in the land of Israel. We discuss how the serious scholarship on this subject dispenses with many of the arguments advanced by Christian apologists, while discussing our honest confusion over the fact that the Bible does not contain an outright abolition of slavery. At the same time, we point out that it was the very teachings of Jesus and the New Testament writers, built on the legacy of the Old Testament law, that laid the foundation for our modern views related to human rights, anti-discrimination, equality, and dignity of all persons, and that ultimately to the abolition of slavery. Our goal in this episode is to demonstrate our willingness to study deeply, wrestle with troubling issues honestly, and still faithfully follow Jesus by trusting that – while our knowledge of God will always be incomplete – we are ultimately putting our trust in the person of Jesus, and not in having certainty about the answer to every question we may ever pose about the Bible.

Americans are known for their rugged individualism. But our value of individualism and wanting to be at the center of every narrative can derail our efforts to follow Jesus. In this episode, we examine the ways that our culture – and even our churches – have reinforced the idea that we are the main character in our worship and in our reading of the biblical narrative. We discuss how this focus on ourselves shows up in subtle and not so subtle ways, and our discussions seeks to show how inserting ourselves at the center robs us of the richness found in being an integral part of the united people of God. Our affirmation is that Jesus is the main character of the scriptures and of all of cosmic history, and that finding our true place as part of His body is an important part of following Jesus as our Lord.