The Talkback format is a 45-minute theological talk, followed by 45 minutes of Q&A with the speaker. It’s practical theology – which means the talks are rooted in faith and everyday life. Mike will help us explore what it means to be a Christian who seeks the good of the city, in an increasingly secularized and post-Christian culture.
The Talkback format is a 45-minute theological talk, followed by 45 minutes of Q&A with the speaker. It’s practical theology – which means the talks are rooted in faith and everyday life. Mike will help us explore what it means to be a Christian who seeks the good of the city, in an increasingly secularized […]
The Talkback format is a 45-minute theological talk, followed by 45 minutes of Q&A with the speaker. It’s practical theology – which means the talks are rooted in faith and everyday life. Mike will help us explore what it means to be a Christian who seeks the good of the city, in an increasingly secularized and post-Christian culture.
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We're gonna go ahead and get started. Welcome to our theological talk back, with Redeemer Community Church. We're so glad that you are here with us tonight. The format, if you've never been to a talk back before, the format is this. For, for the first hour, there's a talk.
Jeffrey Heine:And then we take a quick little, like, 5 minute break. And then we come back together for an hour of q and a. And so throughout the talk tonight, be sure and make some notes, type them out on your phone, any questions that you might have for the q and a part tonight. And so, we are so excited, for the second time now to have Mike Cosper with us. Mike is one of the founding pastors of Sojourner and Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Jeffrey Heine:And now he serves as the director of Harbor Media. And it's, through, that media group that, they produce the Cultivated podcast, which I know many of you are familiar with. And if you're not familiar with it, now's now's your chance to get familiar with it. And, not only is Mike one of the writers of different songs that we actually sing as a church family on Sundays in worship, He is also the author of a new book entitled Faith Among the Faithless Learning from Esther, How to Live in a World Gone Mad. And so tonight, we're gonna be engaging some of those ideas and the ideas of what it means to have a theology of cultural engagement to interact with the world around us, those who are believing Christians and those who are not, and how, how are we to be a light in the midst of darkness.
Jeffrey Heine:And so if you would join with me in welcoming Mike
Collin Hansen:Cosper. Thanks. I am, glad to be back here. I was here a couple summers ago for one of these, and it was at a brewing company where it was like all open. And in the room next door, some of you guys probably remember this, the room next door, there was Skee Ball and cheering, and and I had planned, like I was talking about stories, and I had planned on opening up with this like, this really great reading from a Cormac McCarthy novel, that was all about story, and it was real deep.
Collin Hansen:And man, that did not go well. So, being here and being in this space is super encouraging. I love this church. I love love these leaders, and it's been a joy to be a friend to your church over the last few years through Sojourn Network. The general idea of what I wanna talk about tonight, the broad idea I wanna talk about is, how do we love and serve our cities?
Collin Hansen:What does faithful presence in our communities, in our culture, really start to look like? And I'll go ahead and give you the spoiler answer to that question that we'll be exploring from a variety of angles, which is that, I think we we love our cities well, by living with a faithful presence, and by making ourselves vulnerable to the the challenges that come with being a Christian in a culture like ours. And I think faithful presence is a really helpful idea. This idea that we're going to stay faithfully committed to our doctrine, to our ethics, to our practices of spiritual formation and of transformation, in the midst of a world that's increasingly hostile to many of those ideas. So I think a great place for us to look when we, when we talk about that kind of a faithful presence, is to look at the stories that come out of the exile from the old testament.
Collin Hansen:So that's where we'll be. Again, another spoiler. We were talking about, I wrote a book about Esther, and so we will eventually be getting ourselves to the book of Esther. But to set things up, I think we should talk about where we are. A couple of years ago, there was a real simple narrative to describe what was going on in our culture, which is that things were getting, you know, post, post World War 2, post sexual revolution, post technological revolution, things were getting progressively and progressively more progressive, more liberal, more left leaning, more secularized, more hostile towards Christianity, more to hostile towards conservatism as a philosophy and an ideal.
Collin Hansen:The progressives were winning. The, you know, gay marriage became the law, and 3 months later, the next battleground became, you know, transgender use of bathrooms. There was increased pressure happening on churches. There was a moment where the mayor of Houston subpoenaed the sermons of all the churches in the city of Houston to check and see what they were teaching about sexuality. And so Christians felt like the pressure was coming at them, like they were having to sort of withdraw and protect themselves, and then something very strange happened, and that very strange thing is a guy named Donald Trump.
Collin Hansen:Donald Trump comes along, and he galvanizes conservatism, and a certain breed of conservatism, certain brand of conservatism, and everything changes. And so now, we're in this interesting, sort of tense place, where it's hard to really tell a simple narrative about what's happening in our culture. Progressives could no longer claim that the march of history was with them. Christians had a hard time claiming they were being oppressed, since they had just won an election. And so what what you have now, in a certain sense, if you listen to some of the dialogue that's going on, is actually both sides of the cultural debates are arguing that they're in the place of the victim.
Collin Hansen:Progressives are looking at the LGBT community, they're looking at minorities, they're looking at people who sort of live on the fringes of culture, and they're saying, these are the oppressed peoples, we're standing with them, we stand with the victims. Conservatives are looking at the pressure that's been applied to churches, and applied to Christians over the last several years, and they're saying, Look, we're with this oppressed minority, we're the victims. And it ends up being this kind of race for race to the bottom. There's a philosopher named Rene Girard who says that this is the way culture works. It's a back and forth between victims and scapegoats.
Collin Hansen:So the LGBT community is oppressed for decades. They could be coming to this position of victims. The culture as a whole has to rise up and say, What are we gonna do about these oppressed people? We have to find a scapegoat, we have to find someone to blame. So who did they blame?
Collin Hansen:They blamed conservative, particularly evangelical Christians. And so that's where that hostility came from. Christians, on the other hand, have sort of told the same sort of story about themselves, saying, No, because of this pressure that's coming at us from secularisms, we're the victim. And so there's this tension about who the real victim is. David Brooks wrote about this in the New York Times.
Collin Hansen:He writes this, The only reliable way to feel morally justified in our culture is to assume the role of victim. As Wilfred Maclay puts it, claiming victim status is the sole sure means left of absolving oneself and securing one's sense of fundamental moral innocence. If one wishes to be accounted innocent, one must find a way to make the claim that one cannot be morally responsible. This is precisely what the status of victimhood accomplishes. Brooks goes on to say, I'd add that this move takes all the moral striving and politicizes it.
Collin Hansen:Instead of seeing moral struggle as something that happens between you and God, the religious version, or as something that happens between the good and evil within yourself, the classical version, Moral struggle now happens primarily between groups. We see events through the lens of moral Marxism, as a class or ethnic struggle between the evil oppressor and the supposedly innocent oppressed. The moral narrative of colonialism is applied to every situation. The concept of inherited sin is back in common currency, only these days we call it privilege. To be clear, he's not talking specifically about the idea of this concept of white privilege.
Collin Hansen:This concept that's applied to race. It it applies somewhat, but that's not primarily what he's talking about. He's talking about privileged classes. One privileged class that that that you can make the claim if you can make the claim that this class is privileged over another one, then that gives you the right to make the case that you are the real victim, that you're the real one that's in trouble. And then if then if you're the victim, you have the ability to and the and the power to rally the community, to rally the culture to your cause, and to stand up for you.
Collin Hansen:And that's that's in a sense how you win these cultural battles that we're fighting right now. So these days, the privilege gets thrown around as an accusation about everything. The right throws this accusation right back that LGBT folks are privileged minorities now who get special protection and special treatment. And the point is that victimization is the new virtue. So it's a stalemate.
Collin Hansen:Neither victim's grievance can be back off from their convictions. Christians can't change their position, or at least they shouldn't, because they stand as part of a 2000 year tradition that teaches this is how God made the world, this is what God's intentions for humanity are, and these are the ethics to which we're committed. Progressives can't change because they're living out this story of continual progress, that things are getting better and better, and that anything that stands in the way of that progress is is archaic and is problematic. The sexual revolution and its products are seen as fundamental human rights. And so for Christians who are in this place, we're in this kind of we're stuck in this stalemate, we have to figure out some ways to move forward.
Collin Hansen:There's the temptation to assimilate and to say, Okay. We'll give up our ethics in exchange for being able to hold on to some core principles, some core doctrines. We'll give up on what we hold here in order to maintain our place in the culture. Christians could also choose to retreat. They could choose to sort of withdraw into our own communities, block ourselves off from the culture, try to find ways to be more dependent on each other than we are on the outside world.
Collin Hansen:Or we could do what I think is the proper way forward, the better way forward, which is to embrace the vulnerability of this moment, and stay present in a hostile culture. If we look at what happened in the exile, this is, I think exactly what God called the Jews to do when they were exiled from Israel. What happens is, the Babylonians come along and they they sack Jerusalem, and they take captive the majority of, sort of, the elite class of Israelites, and they drag them off. They drag them off into exile, and they ultimately destroy the kingdom, and the Jews are scattered throughout the Babylonian empire. And they spend the next several generations under the oppression of the Babylonians, and under the oppression of, later, the Persians, when the Persians take over from the Babylonians.
Collin Hansen:And in the midst of this, this same kind of tension is taking place. People are saying, Do we assimilate? Do we become like the Babylonians? Or do we withdraw? Do we hold off?
Collin Hansen:Do we not even pack our bags, unpack our bags and just assume that God is gonna come and rescue us? And you had people advocating for this on both sides. And in the midst of this debate, along comes the prophet Jeremiah, and he speaks this into the conflict. He says, Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I've sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and live in them.
Collin Hansen:Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf.
Collin Hansen:For in its welfare, you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream.' So again, some people are sitting there waiting around, these diviners, these prophets, they're saying, God's coming back. God's gonna rescue us. This isn't gonna last very long, so just wait for Yahweh to show up and to take us back home. And Jeremiah says, Don't listen to those folks.
Collin Hansen:Know that we're here. And look at the verbs. You can't see them, but I I can see them. Look at the verbs in the passage. He's telling them to build, to plant, to settle, to marry, to multiply.
Collin Hansen:And if you think about it, it's the creation mandate. Fill the earth and subdue it. Fill the earth and subdue it. He's calling them to live out who they are as God's children in this place. You shouldn't be living differently.
Collin Hansen:You shouldn't be retreating. You shouldn't be assimilating. You should be marrying one another. You should be continuing to sustain your identity as Jews by continuing to give to one another in marriage, your sons, and your daughters. But ultimately, you're called to this place.
Collin Hansen:I want you to plant yourselves there, to settle down, and to try to make it flourish, just like you would make any place else where I would call you to flourish. Now, the ultimate expression of this, of somebody who really does this and does this well, is Daniel. Daniel worked for the thriving of the empire, He never backed down from his Jewish identity. He didn't eat their food. He didn't bow bow to their idols, but he worked for the peace and the prosperity of the realm.
Collin Hansen:And as a result, we have this amazing story of the book of Daniel. And if you listen to a lot of what's going on right now, and conversations about what's happening in our culture, you'll hear a lot of people say, This is our Daniel moment. We need to all be like Daniel right now. We need to have that kind of boldness, and that kind of strength, and we need to speak up and resist these pressures, and live out a Daniel like life. But I think there's a real problem with using Daniel as a model, at least for most of us.
Collin Hansen:Daniel was probably about 15 years old when Jerusalem was sacked, and he was taken off into exile, which means that he spent the formative years of his life within a well established religious and moral world. He lived out the rhythms of Jewish identity in Jerusalem for 15 years. And so he knew what it meant to be a Jew. He knew how to live that life. He was acclimated to not eating these other foods.
Collin Hansen:He was acclimated to not bowing down to other idols. He lived in a distinctly Jewish world for 15 years before he goes into exile. And so he has the reference, he has the point of reference. He has the foundation to resist when these temptations come along. And I think this is exactly what makes it difficult for us to look at Daniel as a foundation for us, or as a model for us.
Collin Hansen:Because most of us, many of us, especially if you didn't grow up in a Christian home, some of us who did grow up in Christian homes that were nominal Christian homes, most of us lacked that kind of formative tradition to prepare us to live in a secular age. Culturally speaking, we're long past the time when Judeo Christian values were a primary shaping influence in our culture. If you look at our formative institutions today, they're all radically secularized, or they're neo pagan. I'm talking about our education systems, our media, and our entertainment culture. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in our politics, which are thoroughly divorced from Christian values.
Collin Hansen:And I say this too about the so called right, the conservative movement. It has radically transformed. It has radically changed in the last decade. Donald Trump is definitely a symptom of that. The head of the party is somebody who in no way represents the moral and ethical values of of Christianity.
Collin Hansen:Another character who's sort of, I think, the next generation version of this is a woman by the name of Tomi Lahren. You may have heard of her, she's on Fox News often. But she represents this new sort of secular right. She's hostile to religion, she's pro choice, and she's radically nationalistic, and falls into the category of being a conservative. And so politics are becoming secularized more and more on both sides of the aisle.
Collin Hansen:Now listen, I wanna be clear that I'm not not saying that you've abandoned the faith if you voted for Donald Trump, and I believe far from that. And I understand that many people went to the ballot box, and they held their nose, and they pulled the lever in hopes for the Supreme Court, and guess what? That has proven to be a helpful thing for religious liberty. I think those things are gonna turn out well. But what I'm concerned about is that conservatism as a philosophy is about conservating certain aspects of our culture, our traditions around education, religion, marriage, family, liberty, equality.
Collin Hansen:And we have to ask, given the radical shifts that have been taking place inside this so called conservative movement, what are we saving? What are we conserving? And what are we losing in these moments? To put it simply, we're secularizing. We're secularizing just as much as the left is, and we're galvanizing ourselves around other values.
Collin Hansen:So back to this idea of exile. If we're surrounded by secular institutions and secular movements, then Christians are a people in exile. We're people without a safe space, in an increasingly tumultuous and hostile culture. So Jeremiah gives us this framework for thinking about faithful presence, living in the midst of this community. And Daniel gives us a picture of it, but Daniel's also problematic because we don't share his formative experiences.
Collin Hansen:So where then can we look? This brings me to the book of Esther. I think Esther is a great place to look when we start to ask these kinds of questions. And in Esther, we see the heroic characters are Mordecai and Esther. And when we look at Esther, we have to be very careful not to misread the book, and not to misunderstand the story.
Collin Hansen:Because Esther gets misread and mistreated often. Most of us know the story of Esther as a Sunday school story about a girl who is this beautiful Jewish girl who wins the heart of the king, and ultimately gets to save the kingdom because of her, you know, because the king loves her so much, and can't bear to see her suffering. That's the Veggie Tales version of this book. And if you read the actual book, it's a whole lot more like Game of Thrones than it is Veggie Tales. The actual story is about power, and sex, and compromise, and murder, and conspiracy.
Collin Hansen:And I'm not gonna read the whole book or go over the whole book today, but I do wanna hit the highlights. So here's an overview of the story of the book of Esther. I encourage you to go home and read it. Esther opens with this massive banquet that this king, King Xerxes, it's variously translated as Xerxes, and a Hashvarosh. Interesting little side note, a Hash Farosh, which is the name that that's often translated, is a pun on a Hebrew word for headache.
Collin Hansen:So this is King Headache. He causes a lot of headaches for the Jewish people. Xerxes is about to go to war against the Greeks, and he is throwing this massive party, basically as a fundraiser, and as a rallying cry to all of the kingdoms in Persia getting ready to go out and to have this war. He summons his wife. There's something suggestive about what's going on, something probably sexually suggestive about what he's asking his wife to come to the banquet and do.
Collin Hansen:We don't really know what it is, but we know that she says no. And because she says no, he he he banishes her. What happens next is he goes on, he goes from there, he goes into the war with the Greeks, and he loses this war. And he comes back home, and he's disgraced, And he also is disgraced because his wife dishonored him, and he doesn't have a wife. And so his advisors trying to cheer him up say, Look, let's find a new queen.
Collin Hansen:We'll bring you every virgin in the kingdom. You can sleep with each one of them, and you can choose the one that you like the best to be the new queen. And again, sometimes people talk about this, and it's like The Bachelor of Persia. But it's really like, Who wants to marry a brutal Near Eastern dictator? And it's a terror campaign.
Collin Hansen:Imagine what it would be like if we woke up tomorrow and heard on the news that some kingdom, somewhere in the world, was kidnapping the daughters of every All the unmarried daughters of every family, and that they were going to belong to the king for the rest of their lives. Because that's the thing. Once they're in the harem, once they've been with the king, they can never know another man ever again. That's the law in Persia. And so it's a terror campaign.
Collin Hansen:It's it's it's kidnap. It's horrifying. And so into this situation, we begin to meet Mordecai and Esther. And in Esther 2, chapter 5, we're introduced to Mordecai with this sentence. It says, Now there was a Jew in Susa the citadel, whose name was Mordecai.
Collin Hansen:Now, if you're a Jew living in, the time that this book is written, or before, and you hear that phrase, it's gonna make your ears hurt. It's gonna make your ears hurt for several reasons. The first is that there's a Jew living in Susa, the citadel. The citadel is the heart of power for the Persian kingdom. This is the southern, the southern palace of of Persia, where the king lived about half the year.
Collin Hansen:And so it's the seat of power. Susa is the seat of power. And the citadel is where essentially, royal officials, important people, soldiers, generals, people who are a part of the political mix, are all living. And so there's somehow a Jew living there, instead of living in the Jewish ghettos where he should have been living. So that should make your ears hurt.
Collin Hansen:Far worse than that is the fact that his name is Mordecai. Because up until this point, Mordecai is not a Jewish name. Mordecai is named after Marduk, a Persian god. So you have a Jew living someplace he's not supposed to live, and he's living without a he's living with a Persian name that's named for a foreign god. It reminds me of this old Jackie Mason joke.
Collin Hansen:He said he said, What is it with American Jews today, and the way they name their daughters? You look around and no one's using Jewish names anymore. You hear names like Tiffany Schwartz or Jessica Lipschitz, the next thing you're gonna hear is somebody named Crucifix Finkelstein. A Jew named Mordecai is like the name Crucifix Finkelstein. It is wrong.
Collin Hansen:It doesn't make sense. So Marduk is named for a Persian god. Esther too, Esther, we're told, has two names. She's named Hadassah, and she's named Esther. And she's Mordecai's cousin who came to live with him because she's an orphan.
Collin Hansen:So what most interpreters tend to say is that her parents, who were Jews, who died for some reason, probably gave her the Jewish name Hadassah. And when she came to live with her cousin Mordecai, he gave her this Persian name, Esther, which is also a name for a Persian god, Astrid. We need to see these 2 people then, that when they're introduced to us, they're introduced to us as profoundly compromised people. So this plan gets announced that the king is going to take all of these, all of these women into his home, and he's going to sleep with every single one of them. And when he picks his favorite, she's going to become the queen.
Collin Hansen:And here we see the contrast between Daniel and Esther. Because when Daniel goes to the kingdom, you know, he refuses to bow to the idols, and he refuses to give up his habits of prayer. He refuses to do anything that compromises his Jewish identity. When this decree goes out, Mordecai, had he been a good, committed Jew, he would have gone to his cousin, and he would have said, We've gotta find some way to resist this, because I'm not gonna let you be fouled by this Persian king, and by all of his rules, and by all of the horrible things that are gonna happen inside his house. Instead, he goes to her and he says, Listen.
Collin Hansen:When you get to the harem, make sure they don't know you're a Jew. Make sure you do everything they tell you to do. Make sure you eat all the food, and you take all the cosmetics, and you do all the beautification routines, and you try to really, really make them like you, and win them over, which she does. And ultimately, that results in her becoming the queen. Again, the contrast is so important.
Collin Hansen:Daniel won't eat the food, and so they're ready to kill him. When Esters get taken into the into the harem, she's told, Make sure and eat the food. Make sure they don't know that you're a Jew. Esther wins the contest. If you read some of the Talmudic commentaries on how that happens, they're downright filthy.
Collin Hansen:But Esther is profoundly compromised. She becomes the queen of Persia. And the next thing that happens in the book is really interesting, and it can be interpreted in a couple of ways. I think it's the first moment in the book that we begin to see a kind of a turning of the tide for these compromised people living in Persia. Esther 2, starting in verse 21, it says this, In those days, as Mordecai was sitting at the king's gate, Big Thin and Teresh, 2 of the king's eunuchs who guarded the threshold, became angry and sought to lay hands on King Xerxes.
Collin Hansen:And this came to the knowledge of Mordecai, and he told it to Esther. And when Esther told the king in the name of Mordecai, when the affair was investigated and found to be so, the men were both hanged on the gallows, and it was recorded in the book of Chronicles in the presence of the king. So a couple things here. First of all, the fact that Mordecai is at the king's gate tells us once again that Mordecai is somehow in a place of influence and a place of power. And we'll find out, it'll be clear in another few verses here in the story, that nobody knows he's Jewish.
Collin Hansen:So he's passing as Persian, and he's living this life at the center of Persian politics and power, and he hears about this assassination plot, and he reports it to the king through Esther. And we it's worth stopping and asking, why would a Jew, an oppressed minority, even one who's only Jewish in secret, stop the murder of this king, who's clearly corrupt, who we know for all kinds of reasons is is erratic, is dangerous, and has no interest for the Jews in mind. One reason may be that he's leveraging for power and influence. One may be that he's trying to protect Esther from something happening in the aftermath. And the third reason it may happen, and this is one that, again, a number of scholars, a number of particularly Jewish scholars of the text say, No, this is a moment where Mordecai starts to turn, because this is an effort to keep the peace and the prosperity of the city.
Collin Hansen:The death of the king, especially the murder of a king, would have thrown the realm into chaos. And there's a good case to be made that this would be Mordecai's motivation. Both for Esther's sake and the sake of the whole realm, it's perhaps a sign that the spirit of Jeremiah 29 isn't totally lost on Mordecai. And it's a preview of what's to come. PS, one unnecessary fact that, underscores that this is more like Game of Thrones than Veggie Tales, is that in the book of Esther, when they talk about hanging you, they're not talking about hanging you from a noose.
Collin Hansen:They're talking about impaling you on a spike, and hanging that up in the air. So again, it's pretty rough. Okay. Moving on. I thought that would get a laugh, so I guess not.
Collin Hansen:So a lot happens. This plot against the king happens. Mordecai foils the plot, and in the aftermath, the king is anxious about this attempt on his life. Early in the book, we see that he's surrounded by these political advisors who are kind of talking him through what to do. But then all of a sudden, in the aftermath of this assassination plot, we're introduced to this character named Haman.
Collin Hansen:And Haman is given essentially absolute authority. And what's happening here is that in the aftermath of the plot, the king is anxious. He doesn't know what's going on inside of his kingdom. He decides, There's one guy I'm gonna put my trust in to make sure that this all gets sorted out, and that the the the turmoil ends, and that nobody else makes an attempt on my life. So I'm gonna trust Haman, and I'm gonna empower him, and and expect him to be able to bring peace, to the realm, to protect me.
Collin Hansen:Again, another Game of Thrones reference. This is sort of like being the hand of the king. He bears all the king's authority, and everywhere he goes, people are supposed to bow down to him. Xerxes is trying to get control, and in order to get control, he empowers Haman. And when we meet Haman, we're told that he's an Agagite.
Collin Hansen:So the Agagites this is an interesting, an interesting term. The Agagites, it's believed, were descendants of Agag, a king who did battle with King Saul, who was himself an Amalekite. The Amalekites, to trace them back, were the first tribe to attack the Jews in the wilderness in the book of Exodus. Now in Jewish tradition, whenever the book of Esther is read, there's a celebration each year called Purim. And at Purim every year, you read the book of Esther.
Collin Hansen:And whenever you read the name of Haman, you're supposed to yell and shout out and blot out the name, so nobody can hear it. So you hiss and you, it's a wild scene. But one of the things that they do is, before they read the book of Esther, they, they read this passage from the book of Deuteronomy. It says, remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you had come out of the land of Egypt, How he met you on the way and attacked your rear, and all those who were faltering behind, and you were faint and weary, and he feared not God. So what the Amalekites did is when the Jews were on the Exodus, when they were on their way to the promised land, the Amalekites attacked them from behind.
Collin Hansen:Not out front where the scouts were, and the soldiers were, and the stronger and the healthy were, but from the back of the, the back of the caravan, where the weak would've been, where the sick would have been, where the old would have been. It was a terror campaign to to frighten them, and to and to demoralize them by attacking their weeks. In a sense, you can see sort of the origins of terrorism in this. Attack the innocent to demoralize the strong. Yoram Hazony, a Jewish philosopher, wrote this about the Amalekites.
Collin Hansen:He said, we have no idea what gods ruled over them. None are named. And for all we know, there may have been none. What we do know is that whatever gods may have belonged to Amalek, as a people, they did not fear any moral boundaries. Unlike the most depraved idolaters of Canaan, they respected no limits on their desire to control all that they saw fit.
Collin Hansen:So by linking Haman to the Amalekites, the author of the book of of Esther is linking them to an historic anti Semitic enemy of the Jews, and to a people who will grasp for power at all costs. So when we see Haman appear, and when the kingdom as a whole is told, Bow to Haman. Everyone has to bow to Haman. What we see is this enshrined idol of power. And everyone has to bow to the idol of power when it appears.
Collin Hansen:And this sets up the great conflict of the book. The king that rules everybody has to bow down to him, and when he appears at the king's gate, everybody does this except for one person, and that's Mordecai. And everybody's going, Mordecai, bow down. What are you thinking? This is not a good move.
Collin Hansen:And he says, I can't bow to him because I'm a Jew. This is the moment he comes out to the crowd and tells them that he's Jewish. Something happens where he can no longer live as a Persian, and he chooses to disobey this law, announcing that the reason that he's must is because he belongs to the people of God. And we need to start to ask ourselves, as we read this story, where are those moments for us? Where are those moments where we look at our own lives, and we look at the compromises in our lives, and the compromises in our culture.
Collin Hansen:And where do we say, I can go no further. I can't bow. I can't bow. We need to see this as a crisis and as an awakening. Haman himself is furious, but he's so murderous that he chooses not to just take out his fury on Mordecai directly.
Collin Hansen:He goes to the king, and he convinces him that the real people, the real problem for him, the real problem for the king are the Jews. Now again, he's been put in power in the aftermath of this assassination plot, and the king is anxious, and he's trying to figure out who's out to get me. So this guy, Haman, is supposed to be the one who's gonna be able to help him out. So Haman comes back to him and reports, I know what's wrong. There's these people who live amongst you, and they don't worship our gods.
Collin Hansen:They don't live like us. We just don't have any reason to trust them. They're called the Jews, and we need to kill them all. And one of the things that that's happening here is, Haman is essentially introducing what we might call political ideology. This is something that appears over and over and over again in history, which is whenever something, whenever culture gets tumultuous, people show up with solutions that are very simple.
Collin Hansen:Listen, we can solve all of the problems of our culture if we just do this one thing, if we can just scapegoat this one thing, or if we can just fix this one issue. So people will come in and say, you know, the real problem here is that we don't have free markets, or the real problem here is that we don't have income equality, or the real problem here is that we haven't been stopping illegals, or the real problem is the oppression of the LGBT community, or or the real problem is that we just need to return to our roots as a Christian nation. We're presented these simplified solutions that say, if we just do this one thing, everything's gonna be okay. And I'm not suggesting that we don't hold to political convictions. I am saying that we should be extremely suspicious when the language around a political idea becomes utopian.
Collin Hansen:The idea that we can fix everything if we just do this one thing. Xerxes is totally taken in by this idea that there's a solution to his anxiety, and it's in destroying the Jews. And so he gives over to that desire. He puts out a command that on this day of this month, everybody needs to go to war against their Jewish neighbors and to kill them. So word spreads about this decree, and Mordecai begins to protest.
Collin Hansen:And he eventually gets word to Esther, that she needs to do something about this. She's gotta stop this plan. She's gotta confront the king. And they're communicating through messengers, and Mordecai tells her to go and to protest, and she says, Listen, I can't go to the king without him inviting me in. It's against the law for me to barge into the king's chambers without permission.
Collin Hansen:If I do that, he can actually kill me. So here's Mordecai's response. This is Esther 4 13 through 16. Mordecai told her servant to reply to Esther, Do not think that you yourself in the king's palace will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise from the Jews from another place.
Collin Hansen:But you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether or not you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Then Esther told him to reply to Mordecai, Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for 3 days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law.
Collin Hansen:And if I perish, I perish. When you hear this story told, people often get very excited about that line, for such a time as this. It's it's, you know, sort of a rallying cry of, you know, God's brought us to this moment, and so for such a time as this, we, you know, need to have a capital campaign or something like that. But seriously, I was in a church that used that verse for that exact reason. It was very disturbing.
Collin Hansen:But I think the I think the most interesting passage here in this is where Mordecai says this. He says, If you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place. But you and your father's house will perish. So he's saying, Look, if you do nothing, God's gonna save the Jews. Which is a wild thing.
Collin Hansen:It's a wild thing, because this is a guy who was profoundly compromised just a few chapters ago, but now something's woken up in him, and he's saying, I trust that God is going to save his people. If you do nothing, God's still gonna show up. So it's this step of faith. But then he tells her, But you and your father's house will perish. And that doesn't seem to make sense that if God's preserving the Jews, how will Esther and her house perish?
Collin Hansen:Well, I think what's happening is that Mordecai is pressing Esther to have the same awakening that he had. If you don't identify with God's people now, in this time, in this moment of crisis, you'll be cut off to you'll be cut off forever. One of God's great promises throughout the scriptures is that he's going to preserve the Jews. Walker Percy wrote about this one time. He said, there's something to the effect of, you you can walk down the streets today, and you won't meet a Midianite, and you won't meet a Canaanite on any streets of any city of the world today, and yet somehow the Jews have been preserved as a people.
Collin Hansen:It was one of God's promises. He's going to preserve them. He's going to protect them. Mordecai is trusting in that. But he warns Esther that her place and that legacy is gonna disappear if she doesn't stand up with the Jews now.
Collin Hansen:Remember, she's an orphan. She's the last in her family, and her family is Jewish. And so he's saying, If you don't stand with us now, you can never stand with us. Your father's house perishes with you. You're a Persian.
Collin Hansen:You'll die a Persian. You lose your heritage. You lose your legacy. And her response, like Mordecai's, is to have an awakening. She uses the same word that Mordecai uses when he says perish, but she inverts it.
Collin Hansen:She promises to go to the king risking her life and says, If I perish, I perish. I will go, but if I perish, I perish. Better to die and be counted among God's people than to live and be cut off from them. She calls for this 3 day fast, and only after that, she approaches the king. And again, this is one of these moments where I think the Sunday school version of the story misses the point.
Collin Hansen:She puts on this gown and she goes before the king. And I think a lot of times when you hear the story told, we're told that she appears before the king and she's so beautiful. She's so beautiful, he can't help but have mercy on her. But think about it. She's gone 3 days without food and water.
Collin Hansen:She's gone 3 days staring down the reality of her death, her imminent death. In one of the rabbinic commentaries on this, it said that during those 3 days, all she did was pray the first line of Psalm 22 over and over again. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When she comes before the king, she's not coming before him in glory and in beauty. She's coming to him in weakness.
Collin Hansen:She's been wrecked by 3 days of fasting and of fear. And she comes in, and she's this vision of this hollow vision, this terrifying vision of fear, of anxiety, of loss. And so it's then that the king says, What's wrong? He has mercy on her, and he begs her to tell him what's wrong. So she invites him to this feast.
Collin Hansen:It's important for us, for our understanding of the story, and for our understanding to to think about the dynamics of the story, to see that she comes not in strength, but in weakness. And I think this is one of the keys to our presence in a post Christian world. Are we willing to accept a posture of weakness and vulnerability? And again, I'm talking about vulnerability here, not victimhood. Victimhood is a way of rallying power to ourselves.
Collin Hansen:How do we present ourselves as the oppressed people so that everybody rallies to ourselves? Vulnerability says, If I perish, I perish. Vulnerability approaches with humility and with genuine risk. Whatever the, you know, whatever the opposition is, whatever the challenge is. Are we willing to risk our reputations, our place in society, our comfort, our wealth, our jobs, and even our lives to be counted amongst God's people in order to do what's good and right for our cities.
Collin Hansen:Vulnerability means we put ourselves in harm's way. We see difficult things. We see frightening things, and we do them anyway for the sake of God, for the sake of his kingdom. I think one of my favorite examples of this, and ironically, I actually got to have her on my podcast this week, if I can plug my podcast one more time tonight, cultivatedpodcast.com. You can sign up for our newsletter.
Collin Hansen:I had a guest this week, her name's Rochelle Starr, and she runs a ministry called Scarlet Hope. And about 10 years ago, in fact, exactly 10 years ago, she had a vision that God was calling her to try to love and serve women serving in the sex industry. So literally, one Tuesday night, she and her friends, three friends, they went to a strip club. They wore no makeup, they wore baggy turtlenecks, but they went to a strip club. Not like a strip club in the off hours, like a strip club with people dancing and men throwing money, and it was a wild scene.
Collin Hansen:And they sat at a table and ordered a Coke, and we're trying to figure out, what do we do? How do we even begin to love on the women in this building? And women were coming over to their table and offering them dances and things like that, and they were like, No, but tell me how you're doing. How's your day going? And they were just totally thrown off, they didn't know what to do, so they'd just walk away.
Collin Hansen:And she says that at one moment, she's sitting there and she just hears the voice of God say, Go over and talk to that man. And so she gets up and she walks across the room to this guy, and she said, I'm here because God told me to do something kind and loving for the women in this place. Can I come back and bring them a home cooked meal? And the guy was like, What? She didn't plan that.
Collin Hansen:She walked over there and that came out of her mouth. And so the guy's like, Sure, come back on Thursday night. If you wanna bring home cooked food for the girls, that's I don't have a problem with that. He's like, I'm kind of surprised. Like, the only Christians that I've ever seen have been standing outside the club with signs yelling at our patrons.
Collin Hansen:But if you want to come and do this, we'll totally welcome you. Well, 10 years later, they do this in 27 strip clubs in the city of Louisville, and they do it in strip clubs in Cincinnati, Reno, and Las Vegas. Every Thursday night, an army of women makes home cooked meals. They go into these places, these places that we would think Christians should never go. They go into these places, they served home cooked meals, and they tell people that Jesus loves them, that their lives have dignity and worth, and they listen to their stories, and their stories will break your heart.
Collin Hansen:That's what it means to be vulnerable. That's vulnerability, not victimhood. That's going to the dark and the spoiling places of our world and putting ourselves at risk. And you know what? And it's also saying, If I perish, I perish.
Collin Hansen:Rochelle has horror stories about being threatened by club owners when girls quit the job, being threatened with knives by angry girls, being threatened by drug dealers. This is not, you know, this is not a peachy keen Mary Poppins kind of situation. It's very real, it's very gritty. But it's putting themselves she's putting herself in a place of vulnerability for the sake of God's kingdom. Vulnerability means being in a hostile culture and listening to the words, build, settle down, increase, don't decrease, seek the peace and prosperity of the city.
Collin Hansen:It means, I think, what Mordecai did early in the story, when he worked to to foil a plot against the king, was seeking the peace and the prosperity of the city. Esther, going to the king and trying to end an assassination or a and end a plot to annihilate the Jews, is seeking the peace and the prosperity of the city. It's risky, but we do it anyway. We might say, if I try to work in this field, or if I try to live in this part of the city, or if I try to serve this kind of community, the anti Christian progressives are gonna come after me. If we try to maintain a faithful presence in the post Christian world, we're gonna be oppressed, or we're gonna be laughed at, or we're gonna be shamed and humiliated.
Collin Hansen:And I think the invitation to us is to do it anyway. To build houses, to settle down, and to seek the peace and prosperity of the city, and to not get caught up in the scapegoating that happens. Don't brag about being victimized. Focus instead on loving and serving where we're called, and loving and serving in the midst of exile. What happens next in in Esther's story moving very quickly is that Haman's grasp for power turns against him.
Collin Hansen:The king, the the the Esther makes her appeal to the king. She brings him to this feast, and she she makes this appeal. And long story short, Haman's own plot turns against him. He had built a gallows, which was one of these spikes. He had built a gallows to kill Mordecai on it on that on that day, and he ends up being hung on it himself.
Collin Hansen:And there's a big lesson about power in all of this. And again, I think this grasping for power is the contrast with the vulnerability. For Haman, it was grasping at more and more power, more and more destruction, more and more, forcing the forcing the kingdom to bow to himself. That's contrasted with Esther, who weakens herself, who goes before the king and risks her life. One of the commentaries said that that having power is like having a pet crocodile.
Collin Hansen:You feed it and you feed it, until you have nothing left to feed it, and it eats you. So Haman's dead, Xerxes appoints Mordecai as his new second hand, and he brings back his advisors. At the end of the book, you see that he's surrounded once again by a council, rather than putting all power into the hands of 1 man. And Esther actually has to go back again. This is hard to deal with in the text, because things go kinda quickly in the text, but you actually see that Esther goes twice to the king to appeal on behalf of God's people.
Collin Hansen:And that's an interesting point, because once she's risked her life, somehow or other, it's easier. There's less anxiety about going and risking her life a second time. And this time the king relents and he says, Look, we can't revoke the command, but we can allow the Jews to defend themselves. And so the day happens, and this battle breaks out between the antisemites who want the Jews gone, and the Jews themselves, and the Jews win. And Persia is now a safer and more peaceful realm as a result.
Collin Hansen:This whole series of events gets celebrated in Purim, and I could do a whole talk about Purim, because Purim is the inauguration of a new formative practice. We've gone through this crisis as God's people. We've risked ourselves. We've almost been destroyed. God saved us.
Collin Hansen:How are we gonna commemorate this? We're gonna have a new celebration that every year we come back to, and we remember what God has done. It's a new formative thing. We need those kinds of traditions. We need things that we come back to again and again, to retell the stories of what God has done in our lives to redeem us.
Collin Hansen:And more or less, that's the end of the story, at least so far as we're gonna get into it today. Some some final thoughts, and I'll wrap up. One thing to see in this is that compromised people are not written out of God's story. If you're somebody who can totally identify with Esther and Mordecai, living a life distant from God, living a life without those formative traditions, living a life where you feel the the push and pull of secularism in your own heart. Know that you're not written out of God's story, and that in fact, God can use you in marvelous and miraculous ways.
Collin Hansen:Know as well that being counted amongst God's people is a life and death decision. Look at the story and see that power isn't an evil in itself. Esther and Mordecai end up being incredibly powerful people at the end of the story. But power for power's sake is suicidal. If our posture in our culture is to seek power for its own sake, we'll be we'll be adopting a pet crocodile, and the day will come when it will eat you.
Collin Hansen:And I think some of the things that are happening right now in our culture are those kinds of consequences. Our own power grabbing tactics from the eighties nineties, I'm talking about evangelicalism as a whole, our own power grabbing tactics from the eighties nineties are being turned against us, and it's the the result is the kind of pressure that we feel now. Remember that vulnerability is different than victimhood. It means embracing risk for the sake of others, for the sake of God's kingdom, or for the sake of flourishing. We need soft hearts, open hearts, even while we remain committed to our identity as God's people.
Collin Hansen:And we need to remember that embracing vulnerability and weakness is the pathway to overcoming the powers of evil in the world. It's exactly what Jesus did. This is what Philippians is talking about in Philippians chapter 2, when it says, have this mind among you, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him.
Collin Hansen:That's the ultimate expression of weakness in the face of power. He had power. He had power to grasp, but he gave it up. And it was through weakness, it was through making himself vulnerable, that he did an ultimate act of redemption. And that's an invitation for us.
Collin Hansen:Like Purim, Christians need to embrace formative traditions that will help us and our children, and our children's children remember our faith and preserve our faith in days to come. One comment I'm gonna skip for now. We need to be firmly rooted in our Christian heritage and convictions. We need to be vulnerable and open hearted, willing to risk our lives and comfort for the sake of others. There's a story that's being told in our culture about who Christians are.
Collin Hansen:If we wanna change that story, we need to live a better story, and I think this might be a way forward. Thanks for listening.
Jeffrey Heine:5 minute break. There's some more drinks and I think a little bit of Big Spoon Creamery still over there. And then we'll, gather back up for q and a in 5 minutes. All right. So, yeah.
Jeffrey Heine:The way this is going to work out is, if you want to raise your hand when you got a question, we'll bring a mic over to you, because this is being recorded and everything. And so that way, we can, get the back and forth, on the podcast. But, raise your hand. We'll bring a microphone over to you. Ask your question.
Jeffrey Heine:And then we'll, keep it moving from there. Sound good? Alright. So who's going to be the brave bold person for such a time as this to be asking a question? Who wants to go for it?
Jeffrey Heine:Got one over here.
Speaker 3:Thank you for, your remarks. It was really good. I'm interested. Corporate America has become increasingly secular. You have a lot of companies that are taking stances on issues that they previously wouldn't have.
Speaker 3:I'm interested for advice on someone that maybe works for a big public company, and they've taken a stance on an issue? How do you balance being engaged and, you know, being there, being a part of a company versus, as a believer, a stance that you don't agree with?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. That's a really hard question. I think, you know, I think there's gonna be Okay. So the first thing I would wanna say is that, with any of these questions, and probably I'm probably gonna say this a lot tonight, is there's a really important role for conscience and community to play in in all of this. The territory we start to get into with questions like yours, are questions of Christian liberty.
Collin Hansen:Do I have the freedom to do this? So for instance, do I have the freedom to work at my job if my company is, funding a political action group that's doing something that I'm diametrically opposed to? Do I have the freedom to do that? That's something to wrestle through. And my argument would be, you know, in all likelihood, if you had to ask me tonight, which you did.
Collin Hansen:My argument would be, the freedom is there. The question becomes a matter of conscience. Are you free to do that? And so that's where we can look at, you know, the book, you know, the letters to the Corinthians about food sacrificed to idols. What you had, you know, that's such an important story for thinking about cultural presence and these kinds of sticky issues.
Collin Hansen:The situation you had is you had these temples where animals were being sacrificed to idols over fire pits, And when the meat was finished, when the ceremonies were finished, the meat that was cooked would be taken out to the streets and sold, oftentimes kinda sold to the poor. And so there were people in the church who were eating this, buying this food and eating it. And there were people in this church who were saying, You can't eat that food that's been sacrificed to an idol. That's idolatry. You're participating in it.
Collin Hansen:And Paul has a very generous posture in this essentially saying, those whose consciences permit them, you know, if you can eat that food without your conscience being pricked, to think that you're somehow participating in the worship of an idol, then by all means, eat that food for the glory of God, because you know that God made that food, and you know, that ultimately it's good. If your conscience is, you know, so bothered by this, so bothered by where it comes from, that you can't give glory to God in doing it, then you, you know, then don't eat the food. I think a similar That should be a similar way that we frame a question like that. Is your conscience so seared by the work that you're doing well? You could make the argument, I'm working for this company, I'm making money for this company, I'm helping them flourish, and those profits are going to these places that I have a problem with.
Collin Hansen:I don't wanna do that. You could also frame the question the other way and go, I work for this company, here are the products this company makes, and the services this company offers, and the ways that it's serving the city, and providing jobs for other people, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You can trace those threads in a lot of different directions. And I think that's necessary work. So that's gonna sort of feed your conscience.
Collin Hansen:And the second thing you need is, you need community around you that you can process those things with. Those two things are like the crucial ingredients. Well, the 3 crucial ingredients, I argue, for how we navigate Christian liberty questions are our context, where am I? Our conscience, how do I feel about this? What's my gut telling me about this?
Collin Hansen:And then my community, what are the people around me? What kind of counsel am I getting there? So, that complicates your question, but I think that's the best answer I can give. If that helped. No.
Collin Hansen:Did not help.
Speaker 4:So you talked about, I guess, kind of vulnerability in general and, the cultural presence requires vulnerability. Yeah. And I guess, when you're talking about cultural engagement, in this case, kind of more about political structures, stuff like that. Jeff also mentioned in the intro that y'all do a lot of stuff with music and the arts and Mhmm. So on about that.
Speaker 4:So how do you kind of translate, as you're working with, say, music, how do you kind of translate that vulnerability into that sphere? How do you make something that's present in the community that, I mean, is a way of building up the society Yeah. Around you artistically, contributing to the common welfare while also showing that vulnerability?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. I think it means, it primarily means showing up. So I think, I think one of the temptations for Christians in our culture right now, and our temptation for Christian artists, in the days going forward, is gonna be to build insular ecosystems. So, in a sense, this already exists, the Christian subculture. So we can, you can become a rock and roll star, and never meet a non Christian.
Collin Hansen:Because you sell your records at Lifeway bookstore, and you only play churches, and Christian festivals, and things like that. I'm not saying there's not a place for that kind of ministry. There's totally a place for that kind of ministry. I would wanna challenge artists, missionally though, to think about, how do we, do we, do we have to live in such an insular and isolated way? It's scary to make music from a Christian worldview, and go into our cities, and into our cities' music scenes, and try to be a part of that.
Collin Hansen:Because what's gonna happen is, when people hear you singing about Jesus I mean, this happens to my friends that are musicians all the time. They hear, you're singing about Jesus. I'm not sure about this Jesus stuff. I'm not sure about you now. What do you think about gay marriage?
Collin Hansen:It's like the first question for Christian artists. It sounds like I'm making that up, but I'm just not. Like it happens all the time. And so the willingness just to show up, and to kinda navigate the pressures and tensions that come along with that, into a local music scene, are huge. And I think what the opportunity is, to show up, answer the questions honestly, and keep showing up.
Collin Hansen:Keep making yourself a part of the scene. A group who I think does this, a beautiful example of this, who ironically are gonna be One of the members is gonna be appearing on Cultivated Podcast here in just a couple of weeks. It's a group called Alert 312. They're a hip hop group from Chicago, and they're on Humble Beast Records. So they have a presence in kind of the Christian music scene, because they're on Humble Beast, and they tour with some of those artists.
Collin Hansen:But their primary scene is the Chicago hip hop scene, which is a big local music scene. They play block parties, they play festivals, they play, and they're right in there. Like, they're singing very, you know, overtly Christian lyrics in the midst of contexts where they're definitely the only guys talking about Jesus. But their craft You know, and this is the second thing that's really important. If you wanna be faithfully present as a Christian in the arts, in your city's art scene, whether you're a musician, or a painter, or an actor, or whatever it is, really, you've gotta pay attention to your craft.
Collin Hansen:Because if you show up and you say, you know, I'm a Christian, the first thing they're gonna ask are the sort of hostile questions. The second thing they're gonna do is look at your craft. And if your craft If you can't hang in the scene, then maybe don't even bother showing up in the first place, because it hurts the witness. Like develop your craft so you're ready to be part of that kind of a community. And then, and then I think what I've seen in talking to Christian artists over the last few years, especially, is that people who do the craft really well, whatever it is, find a way to survive in a quote unquote secular context, regardless, because you can't deny excellence.
Collin Hansen:So, yeah. Does that answer your question? Okay.
Speaker 5:I'm I'm standing right in front of you, so I feel awkward holding this because this is for everybody else. So, I think that there are a lot of times, there are issues from a conservative standpoint that seem to be like that we hold or that conservatives hold, the only kind of sanctity of life issues when it comes to voting or or like social issues for those that are marginalized, but it really seems that both sides are trying to tackle those issues. And, when it comes to appreciating the sanctity of life or, serving those or taking care of those who are marginalized, that seems to be like a very Christian principle. Right? And both sides are trying to tackle that.
Speaker 5:So how do we as believers, approach voting or participating in politics when it comes to, taking care of issues that at first glance seem like there's only one side that does that better than others. But really when you start to think about it and talk about it, you're like, well, when it purely comes to 60 life or taking care of serving others, there are people who are trying to do it from all different sides. So how do we vote for maybe imperfect candidates, or how do we participate in politics Yeah. Under that approach?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. I think, unfortunately, I think the answer to that question is is to say that we, we need a strategy for the next 3 or 4 decades, to get to a place where we're gonna be able to, like, vote our consciences that way. You know, both parties are running away from Christian ethics in certain ways. Both parties are holding on to Christian ethics in certain ways. And, you know, there's a great group of folks called the and campaign, that are talking about this, and writing about this, and basically saying, Look, we want both.
Collin Hansen:We don't wanna have to choose between caring for the poor and the marginalized, and caring about pro life issues. But I, you know, I think political, you know, to get to the place where that kind of an option even exists on the ballot box is, you know, the answer to that is we need some kind of political movement. We need some we need yeah. We need some kind of political movement. And that's probably gonna start small and start local.
Collin Hansen:And it's probably gonna start with, you know, with people who have those kinds of convictions being willing to put themselves at risk and go, okay, I'm gonna throw my name in the hat, you know, with an election or a primary or whatever, and I'm gonna openly stand for these two things, against the odds, knowing that I'm gonna alienate half of my constituency, for one reason or another, and taking those risks. And I think I just think it's a process that's If we ever wanna see that on a national scale, that's a process that's gonna take a few decades of really hard work. And the unfortunate thing that I think, you know, the fact that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. I think what that reveals is that there's not a lot of will power, you know, in place already for that kind of a movement. There may be, in the next generation, because that's the other thing that's interesting.
Collin Hansen:If you break down the numbers again and go, Well, who voted? And if you expand the numbers and you go, Well, what about non white evangelicals? Who did they vote for? You know, there seems to be possibilities. But the question is, how do you sort of pull those different constituencies together, and align them, and mobilize them.
Collin Hansen:And in America, to do that, it takes just a tremendous amount of time and money. And, you know, that doesn't seem to be where those assets are realized right now. So available right now. So, yeah, that's the depressing answer to that question.
Speaker 6:I'm interested in your thoughts on using or embracing the term evangelical now that, I guess, in the broader culture, that has taken on some new connotations, some of which, we may not be completely comfortable with?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. I don't know. Who owns the words? You know, who owns the language? Right?
Collin Hansen:I think when you define evangelical as a, primarily as a set of theological convictions, then you have to say you have to kind of end up going like, Yeah, I am one of those, and so are these people over here, and I really disagree with them. But I'm lumped in with them anyway. Because I don't wanna exclude them from the camp that's holding this set of theological convictions. Like, I also want to say that I think that it's important that evangelicals need to have a big fight over what that term means, and what the public theology that is attached to that term means. Like, that fight is happening, and there are people like, you know, Russ Moore, and Thabidi Anya Buile, and others who are really sort of raising big big stakes questions around this.
Collin Hansen:Beth Moore is is really raising a lot of questions around this, in a way that I think is helpful. And so, I think it's a fight worth having, rather than abandoning the term. Because if you kinda come back to the core of where did the term come from, and if you want more information on that, you should ask Colin Hansen. If you want to really understand where the term kinda came from, there's something about the movement that it arose out of that I think is worth trying to sort of, let's fight for the word, let's fight for the movement, let's, you know And I say that now, and you know, 2 years from now, if I'm on the team that has lost that fight, then I'll probably say, Oh, forget it. It's ruined.
Collin Hansen:They've ruined it. Let's move on. Let's find something else. But I mean, I think I don't think we're there yet. So, I don't think I think, I'm hopeful that the divisions can be bridged.
Collin Hansen:And I'm expecting that I'm expecting that things are gonna go very bad for conservative evangelicals for a while, And that that'll be the thing that reunites conservative evangelicals. That's my expectation for where we are.
Speaker 7:When you said, we all come to this moment where we say, I can go no further. I cannot bow. I was wondering if, like, you had a personal story of where you came to that question and you had to answer it. And if you would be willing to share, that'd be cool.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. So Sojourn Church in Louisville ran an art center for a few years. And it was called the 930 Art Center, and we had a couple of it was a 3 story building. We had 2 art galleries on the 1st floor, 2 music venues, studio spaces, you know, office spaces that were rented by everything from visual artists, to a skateboard company, to a documentary film company. And this was our Sunday facility, but throughout the week it was this art center.
Collin Hansen:And we, for for several years, the thing really thrived. We partnered with local radio stations and promoters, and brought in all kinds of music, you know, from, you know, some Christian acts, a lot of non Christian acts. Christian artists, a lot of non Christian artists. Probably more non Christian stuff than Christian. And we'd been going for about 3 years, and a local newspaper wanted to do a story on us.
Collin Hansen:And, you know, it was It's a very left leaning local weekly. And so they came in and they were doing interviews with our pastors and all this kind of stuff. And there was this very like, you know, there was this point in the conversation where he's like, So tell me what you think about homosexuality. And you know, we were honest with him, we were upfront with him. And then we just kind of said, look, is that what this whole story is gonna be about?
Collin Hansen:You know, is this just a chance to kind of out us? And he's like, No, no, no, no. I would never do that to you. You know, like, that's not what this is about. And the piece published the next week, and the title of the article was, Smells Like Holy Spirit.
Collin Hansen:They're young, hip, socially engaged, and they think it's a sin to be gay. Like front page of the newspaper, you know? And it was this moment for me personally, because he said a number of things that were untrue about us, and exaggerated about us, and all of this, where, you know, my I had to, like, over and over again with promoters and with artists and with other people, kind of be willing to say, hey, is this true about you? And go, yeah. Yes.
Collin Hansen:Ultimately, it is true about us. You know? Instead of hemming and hawing and caging. But also had to engage, you know, very publicly in in a series of sort of back and forth letters to the editor, to the paper, trying to trying to clear up, like, hey, you've lumped us in this camp, and that's not really who we are, and and all of that. And it led to Ultimately, it led to getting enough activists angry enough that we ended up having to shut down the art center.
Collin Hansen:Every time we'd book an artist, they'd get spammed by emails from activists saying, You can't play there. They hate gay people. They're a bunch of bigots. You know, and all this kind of stuff. And, so it it dwindled down to where, you know, we could only do Christian shows, and we were like, that's not why we opened this place.
Collin Hansen:We opened this place to be serve the whole community. They don't want us to serve the whole community, so we'll find other use for the space. And so, that's the That was like the biggest It was very public, and it was very, you know, I live in the neighborhood with At the time, I lived in the neighborhood with the art center. You know, everybody knew who I was, primarily connected to the art center, and they kinda knew about the church. And so it was this very It was 2 months of very hard conversations with a lot of my non Christian friends that, you know, burned a lot of those bridges.
Collin Hansen:And as I wrote, you know, this talk and thought about some of these things, like one of the questions that always comes up for me in this stuff is, would I do it over again? And I'd like to think that if the opportunity arose, I would do it again. I'd do it anyway. Because I think what it said about who we were as a people, to try to have that center and serve the community that way, What it said about the values of our community, to try to embrace the arts and celebrate the arts, was worthwhile. And if if we had the chance to do it again, or do it over again, or whatever, I would still wanna do it.
Collin Hansen:Even knowing how, you know, how difficult and potentially the opposition can be. Yeah. Over here.
Speaker 8:Hey. So, Paul talks about going into communities, to the marketplaces, knowing the, people there before engaging them in the message of Christ. He talks about becoming like a slave though he was free, being like a Jew though he wasn't a Jew, and yet keeping God's principles. Can you give a modern day example of that and how to go about it?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Yeah. I think it's it's tricky. You know, ultimately, I think what where that conversation goes in terms of where we are now, is kind of contextualization. So to go to a like, sort of a wild example of this, You know, I have a friend who works in, who works in the, who works in South Africa South America, and he's a missionary to unreached, unengaged, uncontacted, I think is what the the third you is.
Collin Hansen:People groups. And so these guys go in, and they get in canoes, and they go down the river for miles and miles and miles, and then they climb up, you know, climb up into the mountains, and then they've befriended certain tribes, and they've reached certain tribes, and then they go with these guys, and they go way even further, you know, into the jungles. And they try to find these people that like, anthropologists haven't even found yet. You know? When he goes there, he knows there's a certain, there's a certain, there's a certain etiquette that he has to employ just to get out alive.
Collin Hansen:You know, because these people are very hostile to outsiders. So part of it is that, you know, he goes with these other tribes who are somewhat familiar with this kind of etiquette and this sort of thing. So you go in, and you try to embody to the extent that you can. But the reason I think it's a helpful example is, there's a limit to how far you can go with any of that. Right?
Collin Hansen:So God's sending him to these people, but he can't fully embody who they are in order to reach them. There's There, you know And this would have been true of Paul as well. Like, Paul, you know, Paul is saying, I become like a slave. I mean, there's an element of like a polemic to that, right? And And so I think we have to sort of think about it that way, in that, I'm going to go into this community.
Collin Hansen:I'm gonna try to understand, you know, whatever my context is. Whether it's suburbia, whether it's, hipsters living in the inner city, whether it's, you know, whether God's calling me to, you know, in Louisville, you know, we have a neighborhood called Smoketown, where a bunch of people from our church have moved in, and And it's a predominantly African American neighborhood. There's so far that they can go to love and serve those neighbors. But if they go too far, in trying to sort of embody the culture of Smoketown, it's gonna come off as fake, it's gonna come off as problematic. Right?
Collin Hansen:All I have to say, I think it's a giant spectrum. Culture is a spectrum. All of culture is a spectrum. It's always transitioning. It's always, you know, culture is always sort of a melting pot of elements of this culture are mixed with that culture.
Collin Hansen:You know, I'm kind of rambling here. I'm sorry. What I'm trying to get at is, I think we have to look for the ways that we can embody, the normal ways of cultural expression in any community where God is calling us. And some of that's gonna be putting to death some of our preferences, in order to to be a part and to serve, you know? But there's always a limit to how far that goes.
Collin Hansen:Both in that, we don't, at any point, have the liberty to compromise our moral and ethical convictions. And also, we can't help being a particular person, from a particular place, who carries that cultural embodiment with them, into whatever context we go. Does that make sense? That was a really long answer. I should have just said that, not share the other stories, but there you go.
Speaker 9:Thanks. So this summer, as a congregation, we've talked a lot about prayer.
Collin Hansen:About what?
Speaker 7:Prayer.
Collin Hansen:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So how has thinking critically about these issues as you've grown in your understanding and as you engage with your community in this way, how has it changed your prayer life?
Collin Hansen:Oh, that's a great question. I take really seriously the You know, especially over the last few years, I've taken really seriously the call to pray for our leaders. You know, political leaders. Because God can change hearts, and, you know, wouldn't that be a great story if suddenly a whole host of political leaders had changed hearts, and wanted to work for unity, and wanted to work for human flourishing, and wanted to, etcetera, etcetera. So I take that very seriously.
Collin Hansen:And then, I find myself praying for protection for the church in this season. Like, just sort of broadly praying, like, that God would protect us from compromise, and that God would protect us from trials, from people coming at us. Because follow the work of an organization like ADF, they're the legal fund that basically, anytime there's a religious liberty case, those are the lawyers that are gonna show up to argue the case before the Supreme Court. If you follow their work, it is kind of frightening. Or if you read Rod Dreher, it's kind of frightening.
Collin Hansen:Like, there are a lot of hostile parties taking aim at religious liberty, and at Christians. And so, I think it's caused me to pray a lot for like, Lord, just protect us from the consequences that could come from, you know, angry folks coming at us. So, yeah.
Speaker 10:Over here. Oh. How are you doing? I just have the mic. So Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So one one of the things going on in our culture is this, like, dehumanization of the other. Like you see it in where it's being combated with things like the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter where these people that have been oppressed are rallying and trying to
Jeffrey Heine:Yep.
Speaker 10:Be human and the broader culture. And I think one of the sneaky ways that gets into evangelicalism is this idea that there's this other that is oppressing our beliefs. And and there's this very real reality where culture, like the culture that we live in, is is not a Christian culture. It doesn't it doesn't agree with a lot of the tenants of Christianity. But one, or at least I find one of the back nor the words are hard, one of the downfalls of that is that it tends to, in broader evangelicalism, we tend to dehumanize those that disagree with us, or that, hold those views.
Speaker 10:And so in instead of engaging with them, it's easier to just I don't really know what I'm trying to ask other than, like, how do we how do we
Collin Hansen:Yeah.
Speaker 10:How do we not, how do we hold that to be true? We agree. The culture that we live in does not affirm our conservative Christian beliefs with while also still being able to engage with people that don't agree with everything that we think.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. So Yeah. I think, so I think the broad categories are like a necessary way of talking about cultural movements. So when you say a phrase like conservatives or progressives or evangelicals, it's like, you kinda can't talk about cultural dynamics without using some of those broad categories. But then, when it comes to the ways that for 95% of us, when it comes to the ways that those issues actually affect us, they affect us in personal relationships primarily.
Collin Hansen:And at that point, you go back to Jesus, and the question, who's my neighbor? And I think this brings you back to sort of the question of vulnerability, which is, you know, when we see our neighbor, you know, lying in a ditch and this happens to be a person who's extremely hostile, you know, been extremely hostile to us for a variety of reasons, are we willing to get off our donkeys and help? So, I think there is a need for conversation that's generalized about, you know, about sort of American tribalism. But I think when the rubber hits the road, it really comes down to the particulars of how am I seeking to love my neighbor. What are the opportunities that God has put in front of me to connect with, and love, and serve, and sacrifice for the sake of somebody who's, you know, doesn't believe like I do, doesn't think like I do, doesn't, you know maybe doesn't want me around.
Collin Hansen:Am I willing to put myself at risk and try to sort of pursue relationship and pursue opportunities to serve? So, I totally agree with you. I think it's super Like, the danger of the broad categories is that it does just create this ugly other that's easily sort of dismissed, and criticized, and all of this. So we need the categories. We need the particularization of, these are the people that are in my life that I can actually connect with.
Collin Hansen:And, you know, and then we need the capacity for risk that says, I will engage them. I will love them. I will I will seek to serve them. Because what that serves to do is to temper some of the, you know, the tendency towards hostility based on these broad, broad categories. That's what makes cable news just so toxic, is it's built around charging up angry tribalism.
Collin Hansen:And what ends up happening is people live in a vacuum where they only watch this news channel, and they only, you know, read this news website that's skewed in the same way as the news channel that they read. And they walk around, they look at their phones all day, and when they're home, they stay inside and watch their TVs. And point being is that, we've come to this place where technologically, we're so plugged in all the time, that we're actually disconnected from neighbors. And the ability to particularize somebody who disagrees with me, is disappearing. Because we live in these vacuums.
Collin Hansen:And we live in these increasingly polarized vacuums. And if we wanna break that, let's find a way to build community in our cities, where people who don't like each other have an opportunity to have a cookout together. That could be extremely transformative. So, yeah. Alright.
Speaker 11:You mentioned you mentioned Rod Dreher. This this might require some, a bit of explanation, but, he is a proponent of the Benedict Option. Yep. Are there aspects of that that you are sympathetic to and that, even as kind of what you're putting forth, the Esther option, that you believe, part of what he is, as a proponent of the Benedict Option, that the church should adopt in a way to, to survive and and, in many cases, thrive in a in a secular age.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Yeah. So So there's a columnist, a columnist for the American Conservative. His name is Rod Dreher. He wrote a book called The Benedict Option.
Collin Hansen:He wrote probably 200 columns at the American Conservative about the Benedict Option. But don't worry, you don't need to read any of them. You can just read Colin Hansen's review of the Benedict Option at the Gospel Coalition website, and you will know all you need to know. The gist of this is, you know, he he points to Benedict, Saint Benedict, and essentially says, you know, Benedict saw the dark ages coming, and so he formed the monastery as this And this is really really summing up in a very general way. But he formed the monastery as this sort of, you know, basically like It was like this idea of like, we're gonna build an ark of Christian civilization that's going to be able to survive the dark ages.
Collin Hansen:And so, Rod is, in a very alarmist way, saying, this is our cultural moment. We are at the point where the next dark ages is coming, because we are seeing the moral collapse of the West. And he's convincing, at times, and disturbing at times, and at other times, he's infuriating and very wrong about some things. The argument though, the general argument is that what we should be doing The more specific argument is, what we should be doing is shoring up our Christian institutions. So we need better Christian schools.
Collin Hansen:We need better churches that are doing better formative practices, and actually making disciples. We need we need to build networks of, you know, of of businesses and and associations and that sort of thing, so that, when, you know, when everybody wakes up one day and says, we're not doing business with Christians anymore because they're all a bunch of bigots. There needs to be a network of, you know, amongst the Christian community that where they can depend on one another and still survive. And he has a lot of other sort of versions of that. So, what do I think of the benefit option?
Collin Hansen:Like, I'm pretty sympathetic to it, but I'm also like, there's a part of me that just says, we should just be doing this anyway. We should be building better churches that are better formative communities in the first place. We should be figuring out ways to do formative practices and formative education of our children with a Christian worldview, we should be doing that anyway. And I think what Rod's right about is that there were some ways, there were some ways in which Western culture did this better in the past than they're doing it now. But I think it's a matter of sort of calling for renewal, rather than calling for, you know, calling for sort of this radical, almost escapist plan for how we survive the future.
Collin Hansen:So I'm sympathetic to it. I think he has a lot of good things to say. I think his critiques of what's happening, and his his sense of the pulse of what's happening is, is more right than wrong. And that's where I think we have to be very serious about, like, when Like when I say vulnerability, I mean, real vulnerability, real risk because people like Because a large segment of our population is very hostile to the things that we believe, and statistically speaking, you know, demographically speaking, that segment is growing, and is likely, you know, is likely to continue growing unless something changes. Now, with that said, things can change on a dime.
Collin Hansen:I had a conversation with, doctor Albert Mohler about this a while back, and we were talking about just this kind of thing. And, you know, and I was just saying, I mean, you look at the trajectory, you know, how bad is it gonna get? And he kind of shrugged his shoulders and he goes, who knows? It could turn around tomorrow because revival could break out. You just don't know.
Collin Hansen:Culture changes so fast. All kinds of factors could change it. A natural disaster, a war, a political scandal and crisis. There's all kinds of things that could happen tomorrow that could totally shift the tide of what's happening. So we just don't know.
Collin Hansen:What's a good thing for us to do? Make disciples, share the gospel, put ourselves at risk for the sake of our neighbors. Those were always our our call and responsibility, regardless of what's going on around us. So let's double down our commitment to those things, knowing that whatever else is happening, we're doing the work that is building the church and making the kingdom present in the cities around us.
Speaker 7:I would just love to hear, basically, a summary of how it is or why it is that, the Lord put on your heart for this to specifically be your ministry, and on that note, what is your, like, big picture best scenario of what you would hope us as listeners would do as we walk out the door?
Collin Hansen:In terms of, like, in terms of, like, cultural engagement as my ministry. Is that I had a pastor. Yeah. Yeah. I would say, honestly, the story I shared earlier about the 9:30 Art Center and that getting closed down, That was a real milestone in my life, that I didn't know what to do with for a very long time.
Collin Hansen:I'm passionate about culture. I'm passionate about the arts and storytelling. I've seen so much, you know, I've seen the struggles that Christian artists have had in in their spaces. And I tend to think that what's happening in the world of the, the world of the arts is usually just that's usually the leading edge of where culture's going. And so my my sense from just watching what was happening with my friends that were artists, made me feel like, oh, this is gonna be, you know, the right to be there is gonna be contested in other spaces too.
Collin Hansen:You know, so your right to be there as a musician, and the music scene, if you're a Christian, is contested in a lot of places. That's probably, in the future, gonna be true about doctors, lawyers, politicians, teachers, if Again, if things kind of hold the line. So so those kinds of concerns, I think, have led me to to think, like, I really want to devote as much as I can to helping Christians think through faithful presence and, you know, being being able to to stick it out and to suffer what what may come. And if there's anything you walk away with tonight, you know, we'll go back to Esther, and we will go back to For such a time as this. Because that phrase is really That phrase is really about God's providence, and putting someone in a particular place, at a particular time, for a particular purpose, which is actually true for all of us.
Collin Hansen:God puts us wherever he he puts us for a reason. And the smartest thing that we could do is figure out, how do I present an image of Christ through my person, through my presence, in this place that God's put me, in a way that's transformative and helps whatever my community is, my circle of influence is, helps it to flourish and helps it to see the beauty of the gospel. So that would Yeah. That'd be my answer.
Jeffrey Heine:Alright. We got one last question here.
Speaker 12:Good. It's a very long and complicated question. Actually, no. I'll say that one for later. Oh, we're a church in Birmingham, which means that one of the major issues that we face is a city with a a really ugly racial past.
Speaker 12:And one of the main issues that we have to engage with, if we're gonna be effective in this city is being instruments of racial reconciliation. Do you have any words of wisdom from encouragement or rebuke for us
Speaker 11:that has to do with how we
Speaker 12:might address issues of race?
Collin Hansen:Gosh. Yeah. That's a real small question to end on. That's great. We
Speaker 11:have 5 minutes.
Collin Hansen:What's that? Yeah. So my church, we built a building. Well, we renovated a building in a neighborhood called Germantown, in 2,006. And the building literally sat, what was bordered on one side by railroad tracks that runs through the city.
Collin Hansen:And the railroad tracks are the racial dividing line for these neighborhoods. On one side of the tracks is Germantown, 90% white. The other side of the tracks is Smoketown, 90% black. We were in that building for, 6 years. And then in 2012, we bought a building that was on the other side of the tracks.
Collin Hansen:And for for several years, we kind of had this naive belief that, we're here now. You know, we're in your neighborhood. Clearly, African Americans are gonna come flocking to join our community, and we're gonna have this great multi ethnic church. Not surprisingly, that did not happen. And and honestly, we didn't expect that to happen.
Collin Hansen:We we knew we needed African American leaders. We knew, you know, we knew God was gonna have to do a number of things in order to make that possible. And to make, you know, to make the long story short, we hired an, hired an African American lead pastor for that campus. Hired a Latino worship leader for that campus. Hired a, you know, our 1st church planting resident that was there, was an African American.
Collin Hansen:And we started to see some progress there. And I think the lesson that we've learned, you know, the clearest lesson that we've learned is that, if you want to be a church that's part of the reconciling process, then the starting place is giving empowered leadership to people of a different race. It's not just getting them in your doors and into the pews. I think the starting place is going, we want to go here. We need somebody who can lead us here, and they're not gonna look like us.
Collin Hansen:And they may not like what we do. I mean, that was one of the things that we found. Like, frankly, there were a number of things about the culture of our church that very quickly had to change once we brought in African American leaders. Because they were like, you know, number 1, African American people aren't gonna like this. And number 2, I don't like it.
Collin Hansen:So, let's not do it this way anymore. And, so I think on the local church level, you know, if if you wanna see that kind of transformation happen, I think that's the only way to do it. On a more global kind of city level, I think it's looking for opportunities to have solidarity. When when the the black community in Birmingham is hurting, find ways to express that we we hurt for you, we grieve with you, we weep with you. And I think because racial tension and grievance is so politicized, that's going to put you on the wrong side of a lot of your evangelical friends and neighbors.
Collin Hansen:And you gotta be prepared to pay that cost, and willing to be called a Marxist. And you can go look at my Twitter feed and all the things I did called whenever I mentioned these things. But, yeah. I don't think I think I think that's the way forward. Empowered leadership and then being willing to lend whatever whatever power your voice, your platform, both as individuals and as a community, to try to show solidarity and and to weep with those who weep, and to speak up when it it's time to call for justice.
Collin Hansen:And that would be that would be the short version of that answer.
Jeffrey Heine:Alright. Well, join me in thanking Mike for being here tonight.
Collin Hansen:Thank you. Thank you so much.