Make Christianity Strange Again
Encouragement in a time of political turmoil
On June 21, we found ourselves glued to the news, watching live updates as the US bombed Iran. From what we know now, Trump’s move is, at best, a gamble to preemptively knock out Iran’s nuclear problem. At worst, this could be the escalation of the current war, and deeply expose the US to terrorist actions. As a mother to three teenage boys, I feel this moment keenly.
You can read a million different takes with much more nuance and political savvy than mine. That is not my expertise. My point instead is that in this moment, we have the opportunity to belong to a better, more strange, more wild, and better story.
When I showed up to worship on Sunday, June 22 (which also happens to be my 23rd wedding anniversary to my husband, who is also my pastor), I had different things on my mind.
I’m deep in the weeds in our September/October Christianity Today magazine editing,1 and in the process I am thinking much about the strangeness of the Christian story. It explodes, reorients, catches us sideways. For those of us who grew up in the church, it can feel as familiar as a flannel graph. Sometimes grace is violent — as Flannery O’Connor knew — and we need to be awoken, shaken, rebuilt and remade. We need the awesomeness of grace to kick us off our feet and make us bow in worship. When we come up against words like “war,” we have to at least take stock of what we’ve made of our lives.
In worship, what we were doing — along with millions around the world — was rehearsing the Christian story that was bigger than bombs and geopolitics. For those going to brunch we look odd. For those glued to headlines we look naive. But for those who have been so struck by the blinding light of incomprehensible grace, this was the most natural thing in the world.
Sunday my husband reminded us not only that the nations rage and plot in vain in his pastoral prayer (Ps. 2) — so that we have a deep, everlasting cosmic hope beyond the raging of the nations — but more than that in his sermon, preaching on wisdom and folly from Proverbs chapter 8: he reminded us that wisdom is a person. She is Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, and elsewhere the one calling aloud in the streets is none other than Jesus himself.
In worship I was reminded that even as the very real issues on our geopolitical stage take the headlines, we have a bigger story to belong to. The lights and big stages may go. The celebrity book deals surely will. What lasts will be the small seeds of faithfulness in ordinary people gathering week by week.
We need Christianity to be strange again — in the weird and wonderful and counter-cultural way that C.S. Lewis saw that the story of Jesus was “true myth.” This is our hope in our polarized age (and indeed in all ages!).
Perhaps now, in the chaos of our late modern moment, the Christian story is delightfully strange enough to be received again.
In worship, I was reminded that we are all fools in various ways. Some of us take our foolishness out on others, all knees and elbows, ready to take down any one who says that our way of seeing reality is incorrect. Others of us take our foolishness in the form of doom-scrolling, or the amassing of information, or trying to stand off — the scoffer — never getting in the fray but sure that everyone else is doing it wrong and reality should bend to their will. Others of us are simply newbies, foolish in our lack of experience, adolescent in our risk, and unwise in consequences.
In this moment of war, where the pundits are telling us which pathway the bombing of Iran could go, I was reminded that foolishness (whatever its form) and wisdom are reborn again and again in every generation. Nothing is new under the sun.
But every Sunday the Christian proclaims his or her allegiance to a better, bigger, wiser story: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. It looks foolish, but the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
When our feeds are saturated, when our brains are numb from scrolling, when we’ve given away our agency through generative AI and followed the latest political savior (on the political right or left, take your pick), worship can really be strange again.
Then, it has the power not only to amaze, but to save.
Lord, have mercy.
And — in the meantime, may we do the quiet things with great joy. For what else can we do when war looms on the horizon but to practice being human by tending to one another, to our places, churches, and communities in the meantime?
Amen to "the small seeds of faithfulness in ordinary people" - may we lean into this.
Thanks for this one, what timing. I am currently working through a draft with a similar line of thought on my Stack. The call to make Christianity "strange again" is not merely an aesthetic or rhetorical posture, it’s is an urgent summons to recover the scandal of the incarnation, where the eternal God became dust, sweat, and blood. In an age where power is measured in missiles and algorithms, the Christian story subverts all imperial logic by declaring that salvation arrives not through domination, but through a crucified peasant. The true strangeness of Christianity lies not in its otherworldliness, but in its stubborn insistence that the divine is embedded, in bread and wine, in whispered prayers, in the quiet fidelity of ordinary fools who dare to believe that an executed criminal is Lord of the universe.
When the nations rage, prayer and worship is the most radical act of resistance. To bow before an invisible King while presidents and generals posture is to enact an alternative politics… one where power is made perfect in weakness. The Psalmist’s declaration that the nations "plot in vain" (Psalms 2) is not a dismissal of geopolitical reality, but a revelation of its ultimate fragility. The Cross is the divine punchline to history’s tragicomedy of violence. A joke that only the foolish can understand.
Wisdom, personified in Christ, does not shout from the war room or the think tank, but from the margins, from the gutters, from the places where the world’s power brokers least expect her. To seek her is to embrace the absurdity of a love that refuses self-preservation. In an era of doom-scrolling and AI-generated despair, the strangest thing of all may be the quiet conviction that a handful of broken people singing hymns in a rented building are participating in the reconciliation of all things.
The mercy we plead is not an abstract benevolence but the very flesh of God, stretched over the wounds of the world. To "tend to one another" in the shadow of war is not naivete, it is the defiant proclamation that the Kingdom comes not with observation, but in the hidden, the small, the foolish. The bombs will fade. The algorithms will decay. But the Word became flesh, and flesh, in all its fragility, is where eternity pitches its tent.