This Sunday is the “Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost.”   The assigned Epistle text is instructions for living out our faith.  Looking at how so many well-meaning folks have been seduced by the theology of Christian Nationalism, I cringe when I read the text from Ephesians.  That’s because the difference between what the scriptures say and what we hear from too many pulpits are so vastly different.

          Years ago, Harry Emerson Fosdick, at the time Senior Minister of Riverside Church in New York City, was invited to give an address at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where the student body comprised students from sixteen different religions.  Fosdick began by saying:  “I do not ask anyone here to change his (or her) religion; but I do ask all of you to face up to this question: What is your religion doing to your character?”

          It was a call to consider one of the great issues of human belief: religion and life, and especially Christianity and character in some many of its adherents that we see in America today.  Emerson said, “What you speak so loudly that I cannot hear a word you say.”   And James Baldwin said, “I cannot believe what you say, because I see what you do.”