By Tommy Airey

Last week, in Southern California, we got to spend an entire afternoon at the beach with our nephews. We were on boogie boards for most of it. The next morning, Riley and his brother Mason played a couple games of UNO with their Aunt Linds while I made them pancakes. Riley won both times. When we were driving them back to their dad’s place, Riley pulled out an UNO reverse card from his pocket.

Riley said he carries the card with him because it possesses the power to reverse any of the bad stuff that might happen in real life. He said there’s a YouTube clip that shows a guy getting pulled over by a cop. He flashes his UNO reverse card and the cop lets him go without a ticket or jail time. Riley said the blue UNO reverse cards are the most powerful – then the red, the green and the yellow. In that order. He said that all the other fourth-graders at his school last year respected the power of the UNO reverse card too.

What if Riley and all his ten-year-old friends were right?

What if the UNO reverse card could work when we’re confronted by bullies, narcissists and abusers?

What if it could work on cancer and covid – or my codependency?

What if it could reverse these recent Supreme Court decisions?

What if it could reverse the rising tides of climate catastrophe and mass shootings?

What if the blue card had the power to unwind whiteness, capitalism and patriarchy? One thing’s for sure. If these supremacy stories were reversed, white men would play different roles. We’d be centered and emotionally available. We’d connect the dots and tell the truth no matter what it costs. We’d live with awe and wonder. We’d listen, learn, nurture, stay curious, show appreciation and ask for help. We’d sweat vulnerability.

This real life role reversal is the key to our healing and recovery. It is not far from the reign of God. Jesus of Nazareth held up the reverse card to the conventional wisdom of Roman imperial culture and Jewish professional religion. Back then – just as it is right now – everything hinged on a human hierarchy of value. From the all-male echelon of Caesar and his soldiers and client kings and nobles and Temple scribes, all the way down to the tax collectors, the tenant farmers, the ill, the injured and the imprisoned, the women and children, and, of course, the so-called criminals and crucified.

In his ancient context, all the protagonists in Jesus’ sermons were picked from the bottom of the pecking order. Jesus proclaimed a gospel that was economic, socio-political and spiritual. It was a much different “good news” message than the get-into-heaven-when-we-die guarantee brandished by the almost all-white evangelical churches of my adolescence and early adulthood. Jesus said Something Else.

The last will be first.

The humble will be exalted.

The greatest are those who serve.

Jesus did not promote “progress.” He put his platform in reverse. He rolled it back to the left-side of the bible. He told the story of the unhoused, unemployed Lazarus trading places with the rich man after they died. While the rich man agonized in the bowels of Hades, Lazarus was comforted in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man begged Abraham to warn his wealthy brothers. Abraham told the rich man if they didn’t want to get tormented too, they’d better listen to Moses and the prophets! This was a not-so-subtle jab towards sabbath and jubilee. The Marxist Biblical revolution to redistribute wealth and land – so that society could be sane and sustainable again.

Jesus whipped out the reverse card and held it up to the Roman hierarchy. He downgraded Caesar and the scribes and Pharisees for the poor, persecuted, peacemakers, pure in heart and those who hunger for justice. Jesus did not only weaponize the reverse card. He incarnated it too. He became Something Else. His whole life was a ransom for a revolution. He preferred to be called “the human one” – instead of taking on titles like rabbi, messiah, lord or savior. He was executed on a cross with two criminals – because ruling elites felt threatened by his embodied authority. He actually practiced what he preached.

Unfortunately, my nephew Riley lives in a context saturated with churches counterfeiting the radical reversal of Jesus with white nationalism and rapture theology. These pastors preach to congregations plastering American flags all over their homes, cars, clothing, bodies, babies and social media accounts. They quote the Apostle predicting the Savior’s sudden descent from heaven at the sound of God’s trumpet. They turn Revelation, a book about resisting empire, into an end times prophecy with America playing the salvific role.  They skip right over the resurrection, right over the Gospel text that says that Jesus has already returned in the bodies of the unemployed, unhoused, unclothed, ill and imprisoned.

These grown ass adults who believe in America’s innocence and greatness and in the future return of Jesus are allergic to arguments aligned with data, logic, love and mercy. Instead of flashing the reverse card on neoliberal policies producing pain and suffering, they press the fast forward button. Instead of grappling with the root causes of poverty, they blame the victims with personal responsibility narratives. Instead of doing whatever it takes to build affordable housing, they minimize the more than 171,000 unhoused Californians by boiling the whole thing down to symptoms like mental health, or the myth that says that most of the unhoused population has moved in from other states. They use soundbites denigrating “wokeness” and gender identity in attempts to groom children like my nephews into entitled young adults indifferent to the pain and suffering of the masses.

White people, James Baldwin famously wrote, are trapped in a history we do not understand, and until we understand it, we cannot be released from it. Our release, our recovery, our healing has nothing to do with cheap grace, personal piety and a future home in “heaven.” The actual Gospel episodes attest to a radical reversal. A whole prophetic paradigm shift from sacrifice to mercy. Right here. Right now.

In the land of my nephews, the place that Acjachemen people tended for thousands of years before it was called Orange County, the reverse card calls for a return of the land. Somehow. Some way. Same goes for the stolen health, wealth and well-being of its Black population, which has been excluded, exploited, unemployed, unhoused and incarcerated at drastically disproportionate rates.  

In this game of real life, laying down the reverse card gives other players (and perspectives and protocols) a turn. We break rank with the old pecking orders that rotate on race, class and gender expectations rooted in supremacy. We stop doing and being what white folks, middle-class people and male leaders have always insisted is the norm. We prioritize dark skin, queer sensibility, feminine energy, earth wisdom, and essential workers. If this is what it means to be “woke,” then I think we ought to stay woke forever.

Nephew Riley’s belief in the power of the UNO reverse card is far more in touch with reality than all these unserious adults sugarcoating the past and fantasizing about the future. This critical mass of make-believe – enabled by liberals who continue to engage the fraudulent framing of Christo-Fascists – is a massive obstacle to our collective liberation.

If our three-week trip to the whitest metro region in America was any indication, the next eighteen months is going to be a gut check. We who are, like Jesus, committed to living out the left-side of the bible, cannot just go along to get along. Love will not win unless we pull out the reverse card. Unless we go public with our dissent. Over and over again. No matter what it costs.

Tommy Airey is a post-Evangelical pastor and the author of Descending Like a Dove: Adventures in Decolonizing Evangelical Christianity (2018). That’s Tommy and Nephew Riley pictured to the right.