By Wes Howard-Brook, the author of several books, including Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected

A decade ago, I was teaching Bible and theology full-time at our local Jesuit school, Seattle University. Now I am retired.

A decade ago, my wife and ministry partner, Sue, were part of our local Mennonite congregation.
Now, we do not attend church.

A decade ago, I identified as a Christian.
Now, I have reclaimed my birth identity as a Jew who loves the Jewish Jesus.

A decade ago, Sue and I were in the midst of an eighteen year stretch of hosting and leading a Scripture group that met every Thursday for two hours in our living room.
Now, it is hosted elsewhere.

There are many reasons for these changes, some which we all share—the pandemic, for instance—and others that are personal to my own journey. But as a result of these choices, I now am experiencing life much differently than I was a decade ago.

For the first time in my seven decades of life on this beautiful planet, my time is not subject to external controls. No “bosses,” no “deadlines,” not even “schedules” to constrain my freedom. Instead, I arise each morning to the gift of Life, with infinite possibilities before me. I experience the Presence of God in so many moments, no longer as “anxious and distracted by many things” (Luke 10.41).

For nearly four decades, I taught “live” in churches, universities and living rooms about the Gospel and the wider “religion of creation” that Jesus inherited from his ancestors. Now, I am shaping my work into a legacy project: a YouTube channel, Radical Bible, where I go through the texts word-by-word, verse-by-verse. It has become one of the most exciting, satisfying efforts of my life, enabling me to feast on the banquet of recent scholarship and weave it all into 15-20 minute videos for whomever might be interested. And when not working on my videos, I have abundant time to celebrate the joy and beauty all around me: the trees, the mountains, the children, the spiders.

For over four decades, I walked in Christian circles, first Roman Catholic, then ecumenical, then Mennonite. But my work in my book, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected, 2^nd-5^th Centuries (Orbis 2016), shook the foundations of my understanding of how “Jesus” and “Christianity” went together. I reject utterly the body/earth-denying Platonism that is at the root of a religion that has little to do with Jesus at all, but much more to do with elite Roman philosophers and politicians taking sacred Jewish stories and colonializing them for their own,empire-supporting purposes. And in an era where “Christian” is associated with Trumpian nationalism, I go on record standing against all of that.

But here’s my wild hope for the coming decade: when the MAGA balloon finally pops, young people who rightfully have seen “religion” as more the problem than the solution, may, just may, seek a Story that can give Life to all people and all creation. The Story, of course, is of radical discipleship of Jesus. We who peruse these pages know the sharp difference between what our culture sees as “biblical thinking” or a “biblical lifestyle” and what the Story really invites us into: God’s realm of abundance, joy, love, freedom, community, justice, peace.

One thing I’ve learned in my work: empires have a 100% failure rate. Whether Babylon, Rome, or today’s empire of corporate capitalism, it all “is fallen.” The experienced horrors of climate change are akin to what we hear in the Jubilee text of Leviticus 26: if we live in harmony with the Creator, life is beautiful. If we don’t, we create our own hell. The choice, as always, is before us, individually and as a species. The Story is what keeps reminding and empowering us to embody the Way of the Creator.

I am grateful for all the folks who have kept this website going, have enabled these expressions of pain and hope to be shared, and invited us to continue the conversation. In the Name of the One who brings all into being and sustains us with Love beyond our comprehension, I give thanks. May the Story never end!