Christian Mythbusters

About Christian Mythbusters

Each week Father Jared Cramer, the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, MI, offers a brief 3-5 minute episode where he tried to unpack, debunk, and reconsider some of the ways we often think about Christianity and the church.

Publisher

Fr. Jared C. Cramer

Category

education · religion & spirituality · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Sept 2020

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

147 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   You Are Not a Worm

   This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Last week, I talked about the two ditches on either side of the spiritual path: thinking we are better than we are, and thinking we are worse than we are. This week, I want to stay in that second ditch a little longer, because I think a lot of us were taught we have to live there. When I was growing up, we sang an old hymn by Isaac Watts: “Alas! and did my Savior bleed, and did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” And, of course, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Now, as a priest, I hear a message in those words about who you are. A worm. A wretch. And I think that message is damaging to the core. It has been used to shame LGBTQ people simply for being who God created them to be. But honestly, words like that create shame in almost anyone who hears them. That’s a myth that needs to be broken. When I was in seminary, I was surprised to learn there are actually two very distinct ways to view humanity in the Christian tradition. The first is the one many of us absorbed in American Protestantism, shaped especially by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition. You may have heard of TULIP, the acronym for the five points of Calvinism. The T stands for “total depravity.” To be fair, theologians mean that sin has touched every part of us, not that we are as evil as we could possibly be. But in the pews, it often lands as something much simpler: at your core, you are rotten, and grace is God choosing to save a worm. The second way is older, and it’s held by most Christians throughout history and around the world today. Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and many others begin somewhere else. They begin in Genesis, where God makes humanity in God’s own image, then looks at all of creation and calls it “very good.” Sin is real, and it is serious. It wounds us, distorts us, and separates us from God and one another. But it does not erase the image of God in us. As Saint Irenaeus put it back in the second century, the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Salvation isn’t God rescuing garbage–and I’m so sorry people have perhaps told you at times that you are garbage. Because you’re not. Salvation is God healing a beloved creation and restoring it to who and what it was always meant to be. You can see this in my own church’s catechism, found in the Book of Common Prayer. Its very first question is about us: “What are we by nature?” And the answer is not “worms” or “wretches.” The answer is, “We are part of God’s creation, made in the image of God.” Only after that does the catechism talk about how we misuse our freedom and make wrong choices. Goodness comes first. Sin comes second. And that order matters. It matters because what you believe about your deepest self shapes how you live. If you think you’re a worm, you’ll hide, just like we talked about last week. But if you know you are made in God’s image, you can look honestly at your sin without being crushed by it. Repentance becomes simply turning back toward who you really are. So if you were raised on those hymns, or on that one perspective on what humanity is (which is actually a minority perspective in Christianity) hear this: you are not a worm. You are a beloved child of God, and the goodness God placed in you runs deeper than anything you have done or left undone. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

2. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Neither Perfect, Nor Discarded

   This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. A few weeks ago, I was sitting with my therapist, trying to put words to something I've wrestled with for a long time. Some days it feels like I'm walking a narrow path between two ditches. On one side is the danger of thinking too highly of myself: arrogance, hubris, the belief that I've got it all figured out. On the other side is the danger of thinking too little of myself: shame, discouragement, even depression. That's a vulnerable thing to say out loud. But I have a hunch I'm not alone. So this week, let's talk about the myths we build about ourselves on the spiritual journey. The first myth is that we are better than we are. The spiritual life has always been tempted by self-importance. You see it all through Scripture: Moses, David, the religious leaders of Jesus' day, the disciples arguing over who was the greatest, even Peter and Paul in the early church. When you care deeply about your faith (and that's a good thing!), it becomes easy to blur the line between your convictions about God and God's own voice. We start to assume that because we're on God's side, God must always be on ours. Then we minimize where we've gone wrong. We get defensive. We point to how hard we tried and how good our intentions were. That's why the old practice of the examen matters so much. Saint Ignatius of Loyola taught people to pause each day and look back over the hours with God, giving thanks, noticing where they were drawn toward love, and naming honestly where they fell short. My own tradition builds something similar into our worship. At daily prayer and at every Eucharist, we confess that we have sinned "in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone." When we do that honestly, without excuses, we come to a truer picture of ourselves. That produces humility. And when humility meets the love of God, something surprising happens: we become gentler, both with ourselves and with others. But there's a second myth, and it lives in the other ditch. It's the myth that we are worse than we are. Sometimes self-examination slides into something darker. Researcher Brené Brown offers a helpful distinction. Guilt says, "I did something bad." Shame says, "I am bad." Guilt can move us toward change, because it holds us accountable while keeping our worth intact. Shame does the opposite. It isolates us, tells us we're beyond repair, and makes us hide. And people who are hiding rarely grow. Christian faith has never asked us to hate ourselves (and if anyone’s told you that, they were wrong). Confession isn't meant to end in self-loathing. It's meant to end in absolution and an experience of God’s love. As the First Letter of John puts it, even when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. So what we need is balance. Saint Paul told the Romans not to think of themselves more highly than they ought, but to think with sober judgment. Sober judgment means seeing ourselves the way God sees us: not perfect, not discarded, but broken and so deeply loved. That's the truth that frees us from both myths. You don't have to defend yourself, because your worth was never something you earned. And you don't have to hide, because the One who knows you best loves you most. Humility and gentleness, it turns out, grow from the very same soil. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   What About Fighting Monsters

   This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. For the last two weeks, I've been talking about the Gospel according to Jelly Roll. First, that there's no asterisk after the word "neighbor." And second, that while we are fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become monsters ourselves. Not long ago I was visiting a member of the parish, and a friend of hers mentioned he'd been listening to these episodes. Then he asked me a great question about what I was saying. He asked, “But what about when they're real monsters that you’re fighting?” I told him to hold on, because that was where I’d go next. It’s an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. Because far too often, when the church has come face to face with something truly monstrous, it has stepped back and abdicated its role as the body of Christ in the world. The theologian William Cavanaugh tells one of those stories in his masterful book, Torture and Eucharist. It's about Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, where torture worked like a kind of liturgy of the state. It made people disappear and broke apart every community that might resist. For too long, the church cared for souls while leaving the bodies to the generals. But eventually it woke up. It defended the families of the disappeared, and the bishops declared torturers cut off from communion. Cavanaugh's point is that the Eucharist itself is the answer to torture. The state disappears bodies. The church gathers them back into the Body of Christ. We see the same failure, initially, in the church's response to Hitler. Most German Christians went along, and even the Confessing Church too often stayed silent as its Jewish neighbors were rounded up. We rightly remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the exception. But what I find most honest about Bonhoeffer is that he never pretended resistance was simple. When he joined the conspirators against Hitler, he didn't claim to be righteous. He wrote about the guilt we take on when we act responsibly in a broken world, and he threw himself on the mercy of God. He fought a monster while wrestling with how not to become one. So how do we walk this path? I think one of the most powerful witnesses comes from my own Anglican tradition: Desmond Tutu, who became the Archbishop of Cape Town. For decades he stood against apartheid, a system that was truly monstrous. He called it evil without flinching. He called on the world to impose sanctions. He buried the young people the police had killed and preached at their funerals with a fire that terrified the government. But he never treated his enemies as less than human. In 1985, at a funeral for activists, an angry crowd turned on a man they believed was a police informer and were about to burn him alive. Tutu pushed into that crowd, threw himself between them and the man, and saved his life. Bishop Tutu fought apartheid with everything he had, and he would not let the movement become the very thing it was fighting. For Tutu, the goal was never just defeating his oppressors. It was a future where oppressor and oppressed could both be free, both be human, both be reconciled. Truth told plainly. Justice demanded. And mercy held out, even to the guilty. So here's the myth I’m trying to bust: that loving your enemy means going soft on evil. Tutu shows us the opposite. You can name the monster. You can fight the monster with everything you have. And you can still refuse to let hatred make you one, because even your enemy was made in the image of God. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

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