Kyle Dresback

Dear Friends,

As I read John the Baptist’s words in today’s gospel reading (“You brood of vipers!”), much of my teen and early adult years come to mind. I was raised in the church and I’m so thankful for the way my upbringing shaped my spiritual imagination and surrounded me with such a loving community. But I’m genuinely sorry to reflect on how my own concept of Christianity often resembled a status. And few things are more dangerous for religion than the slide into tribalism.

I specifically remember a teacher keeping me after class and—I truly believe for my own good—telling me, “Buddy you’re not making a lot of friends in our class discussions.” As if that wasn’t telling enough, my enduring memory is of my internal thought process while he was speaking: “He’s one of them.”

I had reflexively made him an enemy. A mind that’s constantly calculating “us” vs. “them” is going to have difficulty internalizing the gospel message.

Jonathan Haidt has an important insight in his book titled “The Righteous Mind” that touches on religion: morality “binds” groups and also “blinds” them. The binding is what many traditionalists today lament has been lost with the rise of pluralism—a shared narrative of who we are and what we value. The blinding takes place when the tribalist impulse blinds members of an institution, religious or otherwise, to other corrective voices and perspectives. Those voices are often dismissed as “them.”

I think it’s safe to say here that John the Baptist is frustrated at the settled tribalist presumptions of the religious elite “insiders.” And while much of the church’s energy is spent criticizing the outside world (“them”), John may have something to say to us insiders.

Of course no one reads John’s scathing words and thinks “Maybe he’s describing me!” I certainly would not have in my younger years. I knew John was talking to them. And to that, there may be no more fitting conclusion than the collect for the day:

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

In Christ,

—Kyle