Undressed: Are We Unwittingly the Emperor?

What if the most dangerous thing happening in American Christianity right now isn't happening in Washington, it's happening in us?

 In this episode, Kristen sits with two early voices: Paul writing to a fractured community inside Caesar's Rome and James writing to people who were hearing all the right things and walking away unchanged. Between them, they have a diagnosis for exactly what we're living through right now.

 We unpack Romans 12:1-2 phrase by phrase, the imperial claim on bodies, the weaponizing of the text through purity culture and the theology of slavery, the flip that turned 'do not conform' into a bunker, and the metamorphoo that is received, not performed. Then James holds up the mirror: not for people who rejected the gospel, but for those who looked at it carefully, walked away, and forgot their own face.

 Including: the first American pope quoting Isaiah in Holy Week, and Christians calling it unbiblical. The Acts 2 community that became something the world couldn't explain. And what formation actually looks like, in the kitchen, at church, at the checkbook, and in the spaces where answering the oldest theological question out loud costs something real.

WORD STUDY: THE GREEK BEHIND THE TEXT

katanoeō (James 1:23)To perceive, to observe carefully, to really take in what you're seeing. Not a casual glance. The person in James's mirror fails not because they're unwise but because they looked carefully, saw clearly, and then walked away and forgot. The forgetting is the indictment.

nomos teleios (James 1:25)The complete law, the fulfilled law. Not the law as burden or guardrail. The law as Jesus fulfilled it: love God, love neighbor, do not overlook the poor. A direct inversion of Roman imperial law, which gave freedom only to the powerful.

poiētēs (James 1:25)An active, ongoing doer. Not someone who did a thing once. Someone whose identity is shaped by continuous action. Formation language, not compliance language.

metamorphoo (Romans 12:2)The same word used for the Transfiguration. What happens to a person encountered by the living God. Not performed. Not achieved. Received.

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start?
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenannette.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

Justice Coaching options!

"Find your justice mindset" quiz!

Transcript

Season 3 Episode 16, Undressed: Are We Unwittingly the Emperor? 

What if the most dangerous thing happening in American Christianity right now isn't happening in Washington, it's happening in us? In the slow, quiet drift toward a faith that knows all the right words and has yet to be formed by any of them.

This is not a new danger. It has a two-thousand-year-old name. And today we're going to sit with it

Music intro 

FRAMING THE MOMENT 

Hi friend. Welcome back to Jesus, Justice, and Mercy. Grab your coffee or beverage of choice and find a quiet spot, because we have some ground to cover today. I've had two incredible conversations over the past two weeks with Conscious Coore and Kieawnie Clar, and if you haven't listened to them yet, I want you to go back. They are definitely worth your time. But today we're back in the Word, figuring out what it might have to say to us at this specific time. 

Because I have to tell you, I may have run out of language for what we are bearing witness to in this season.

It is baffling to me. Leaders wrapping cruelty in the language of blessing. Christians are defending the powerful while the vulnerable are stripped of care over and over. Religious figures standing behind podiums, Bibles open, calling it faithfulness, while the hungry lose their tables, the stranger is turned away at the door, and the prisoner is left to fend for himself. A Pope calling the church to peace and Christians mocking him for it.

This is not new. This is the oldest temptation in the book, dressing the empire in the language of God and calling it faithful. The church has been here before. And every time it has, there have been voices inside the tradition saying wait. Look again. You have confused Caesar with Christ and you are not even sure when it happened.

Today, I want to sit with two early-century voices. Paul, writing to a fractured, pressured community inside Caesar's Rome. And James, writing to people who were hearing all the right things and walking away completely unchanged. Between the two of them, they have a diagnosis for exactly what we're living through right now. And I hope neither of us walks away unchanged.

SECTION 1: PAUL'S WORLD BEFORE HIS WORDS 

Paul's writings, taken out of context, can be incredibly difficult. So, let me set the scene for the passage I want to share with you: Put yourself in mid-first-century Rome, which is bustling. The leader, Caesar, holds the titles we reserve for Jesus, Son of God, Savior, Lord, and bringer of peace. That's not a metaphor; that's the imperial propaganda you would have walked past on every public monument. The early church wasn't choosing between Jesus and nothing. They were choosing between Jesus and a very compelling, very powerful alternative that promised security, belonging, and blessing if you just gave it your allegiance.

The community Paul is writing to is fractured, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in genuine tension over who belongs, whose practices matter, and whose history counts. The book of Romans isn't a systematic theology written to people doing fine. It's a pastoral letter to a divided community being asked to become something new together under enormous pressure to conform.

When Paul gets to chapter 12 and says I urge you therefore, that word therefore is doing everything. It's pointing back across three chapters of Paul wrestling with mercy, with Israel, with Gentiles, with the radical, disorienting width of God's grace. Chapters 9 through 11 are Paul on his knees in awe of a God whose reach he cannot fully explain. He ends chapter 11 with a doxology, Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his ways. He is undone by mercy before he asks anything of anyone. 

That matters. Because what comes next, the call to offer your bodies, to resist conformity, to be transformed, none of it is a demand made on people who haven't yet earned grace. It is a response that has been invited from people who have already received it. The transformation Paul describes isn't the condition for belonging to God. It is what belonging to God starts to look like in a body, in a community, in daily life. It comes out of mercy already given. This is a response, not a requirement.

Which means when Paul starts talking about empire, about bodies, about the renewing of the mind, he's not issuing a threat. He's describing what happens to people who have actually encountered the God of Romans 9-11.

SECTION 2: THE TEXT ITSELF, ROMANS 12:1-2 

Let's go back to the text itself. Paul starts with a sentence that can hit hard and then continues.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. NIV

I want to slow this down and take it phrase by phrase, because every line is doing something Paul's listeners would have felt in their bones.

Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.

Don't rush past this. Because in Caesar's Rome, the empire had a claim on bodies. Bodies labored in its fields, fought in its armies, died in its arenas for entertainment. The empire's theology was simple: your body belongs to the state, and the state belongs to God's favor. Paul is writing to a community that lives inside that system, some of them enslaved, some of them freed, some of them navigating exactly what allegiance to Caesar has cost them.

And the weaponizing of this text didn't end with Rome. I'll come back to how this language was used to sanctify slavery, which has to be named, and I’m not going to skip it. But I want to pause here on something closer to home for a lot of us.

Modern evangelical culture did its own version of this. Offering your body as a living sacrifice became the foundation of purity culture, a theology that told young women, especially, that their bodies were the primary site of spiritual failure or faithfulness. That holiness was located in what you did or didn't do with your body, particularly sexually. That your worth before God was tied to physical purity in ways it never was for the men in the room. The text that Paul wrote to a community resisting imperial control over their bodies got repurposed to give the church control over bodies, specifically women's bodies, in ways that caused profound and lasting harm.

That's not transformation. That's conformity that has convinced itself it's holiness, so thoroughly that it no longer knows the difference.

Paul is not talking about control of our bodies. He is talking about reorientation. The question he's really asking is simple: who do you belong to? Not the empire. Not the institution. The God whose mercy he just spent three chapters trying to describe

 Remember I said we weren't going to skip the slavery piece. We're not. Because this text has a wound in it that we can't just walk past."

This same language, offer your bodies, was used for centuries to tell enslaved people that their suffering was holy. That endurance was piety. That submission to the system was a demonstration of faithfulness to God. Slaveholders preached Romans to the people they owned. It is part of this text's history, and we don't get to pretend otherwise.

But here's what the slaveholders got catastrophically wrong: they read 'offer your bodies as a living sacrifice' and handed it to the people they owned as a theology of endurance. As if Paul was telling the powerless to accept their suffering as holy. But Paul wasn't writing to enslaved people, telling them their chains were God's will. He was writing to a persecuted, economically precarious, religiously marginalized community, many of whom were enslaved themselves, and telling them that their bodies belong to a different story than the one the empire is telling. This is not self-erasure or personal sacrifice. This is reorientation. The living sacrifice Paul describes is an act of resistance, not compliance. It is the refusal to let Caesar's logic be the final word on what your life is for.

So, when we read 'offer your bodies,' the question isn't how much can I endure? The question is who do you belong to?

·      Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world.

In Caesar's Rome, the pattern was unmistakable: power, domination, the blessing of God on the strong. Conformity didn't require a decision. It just required going along. Paul's listeners knew exactly what that pressure felt like, and I am sure many of you do too.

But here's what happened to this verse in American evangelical culture. It got flipped.

Instead of forming people who could resist the logic of empire, who could look at power and domination and name it clearly, it became the foundation for a theology of withdrawal. Don't engage with culture. Don't let the world in. Separate yourself, your children, your community from anything that might challenge what you already believe. Homeschool only. Christian school only. Christian music only. Christian movies only. Build the walls high enough and call it holiness.

And I want to be careful here because I know some of you made those choices out of genuine love for your kids and your faith. I'm not indicting the choice. I'm naming what happened to the theology underneath it.

Because here's the problem. When you form an entire generation inside a sealed system, where the only voices allowed in already agree with each other, where questioning is treated as spiritual danger, and specifically where the world outside the walls is painted as enemy territory, you don't produce people who can resist conformity. You produce people who have simply conformed to a different mold. A smaller one. A more curated one. But mold, nonetheless.

And then, and this is the part we currently recognize, that same verse-"do not conform to the pattern of this world" gets turned around and used as a weapon against the very things that look most like the kingdom. Caring for the poor becomes "social justice", worldly. Affirming the dignity of LGBTQ people becomes "caving to culture." Naming racism becomes "critical theory", dangerous, worldly, and conformist. The verse that was supposed to protect the community from the empire ends up protecting the community from the gospel.

Paul's point was never to withdraw from the world. His point was, don't let the world's logic, power, domination, the blessing of God on the strong, become the logic you live by. The renewed mind is the mind that can tell the difference. Between the kingdom and the bunker. Between faithfulness and fear. Between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus being used to keep the walls up.

·      But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

The Greek word for transformed here is metamorphoo (met-am-or-FOH-oh). It is the same word used for the Transfiguration, the moment on the mountain when the disciples saw Jesus as he actually was, not as they had assumed him to be. Matthew uses it. Mark uses it. And Paul uses it here, in Romans 12, to describe what happens to a person encountered by the living God.

This is not a self-improvement program. This is not a mindset shift or a curriculum or a set of practices that produce the desired outcome if you do them correctly. Metamorphoo is what happens to you. Not performed. Not achieved. But received. And I think that's what Kieawnie was pointing at last week, that moment when she described the difference between a faith you construct and a faith that constructs you.

·      Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.

Don't miss what Paul is doing here. The whole point of transformation, in his framing, is discernment. The renewed mind is the mind that can tell the difference. There's a reason the Treasury Department doesn't train people to spot counterfeit money by studying fakes. They train them by handling the real thing so extensively, so intimately, that anything else feels wrong the moment it's in their hands. That's what Paul is after. A community so formed by the actual Jesus, his priorities, his people, his kingdom, that the counterfeit version is immediately recognizable. 

I don't think most people end up there on purpose. Nobody wakes up and decides to follow a Jesus shaped by power instead of the one in the Gospels. It happens the way the emperor's new clothes happened, slowly, surrounded by voices all saying the same thing, in a community where questioning feels like betrayal. You think you are following Jesus with your whole heart. You are doing what everyone around you is doing. You are using the right language. And somewhere along the way, without a single moment of conscious decision, you end up somewhere else entirely. That's not a failure of sincerity. That's a failure of formation. And it's exactly what Paul is trying to prevent

Seeking the difference between the kingdom of God and a kingdom that borrows its language. Between faithfulness and performance. Between the Jesus of the Gospels and a Jesus being used as a mascot for power. Formation develops the capacity to tell the difference. And right now, the church is in a crisis of discernment. Not a crisis of information, we have more access to good theology, good preaching, good writing than any generation before us. The question is whether any of it is forming us deeply enough to know the real thing when we see it

That's what Paul is after. That's what the renewed mind is for.

But then Paul leaves us with a question he doesn't fully answer. How do you know if it's working? How do you know if you're being transformed or just informed? Is the renewal real, or have you just gotten better at the language?

James answers that question. And he is not gentle about it.

SECTION 3: THE MIRROR, JAMES 1:22-25 

The letter of James is addressed to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations, Jewish followers of Jesus living in diaspora. These are people displaced from home, under economic pressure, navigating Roman occupation from the margins. They are not comfortable. They entire being feels precarious.

Scholars date James early, possibly the earliest document in the New Testament, most likely written by James the brother of Jesus, who was executed around 62 CE. This is a man who knew Jesus intimately, watched him be crucified, and then led a community immediately under pressure from both Roman power and Jewish religious authority. When James writes, he is writing from inside that pressure.

The community he's addressing was witnessing favoritism: wealthier members being given better seats, while poorer members were humiliated. There were people claiming a faith so spiritual it had become entirely inward and disconnected from action. James isn't doing theology in a vacuum. He is pastoring a community in crisis, where the gap between what people professed and how they lived was actively causing harm.

Here's where James gets uncomfortable. Because James isn't writing to bad people. He's writing to people who are hearing good things and walking away unchanged.

Chapter 1, verses 22 through 25, in the NRSV:

But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act, they will be blessed in their doing.

The word James uses for “look” in verse 23 is katanoeō. (Cat a no eho) It means to perceive, to observe carefully, to really take in what you're seeing. It's not a casual glance. The person in James's image doesn't fail because they're unwise. They fail because they looked carefully, saw themselves clearly, and then walked away and forgot. The forgetting is the indictment.

In verse 25, the word for perfect law is nomos teleios (TEH-lay-ahs). It is the complete law, the fulfilled law. For James, this isn't the law as a burden or a strict set of guardrails. This is the law as Jesus fulfilled it: love God, love neighbor, and especially, do not overlook the poor. The law that gives freedom is a direct inversion of Roman imperial law, which gave freedom only to the powerful. James is describing a community ordered around a completely different logic.

And the word for doer, poiētēs (poy-ay-TACE ) describes someone in motion. Not someone who did a thing once. Someone whose identity is shaped by continuous action. Notice how this is formation language. Not compliance language.

The mirror image in James is almost devastating in its gentleness. You look. You see. You leave. You forget your own face.

And here is what that looks like when it moves from ancient text into living news.

A few weeks ago, during Holy Week, the most sacred week in the Christian calendar, the first American pope stood in St. Peter's Square and preached a Palm Sunday sermon. He built the entire homily around Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey, the king who comes in peace, not on a war horse. He quoted the prophet Isaiah directly. He called on leaders waging war to lay down their weapons and remember that the people they are killing are their brothers and sisters.

Christians across the political spectrum heard those words. And a significant portion of Christian media responded by saying the pope was wrong. That his sermon had no biblical basis. That Isaiah, quoted directly from the Christian Scriptures, was not actually biblical.

For those in the back.

The leader of the world's largest Christian body, in a Holy Week sermon, quoted the Hebrew prophet Isaiah about the Prince of Peace. And Christians called it unbiblical.

That is the mirror of James 1. Not people who rejected the gospel. People who heard it, looked at it carefully, and walked away and forgot their own faces. The word became unrecognizable the moment it challenged what they had already decided.

This is not a Catholic moment or a Protestant moment. This is a James 1 moment. It is what happens when our political formation has gone deeper than our spiritual formation. When we have been conformed to a pattern so thoroughly that Scripture itself starts to sound like the enemy.

Paul warned us. James warned us. The prophets warned us. And here we are.

I've been sitting with that for weeks. And what I keep coming back to isn't what the church needs to do. It's what I need to do. What you need to do. In the ordinary, unglamorous, nobody's-watching places where formation actually happens.

SECTION 4: WHAT FORMATION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE 

I want to be honest with you about where I am right now.

I am someone who has spent this entire podcast season asking you to be formed by what you're learning. And some days I open my phone, and I scroll, and the news is so heavy and so relentless that I genuinely don't know what any of us are supposed to do with it. The overwhelm is real. The gap between what I know and what I can actually change on a sunny afternoon when I'm exhausted feels impossible to close.

And I think that gap, that exact feeling, is where James has something to say that isn't a guilt trip. It's actually a relief.

Because James isn't describing heroes here. He's describing people whose identity is being slowly, quietly shaped by continuous action. Poiētēs. The ongoing doer. Not the person who did the great thing once. The person who keeps showing up.

Luke gave us a picture of what that looks like. Acts 2, verses 42 through 47. The community that formed in the days after Pentecost, after the Spirit showed up and blew the whole thing open. Luke describes them this way: they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to prayer. They sold what they had and gave to anyone who had need. They met in the temple courts and in each other's homes. They ate together with glad and sincere hearts.

And then Luke adds this: they enjoyed the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Nobody handed them a strategy. Nobody gave them a marketing plan. They just became something the world around them couldn't explain. And people noticed. People were drawn toward it the way you're drawn toward a fire on a cold night, not because someone told them to come, but because something real was happening and they wanted to be near it.

They will know we are Christians by our love. Not by our arguments. Not by our certainty. Not by how loudly we defended our interpretations of scripture. Not by the monuments we build to our own righteousness like posting the 10 commandments everywhere. But by the actual quality of life happening in the community. By whether what we have looks like something worth wanting.

That's poiētēs in action. That's the ongoing doer, showing up day after day, in the ordinary, unglamorous work of being a community that actually reflects what it claims to believe.

In episode 14, Conscious said something at the end of our conversation that I keep coming back to. She said she wants listeners to see themselves as people who can make ripple effect change, not by doing the work she does, but by becoming fluent in the language and using it in the spaces where they already have influence. Their dinner tables. Their small groups. Their workplaces. Their family rooms.

That's James 1 in real time. The word getting into your body and coming out in the places where you actually live.

And then Kieawnie said something last week that lands right next to it. She was talking about centering prayer, about lying silent before God and doing essentially nothing. And she said: You notice over time, there's a change. It's not even you saying I have to learn how to listen. It just happens. The formation happened while she wasn't performing it. While she was just present.

That's metamorphoo. That's the transfiguration pattern showing up on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

So here's what I think formation actually looks like. Not the version that ends up online. The version that happens when nobody's watching.

It looks like having conversations with my boys about what it means to be a kind man in a world that keeps telling them strength means domination. Talking with them about how their vote matters on issues that may seem ancillary to their current lives. Not a lecture. Just a moment in the kitchen where we talk honestly about what we're seeing, who we want to be, and who we want to take care of.

It looks like staying at church when I really want to go home, because I feel that nudge to sit with someone who just needs an ear, who doesn't need anything from me except presence.

It looks like anxiously checking my Excel spreadsheets and trusting that if someone in front of me has a need I can meet, I do it, and trust that God will come through for my family and me.

And it looks like this.

My brother Ryan is gay, and he is also my best friend. And I'll be honest; I don't always get it right. There are conversations I've stayed too quiet in. Tables where I let something slide because the moment passed too fast or the relationship felt too fragile. But I keep coming back to this: If I actually believe Ryan bears the image of God fully, not as a theological position I hold, but as something that shows up in how I speak when he's not in the room. As something that shows up when someone in a Christian space uses language of worthiness, who deserves love, who gets to call themselves a follower of Jesus without an asterisk, then I have to decide in that moment whether I actually live what I say I believe. Whether the word that got into my body was the one about every human being made in the image of God. Or whether I looked in that mirror and walked away.

Because that's what's actually being argued in those spaces. Not just who belongs. Who is worthy of love. Who bears the image of God without condition.

That is not a political question. It is the oldest theological question there is. And in Christian circles right now, answering it out loud costs something. I'm not saying I've paid that cost perfectly. I'm saying it's the mirror I keep having to look into.

Kieawnie also said something I want you to sit with: if we're not loving ourselves well, the love we offer other people is performative. It's coming from our heads, not our core. And people who have been failed over and over, they'll know the difference every single time.

That's James 1. The performative version walks away and forgets its own face. The formed version stays long enough to be changed.

None of this is heroic. A moment of formation doesn't usually look like a moment. It looks like the accumulation of small choices made by people whose minds have been quietly, stubbornly renewed, that still small voice that won't stay quiet, no matter how hard we try to silence it.

And I want to make sure I name something here. There is a version of justice-adjacent Christianity that knows all the language: repair, reconciliation, trauma-informed, decolonize, and has not been changed by a single word of it. Maybe because it's too scary. Maybe because the risk is too high. Maybe because the other voices are so loud right now. But information without formation is just a more sophisticated way of conforming to the pattern of this world.

James isn't asking for perfect doctrine. He's asking whether the word you heard is changing how you live.

What does your calendar say you believe? What does your bank account say you're formed by? Who do you show up for when it costs you something?

That's the doer James is describing. Not the person who got it all right. The person who kept looking in the mirror long enough to be changed by what they saw.

CLOSING INVITATION 

I get it. The world is exhausting. And what’s going on all around us doesn't even touch the regular day-to-day life that can crush us. So, if you are scared or angry at what you're watching and don't know what to do with it, if you are overwhelmed just thinking about how you are going to make it to tomorrow, know that you are not called to fix the whole church. You are not called to have the right words or the perfect response or a theology that holds up under pressure every single time.

You are called to stay in the room.

To offer your body, your actual life, your actual presence, your ordinary afternoon, as the place where something new is being built. In your kids. In your neighborhood. In your church. In the person right in front of you, who just needs you not to leave.

That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.

Paul wasn't writing to famous people. James wasn't writing to heroes. They were writing to communities of ordinary people being asked to become something the world around them couldn't explain. People who looked in the mirror and stayed long enough to be changed. People who kept showing up even when they didn't know what they had to offer.

Just that was the extraordinary. It still is.

And it’s still the invitation. And after everything this season has asked of you, I think you're more ready than you know.

Next week I want to talk about grief. I was asked recently to sit with a group of people who had just lost a colleague. Sudden, devastating loss. And I went in unsure of what exactly I had to offer. There is no curriculum. No easy answers. No five steps to healing when the pain is so raw. And what I discovered is that maybe that was exactly the point. What I had was the willingness to stay in the room. To hold the space. And it turns out that might be the thing the church is most afraid to do and most desperately needs to learn. Next week, we will talk about what the church owes the grieving. I'll see you there. Jesus, Justice, No apologies.