When I think about what it means to call oneself a Christian, I often return to the historic creeds of the early church. That's an odd statement from someone who was raised in a decidedly non-creedal denomination. I simply think that it's a good place to start the conversation. When we're talking about people who follow Jesus, that seems like a good place to define the parameters.

And when I look at the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed, I see a lot of land. There is room to roam if you have different interpretations and takes on faith, scripture, and whatever else. It's not anything goes territory, but it has been home to lots of different viewpoints over a couple of millennia. That vast country is part of what makes the Church so complicated. Yet it is also what makes the Church so beautiful. There is space out here for Catholics and Baptists, Disciples and Eastern Orthodox, Methodists and Anglicans, Pentecostals and Presbyterians and more.

It gets messy. It makes the unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 massively and ridiculously challenging. Yet when it works...my God, when it works, it is something amazing to behold. The real challenges occur when something like the Nashville Statement happens.

I knew the eclipse was going to be something special when I saw EA's face after first caught a glimpse of a sliver of the moon over the sun. She pulled off her glasses and her eyes were like that of a kid. It was like she had seen snow for the first time. Our faces don't beam with that kind of surprise so much when we're adults. That's when I knew.

The actual kids in our household were in awe also. Jim, our oldest, was beside himself for excitement. Schools in Nashville were off for the eclipse and they had been talking about the event at school. "THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!!!" he shouted. Granted it doesn't take much for him to declare a day as the best or worst ever, but he said this was the best more often than usual.

So we stood and stared at the sun through our eclipse glasses. We watched that sliver of a moon grow and grow. Eventually it hid enough solar real estate that the sun turned into a Carolina crescent. Then ultimately our solar system's great light disappeared into a sliver itself.

My U.S. History teacher was a nice woman. She was polite. She seemed like kind of a gentle soul. She was also the first person I met who seriously referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. And that's when things got complicated. Even as a 17 year old lifelong South Carolinian, I knew that there were all kinds of problems with that statement. But I didn't say anything.

I didn't say anything because I was 17 and my teacher was nice to me. But of course she was nice to me. I was a respectful white kid who was darn good at U.S. History. This isn't to say that she was mean to anyone. I doubt I ever heard her raise her voice. But it was easy for me to push aside my unease with her language about the Civil War. She was nice and I was not going to run afoul of that niceness unless I set out to do so.

Sir,
I don't recognize your Jesus. That is the simplest way for me to say this. You say that God has given the leader of our country the authority to wipe another person off the earth by whatever means necessary. You acknowledge that this includes means that would annihilate millions of lives. Eliminating exponential scores of people alongside the man who has cruelly punished them is no sort of justice. It surely isn't in the realm of anything one would call pro-life. The act is evil, pure and simple and you are saying that God is blessing this: a means of death and destruction, tools full of utter disregard for humanity, and weapons that could wipe life from the face of God's good creation.

I do not recognize your Jesus. I don't hear your Jesus blessing peacemakers or loving his enemies. I don't see him offering forgiveness or weeping over the lost. I don't see him laying down his life for others. And I'm sure you might point out that Jesus once said that he would bring a sword. But this, nuclear destruction, is not what he was talking about and let's not pretend you think that was what he was talking about either.

Your Jesus is not the Prince of Peace and Son of God I see in the Bible. He is a cartoon cowboy riding a weapon of mass devastation in a Kubrickian farce. Your Jesus screams "MAGA!" and reigns over the Kingdom of the U.S.A. rather than the borderless Kingdom of God. Your Jesus blesses excruciating death rather than being one who overcame it.

The ABBA-evoking piano swells in the background as Arcade Fire lead singer Win Butler sings out in a staccato groove "Every room in my house is full of s--- I couldn't live without out." The juxstaposition is pronounced. There is trump and tragedy in Butler's declaration. The music makes you want to dance while the words make you want to make you mourn the consumerism that has swallowed culture whole.

That's Everything Now in a nutshell. Musically Arcade Fire continues to dance in the direction they started with previous release Reflektor. And the lyrics rummage through the complicated, broken world. There are moments that touch on a darkness the band hasn't hit since Neon Bible. Of course, Arcade Fire is not the first band to sing about the darkness while trying to dance. They won't be the last either, but this band is talented enough that it makes for an interesting, rewarding, if not perfect listen.

Words will fail here. I should get that out of the way at the start. Whenever I write something, I always feel like someone who underestimated the distance of a jump, but only realized it midair. But I know that these words are never going to cross the gap. It's not possible.

12 years ago, EA and I were married and time has done a weird thing. It doesn't feel like we have been married for that long, but at the same time, it's hard to remember a time before EA was in my life. A dozen years doesn't seem that long ago. 2005 doesn't seem like it was eons in the past. Then I remember that 12 years before I started falling for this woman, I was seven years old just like our oldest son is now.

"They told me this tale. A story about a creature that was born at the beginning of sentience. A yellow entity that was made of living fear. It created terror into anything it came in contact with. Caused entire civilizations to destroy themselves out of paranoia. Their fear was eaten by this creature....

[It] threatened to consume the entire universe. It wanted to infect every living creature with fear, and fear leads to violence. Violence leads to fear. Like an endless loop of death and destruction."
-from Green Lantern: Rebirth #3 by Geoff Johns