Photo by Karl Callwood on Unsplash (Cropped)
Heretic Adjacent | Feb. 23, 2026
To the ones who have more than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes,
On behalf of people truly trying to follow Jesus, I need to apologize. I need to tell you that we lied to you. We handed you a Jesus we edited for your comfort. And in doing so, we failed you and the people sleeping outside your gates. Most importantly, at least from where I sit, we failed the God we claimed to represent.
Here’s what I’m talking about.
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For decades in this country, the church decided that the sins worth preaching about were the ones happening in other people’s bedrooms. We built entire theological campaigns, ecclesiastical empires around demonizing any form of sexuality that didn’t look sufficiently like Ward and June Cleaver.
We made it absolutely clear where we stood on who was allowed to love whom and in what legal and domestic configuration, and we policed those boundaries with a ferocity that would have impressed even the most sanctimonious fussbudget.
And while we were busy doing all that finger-wagging at what people do with their genitals, we said almost nothing about the sin Jesus actually wouldn’t stop talking about.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you read the Gospels without the benefit of centuries of wealthy-donor influence on scriptural interpretation, Jesus is alarmingly clear about money.
He’s clear in Luke 12, where a man builds bigger barns to hold his surplus and dies before he can enjoy any of it, and Jesus calls him a fool.
He’s clear in Mark 10, where the terms he offers a rich young man are so unambiguous that the young man walks away grieving because he knows he heard correctly.
He’s clear in Luke 16, where a man in fine linen steps over Lazarus at his gate every single day, not with malice, just with the casual indifference that extreme comfort almost inevitably produces. But he still ends up separated from God by the same distance across a chasm he’d spent his life building.
He’s clear in Matthew 25, where the test turns out not to be a doctrinal exam but a simple two-part question: “Did you see the hungry, the cold, the sick, the stranger? Did you act?”
The prophets were screaming the same thing centuries earlier. Amos calls out those who are “at ease in Zion,” who lie on beds of ivory while the poor can’t find enough to eat.
Isaiah says that the worship of people who grind the faces of the impoverished is noise in God’s ears.
James, who may be the angriest writer in the Christian Scriptures, tells wealthy hoarders that the wages they’ve withheld are crying out and that God has heard every cry.
In other words, this isn’t a minor theme. This is the throughline that runs from Amos to Jesus to James without interruption.
The reign of God that Jesus kept announcing is a world where nobody gets left at the gate with only the dogs to lick their sores, nobody’s child has to go to school hungry, and nobody dies because they can’t afford to live.
And if I’m going to be true to my vocation, I have to be honest: We knew that. We just decided not to say it out loud. Because the people who could fund our buildings and our programs and our staff salaries were typically the same people Jesus was talking about.
But here’s the hardest part to admit: We made a calculation, mostly unconsciously, the way institutions always do, that our survival was worth more than our honesty.
So, we landed on the sexuality debates, which cost us nothing financially, and we fought them loudly enough that nobody noticed we’d stopped preaching the Sermon on the Mount to the people who most needed to hear it.
We also discovered that a religion preoccupied with personal salvation is a religion that never has to ask hard questions about who’s eating and who isn’t. If faith is fundamentally a transaction between our soul and God, then following Jesus becomes a matter of interior architecture, not economic responsibility. We can have a deeply moving quiet time at 6 a.m. and vote against the minimum wage by 9, and nobody in our small group will say a word. We built entire church cultures around that very silence.
We also handed a lot of people a flag when they came looking for a cross. Then, we told them the difference between the two wasn’t that big a deal. Once we welded national identity onto Jesus’ cross, wealth started to look like divine favor for the deserving, and poverty started to look like the personal failure of the undeserving.
(I mean, you’ve got to hand it to us. Christian nationalism is a remarkable theological achievement in that regard: it takes everything Jesus said about money and makes it sound unpatriotic.)
So, I’m sorry.
We let you believe that Jesus made peace with acquisitiveness. He didn’t.
We let you believe that your wealth was a sign of God’s favor. The text won’t support that reading.
We let you believe that what you did with your money was between you and your financial advisor, when Jesus was especially clear that what we do with our money is between us and … every person who doesn’t have enough.
We owe you an apology. The church failed you by telling you a comfortable lie when you needed a true friend, which is to say, a friend willing to tell you the truth.
The Jesus we should have introduced you to doesn’t offer loopholes any larger than a needle’s eye.
But he also doesn’t write people off. He just tells the truth and waits to see what we’ll do with it.
The chasm isn’t fixed yet. Lazarus is still lying at the gate.
What we do next is between us and the Jesus we should have been preaching all along.
With true sorrow,
Derek
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from the Rev. Derek Penwell's Facebook page. Click here to read the rest of his Substack essay.