On the TV show Stranger Things there is an alternate universe called “The Upside Down.” I hate that I have to say this, but it is not literally an upside-down version of this world, where everyone walks on ceilings, houses hang from the sky and trees sprout from clouds. Instead, the Upside Down is an alternate dimension (perhaps an entire universe), similar and connected to ours. It’s a shadowy place of death and decay. The air is toxic and infects your soul.

The Upside Down is under the control of an entity known as the Mind Flayer, whose goal is to corrupt everything it touches until it rules our dimension as totally as its own. This dark Alterverse was named when one of the characters (Eleven) flipped a game board upside down to show everyone else where their friend Will was trapped—in the Upside Down.

Stranger Things is set in 1980s America when videogames, big hair and British rock bands slinging both punk (The Sex Pistols) and pablum (Duran Duran) were all the rage. Life is good for the teens who live in Hawkins, Missouri, but the Upside Down is already creeping into and corrupting their idyllic world.

Sometimes, I feel like Christianity has also been corrupted by the Mind Flayer because some of the things I hear Christians say turn Jesus’ love and compassion into judgment and intolerance. The Gospel of Jesus Christ that I understand often seems like it’s from a different reality than the Christianity espoused by people I speak with from the self-proclaimed “orthodoxy” (and orthodoxy is always self-proclaimed, by the way).

Consider this: Jesus overturns tables in the Temple courtyard—a clear analogy about what he intends to do to what he sees as untenable religious, social, legal, and political systems. American Christians, on the other hand, have taken a page from Rome’s playbook and are all cozied up with the American Emperor. In America, and in truth in Rome shortly after Jesus’ death, Jesus is no longer a rebel, rallying his followers against systemic injustice and oppression. Now, Jesus loves guns and Uncle Sam, is on our side in every war, hates socialists and commies, and fights with Christians against, well, everyone else. You know, just like Jesus fought for Constantine, on Rome’s side, as if Jesus would fight on any side, much less the team responsible for crucifying him. Constantine’s dream of a cross emblazoned on the shields of his army 1500 years ago was a most unfortunate turn of events that created the Upside Down Christianity currently plaguing the world like the Mind Flayer.

Any gospel that preaches Jesus on the side of warmongers is not only upside-down, it’s also perverted.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself by all accounts, is about subverting the systemic injustices that invariably arise from human governments and religions. Jesus wants to convert people’s hearts to love, not to Christianity. He urges us to reimagine our relationships with each other and to recreate our institutions along the lines of God’s sense of grace and righteous justice. Jesus says, “remember our covenant with God!” He urges us to use that deep, intimate relationship, foundational to our very existence, as the groundwork for everything we create here, in this reality. Even 2000 years ago, Jesus was well aware that we’re already living in the Upside Down. And Jesus, like Will’s friends in Stranger Things, wants to rescue us.

For the record, here’s a sample of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—what he preaches, not what was written about him in the century after he died. Jesus teaches about turning the world upside down, not about his human sacrifice to right the Cosmos–which has become the Upside-Down Gospel about him.

Let’s also remember Jesus in the context of the early First Century, CE. Scripture indicates he was an itinerant Rabbi. It would have been common for Jesus to be invited to teach at various houses of worship throughout Israel. Sometimes, these were synagogues. Most often, we’re told, Jesus taught in private homes. When those became too crowded, he’d go to a high point in a park, or preach from a boat, although I think the boat is more metaphor than literal. Have you ever tried speaking to people on land from a boat?

In Mark 1:.4b–5, Jesus introduces his ministry (not from a boat) by saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (ESV). From go, Jesus lets his students know that he is preaching a message of good news, that the Kingdom of God is already unfolding in their midst.

The Kingdom of God is Jesus’ central theme. It’s hard for us today to imagine what that idea meant to the people hearing it then. We hear kingdom and think Harry and Meghan. Jesus’ audience heard kingdom and thought about Rome, whom many Jews considered their oppressors. They also remembered their history as an independent kingdom, threatened continuously by surrounding superpowers.

When Jesus’ Jewish audience heard Kingdom of God, they would have been reminded of their ancient covenant—and been forced to consider how well they were fulfilling it, as their ancestors were warned generations before in 1 Samuel 12.1-12: But when you saw that Nahash the Ammonite king was coming against you, you said to me, ‘No! There must be a king to rule over us.’ But the Lord your God was already your king!

Like Samuel, Jesus reminded his students of their pledge to exalt no other king before God. Jesus was not-so-subtly urging them (and continues to urge us) to rethink their loyalty to the Empire. Yes, there is the time Jesus tells his followers to pay their taxes (Matthew 22.21, “Give Caesar what’s his”), but that is to maintain the civil peace, protect the rebellion, and make the critical point that just laws should be obeyed, but unjust laws should be protested.

Jesus wants us to rebuild our civilization on the idyllic foundation of God’s unequivocal, universal love, a love that creates laws from our understanding of God’s righteous justice. Jesus wants us to see what the world looks like when it’s built together as one people, what society looks like when we see each other through his eyes. Jesus never envisions a lawless society, but he does inspire us to rethink our laws and social systems. In fact, he wants us to turn our unjust systems upside down!

In fact, part of Jesus’ problem with the Jewish Temple leadership of his era is that he believes they are stuck in the letter of the law, missing the more profound meaning. Understandably, the priests have ended up mired in the ink of legality for the sake of legality. That’s what lawyers do. Of course, Jesus wants to turn the law upside down, too, reminding us we are all intended to fulfill the law—not by obsessing over technical legalities that have nothing to do with justice for the accused and accuser, but rather, by acting like Jesus.

Jesus even distills his teaching into the same easy-to-use formula his teachers and the Rabbis before they developed. It’s a formula created to make it easy for all of us to remember our duty to God because our only duty is to God, not to any nation and certainly not to any national leader. According to Jesus, there is only one law God requires, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, body and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.

That’s it. Love, and that unconditionally. Jesus doesn’t say to make exceptions. “Love everyone except the Swedes, because someday their IKEA products will drive you insane by their pictographic instructions.” Never heard Jesus say that. Love everyone. That’s all Jesus ever says, in a thousand different ways. So, any gospel of Jesus that is not about unconditional love must be upside-down. Consider what Jesus says in  The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:1–7:29, or more succinctly in Matthew 6:24:

LOVE GOD ABOVE ALL! No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Lastly, I have to laugh at the irony of a gospel that turns Satan into the good guy, which is precisely what the American Christian, upside-down Gospel does. Think about it. The Upside-Down Gospel is about God keeping most people out! We can only enter Heaven if we claim belief in certain things about Jesus, and then we still have to face Peter at the “Pearly Gates.” In the Upside Down Gospel, Heaven is a gated community, and everyone else goes to hell.

Which makes Satan way more inclusive than God! It’s no wonder people are leaving Christianity for Secular Humanism because when Satan becomes the good guy—the all-inclusive, unconditional one—you know you’re practicing the Upside-Down Gospel instead of the gospel of Jesus Christ that turns that sort of thinking on its head.

While the upside-down gospel is designed to keep people in the dark, evil-infested alternate reality of the Upside Down, the Gospel of Jesus Christ lifts people up and out. Up and out of the darkness and into the light of a new reality. Right here, waiting for us to flip the board over and reveal it.

Amen.

Be part of The Current #creatingCommunity! Join us live on Sundays at 9am for a current events discussion, and 10am for a postmodern “church” service with music, meditation, communion and community discussion. Also, join us online for Intersect Live! the first Thursday of every month, and for Spiritual Dessert every other Thursday at 12pm. Join our mailing list for details!

For more information on our events, check our Facebook Events page: https://www.facebook.com/GoWithTheCurrent/events/

Alterverse: a reality similar to, but different from, ours. Think of our universe as one page in a book. Turn the page, and there is another reality, separated by ours by the thinnest of veils. In fact, if we hold the page of a book up to the light, we can see both realities at once. All these pages, representing a quantum of probabilities, are bound together by the book’s spine. In contemporary science, that binding force is often referred to as the Fundamental String: a vibrating, one-dimensional object out of which everything else flows. In religion, we call that God.