Bunyan Cocar

“Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’.39 Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime.

That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister.

And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you.

When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that.

And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you.

And she believed.

When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?”

Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian.

All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now.

But I don’t have an answer for them.

How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”

Why else would she believe it?

It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.

My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.

That or Sima is insane.

There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it.

If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake.

But she doesn’t think so.

She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed.

And she’s poor now.

People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better.

It’s true.

We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma.

We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong.

But you can’t make Sima agree with you.

It’s true.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

This whole story hinges on it.

Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“The short, simple, and simply beautiful liturgy of Ash Wednesday, which begins our annual commemoration of Jesus's march toward death, teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are a part of a church or not, whether you believe or you don't, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or someone whose faith experiences far transcend the laughable limits of labels, you know this truth deep in your bones: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith