Episode 71: Same Field Different Game

The volume is up, the outrage feeds are endless, and too many voices use Jesus as a brand for power. We press pause and ask a harder question: what does faith look like when you strip away celebrity, nationalism, and culture‑war noise and return to the way of Jesus?

We start with the warnings of Matthew 7—being known by our fruit, not our slogans—and the centering call of Micah 6:8 to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. From there we draw a sharp line between Christ’s kingdom and the pursuit of dominance, showing how religious nationalism confuses allegiance to Jesus with allegiance to a party. Fresh from a civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery and Selma, we trace painful continuities from Jim Crow to today’s rhetoric and ask the church to tell the truth about complicity, echoing Jamar Tisby and Bryan Stevenson. The measure of spiritual health, we argue, is not platform size but how we treat the poor, the accused, and the marginalized.

This conversation gets practical. We talk about turning down the noise, matching your news time with scripture time, and learning to wait in prayer rather than chase instant answers. We walk through reading the Bible in context, resisting proof texts and shallow takes, and building real friendships across difference instead of huddling in ideological tribes. We offer heart‑check questions—about control, scarcity, and joy at others’ losses—that help expose self‑righteousness and invite repentance. Throughout, the thesis stays clear: Jesus is enough. Not as an excuse to withdraw, but as a mandate to embody justice, mercy, humility, and neighbor love right where we live.

If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe for more thoughtful conversations at the intersection of faith, race, and reconciliation, and leave a written review so others can find the show. Your voice helps amplify a quieter, stronger way forward.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Purpose
• 0:49 False Prophets And Self-Deception
• 2:10 By Their Fruits: What Jesus Requires
• 2:51 Religious Nationalism Versus Christ’s Kingdom
• 3:39 Micah 6:8 And True Worship
• 5:12 Celebrity, Power, And Deception
• 7:05 Competing Playbooks For Power And Justice
• 7:39 Civil Rights Pilgrimage And Parallels Today
• 8:43 Telling The Truth About Complicity
• 9:20 Tools Of Peace Versus Tools Of Oppression
• 9:53 Loud Voices, Shallow Faith
• 11:01 Jesus Is Enough And The Hard Work Of Justice
• 12:01 Practicing Kingdom Principles Here And Now
• 13:21 Turn Down The Noise
• 14:06 Pray, Study, And Wait
• 15:04 Read Scripture With Context
• 16:15 Resist Tribalism; Build Real Friendships
• 17:23 Heart Check: Hard Questions For Ourselves
• 18:24 Enough For All: Choose Neighbor Love
• 19:34 Commendations, Encouragement, And Closing Calls

Transcript

Grantley Martelly: 0:08

Welcome to Above the Noise, a podcast at the intersection of faith, race, and reconciliation. And I'm your host, Grant Lee Martelli. Welcome back to Above the Noise. It's good to have you, and I really appreciate your support. Our audience is growing every episode, and your support is really appreciated. Thank you for telling your friends and your family and sharing this with others. Without you, this podcast would not be much. So I thank you again. And I've been thinking about some of the current chaos and vitriolic ideological battles taking place in the United States and in some other countries around the world, as we've seen in Great Britain, France, Germany, some parts of South America, and other countries. As a follower of Jesus Christ and one who believes that the life and teachings and the spirit of Jesus is the only hope for peace and reconciliation in our world, I find it difficult to recognize and affirm many of the false teachings and false prophets who today use the name of Jesus, but whose language, ideology, and actions are clearly not of Christ. Jesus speaks in Matthew 7, verse 21 to 23 that many shall say, Lord, Lord, and never see the kingdom of heaven. He said that I will say, I do not know you. And they will say, When did we see you naked or hungry or in prison? We did this, we did that, we spoke your name, we defended our people, we stood up for our country, and Jesus will say, I do not know you. It is a warning against self-deception and a reminder that true faith must be accompanied by a life lived in accordance with Jesus' teachings, not just words or spiritual performances. In the same book of Matthew, verse 16 to 20, it says, By our fruits we shall be known. It's a reliable test of a true believer of Christ. True worship is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, to take care of the widow and the orphan, the immigrant within our community. Some are using the religion to promote hate, racism, attacks on the poor, the indigent and the migrant, to seek political alliances that are built on these principles. And they question the authenticity. Other passages tell us that we should not put our trust in horses and chariots. Yeah, we see many promoting religious nationalism and calling for one group to be stronger than the other, demanding that people follow a certain way or demanding that we have a country that has all Christian principles. I don't ever remember Jesus trying to establish a political party or political Christian platform, Jesus' platform in any of his teachings. As best as I can recall, our call is not to recruit people for an earthly kingdom. God's kingdom is not of this world. And armies in power and privilege, supremacy, protectionism, and exclusivity are not pillars in that kingdom. A core biblical verse about true worship is found in Micah 6 8, where it says, He has shown you, O man what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. This verse connects loving God with acting justly and showing mercy to others, encapsulates in the essence of true practical worship. What is doing justice? True worship isn't just about prayer or rich religious rituals. It's about actively working for justice and standing up for the oppressed and the widow and the fatherless. To love mercy, to truly love God is also to love mercy and compassion, extending it to everyone, especially those who are vulnerable. And he causes to walk humbly. The act of humbly walking with God is a foundational posture for demonstrating both justice and mercy, showing that our actions stem from a genuine relationship with Him. It seems that for some, Jesus and his biblical message is just simply not enough for this day and age. They need kings, they need signs and wonders, they need celebrities. We want to make kings out of criminals, heroes out of self-centered villains. We want celebrities from social media that portray lifestyles that we could never live, and popularity that comes from clicks and cleverness. We suspend reality because to truly accomplish some of these things, we must find enemies around every corner in people who have done no wrong and create causes for misinformation and ignorance. They are those who promote their own agenda under the guise of Christianity because they have found that using the right words, absence of professed lifestyles, brings prominence, sponsors, audiences with celebrities and positions of power. They use the name of Christ to hate their neighbors, to abuse and assault the poor and the vulnerable, taking money from the widows and depriving parents of their children. This desire for prominence and the national religion have made many people write for deception. When we seek simple answers to difficult questions, when we relinquish our responsibility of the hard work of biblical discipleship to actually read the word, to test the word, to prove the word. We want to settle for checkbox routines and the applause of men for our signs of righteousness. We want a prescription rather than godly principles for daily living. Being a good neighbor has never been about institutions. It has always been about relationships first, how we get along with each other. They are those who value their upbringing and traditions above the transformational power of the Holy Spirit, never seeking really to expose our traditions and institutions to the light of biblical truth. So what happens when we claim to be on the same team, where we have diametrically opposed views of the game? How do we know if we're being effective? Which playbook do we use? How do we measure or win? The game plan for power, supremacy, privilege, self-righteousness, oppression, self-promotion, exclusivity, and discrimination is not the same game plan that we have for justice, peace, mercy, grace, equality, and hope. We may be in the same stadium, but we are not playing the same game. The game players will not resemble each other, and eventually there's going to be a forfeit. And this is where we are now. A team divided against itself will never win a championship. We just came back from a civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery and Salma, Alabama, visiting sites and re- and re-envisioning the tragedy of slavery and discrimination and Jim Crow and the Christian nationalism principles that undergirded that whole structure of slavery and oppression. We also visited the civil rights monuments, Rosa Parks, National African American Museum, read the documents, watched the videos, read the articles, and it even made the vision of the differences even more clear. And it was amazing to me how similar the language for power dominance and supremacy and religious nationalism, dehumanizing our fellow human beings, and criminalizing the innocent and creating social chaos in order to justify brutality and police action is being repeated, and in some cases, word for word. If we want to refocus on the heavenly kingdom, we must be intentional. As Jamar Tisbe explains in the book The Color of Compromise, the church has long been hesitant to confront these difficult truths. He writes, and I quote, for all the talk of reconciliation, the time will never come until the church is willing to tell the truth about its complicity and racism. End of quote. This avoidance of truth is the hallmark of a faith that fears man more than God. And Brian Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative also reminds us the true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. Our spiritual health is revealed in our actions. The spirit, the language, the training, the mindset that we use for peace, justice, inclusion, grace, love for our neighbors will not in any way resemble the tools of power and oppression. Therefore, since it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain civility and honesty and decorum, many are resorting to screaming at each other, name calling, writing vitriolic and hateful posts on social media, seeking refuge among those whose priorities are not their own or in their best interest, yet they seek to form alliances because of their political and social standing. We're seeking heroes in words rather than heroes in actions. Our desperation for kings and heroes and celebrity and popularity can cause us to seek alliances that may stroke our egos while destroying us from the inside. Trying to solve matters of the heart and soul with empty religious words, political and social power and popularity will wither as the grass and fade as a cheap metal of our shallow trophies. Relationships that resemble righteous leadership may come with the right words, but many times they're clearly misaligned with our true values. We cannot bow to the golden image. Some voices may not carry as far on the national scale. However, those with the loudest voices are at times simply hiding their shallow faith. Whitewash sepulchres as the scripture calls it, neglecting the important matters of justice, mercy, and fearfulness. In Matthew chapter 23, verse 23, Jesus said, You pay a tithes of mint and dill and cumin, but you have neglected the weirtier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and righteousness. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. Jesus emphasizes that true worship involves a heart aligned with God's values, including justice. The clear message that Jesus is enough will seldom satisfy the appetite for kingship or racial and ethnic supremacy or celebrity influences or self-promotion, spiritual manipulation, or religious nationalism. The desire for an earthly kingdom has existed since Jesus himself walked on this earth. Don't get me wrong, saying that Jesus is enough does not separate us from the hard work of doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly, and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Those things are not easy to do. What it says is that we do not need a strong man, a popular figure, a fake hero to rally around, to bring legitimacies to the kingdom agenda. So then true worship is to love God, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to show mercy and to walk humbly with the Lord. This is how we are supposed to live as people who call ourselves people of faith. It is impossible to love God and hear your brother at the same time. Loving God always comes tied with how we treat others, and they are inextricable. So how do we get on the same page? How do we become heavenly focused again? And when I speak about heavenly focus, I don't mean just focusing all of our attention on heaven. It means learning to live out those kingdom principles. Which begins with how we live it out here on earth and how we treat each other. One of the first things we can do is turn off the noise. Let's find times for peaceful contemplation. There's so much things going on around us. 24-hour news cycle, social media, people call in here and there, newspapers, jobs, athletics, sports, all these things can be noisy, can cause so much noise around us that we don't have time for peaceful contemplation. So find times to turn off the noise. Find times to just be quiet and to listen, to disconnect from all of these distractions. The next thing we can do is spend time in prayer and study. And I encourage you to spend as much time listening to the news and following social channels as you do in prayer and study. That can be a good measure of how we manage our time. And it's also a good measure of how we can find that peaceful contemplation for peaceful contemplation. Also, don't be misled by the loud voices and the shallow rhetoric. Sometimes the people screaming the loudest have the less to say. Sometimes the people who are always out there, the voices and trying to do this and do that and get the most clicks and looking at how many people, how many followers I have, are not really lending anything of value. They're just creating chaos and noise. Avoid the loud noises and the shadow rhetoric. Don't get excited about prosperity at the expense of the vulnerable. If people have to suffer, if we have to despise others, if we have to walk over others, if we have to treat people unjustly in order to be prosperous, then is that prosperity really worth it? Sure, it may bring some temporary pleasure, but at the core of our beings, is it really who we are? Are we really so narrow-minded? Are we so shallow in our faith that we don't believe that God has the ability to supply all of our needs and for everyone without having to take advantage of the vulnerable? The next thing we can do is spend time in prayer. And I'm not just coming to God and asking him with your checklist, give me this and give me that. I want this and I want that, support my person and not this person. But come to God and pray to someone rather than praying for things. God is not surprised with what's happening in the world. So have an open mind. Acknowledge God's awesome power and sovereign lordship. Seek to listen rather than to promote your own agenda. Do more listening than talking and wait. We don't want to do much waiting in this world that we're in. We want everything instantaneously. We want to move fast. We don't want to wait in traffic. We don't want to wait in line. We want a microwave stuff that should be baked, that should be prepared overnight. Waiting is sometimes the most important thing that we can do. And listening rather than talking. Then we can read the scriptures with open eyes and ears. Not just listening to our favorite person or our favorite preacher or our favorite Bible verse or favorite devotional book. But read the scripture with open eyes and ears. Not following anyone, but seeking to learn and seeking to allow the Holy Spirit who permeates that book. Because He's able to teach you what you need to know, and He's able to lead and direct us in the ways that we need to go. Read and listen. Seek context and avoid 21st century rationalizations without understanding the original context and the meaning of what is before us. Take time to become a disciple, a follower of Christ, rather than just a red regular attender and someone who just chick-ticking off the boxes and looking for people who are popular, or for that matter, people who make us feel good. God's word is not necessarily there to make us feel good. It is there to lead us into truth and righteousness and justice and to lead us in a better relationship with God. Avoid hasty generalizations and building relationships that are transactional rather than true friendships with people, getting to know people, getting to know your neighbors, hear their story, listen to their story, find out more about each other rather than just hanging out with our favorite clan or with our favorite channel or with our favorite social group. When we set ourselves in these places where people just adjust like us, it's easy to have hasty generalizations and to make false assumptions about people. But when we get to know people, when we take the time to learn and to listen from them, we may find that they're not as different from us as we really thought. Ask yourself, do I rejoice and get pleasure from seeing others suffer? Do I feel like I must always be in charge or in control of every situation? Can I accept that what I believe to be true may be completely false? And am I willing to change if I learn that is the truth? Do I want things for myself at the expense of others? Do I believe that God has enough resources for everyone to prosper and that he can do it without having me to suffer loss? Am I afraid of people who are different from me? These type of questions really help us to evaluate where we are and where we're coming from. And to begin to see people made in the image of God, and that we don't need to make enemies out of people who've done us no wrong or who've done no wrong just because they're different from us. Loving God is inseparable from how we treat others, and it is impossible to love God while hating our brothers, to find a way back to the true right path, we must be turned to these foundational truths. It is too important to not face up to these issues, to not look at how our communities are going, our country is going, the world is going, to look at the chaos and the exploitation that's taking place and not be brokenhearted about it. There's enough resources in the world, there's enough space in the world, there is enough of everything in the world for all of us to live peacefully together, if we can just put aside selfishness, self-righteousness, greed, nationalism, power, if we can look at our institutions that are built to promote some at the expense of others, and we can truly say we want to be good neighbors, we want to love God, we want justice, what we want for ourselves, we want for our neighbor. How we want to live and how we want to be treated should be how we want our neighbor to be treated. And yes, there are serious issues in the world that need to be corrected. But I would argue that there are better ways of going about it than we are going about it in many ways now. At least in the ways that are before us prominently in the news and on our television sets and in our newspapers and on our radio stations. There are still people in the world doing great things. I don't want to put that aside. There's still people out there giving and sacrificing and showing good examples. And I want to commend you if you're one of those people. And if you're not, I want to encourage you, take some time for peaceful contemplation to listen and to really examine who you are, what you're doing, how you're acting, and truly ask God, am I really following in your way, or am I just following the crowd? Because sometimes we can follow the crowd right off a cliff if we don't be careful. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting this podcast. And please share this episode with your friends and your families. If you have anything to comment to me about it, just write me an email at above the noise24 at gmail.com. If you like this episode, please subscribe and share it with a friend. Remember to subscribe and leave us a written. Reddit is very important to help develop podcasts that's leading the podcast universe and helping it become known to other people. Email us with comments at above the noise24 at email.com. Above the noise24 at email.com. And follow us on Instagram and Facebook at above the noise24. Thank you for listening. Please do this episode.