Sven Björkborg, a pastor who serves several parishes southwest of Stockholm, says that Swedes, too, support the church because it guards important national values and traditions and does good work, such as helping the poor and the elderly and comforting the lonely. He says he believes in Jesus Christ, which is not a requirement for Church of Sweden clergy. (Affirming women’s ordination to the priesthood is required.)

To learn to follow Jesus is the training necessary to become a human being. To be a human being is not a natural condition, but requires training. The kind of training required, moreover, has everything to do with death. To follow Jesus is to go with him to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.

“To all who received [Jesus], who believed in his name,” John’s gospel tells us, “he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12). In Christ we have been given a new identity: We are sons and daughters of the Most High God, children deeply cherished and unconditionally loved by our heavenly Father. Our status and significance in life derives not from our performance, but from our position in Christ. Who we are and what we are, is grounded in the truth that we now belong to God. We are God’s children by adoption and heirs of God’s promises. This new identity offers us a sense of value that does not come from anything that we have done for God, but rather from what God has done for us. No longer are we preoccupied with the way others see us. Our worth comes from how God sees us. No longer are we seeking the approval of others. We are seeking only to comprehend and embrace the wonder of being children of God!

When the Enemy depreciates us, recalling to us the failures and deficiencies of the old self, we have only to assert the truth about our new self:

I have been given power to become a child of God! (Jn 1:12)
I am no longer a slave, but a friend of Christ! (Jn 15:15)
I have bought with a price. I belong to God! (I Cor 6:20)
I am a child of God by adoption! (Rom 8:15)
I am no longer under condemnation! (Rom 8:1)
I have been redeemed and forgiven! (Col 1:14)
I know that nothing can separate me from the love of God! (Rom 8:28)
I am a brand new person in Christ Jesus! (II Cor 5:17)
I am a citizen of heaven! (Phil 3:20)

This is the first gift of the Spirit that is given to us: a new identity that is undeniable and that can never be taken away from us. We are God’s children by adoption, joint heirs with Christ! This is who and what we are now, and will be forevermore. “See what love the Father has given us,” the author of I John exclaims, “that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are!” (I Jn 3:1)

Because higher wages mean more expensive goods and customers don’t want to pay higher prices. While it would make for a simpler narrative, companies like Walmart, Gap, and H&M that have operations in Bangladesh outsource the making of their clothing lines overseas not simply because they want to exploit people on the other side of the world, but because we their customers all but force them to do it. While most of us would be appalled if we saw the working conditions and knew the wages of the people that make the clothes we wear and would no doubt shout our anger from the roof tops, our wallets tell a different story. Our wallets, or more specifically our spending habits reveal the cold hard reality that most of us just don’t give a shit about where we get our clothes, so long as we get them for cheap. Worse yet, as Tony Campolo would say, most of us in the church care more about fact that I just said “shit” than the fact that countless men, women, and children suffer and die everyday as a direct result of our lust for low, low prices. Which is why the problem of evil is hanging in our closets.

And yet, perhaps even more amazing is the fact that 17 percent of Catholics have believed that when they receive the Eucharist it is truly the body and blood of Christ despite not knowing the church teaches this to be true. Though it carries the embarrassing fact of Catholics being unaware of their own faith tradition, the church should still be proud of what this number says about the faith of the church and the validity of its teaching on the real presence. Just like Jesus himself said to Thomas, blessed are those who have not seen (or in this case, heard) and yet still believe.

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters …. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me — because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present.