St. Augustine once wrote, “Why are you tossed about by the billowing waves of the lake and the storm? Because Jesus is asleep; that is, because the faith that derives from Jesus has gone to sleep in your heart.”

The Church has done some pretty amazing things since its beginning in that upper room on the first Pentecost. It has also done some atrocious things as well. There are also a lot of ways that our modern Episcopal church looks like the early church (e.g. the prominence of the eucharist, the way that we read scripture during our services, the high view of baptism), but there are also some important ways that we have veered from how the first Christians lived and did ministry.

As we are coming up to the Fourth of July, we will be hearing a lot of talk about ‘freedom.’ I’ll be honest, the way that we as Americans talk about this always makes me feel a little uncomfortable.

The much harder question for us to consider as 21st Century Christians in an overwhelmingly individualist culture is, “What must a community that places scripture at the center of its life look like?”

A couple of years ago I was invited to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on a Netflix series called Black Mirror. Each episode of Black Mirror is a stand-alone story of speculative fiction that is set in a near-future dystopia and utilizes science fiction technology.

Scripture and tradition are not just two approaches to interpreting the world as Episcopal Christians; they are deeply intertwined.