They were both 37 years old, murdered by federal agents in Minneapolis, less than three weeks apart. On January 7, Renee Good was sitting in her car when she was shot three times, including once in the head. On January 24, Alex Pretti was filming federal agents with his cell phone, exercising his First Amendment right to protest their presence peacefully. They shoved him to the ground and several of them beat him. An agent removed a handgun from Alex’s waistband, which he carried legally, and a few seconds after disarming him, 10 shots were fired in five seconds into his prone body on the ground.
Senior administration officials quickly labeled both Renee and Alex “domestic terrorists,” claiming that federal agents were defending their lives. Go watch the videos online. Alex never drew his weapon. Renee was unarmed, moving her vehicle very slowly. Once shot, agents did not attempt to stop their bleeding or resuscitate them. Administration officials swiftly declared the shootings “justified,” without even investigating them; didn’t start investigating until public outcry proved too much. You can find plenty of videos online of peaceful protesters being shoved to the ground or beaten by a mob of agents or pepper-sprayed in the face.
There’s a pattern building here of arbitrary and gratuitous violence, of lies and cover-ups.
“Equal under the law” apparently no longer applies to anyone anymore; neither does the idea that no one is above the law. Is this who we’ve become? Where will it lead? Are we being groomed for much worse to come, being desensitized into a new normal, like the proverbial frog being boiled in water?
For those who will accuse me later of preaching a “political” sermon, a “partisan” sermon, this transcends politics. Our federal government, by sanctioning unwarranted lethal force, has made this a matter of faith, of basic morality and decency. This goes well beyond politics. We worship Jesus Christ, an innocent man arrested, beaten, and then put to death by the Roman state on false charges just because it wanted to, because it could, because killing him was more convenient.
Jesus was mocked too by those who tortured him, who took perverse pleasure in his suffering, arrogantly assuming they were untouchable. In their lifetimes, they probably assumed correctly. But I wonder how they fared before the great judgment seat of Christ, where all will answer for their sins.
It leaves us wondering what to do now, and what to do next? How can we possibly respond in a way that’s both effective and reflective of who we are as faithful followers of Jesus? Where do we even start? We start where we always start, with Scripture, and we’ll go to the Gospel first.
Mary and Joseph presented Jesus at the Temple, an important moment in their family’s life. Imagine their surprise when they were accosted without warning by two elderly prophets, Simeon and Anna, whose wisdom, gleaned from long faithful lives, gave them insight. They saw how special Jesus was and shared what they saw, in word and deed, with Mary and Joseph. The words of Anna aren’t recorded, just her joy. But we hear Simeon declaring, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed.”
These dark words might feel inappropriate on such an auspicious occasion, but prophets influenced by the Holy Spirit tend to tell it like it is, and Simeon, even in his great joy, saw what was to be: the struggle, the sacrifice to be suffered by Jesus and his parents—“and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” And indeed, Simeon’s prophecy proved true.
Many resisted Jesus’s message, especially those who had the most to lose, those obsessed with domination and control. To them, Jesus was a threat because they knew that their lies would not long survive the light of his liberating truth. His message of unconditional love was a menace, and they would go and did go to great lengths to smother what he brought to give, but they failed.
They tried Jesus falsely, humiliated him publicly, told lies to undermine him, and finally killed him, but he rose again on the third day, proving that the love of God always wins. Those who oppose the truth of love, who rely on lies and cruelty and brutality, strive to induce us to abandon our principles, and they do it slyly by contriving to make us hate instead of love.
We all know the temptation. We watch the videos and read the stories. Our outrage rises rightly at the injustice, and before we know it, the consuming fire of hatred surges in our hearts. We despise the people responsible, and maybe even fantasize about vengeance, which is precisely what the hateful in our world want most from us and for us. The hateful want us to hate so that we can be miserable and puny just like them. It’s also the only game they know how to play. Refusing to hate confuses and disorients the hateful.
We must stay disciplined in Christ’s unconditional love, disciplined in prayer for those who persecute us and others, disciplined in our desire for the repentance and redemption of the hateful and cruel and brutal, disciplined in our witness that there is a different way, a way of forgiveness and reconciliation given to us by Jesus, who died on a cross and rose again.
In that discipline, fueled by grace, we find strength, a strength that refuses to stay silent. Jesus didn’t stay quiet. He stayed clever, but never quiet, even though his life would have been a lot easier and safer and longer if he would have just shut up. Jesus always advocated for the Kingdom, and brought it to bear against the selfish, tyrannical kingdoms of this world. If we follow him faithfully, then we too need to act and speak out, however we can, when oppressive forces seek to crush the innocent, the weak, and the truth.
Just as the Psalmist first prayed to God millennia ago, we too prayed this morning, “Happy are those people whose strength in in you! Whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way. For the Lord God is both sun and shield; he will give grace and glory. No good thing will the Lord withhold from those who walk with integrity.” And integrity cannot be taken away, no matter how much force is brought to bear; integrity is only ever given away.
We can act and speak with Christian integrity, even as we now know that our government might malign, beat, and even kill us for nothing more than simply showing up and asking questions and speaking truth. We can act and speak because we know that Jesus is with us—not only in this sacred space, but in every time and place where we call upon him. And we know that he understands what we’re going through.
That’s part of the whole purpose of Incarnation, of “God with us.” Hebrews is quite clear that “because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested”; “He himself shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”
In Jesus, God walked the earth, in part to know how it feels to be human: to suffer and to be limited, frustrated, apprehensive, intimidated. That’s the quality of love God has for you and me and everyone. The cross was the pinnacle of sacrifice, yet the Incarnation involved a sacrifice too. Just being here with us entailed loss, and by being here with us, Jesus offered a model for how to show up and be present for others, how to resist temptation and evil, how to live faithfully even when it’s hard and scary.
If we fail to act and speak, then who will? It’s tempting to ignore it all and focus on day-to-day exigencies, tempting to be comforted by modest mollifying gestures, tempting to forget how power-hungry governments consistently throughout history have retreated in a crisis, only to surge back with even greater outrages once people are distracted by something else.
Our sole comfort and strength come through Christ. What the months and years to come might bring, no one knows, and things might get worse before they get better, but our hope will not waver, “because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested,” and Christ has proven through his cross and Resurrection that God’s love always wins. Amen.
So this is really long, but my personal take on MAGA based Christianity.
There are more churches than gas stations in the city where I grew up, and most people have their love for Jesus on full display. They're always eager to ~~shame~~ save others from eternal hellfire. Usually you know pretty quickly when you meet somebody that they're Christian. Not always, but fairly often these are people you're better off avoiding for your own sake. I had such a negative experience with religion growing up that it really turned me away from it for a very long time. A few times when I was an adult I ended up making jokes about Christians to somebody only for them to kinda chuckle and roll their eyes before saying "yep, well that's me."
I would always be so stunned because they weren't like the Christians I knew growing up. If you made an inappropriate joke to the people I knew, they would never just laugh it off. It would be like a pre-internet version of being targeted for joking about Charlie Kirk. Scorn and wrath from anyone and everyone that might eventually wind up with the entire church ostracizing you until you made a very public and humiliating show of begging for God's forgiveness while they all prayed for you in a big circle, and maybe eventually they would give you their forgiveness too. Maybe.
But the handful of Christians I accidentally came across as an adult were nothing like that. They usually didn't wear giant crosses and make a big showing of praying for everybody else, so you couldn't really just identify them by sight alone. They didn't boycott Harry Potter and burn books because it was "sorcery," but the biggest difference was they really weren't the type to just constantly judge others. They were so kind. Like legitimately some of the nicest people I'd ever met.
I got even older and I still wasn't religious, but I started volunteering with this group doing free medical care for the homeless. The medic that ran it was legitimately one of the most incredible people I've ever known. His brother had passed away several years earlier while struggling with addiction, and after he passed he decided to devote his life taking care of other people who needed help. I know this sounds cheesy as fuck, but there were legitimately times when I would feel like I was working side by side getting to help Jesus perform miracles.
Obviously not like magic miracles, but like power of decent medical care miracles when it's badly needed. Like cleaning wounds that people without running water had been dealing with for months by trying to wash them out in the river. This guy would go and buy a few jugs of water and soap out of his own pocket, then help people clean the wounds and leave them the rest of the soap and water and extra bandages so they could keep taking care of it on their own. Just seeing the difference it made for people in really bad situations to know somebody actually cared, and gave a shit about following up with them to make sure they were getting better, it always reminded me of the stories I read in the Bible growing up about Jesus and outcasts that everybody else had turned their back on. Even with all the churches Jesus centric culture, growing up, I definitely never saw anybody doing anything like that. This guy wasn't jewish or from Israel though. He was Muslim (I think?) but not actually religious and originally from the Bronx.
Since we're in the south, everybody always assumed we were with a church when we would go places and set up clinics. We weren't, it was just his organization he started all on his own and made sure everybody got trained and certified. It was always weird for people to hear that somebody just recognized people in need and decided to start an organization because help was desperately needed, but I get it. Like I said, I always heard people talk about Jesus but I never saw anybody doing those kind of things in real life. This guy.wasn't doing for the praise. He definitely wasn't doing it for any money. Not for religious reasons or as a status in a church. It was because after losing his brother the way he did, wanted to do something to help somebody else who might find themselves in the same situation. Just straight empathy and doing good for the sake of spreading more good.
Anyway, to wrap it up and get to the point of this whole story, we had this one patient we saw all the time on a weekly basis. He was a really sweet guy in his 80s who had lived a rough life but was on the upswing. Not even that bad of memory problems but he would always forget we weren't with a church, and ask that same question over and over again. So two summers ago I was seeing him for one of our normal visits and taking his vitals.
Like always he asked if we were with a church and I just kind of chuckled and shook my head, but kept taking his vitals. Then he asked why we did what we did, and I kind of gave the same standard reply I always gave. Even though he'd heard it before, he still seemed so surprised like he didn't understand why people would help other people without religion. Normally that would be the end of it, but for some reason that day he asked about the medic and said "Well ok, y'all aren't with a church, but he's Christian right."
I laughed again and told him I believed he was actually Muslim, but we're not a religious organization in anyway. Then he asked me "Well what about you, you're Christian, right?" So I laughed and shook my head again, thinking that would probably be the end of it, but then he asked me, "Well why not?"
He wasn't rude about it or anything, he was just honestly asking me why I wasn't. I realized when he asked me that, nobody had ever asked me that question before and I didn't really have an easy answer. I didn't think much more about it that day, but it stuck with me, and I've never forgot him asking me about it.
Then Trump got elected... and it's all part of another very long story, but since he took office everything has just gradually been destroyed and fallen apart. During the earliest days of the new administration I was home sick and reading a story about JD Vance saying some stupid bullshit I can't even remember exactly. It was something along the lines of not having to have empathy because there's an order in which Jesus says you care for other people, and that order isn't equivalent for everyone. Some stupid shit that I had never heard in my entire life that seemed to completely contradict the entire idea of the greatest commandment. Like an empathy loophole?
That really pissed me off. Then out of anger or frustration I guess, after hearing him say some stupid ignorant bullshit like that while calling himself a Christian, and saying the administration was going to be aggressively spreading Christian nationalism across the U.S., I started looking up Bible verses. Basically things I hadn't really thought about in 18 years that I knew completely contradicted that couch fucker and his stupid fucking claims about "toxic empathy."
So anyway, that's when I came across this one
Matthew 25:35-40
I still can't really read though it without crying, but when I read it that day so many different emotions just came flooding to me at once.
I thought about the Muslim man who lived his life in a way that exemplified everything good I was ever taught about Christianity, for no reason other than empathy and spreading good to other people.
Everything that some part of me held on to for all of these years without even realizing it, and despite all the bad memories that were clouding it. The things that were always guiding my sense of right and wrong without me ever really being consciously aware of it until I was directly confronted with something that reminded me.
I thought about that fucking hypocrite with his stupid eyeliner lying through his fucking teeth to the entire world while running his mouth about his bullshit empathy loophole.
About how so fucking unjust and unfair life can be. And about who the Bible says is responsible for that kind of misery.
Then I thought about my patient asking me "Well why not?" and I realized that bullshit right there. That was exactly why not. I distanced myself from something important to me because of the people who claimed Christianity for themselves the same way they claim everything else: exploit and profit
They take what doesn't belong to them and they destroy it for everybody. They did it to Christianity and now they want to do it to America. Fuck that.
First, that was a really nice story, thank you for taking the time to write all of that out
Secondly, yeah, the intellectual colonization of Christianity is a really tragic thing. I was personally raised by people who had been abused by the kind of conservative and dominating religion you described when they were kids and who had left their churches, so I was allowed to believe whatever I wanted growing up and just relate to the Bible as a collection of cool stories and good quotes (as well as some weird and bad ones), imo not as good as Kurt Vonnegut but better than Tom Clancy (look I read whatever was on the shelves of my local library whether it was good or not as a kid).
What I'm trying to say there is it isn't a personal thing for me either way, because I never really got bullied by a bad church or had a strong family connection with a good one. But I have seen both of these things in other people, and either way, whether they hate/fear the church or associate or with family and community, the reflexive emotional responses those people have had were undeniably genuine and persistent. Those experiences (along with a lot of neurological research suggesting most human beings have brains that are structurally predisposed towards wanting a connection with a god-like force and that's why so many separate groups have independently come up with religions) have really convinced me that religious belief is an almost inextricably deep part of a person's psyche (a lot like sexuality and gender actually).
And yeah, there have definitely been concerted efforts by states and rich people and tyrannical assholes of all sorts who want to use this thing that has such a deep hold on most people to justify themselves since Constantine. But also there's a bunch of examples of this backfiring and religion causing people to rebel, from Martin Luther to John Brown. And also, there's a ton of examples of religion bringing people together from sides that shouldn't have gotten along and getting them to work together, from the Christmas truce in WWI to the American Civil Rights movement bringing white churches from the north to volunteer alongside black churches in the south to register black voters.
So, yeah, religious belief is a really complicated thing with good and bad aspects, but it is a powerful thing and something everyone needs to sort out for themselves one way or another. It sounds like you're walking your path now and I'm glad to hear it!