Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 94
The Wrath of God

1/ I never believed in the wrath of God. I believed in the love of God. Until something happened.

2/ Our little girl was so amazing! She had wide-spaced blue eyes, see-through curls, and sweetness galore. Already, by five, she was funny. Plus, she’d suffered a lot of illness. She was now healthy and had gone to her first day of school. This was back in the 70’s.

3/ We had just moved to Kansas, which, unbeknownst to us, still allowed elementary school principals to use corporal punishment on the students. I went into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight and say prayers. I discovered she was quietly crying. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?"

4/ Daddy I don’t want to go to school tomorrow. I’m scared.” “Why, Honey? What makes you feel scared?” “A man came to our class and told us that he owns the school....

5/".. He had a big piece of wood. He told us that if any of us broke his rules he would hit us with it. I don’t want to go back.”...

6/"...Sweetie, I won’t let him hurt you. Suppose I go and talk with him and make sure he won’t hit you? Would you like that?” She nodded. I held her awhile and then asked, “Want me to read a story?”

7/ Later that night I thought about her first day of school. I thought of that little turd scaring my innocent child on the threshold of her education. I wanted to throttle him. I went to see him with my new clerical collar on...

8/..I told him that he did not have my permission to terrify my child. I had a big speech I was going to give but he told me that what he had done was perfectly legal.

9/ By the time I got to work I was so upset that I snapped at my boss, the head pastor. He asked me what was going on and I told him I was so angry I could barely control myself. I told him about the principal....

10/.. He nodded and asked, “Do you think you might be feeling some of what God is feeling?” What? “Don’t you think that God, who loves her so much, is furious too?”

11/ He was showing me that the love of God produces the wrath of God.

12/ Look at the picture of the two year old screaming in terror as her mother is groped by a US official body-checking her before she is taken away and imprisoned.

13/ Listen to the sanctimonious Attorney General citing God’s word to justify this monstrous behavior. Then listen to the one who ordered it, our fool of a president, blaming Obama for what he himself had done.

14/ We are gratuitously visiting horrendous pain on the most vulnerable people on earth, people who had foolishly imagined that we are still a free, hospitable nation.

15/ We are fallen.

16/ Consider how purely God loves that child and how adamantly His word insists that He identifies with the least among us. Can you imagine the wrath that God’s love for her love generates?

17/ And then there’s this: I’ll bet that principal was abused as a little boy. I’ll bet some cruel and rejecting crap went down on Jefferson Beauregard....

18/.. I’ll bet it was as a little boy that he learned to do the pixie imitation in order to charm his way to safety. I’ll bet pre-school Donald’s home was awash with lies and criminality and rejection and neglect.

19/ Look at those children being abused by the United States.
We are seeding the future with violence.

20/ A reasonable question is, “Why doesn’t God intervene?”
Look again at the cross.
He already has intervened, and will again.

21/ Greedy pop-culture evangelicals, the ones who engage in what my friend Adam Ribbeck calls "Godporn", have grossly reduced the cross to being our ticket to heaven no matter what we’ve done or will do.

22/ No. Look again.

23/ The cross is the way out of the hell we humans are creating on earth. The cross -- Jesus’ courageous way of confronting evil without imitating evil -- is the way of nonviolence. It’s the only way forward. Jesus has showed us the path.

24/ It’s good to be filled with rage at such fascist evil as we see on our Southern border. Rage inspired by what is happening to the children and their parents is one of the ways that we manifest the image of God. God is always outraged when evil is visited on the innocent.

25/ Rage is always dangerous, however. Therefore pray for the grace of Christ, so that like Him, we use rage to propel us on his path of non-violence, offering ourselves to save those children and our nation’s honor.

26/ Mr. Trump; Mr. Kelly; Mr. Miller; Mr McConnell; Mr. Sessions; Mr. Ryan; Mr. Pence; Mr. Murdoch; Mrs. Sanders: Repent now, before the hell you are creating engulfs you eternally.

27/ The rest of us: Rise! Imitate those, like the good Beto O’Rourke, who are acting in nonviolent ways to restore those families.