Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 95
The Lamb of God

1/ Like most of you I’m watching and recoiling from the presentation of monstrous American evil going on at our southern border. Seeing what my country’s officials are doing plunges me--and, I assume, most of you--into acute desolation.

2/ I find that doing theology and praying in such an hour helps me, and so I hope this brief reflection with a closing prayer will help you also. Remembering great truth and praying in the conviction of that truth both re-centers me and, more importantly, enables me to act.

3/ It’s a time to say no in thunder; a time to risk personal security for the sake of our nation’s redemption from the evil we are imposing on humanity.

4/ As I now read the Bible (helped by the wisdom of Rene Girard) here is one of it’s radical and central truths, the truth I believe God wants us to get in this hour:

5/ The victim is innocent.

6/ Humans always sacrifice scapegoats. That is, we look at someone who is different and ostracize him or her. Then when something goes haywire--say military defeat or an epidemic or an economic downtown--

7/-- we point at the different one among us and say it’s all his or her fault. Then we drive that person out or kill him or her, and we feel a brief release and have some peace.

8/ Beginning with Isaiah’s prophetic breakthrough when he writes his suffering servant poems, the Bible presents a radically different vision of evil and of redemption. The world assumed then, and for the most part assumes now, that the victim is guilty.

9/ We burned witches and lynched Africans because we believed that they were guilty and that we would be pure again once they were gone.

10/ But the victim is innocent.

11/ When Jesus was murdered, he was innocent. He was the victim of the violent and deluded men of power in that day. But everyone who knew him declared that he was innocent, without sin. Easter can be understood as the Divine affirmation of the innocence of the victim.

12/ You can see Jesus in the beautiful faces of those children; you can hear Him in their crying. You can watch Pilate and Herod at the White House, trying to wash their hands of their own murderous guilt...

13/ .. Once again you can see that all the faces of the White House thugs are white, and all the faces of their victims are not.

14/ Those boys and girls and their moms and dads were living along harming no one when their towns and villages were suddenly ravaged by the violent gangs who supply America’s endless appetite for drugs.

15/ Those families had heard about America as a land of freedom and safety. They walked 2000 miles to get away from terror.

These are the victims struggling to be free who we are criminalizing in order to satisfy our president’s appetite for domination.

16/ Our border has become for them the place of greatest danger. Trump, Miller, Kelly, Sessions, Nielson had been changing words: A parent struggling to save her child became a “child smuggler.”...

17/... A child in her mother’s arms became an “unescorted minor.” An entire people became an “illegal people”. This administration’s word-mangling is classic propaganda, used to disguise cruelty. There was great insistence on the letter of a non-existent law.

18/ We draw legitimate parallels to Nazi Germany, but the really apt comparison is to the Confederacy. Everything about how we are treating brown-skinned people is modelled after how our ancestors treated black-skinned people.

19/ We need deliverance.

20/ O God, I’m begging You: Strengthen me and all who see this evil into which we have descended as a nation; help us together to redeem the promise of our land, and of your word...

21/.. Bring together all who seek a land of compassion, mercy, and justice; raise us up as a peaceful army to set the captives--your beautiful children--free. We desire to restore every family our wicked government has torn asunder. Father, forgive . . .