an act of god, pt.2

In a previous post I had some comments about whether the Coronavirus pandemic could be seen as the wrath of God, and if so in what way.  Now we have the one-two punch of a pandemic and racial unrest that reveals a soul-sick society still in great need of redemptive healing.  And the voice of one segment of that society cries out in rage. 

Let me just re-iterate the basis of my comments on the virus founded in a Pauline notion of the divine: that God is not a being “out there somewhere”, somehow separate from their creation, but is “over all and through all and in all,” and “in whom we live and move and have our being.”  A reality that transcends creation, but that creation is a part of, that we as humans are integrally connected with, and which is ultimately defined by one word: love.  In that way, who we are and how well we reflect that definition will in part define the health and wellness of God themselves.  

I combine that with the story of a man who is said to be the ultimate example of what that reality would look like as an actual human being living among us.  He was an ethnic minority living in territory occupied by a nation obsessed with its own power and economic well being, daily witness to all of the injustices which accompany that.  A nation with a political structure that was in bed with religious leaders who used a fear and shame based religion to keep people subjugated physically and spiritually.  A system controlled by religious and political leaders who based their power and privilege in defining who the outsiders were and who was less than equal. 

The God-man raged against it.  He excoriated the religious elite with no-holds-barred teaching to lay bare their hypocrisy.  He raged through the marketplace with a whip, disrupting commerce and calling out their unjust and unequal economics for the ungodly travesty it was.  

That was the wrath of God.  That was the voice of God raging against the injustice that is the opposite of love.  Today that is what I am hearing in the rhetoric and seeing in the overturning of tables.  

I began with the notion that the voice of one segment of our society cries out in rage.  I hear in that voice the wrath of a God crying out in sickness and pain, who is still not well, not entirely whole. Because we shouldn’t be able to even describe our brothers and sisters as a “segment” of our society.   It has been 2,000 years since a movement began with the declaration that there are no segments, we are all one and a part of the one that is all.  But here we are.  

The winds and the rain are beating against our house, revealing a foundation that is cracked and unstable.  It remains to be seen if the great crash is what’s next, and if so whether we are able to rebuild a better foundation in order to construct something more durable. 

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