The Prophets Weigh in on the Chanter-in-Chief

“Send her back…,” chanted the crowd led by the Chanter–in-Chief , he evoking earlier chants of, “Lock her up,” all making me wonder if Trump would have put an accusing finger in my wife’s face had she participated in the recent sit-in in Washington, D.C., where a group of Catholic nuns was arrested and handcuffed.  My wonderful wife, mother, grandmother and beloved teacher, as a six-year-old holding her mother’s hand, was part of the flood of refugees displaced by World War II.  After a two-year wait for a sponsor in a DP Camp in Passau, Germany, my wife and her mother arrived in New York, they a testament to the Statue of Liberty’s torch of welcome, that torch now transmuted by Trump into a blinding flashlight of suspicion and accusation.

Before Trump’s divisive campaign for re-election began, I happened to be reading “The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets, Then and Now” by Nahum Ward-Lev.  He asserts that the prophetic stream is characterized by a movement toward freedom and justice and criticism of imperial thinking that would dominate and exclude. The prophets did not mince words. Hear Isaiah: “Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards; they judge not the orphans neither does the cause of the widow reach them.” (1:23). No comment needed.

However, the biblical message of judgment is twinned with equally clear proclamations of caring and love. In his July 22^nd editorial, “For Migrants, the Faithful Offer Light in Dark Times,” E.J. Dionne writes of “nuns and other Jewish activists, both willing to be arrested as witnesses on behalf of immigrant and refugee children being abused by our own government.”  Dionne cites one of the most explicit themes in both the Old and New Testaments – a God who brings enslaved and oppressed people into the “promised land.”  “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21).  During her flight from Hungary following World War II, I like to imagine that this verse might have sustained my wife’s mother and her daughter, my future wife.

The theme continues into the New Testament.  Jesus, an integral part of the rich, Hebrew prophetic lineage repeatedly underscores obligation to the “other:” “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.  I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me.  I was in prison and you visited me.”  (Matt 25:36).

But as Diana Butler Bass, author of ten books on American religion, points out in her CNN Opinion (July 20), another strain exists.  While the president is “wildly unpopular among Christians who are persons of color, a majority of white Christians continue to approve of him.”  Evangelicals are in full support while “the divides in other white Christian groups are fairly even.”  She sees in the “other strain,” a God who is a “masculine Sovereign, a winner-God for people feeling displaced in a pluralistic world.  And after 9/11, this militaristic God became more real.  Meanwhile, the God of Love was not having a particularly good run.” The issue is not new, asserts Bass: The Civil War split major denominations over the issue of slavery, a fissure manifesting “a deeper political crisis bound up with different visions of God: the God of the Master versus the God of Love.”

Dionne’s column ends beautifully with the nun’s witness: “These women of faith, many in the winter of their lives, went beyond words to invoke a God of Love who will judge us by how we treat strangers and children.”

There is something else about this God of love: He asks us to forgive those who oppress, divide, scorn and banish. For me this is hard.  Very hard.  It makes the God who judges and punishes the cager of children and exploiter of the weak very appealing at this moment in time.  But then again, maybe love does win out.  The witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. changed this nation.  And perhaps, today, it is the breathtaking picture of elderly nuns lying down in the shape of a cross in Washington, D.C.