“Don’t make me come down there – God”. I first saw this phrase several years ago on a billboard coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel as I drove into Manhattan. God was pictured looking down on all the turmoil, trauma and degradation that humanity can muster – and was going to ‘come down’ and put everything right. It is a forbidding phrase accompanied by fearsome images of all the cruelty we heap on one another.
The implication of the image and message is that God is absent from day-to-day life – and shows up only when we get out of line, and then God’s work is defined by punishment and rebuke.This is not the God I know now, but – like many of us – it is the God I remember. The God who is the arbiter of sin, and the dispenser of punishment – from fire and brimstone to abandonment if not banishment. A God to be feared for God’s wrath and judgment.
I knew this God, because that was the God that I was taught, a teaching that was not exactly direct, but nonetheless subliminal; causing me to toe the line, obey the rules, keep my nose clean because there would literally be hell to pay if I didn’t. All of which reflects a theology of fear; fear of a God whose main purpose is to foster fear. I have spent years working to let go of that image of God; but that legacy can still sometimes rear its head and threaten to take over my soul.So many people I know who have had it with the idea of a relentless and punitive God, and have let go of the idea of God altogether, if they ever had one in the first place. But the notion of a God who seeks to avenge misbehavior, punish apostates and sinners, has a strong hold on the collective consciousness of American religion and culture; and these days threatens to take over the national soul.
If I had to summarize the primary message of Donald Trump, it would be “don’t make me come down there”. Donald Trump is not God, although there is a sizable contingent of people across America who think he has been uniquely and directly anointed by God. And President Trump seems to relish this designation of and from the faithful, and in a bizarre and fiendish way he is carrying out this mandate: by punishing, threatening punishment, blaming, accusing, defaming and banishing. Fear is injected into every conversation and action. Large companies are afraid to add a tariff fee to their price points because they won’t want to incur the consequences of the President’s wrath.The examples of individuals, communities, governments, corporations and politicians being fraught with fear grows by the minute, all of which reflects, supports, and fuels this notion of an angry and vengeful God.
The God I embrace, and the God who I believe embraces me – and embraces us, all of us — is not a God of rebuke but a God of love and hope. We need to return that embrace – now more than ever — by embracing others, especially those who are being threatened. We do that through the many avenues of resistance: protesting, demonstrating, witnessing, protecting. All are vital and necessary.
Yet there is a form of resistance that often gets lost, and that is the resistance of joy. The forces of fear and the theology of punishment want to squelch joy by conveying that joy is frivolous and fleeting. That it has no power. Joy – which often emerges out of pain — is a form of resistance.Joy is not denial. In the midst of acknowledging the cruelty and caprice of what is happening, resistance rises in the refusal to accept that fear is the final word. In this way joy becomes the ultimate resistance.
Most of us have examples of people whose lives were framed by pain but were able to be apostles of joy. People whose lives were reflections of the wisdom of the psalmist: “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:6). For me, in my experience, two stand out.The first was Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth’s joy was captured in her constant smile and unbridled energy for life. She radiated joy. She had every reason to collapse under the theology of punishment, given that her entire family was murdered during the Holocaust and she was spirited out of Germany to safety when she was fourteen. Her joy emerged out of pain.
As did that of Desmond Tutu.The chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Archbishop Tutu spent months listening to stories of cruelty, abuse and loss that took place during the harrowing years of apartheid. He lived in continuous threat to his own life. He absorbed the pain, stood up to the threat, wept with surviving victims of violence – and at the same time became a world renown vessel of joy. Both Dr. Ruth and Bishop Tutu used their joy to challenge injustices and the fears enveloping their communities by serving them with the joy of their resistance.
We need to embrace that joy, which is always available, and which is not only a power that resists the forces of fear and punishment but can also transform them. Joy can be contagious. Let’s spread it.
