(This sermon appeared previously in a different form as an article www.rightingamerica. net.
Evangelical Unrighteousness and the Killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
Matthew 5:17 – 20, Isaiah 58:2 – 9, and Matthew 20:24 – 28
I’ve spent a lifetime sailing the wide ocean of Christian preaching. The rains have fallen and the storms have pounded my life. For decades, I carefully negotiated the swirling currents of what a preacher could and could not say in the pulpit. I pushed limits. I said more than was safe to say, but even then I had an uneasiness suggesting I wasn’t being honest with my people.
Carlyle Marney taught me to love my people and couch everything I said in the Gospel. The advice guided me through the tumultuous 1960’s. One Sunday, my Marney motto received a trial by fire. In a congregation filled with people who had sold their homes in a subdivision and moved out of town because one Black family had moved into their all-white domain, I preacher from Ephesians 2. I told the congregation that racism and segregation were not God’s will for the world.
After the sermon, a red-faced deacon confronted me. Instead of the usual, “Good job preacher,” he spoke his own brand of hard truth. “Preacher,” he said, waving his big black KJV of the Bible in my face, “If what you preached was not in this book, I swear I would whip your ass right here in church.” The two of us went bass fishing on Thursday and my motto had carried the day.
Having tired of the calisthenics required of me, I upped the ante. People thought me radical. They called me names. But still I felt I was holding back. This sermon/speech represents the defining moment when I have thrown all caution to the wind. I have crossed a line that can’t be recrossed. I thought I had made this journey at the beginning of the 21st century, but I was wrong. I was still trying to be “the successful blesser of a successful culture.”
Until 2001 I was able to invite any church member who disagreed with me to buy me a cup of coffee and tell me where I was wrong. Our nation is in too much jeopardy for coffee drinking.
Now, with the reading and preaching of Matthew 5:17 – 20,Isaiah 58:2 – 9, “let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Psalm 19:4) and “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Revelation 2:7).
Isaiah brings charges against our nation and the people pretending to be God’s people. “Announce to my people their rebellion.” They “act as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments; they want God on their side.” Indeed, they believe God is on their side.
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
4 You fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
I have not found a better description of the toxic politics of our nation.
God commands us to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
In a government eager to cut food stamps, foreign aid, and FEMA funds, can we hear the word of the Lord.? “Share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; (Dare we say “the immigrant?”
Did you know churches are sending their members to buy groceries for immigrants afraid to leave their homes? Did you know churches are stepping up to aid the immigrants?
Isaiah’s words hang heavy in the air as judgment on our nation.
If there was a catalyst me, it has been the last ten years of MAGA evangelicals and Donald Trump. More explicitly, the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and/or Border Patrol agents has become more barbaric in light of MAGA evangelical approval and applause.
Pretti, a 37-year-old registered nurse for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot several time by two agents while zip-tied and held down by other agents. He had a gun but an agent removed the gun before Pretti was shot.
Franklin Graham, speaking of God’s justice, waved Romans 13 at the event: “But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer” (13:4). Perhaps Graham doesn’t know German churches supported Hitler with appeals to Romans 13. Graham and his kind define judgment as “desert” – what people deserve. He serves a harsh, vengeful God who hates.
Maybe failed to notice Romans 12:14 – 21: Bless don’t curse; never repay evil for evil, leave peaceably with all.
“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.’ Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
In stark contrast to the evangelical insistence on obedience to the law (odd for a people of grace), justifications for the killings, and a cruelty defying all empathy, other pastors offered a different testimony.
In his sermon at a Sunday evening Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary, the Rev. Harry Tasto remembered a far different man than the person Trump administration officials were describing. As a chaplain at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, Father Tasto had worked with Mr. Pretti for 10 years. Mr. Pretti “was known for his kindness and gentleness to the patients,” Father Tasto said. “So don’t pay any attention to the vilification from our national leaders.”
Roman Catholic, ABC-USA, Episcopal, UMC, ELCA priests and ministers – and others – have presented a united message of condemnation of the shootings. Any expectation of such a message from MAGA evangelicals would be foolishness.
Let us stop calling MAGA evangelicals Christians. Let us reject their claims that they are righteous. Let us instead tell them they are possessed by habits too corrupt, too pagan to be called a righteous people.
Paraphrasing Stanley Hauerwas, I can but lament:
How many of you worship in a church that justifies the killing of unarmed citizens? I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church in which the pastor prays for God’s wrath to fall on the protestors in Minneapolis? I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church refuses to recognize the right to nonviolent protest? I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church that doesn’t feel remorse for the deaths of Good and Pretti? I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church that believes ICE bears the “sword of God” in righteous vengeance? I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
MAGA evangelicals have traded away their righteousness for political power. They have forsaken “Jesus is Lord” for “Caesar is Lord.” In Luke’s account of the testing of Jesus, Satan says to Jesus, “For [power] has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please” (Luke 4:6–7). Luke says the emperor possesses authority because it has been given him by the devil. And the power Satan offered Jesus has been accepted by MAGA evangelicals.
MAGA has accepted the gifts of Satan rejected by Jesus. Remember Jesus refused to use the devil’s means to accomplish God’s purpose. MAGA has no such scruples.
Not content to deport “illegal” immigrants, President Trump has disinterred an even more disgraceful creed known as “Law and Order.” Never have Americans been so dangerous than when they cloak racism and violence in the robes of law and order. We have a tainted history with law and order as a political dog whistle.
America has trod the path of laws that oppressed people before. We have a history of oppression. Good Christians made the “age of lynching” part of law and order.
Law and order fueled the killing of Episcopal seminarian Freedom Rider Jonathan Daniels on August 20, 1965 by a “special deputy,” Thomas Coleman. His authority to wield the shotgun at Daniels was as murky as that of ICE agents now.
Daniels had a bottle of Coca Cola in his hand; Good was holding to her steering wheel; Pretti had a cell phone in his hand. Daniels pleaded that he was not guilty; the entire Trump administration has claimed the killings of Good and Pretti were justified. Thomas was found not guilty by an all-white jury. The agents involved in the killing have so far claimed immunity from prosecution. Coleman claimed self-defense even though Daniels was unarmed. Ross, the agent who shot Good, claims his life was in danger.
Law and order orchestrated the arrest of a group of civil rights workers in Winona, Mississippi in the summer of 1963. Historian Charles M. Payne recorded Fannie Lou Hamer’s account in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom:
I could hear somebody when they said, “Cain’t you say yessir, nigger? Cain’t you say yessir, bitch?” And I could understand Miss Ponder’s voice. She said, “Yes, I can say yessir.” He said, “Well, say it.” She said, “I don’t know you well enough.” She never would say yessir and I could hear when she would hit the flo’, and then I could hear them licks just soundin’. . . . But anyway, she kept screamin’ and they kept beatin’ on her and finally she started prayin’ for ’em, and she asked God to have mercy on ’em, because they didn’t know what they were doing. And after then. . . . I heard some real keen screams, and that’s when they passed my cell with a girl, she was fifteen years old, Miss Johnson, June Johnson. They passed my cell and the blood was run-nin’ down in her face.”
The ICE agent killed Good and then shouted, “Fucking bitch.” After killing Pretti, agents high-fived one another. President Trump has responded by dismissing Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem from overseeing the Minneapolis operation and sending Tom Homan, his “Border Czar.” It’s like disinterring the body of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Conner and sending him to Minnesota with his dogs, fire hoses, clubs, and violent police force.
Our president admitted in an interview with NBC news that his concern was not with two Americans killed by his agents but with “the bad publicity” he was getting.
Hiding violence behind a badge conjures horrible atrocities against the oppressed. White MAGA evangelicals are now attempting to erase that history because it makes them uncomfortable. And perhaps this is why they now stand by and stand down as that history repeats itself and Montgomery, Alabama “law” comes to the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s 1965 all over again.
Tragically the “righteousness” of MAGA evangelicals has exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees. The goal of the Pharisees was to be God’s holy faithful people. Yet they attempted to be faithful while also in collusion with the state.
MAGA evangelicals try to be righteous while also in collusion with, and subordination to, the Trump Administration. More than this, they promote law and order as a punitive politics designed to punish those with whom they disagree. Aaron Griffith, in God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, argues the evangelical obsession with the law can be phrased as wanting to make “sure that those who have it coming get it.”
According to MAGA logic, among those who had it coming were Good and Pretti.
MAGA evangelicals seek power over all aspects of American lives. This is secular, pagan righteousness based on the power to do as one pleases. Taking a moment of homiletical license, I add Matthew 20:24 – 28 to my sermon. Here’s the key part of the passage: Jesus says, “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.”
MAGA evangelicals believe God has given them the right to “lord it over” everyone. With this pagan assumption they justify killing innocent citizens. With this pagan assumption, they claim the right to force their beliefs on the rest of us.
The Church needs to condemn “lording it over others.” There are no more shameful chapters in Christian history than those where men of the church use the power of the law to behead, drown, or burn at the stake alleged heretics. The MAGA evangelical endorsement of the ambition, vengeance, and immoral goals of the Trump administration is the essence of “lording it over others.”
More than this, MAGA evangelicals have mixed “Lost Cause” Southern ideology into their mosaic of beliefs. The telling catch phrases include: “good patriots or troublemakers;” “conservative Christians or libtards;” “saved with Jesus or damned to hell;” “tough guy patriots or wimpy traitors;” “America: love it or leave it;” “Get your heart in Dixie or get your ass out.”
And God’s agents in such a violent-infused culture: the masked men of ICE. The citizens of Minneapolis are witnessing firsthand, brutality, profanity, fear, anger, and brute force hiding behind the law.
Now, it is 1961 all over again. The new secessionists have a compliant Congress, a dysfunctional president oblivious to the Constitution, and a Supreme Court giving that president free rein. Historian David Blight warns, “It it is time to see the real enemy – a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our microphones midway through our odes to joy.”
The deaths of Good and Pretti were executions. There was no gas chamber or electric chair or lethal drug where good Christians usually hide their murders. This had more in common with a lynching.
When MAGA evangelical righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, they are on road to their own self-inflicted hell. When it becomes pagan righteousness of “might equals right,” it becomes the work of Satan.
Jesus and the prophets never hesitated to condemn fake righteousness. In the name of holiness, righteousness and justice, I accuse MAGA evangelicals of turning “justice to wormwood and bring righteousness to the ground!” (Amos 5:7)
And I take my stand with these words of Amos: “But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24).
And in so saying, I will forever sail the wild seas as I proclaim the gospel of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus is Lord! Amen!