By: Dana Cassell

Psalm 46

I don’t know about your week, but mine has been pretty long and weird. The time changed, which always throws me off. My dog got super sick, turned our apartment into a scene from a horror movie and had to spend the night at the vet (she’s fine now!). And then there was the election.

Ugh.

One of the standout realizations of this week’s presidential election, for me, was that White Christians voted in huge numbers, decisively and unambiguously, for Donald Trump. More than 80 percent of White Evangelicals, more than 60 percent of White mainline Christians and 60 percent of White Catholics all voted for Trump.

More than 80 percent of Black Christians and Jewish people voted for Harris. I couldn’t find reliable exit polling data for Muslims; the category is just “something else,” and of those voters, 60 percent voted for Harris. (A small poll from CAIR reports that 53% of Muslims actually voted for Jill Stein.)

I don’t believe that who you vote for necessarily determines your moral standing or the state of your faithfulness, and I am pretty convinced that we tend to emphasize voting far beyond its actual importance both individually and collectively, but I do think there’s something to be learned from the aggregated data.

White Christians are voting in decidedly different ways from their siblings of color, and in decidedly different ways from our interfaith counterparts. I don’t think it’s any secret that this is because white supremacy and Christian Nationalism thrive in white churches. So many of us – white christians – have been convinced that our salvation will come through electoral politics, political power and racial hierarchy. It’s an old, old playbook of leaders bent on maintaining oppressive power: prey on the tender, intimate spaces in peoples’ hearts to convince them to support you. Religion is one of those tender, intimate spaces. Race – and what we’ve made it into here in this country – is another one.

I do not know how those of us who consider ourselves white Christians can begin to talk to one another about this horrific manipulation and rot in our collective religion. I’ve failed more times than I’ve succeeded at having productive conversations with other Christians about things like power, race and nationalism. I don’t think failing so much means I should give up, but I do have to admit that it becomes increasingly difficult to want to keep trying.

But in this upsetting, frustrating week filled, for me, with horror and exhaustion and feeling at the end of my rope with my white christian people, it has been a balm to read Psalm 146.

This psalm is, according to scholar Wil Gafney, God’s resume. This is who God is, and what God does. This is the kind of God we serve, and the God we are called to follow. It is a pretty decent to-do list for those of us committed to living as God’s people in the world in any time, but maybe even especially in times like this one where it might feel especially hard to find paths of peace, mercy and faithfulness.

In case you, too, are confused and heartbroken about what white American Christians are doing in the name of Jesus, in case you also need a reminder about who God is and what She does, and what WE might do in these days to follow Her, I thought we might just review God’s resume together, this morning.

The psalmist begins the CV with a warning: do not put your trust in princes, in any human being, who cannot save you. Their spirits will depart eventually and all their plans come to nothing.

But blessed are those whose help is in the God of Jacob, the one who made heaven, earth, the sea and everything in all of them. This God is forever faithful.

This God upholds the cause of the oppressed.

It turns out that Hebrew has like a dozen words for different kinds of oppression, and this particular one refers specifically to FINANCIAL oppression: those who are victims of wage theft and fraud. This God sees it, knows it, and brings their cause to the highest court.

This God gives food to the hungry.

My neighbor on the corner, the food insecure children across Virginia, the thousands being starved in Gaza: this God FEEDS people.

This God sets prisoners free.

The unjustly imprisoned, the inmates left behind during Hurricane Helene, the man on death row I used to write to, the women sentenced to years in Metro State Women’s Prison where I served as an intern during seminary, the beaten and abused and forgotten: all liberated.

This God gives sight to the blind.

My former parishioners who spend so much time at the Duke Eye Center as their vision declines, more quickly now than it used to, those tiny kids you see on social media videos getting glasses for the first time and find themselves unable to stop smiling and laughing, your uncle or neighbor or coworker who just refuses to acknowledge how much hurt is being done to people.

This God lifts up those who are bowed down.

The ones struggling under the weight of worry, oppression, violence, grief, systemic injustice, mental illness, the daily struggle of survival: God puts his finger under their chin, lifts the weight off their back and invites them to stand up tall and unburdened.

This God loves the righteous.

Even when it seems like nobody else does, even when the arc of the universe seems to be bending farther and farther away from justice, even when there is no accountability and no reward system, God loves those who live justly and with mercy.

This God watches over the foreigner.

The migrants you all helped find shelter and care here in DC, the Afghani family that fed me rice and lentils as soon as I walked in their door to “teach them English” in Durham, my friends and neighbors whose documentation is now in question – or always was. The immigrant, the refugee, the displaced people fleeing for their lives, the lonely stranger and the unhoused are received, protected, welcomed in.

This God sustains the orphan and the widow.

So many foster kids I know and you know, my friend’s elderly grandma who just lost her husband of 65 years. The most marginalized, the least remembered, those with no family or network of care are woven into new communities, new families, new relationships. God saves and sustains even the most isolated and the least loved.

This is what God is doing, right this minute. As we speak, God is liberating the oppressed, feeding the hungry, sustaining the most forgotten. God is doing it right now because it is what God has always done, and will always do. This is who God is.

And it is who we get to be, too.

There are so very many ways to be a person of faith, to belong to and work alongside this God of mercy and justice. I suspect that all of us here are already doing some of this work, have been doing it for a long time.
But the psalmist doesn’t end God’s resume there, with this long explanation of God’s work. The psalmist ends with this reminder:

This God frustrates the ways of the wicked.

The psalmist doesn’t say that God will destroy the wicked, or that they will get what’s coming to them, or that we are invited to wage battle against them. The psalmist doesn’t say, here on God’s resume, that God CONQUERS the wicked and CONSIGNS THEM TO THEIR FATE. Here, on God’s resume, we just hear that God frustrates their ways.

I love it. I am going to adopt that as my prayer for these next four years and beyond: God, frustrate their ways!

And if God’s resume is also an invitation to US, to join in with God already at work doing these things here in the world, then maybe – maybe – we can consider this an invitation, too. Maybe part of our work is not just to care for those who are hurt by the people in power, but also to lend some of our time, energy and resources to frustrating the ways of the wicked.

I’m not sure what, exactly, that looks like for me or for you, but I suspect that you have some ideas. What would make wickedness harder to accomplish? What would frustrate those people who are attempting to implement it?

I think of the community in Durham who surrounded the ICE van attempting to deport a beloved friend, frustrating the driver and the agents in their attempts to leave.

I think about folks in my town who claimed a bunch of tickets for one of Trump’s last campaign events but refused to fill those seats.

I think of publishers who are giving away books that they think might be banned soon, for free.

Enslaved people who instigated work slowdowns and work stoppages.

During the last Trump administration, flight attendants went on strike and ended the 2019 government shutdown.

I suspect that in these times, those of us who want to follow the God of this resume are going to have to do more than love one another within acceptable limits. I suspect that those of us who follow the Prince of Peace and the God of Liberation are going to find ourselves called to engage in frustrating the ways of the wicked.

I am glad to know people and congregations like this one, who already have an idea of what that might mean. I am so curious how we will live it out, together.

Praise the Lord, the psalmist says. THIS Lord, who feeds the hungry, lifts up the cause of the oppressed, sets the prisoners free, watches over the foreigner and sustains the most marginalized and forgotten among us. Praise THIS Lord, who also always and everywhere frustrates the ways of the wicked. This is the God who reigns forever. Praise the Lord. Amen.