This morning my church hosted an outdoor service to pray for our nation in crisis, to grieve our losses to a global pandemic, and to renew our commitment to the path of Jesus Christ—the way of justice and peace and repentance. One of the scripture texts we read during this service is Psalm 46—a familiar text that speaks of God as our “refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble.”

I reflected on this passage as I stood quietly with my brothers and sisters in Christ while our church bells rang and petitions to God rose from our mouths. The Psalm makes an apparently paradoxical promise: the God who melts the earth and works desolations is the One who is in the midst of the city, making it secure. The God who breaks the bow and shatters the spear is the One who makes wars cease to the end of the earth. 

This God is not a mighty fortress—the eloquence of Luther’s great Reformation hymn notwithstanding—but rather the destroyer of fortresses, the source of the nations’ uproar, the waters that roar and foam. This is why we will not fear, though the earth should change, and though the mountains should tremble.  The One who shakes our foundations is the One who made us and who can be trusted to save us.

That is not to say that God wills violence and destruction of the kind that we saw displayed in our nation’s capitol on January 6: “He has not commanded anyone to be wicked, and he has not given anyone permission to sin” (Sirach 15:20). But God’s creative and persistent and destabilizing presence unsettles all of our towers of Babel, our idolatrous immortality projects, and our hallowed monuments to national power. The Confederate flag-waving insurrectionists who stormed the barricades of the United States Capitol in their MAGA hats were surely not doing the will of the God of Jesus Christ; they were seeking vengeance and doing violence at the behest of a wicked and blaspheming ruler. 

But many of the rioters also carried Jesus 2020 signs and invoked the same God to whom my peace-loving congregation prayed this morning—the God who will be exalted among the nations, according to the Psalmist.  As disturbing and disorienting as these signs of Christian piety were, they can perhaps serve as a reminder that the LORD of hosts is indeed present when the political foundations of our nation are shaking. Following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X remarked that this national trauma was an example of “chickens coming home to roost.” What he meant was that President Kennedy was a white man whose tragic death was an outcome of the violence of white supremacy. What he meant was that we reap what we sow.  

I do not believe that Donald Trump and his white nationalist and evangelical Christian enablers have been sent by God to punish this nation.  But I am convinced that the corrosive and divisive forces unleashed by Trumpism are disclosing just how deep and wide is the iniquity of American racism, especially in its perverse relationship to white grievance and wealth inequality. And this exposure of the racial violence and social injustice simmering right beneath the polite rituals of civil society—including such rituals as peaceful transitions of power—threatens now to destroy not just the Republican party, but the social contract that underwrites the entire American political and legal system—and thus also the economic system by which wealth is accumulated and protected. No, God did not send the Trumpists to punish America, but nevertheless “the nations are sunk in the pit that they made” (Psalm 9:15); the chickens are coming home to roost.  

And these chickens are coming home to roost not just in Washington D.C. or in our state capitols.  They are landing in our communities, in our workplaces, in our institutions, in our churches, in our families. We are learning that there is no place to escape the judgments of God on our complicity with social wickedness. The peace of Jesus Christ is not a peace that hides from God’s judgments.  We cannot heal our communal wounds by saying “Peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).

This is why, when we seek refuge in the God of the Bible, we should not expect a sanctuary from the suffering and tumult of our world. When we take refuge in this God, the God of Jacob, we cling to the One who wrestles with us until we are left limping, who confronts us with the brother we have wronged (Genesis 32-33).  When we take refuge in this God, the God of Jesus Christ, we embrace the one who divides parents from children, who makes us foes of the members of our own household (Matthew 10:35-36).

Are we really ready for the refuge of God? Will we refuse to fear though the earth should change? Can we be still as our shields are burned with fire?

“The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” In this fierce and troubling refuge may we discover the help and strength that we need to heal our wounds, may we endure the desolations by which wars will be made to cease. Indeed, in this refuge may we discover the river whose streams make glad the city of God. 

Gerald J. Mast, January 9, 2021