Confronting readings! A god of love, really??

But we know that God is non-violent. That God does not prescribe violence.

So, I think we have to ask, what’s really going on God?

And what about all the wars and capital punishment that have been done in God’s name through the centuries?

What about extremist religion, killing thousands of people in God’s name or Christian Nationalism and its rounded-up refugees? God, it seems, has prescribed and sanctioned a lot of violence and killing from ancient time right down until today.

God’s got a bit of explaining to do.

So to help us break open the word today, I’m starting at the beginning of the theological alphabet with three applicable ‘A’ words: androcentrism, anthropomorphism and apocalypse.

Whenever scripture speaks about God as being offended, as getting angry,  as wanting to wreak vengeance on his [sic] enemies, or as demanding that we kill somebody in his [sic] name there’s two things going on –  androcentrism and anthropomorphism.

Androcentrism is the propensity to center society around cisgender male needs, priorities, and values which positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific.

Androcentrism also includes the use of male terms (like mankind and manmade) to represent everyone.  Most of our God language, in scripture and in this very liturgy, is dominated by male terms.

Anthropomorphism is projecting human systems: thoughts, feelings, reactions behaviours onto God.

So scripture was written by people, people in a particular historical and sociological context.

And at the same time, Scripture brings a bunch of anthropomorphisms that spawn toxic theology if read and understood literally.

We can make it say things like; God will save some, and not others. Or ‘Some of us are chosen, others aren’t’.

Nope, that’s not how I understand God. Reading scripture needs to go hand in hand with reading theologically. You are allowed, even encouraged, to ask questions about the text.

Our Jewish whanau through midrash have been doing this for hundreds of years.

We may think or feel that God is punishing us, or God is angry with us, or worse, that God is teaching us a lesson, or even that we deserve to be punished, deserve to be lonely or deserve what we’ve got because we’ve sinned.

But I don’t really do individual sin like that – it’s unsophisticated. I also don’t even believe that people are selfish, or that there’s bad people and good people.

I’ve learned that there’s basically two things that keep us quite miserable and feeling disconnected from the whole. Our own self-absorption, and then a kind of a notch above that is our self-assertion and self-entitlement. So, because we’re always worried about me, what’s going to happen to me, or I don’t know what’s going to happen to me today. We can feel stuck.

At our feeling level, we can believe God is punishing us. Our religious upbringing may have somehow helped. However, if Jesus forgives his friends, everyone who betrayed him, even at the moment of his bloody, horrific death  ‘father forgive them for they know not what they do’ then I think God as revealed in Christi, is a God of Mercy, radical patience and unconditional love.

To even believe that we can “offend” God is a little presumptuous. God is not a people.

In the book of Malachi, written in a time of national crisis and despair, the prophet declares that the “sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”

Malachi sees into a future God is already shaping— a future where justice and peace take root, where the wounded are healed, and where the grieving find comfort.

He speaks hope into what looks like ruin.
Not naïve optimism, but prophetic imagination: the ability to envision God’s new creation even when all evidence suggests otherwise. But this hope does not excuse us from action.

The second reading from 2 Thessalonians addresses a problem still present today—passivity disguised as faith, complacency.
Some in the early church believed even today that Jesus’ return was so near that earthly responsibilities became irrelevant.

Why work or care for the world if God was about to settle everything? But Paul corrects this thinking. He urges the community not to grow weary in doing what is right.

Faith does not absolve us from participation; it demands it. My Muslim friend Shahela often says, pray to God but tie up your camel.

God’s future, unfolds through co-creative human action—through justice pursued and compassion practiced, through structures challenged and relationships healed.

Too often, Christian theology has been misused to justify inaction—suggesting that since God will ultimately renew the earth, we can neglect it now.

But that is a denial of both scripture and responsibility.

Christianity is not a spectator sport.

God entrusts us with the care of this world, our participation completes the act of love that began in creation.

The earth’s wellbeing—and the wellbeing of those most vulnerable to its destruction—Is intrinsic to the call to “love our neighbor.”

And yet, even as we labour, we know that the path will be difficult.

Jesus does not avoid this truth. He tells his followers that they will be persecuted, betrayed by those closest to them, hated for his name. He acknowledges that even this, too, is part of the journey.

But then Jesus says: “Not a hair of your head will perish.”

How can this be true, when he has just said that some of them will be put to death?

Here we enter the heart of apocalyptic language. Images of fire, and destruction, and cosmic upheaval are not designed to frighten us into freeze or despair.

They are meant to wake us up. They reveal what is ultimate, what is truly lasting, and what we must surrender.

It is a metaphor for transformation—much like the radical surrender required of someone seeking sobriety.

Apocalyptic texts in the Bible are not blueprints for end-times catastrophe but invitations to inner conversion.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann once remarked that “God is in recovery from all the violence done in his name.”

The same might be said of us. For too long, religious communities have used scripture to justify harm—to exclude, to condemn, to destroy. But the arc of revelation leads us in the opposite direction: toward a God who refuses to retaliate, who forgives even as he is being killed, who carries us beyond death into life. If God’s sun burns, it is only because the same love that nurtures us also exposes what keeps us from that love.

As we stand at the end of this liturgical cycle, we find ourselves in a time that feels not unlike a hurricane—chaotic, disorienting, at times devastating. But even in the storm, there is a center.

Our scriptures today proclaim that even death, is not the final story.  Life is full of little deaths, big deaths, and always new life. So in death, life is changed not ended.

Just like for the first hearers of Luke’s gospel, these times of change and disturbance are an invitation, or initiation, for each of us and all of us to find recovery, to welcome healing, as painful as healing is,
The prophets understood this.

We are called to be spiritual meteorologists. To notice the storms that rage around us and within us, to guide others toward shelter, to rebuild when things fall apart, to recognize signs of God’s reign breaking through. This is the work of the church: not to flee the world but to bless it, to stand firm in hope, to tell the truth in love, and to embody the vision of justice, mercy.