If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

by John Pavlovitz

its ancient genesis, it uses images of and language for God that aren’t strictly male: Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you (God speaking in Isaiah 49:15). As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem (God speaking in Isaiah 66:13). But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content (David speaking of God in Psalm 131:2 NIV).

Ruach, the name for the Spirit of God in the original Old Testament Hebrew, is feminine. The femininity of God is everywhere. A transgender God is as biblical as it gets. I know that for many Christians, these words feel confrontational, provocative—and quite blasphemous.

If you are among them, that may be an

alarm that you’re hearing something you suspect rings true and is challenging...

at God and other people through for your entire life. I get how terrifying such a dei...

From the moment his presidential campaign began, Donald Trump promised to “Make America Great Again,” and in the fall of 2016, 81 percent of white American evangelicals ended up passionately embracing both him and that message—and were largely responsible for his ascension to the presidency.1 It seemed clear from his initial press conferences, his antagonistic tweets, and his incendiary rallies that the “greatness” Trump aspired to was going to be a country marked by vitriol, enmity, separation, bullying, wall building, and abject cruelty. It would be the construction of a heavily fortified gated community of frightened Caucasian

believers, who he easily convinced were assailed on every side by a dangerous and diverse horde of quickly encroaching predators. In the past few years, this swift, grand march toward national “greatness” has been noticeably accompanied by a collective move away from goodness, by a hostility to outsiders and a startling lack of compassion for hurting and vulnerable people. This all underscores the painful truth: good wasn’t part of the plan from the beginning. Sadder still, many of Trump’s evangelical supporters have amened all this bitter, divisive malevolence while still simultaneously claiming Christ, blessing an effort to steamroll the world into greatness by force and coercion, and inexplicably contending that Jesus endorses it all.

There are times when you realize how far the Church has drifted from the mission and how badly so many Christians have lost the plot—and it often comes when you see strange bedfellows gathering: agreement where there should not be agreement, affinities that should not exist, commonalities

Every second we spend trying to decode Jesus’ poetic word pictures about what happens after we die is another second we could be obediently embodying his prolific and very explicit directions on equity, forgiveness, generosity, and social justice: the making of heaven here on earth. Like Jesus, anything carrying the name Christian needs to leave people with more dignity and greater care, with healed wounds and fuller bellies, with calmed fears and quieted worries. It needs to leave people seen and heard and known. Like the life of Jesus, it needs to leave a wake of kindness and goodness and compassion. If we are perpetually burdened to share and to heal and to restore while we’re here and trust that God’s love is something nothing can

separate us from, we can trust in the after-party too.

That the concept of hell is part of a great

many Christians’ orthodoxy and a staple of recent Church history isn’t revelatory—and it isn’t going to alter my conclusions either. I once heard it said that there is a truth that you cannot argue us out of once we have experienced it. This is the spot from which I speak and believe now, even though

there is unsteadiness. In the quiet places where I seek and pray and encounter God, the deep that calls to deep2 says: “There is no fear in Me. You are beloved. I delight in you.” You can mount violent assaults of systematic theolog...

voice. All the finger wagging and threat throwing and pulpit pounding will likely fail to scare the hell into me. You can label me a false prophet and prodigal re...

That’s one of the greatest challenges in the spiritual journey: to keep seeking to emulate the

character of a God who will always outlove you, outforgive you, outwelcome you. The daily task of the believer is to lean into the acts of kindness and hospitality that you most resist, toward the people you least want to bless—to aspire to a place just slightly higher than you feel capable of reaching, because that’s how renovation happens, within and around you.

really want you to see the God in you. Just try really hard not to see God as you.

Elsa is right: being human is hard. We weren’t prepared for it. None of us asked to be here, and we didn’t have any choice about when and where we arrived, the kind of people who would welcome and shape us, or most of what happened for the first two decades of our lives. And even after that, we never really have control over very much, despite sometimes imagining that we do. We come wired for all sorts of fears and

worries and phobias, we’re saddled with individual quirks and idiosyncrasies that so easily derail our progress, and we have persistent voices in our heads that criticize and condemn and can be nearly impossible to turn off. And when we step out of our heads and into the world, we expose ourselves to unthinkable suffering there too. People we let close to us sometimes damage us and do us harm. Strangers purposefully and unintentionally

do us damage. We lose those we love in brutal, senseless, excruciating ways. Despite our best plans and preparations and intentions, things sometimes fall apart. We wrestle continually ...

of our existence. Like Elsa, we all need something that makes the weight bearable, that makes the pains endurable, that makes us feel less alone, that lets the radiant light of hope stream in through the window blinds—something that helps make being human not so hard. Honestly, I don’t kn...

anger and love aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, sometimes what looks from the outside like simply the former is actually profoundly prompted by the latter. It is not rage merely for the sake of rage, but for the sake of justice: a holy discontent that internally

disrupts us, first to the point of agitation and then to action.

When it comes to the heart of it all, your religion isn’t what you believe, your religion is how you treat people. The only real theology that’s of worth is relational theology. It exists in no other way that is meaningful to another human being. Whatever you have floating around inside your head or might preach about regarding a God of love is ultimately inconsequential. Your beliefs take

That’s how personal morality and religious convictions tend to work. No one believes they’re getting it wrong. Everyone is certain their cause is just, their motives are pure, and their character unimpeachable. Every one of us has a story we tell ourselves, and we’ve spent a lifetime crafting an ironclad defense for it. Most people don’t willingly invest their lives (and their afterlives) in an error, and as a result

everyone thinks their God is the best one, or they’d choose a different one. Many religious people think they’re loving their neighbor even if their neighbor has doubts about that, and most of us fancy ourselves table flippers while presiding over tables that themselves could use some upending. Maybe we should check our halos and egos at the door.

They weren’t the beautiful, breathing “least of these” that Jesus says he inhabits and calls us to love as we claim to love him. To so many who occupy pulpits and hold political office, they were the stuff of racist stereotypes and incendiary sermons, the faceless bogeymen of partisan media, cheap meme fodder for would-be wall-builders. But I was close enough to see the creases around Hector’s eyes and the

dimple in Angelina’s left cheek, and I wished for the less-than-loving people in their path to know the human beings on the other end of the bad stories they have.