I live in a state whose leadership has little energy for justice and an apparent insatiable addiction to injustice. They are, to put it in terms the Apostle to the Gentiles might resonate with, “inventors of evil.” The imaginations of these folks is empty of compassion and overflowing with cruelty. They are, like the deity they profess, morally bankrupt and essentially sadistic. 

German theologian, and inventor of the phrase “Christofacism”, Dorothy Sölle describes worshipers of the retaliation dependent god as “wanting God to be an executioner.” Her observation prompts her to ask this question, “What kind of people must those be whose highest being sees his honor in practicing retaliation in a ratio of one to 100?”

A few years ago, as Tennessee legislatures increased their invention of laws to reduce rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ friends, I asked a gay woman who was moving away, “Do you feel like they don’t want you here? Like they’re doing this so you’ll move?”

She answered, “I feel like they don’t want me to exist.” 

The ACLU is currently tracking 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the United States. For the first time in the history of the United States, a sitting president attended a Supreme Court hearing to intimidate justices to rule with him to prevent those born in the United States from being granted citizen status. The budget for ICE (85 billion dollars) makes it the 13th largest military force in the world. 45 billion of that 85 billion is going to expanding detention facilities—a 400% increase. And, voting rights of marginalized people are being threatened by a MAGA project called “Save” which indicates what salvation actually is within systematic theologies of hate.

If you’ve got a moment, take a look at some photos of the faces of Donald Trump’s clown posse. If you can find one photo of one of them expressing actual joy, please pass it along. I don’t mean the demented grin of someone enjoying someone else’s pain or their own false sense of superiority. I mean real, can’t hold it in, soulful, joy. 

Poet and writer Ross Gay: “Puritans are the most laughless folks ever made. Actually: Puritans, the Saved, and the Virtuous. Unless we are laughing at who we’ve condemned, at who we’ve put out of the kingdom. In which case we can really yuk it up.” 

Scripture says Jesus endured the cross—the torture weapon of the state—for “the joy set before him.” The joy wasn’t because he was earning the right to laugh at the marginalized by appeasing the sadistic wrath of his bloodthirsty father. 

It wasn’t the emptiness that turns the vision of loving our enemies into a religion where people can’t even love their gay kids–which makes them feel like their existence is an unwanted burden.

It wasn’t the facade of the soulless, Puritanical self-hatred seeking to torture enemies by negotiating with bombs. However, in Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson’s necro-religion, it is quintessence. And those men are like the god they worship, the one they adore.

What makes someone as unqualified and insecure as Pete Hegseth pray, “Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle, you who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous”? 

If you think it’s joy, please expound. 

What Jesus mocked (again this is from the Bible) was death. What he made a fool of was the principality that unites civil and religious powers for the destruction of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and anyone with the conviction to say the emperor has no clothes. It is a bold declaration that the sword of that phony king is—in the reality of abundant life—a clown’s balloon animal. 

And that joy causes him to say from the cross, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” Sölle again: “When you look at human suffering concretely, you destroy all innocence, all neutrality, every attempt to say, “It wasn’t I; there was nothing I could do; I didn’t know.” 

Reduce the cross of Christ to a masochist son making an offering to a sadistic father and you can snugly sit in a pew like the president in the Supreme Court. But like the naked emperor, it’s not where you belong. In fact, there is absolutely no belonging there to be found.  

Expand that cross to a heavenly joke on death that exposes that power as the insecure, joyless hell that it is, and you’re on your way to freedom that doesn’t require the sacrifice of anyone—not even JD, Mike, and Pastor Pete. Jesus refuses to look at their suffering concretely, reducing them to the monstrous acts they commit. He leaves the door open for their innocence and their always-available choice to say, “It was me. I did know. And there is something I can do.” 

Care to name the joy that might lead to this kind of repentance? 

For those who claim to be Christian, our answer to that question separates the broad road from the narrow one. It knocks down mountains and raises valleys. It turns hearts of the old to the young and the young to the old. It laughs, not at people, but at the ridiculous actions the worshipers of death remain entrenched within. 

Find some joy this Friday. As Wendell Berry puts it, “Laugh though you’ve considered all the facts.” It’ll turn Sadistic Friday to an actual good one.