This year, for the first time ever, I found it impossible to join in the celebrations around the birth of our country. Instead, my heart felt flooded with the kind of grief that comes when you watch something precious die. Something you’ve loved for a long time. Something you’ve believed in your entire life.
What made this experience even harder, the grief more acute, is that it wasn’t just one thing. As I watched the events of last week unfold, it felt like the first thing to die was the essential goodness of the country I have always called home, along with the basic decency of our elected officials. Next to go was my regard for the once-kindhearted Evangelical faith in which I was raised, suddenly unrecognizable in its cruelty.
Over the course of three days, both chambers of Congress approved President Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Except there is nothing beautiful about it. The legislation will strip health insurance from millions of financially vulnerable Americans, take away free lunches from millions of hungry children, close indispensably important rural hospitals, and shutter hundreds of nursing homes.
More: Opinion: Trump budget bill would end health insurance for 650K North Carolinians
But there is one group of constituents who will benefit from these cuts: America’s billionaires.
All of this was painful enough. But watching members of Congress first gather to pray for the passage of this bill, then cheer when it passed, made me wonder if I had fallen through some kind of looking glass and ended up in a disorienting world in which the values my parents taught me and the lessons I learned in Sunday school had been turned on their head.
Because every one of the bill’s provisions, along with the larger goal of enriching the wealthy, is diametrically at odds with the plain teachings of Jesus. Indeed, the gap is so wide it’s tempting to think the members of Congress who voted for this bill, and who profess to be Christians, have never read the Gospels.
Or perhaps they have and simply don’t believe them. An even more troubling possibility: they have read them and have chosen instead to pledge their allegiance to a different God than the one revealed to us in scripture. Not to mention any names.
After the vote I spent two days consumed by grief, fuming with anger, until I finally remembered the truth at the heart of my faith: death is also part of the Gospel story but, key point, in the end it never wins.
Every Easter we remember that even when it feels like hope itself has died, the things we love the most can rise again. But not without some help, as it turns out.
There are actually two resurrection stories in the New Testament. Jesus’ rising on Easter morning is the most famous. But a few chapters earlier, his good friend Lazarus also rises from the dead.
Rereading these accounts, I was struck by how these lifeless men needed help with their rising. Help that came in the form of friends (or maybe angels — what’s the difference?) who were willing to visit their tombs and, despite the evidence, put in the effort to roll away the heavy stones that sealed two corpses in death’s fetid darkness. Friends who then proceeded to liberate those no-longer-dead bodies from the tightly wrapped grave clothes in which they were bound.
One might think of these figures as revolutionaries of a sort, fighters who, against all odds, were willing to take on an overwhelming adversary. Exactly the kind of people America needs right now.
Not insurrectionists but resurrectionists. Steel-hearted loyalists who will not give up on democracy, despite the evidence. Faithful patriots who are willing to do the heavy, messy work national resurrection requires: pushing back on the oppressive forces that would seal our shared hopes for the future in the tomb.
Yes, but what does that look like in practice, you may reasonably wonder. I’m honestly not sure. None of us have been in a moment like this before, when America’s future is in doubt.
Personally, I’m going to start by circulating a petition calling on Rep. Chuck Edwards, a self-professed Christian, to hold a town hall here in Asheville. I want him to explain to his constituents his rationale for supporting a measure that will harm the sick, take food from hungry children, and visit hardship on the elderly.
Because I’m sure I’m not the only one with questions.
More: Opinion: Big Beautiful Bill to take from poor and give to rich.’ That’s not Christian.
Rev. Dr. Steve Runholt
Steve Runholt is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He has served two congregations in the Asheville area and is now an end-of-life coach, educator and caregiver.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill contradicts teachings of Jesus
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