“In those days, the LORD said: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave,” I am set to “wipe out the place.” Abraham begs his Lord, “Will you spare the place for the sake of the innocent?… if there are fifty,” “forty,” “ten?” Unfortunately, Abraham learned the Lord will not spare the innocent. Thus, “at the same time the Lord rained down sulphurous fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord overthrew… the whole Plain, together with all the inhabitants of its cities.”
Abraham is a War Lord. As such he is a mass murderer (Genesis 14). In his own image, he invents a War Lord mass murderer deity, Yahweh. Yahweh, the heavenly War Lord and his many earthly War Lords are worshipped for the mass murder of people in Sodom and Gomorrah, of Egyptian first born in the 10th Plague, of innocent people in Jericho, “Following God’s law they… executed them, killing both men and women, young and old, and oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” They are also guilty of the mass murder of Israelites, killing 3,000 for worshipping a Golden Calf, 70,000 for David’s sin, and many more. Currently, it is pondered why the U.S., a Bible believing, godly nation, has so many mass murderers. Reasons include the man’s prior commission of domestic violence, his traits such as threatened masculinity, revenge, narcissism, and his access to guns. But one reason is usually ignored – that the god many people worship is the Bible’s mass murdering War Lord. Every day, across the U.S., in homes, religious gatherings, and social settings including social media, the mass murderer Yahweh and his mass murderer soldiers and police are normalized, and, worse, sanctified. War Lords being sanctified means we sanctify soldiers and police. It means we believe they abuse people for the sake of freedom and not oil. It means we get trained as and/or we support trained soldiers and police as saviors when they mass murder black and brown skinned people overseas and in the U.S. Mass murderers and their mass murdering weapons, all deemed salvific, shape U.S. society. It makes sense that every guy with a gun thinks he’s good, that every guy with a gun thinks he’s god. All are drawing from the same source copying and pasting the beliefs of the mass murderers who went before them – at Sodom and Gomorrah, Jericho, Hispaniola, Wounded Knee, Auschwitz, Columbine High School, Walmart in El Paso, Tops Market in Buffalo. The mass murderers of history and of today pass on to their sons sacred Old Testimony while they buy their sons sacred new weaponry. Thus, after every mass shooting, mass murdering soldiers and police molded by the War Lord Yahweh are hailed as good and as god in press conferences. Criticism of Uvalde soldiers and police is because they failed to act as god, they failed to act as good guys with guns. The U.S. has very sensible gun control laws, all controlled by the Old Testament. The Old Testament controls our worship of mass murderers. It controls our begging mass murderers to control their killing of the innocent. But, like Abraham, we learn our mass murderers really will and really do kill ‘all the inhabitants of the cities.’
“Elementary school kids know their multiplication tables and know that their dead bodies aren’t enough for old gun-loving politicians to change something for the better… We march, we speak out, but we are not listened to. We are told we do not understand the complexities. That it will be hard to build effective gun control laws. We know. We know. But we also know what we… have lived through or died from. And the bullets aren’t what killed us. Our death is your apathy. Our death is your fear of upsetting a fragile, broken contract. Our death is your cowardice. Our death is you.” (The First Was Columbine. It Should Have Been The Last – abbyptkd)
Prayer: Spirit, give us courage beyond controlling guns and sanctifying War Lords to healing people’s worship of them.
Question: Since we would not let someone sanctify the mass murderer Hitler, why do we let people sanctify the mass murderer Yahweh?
July 24, 2022 Gospel Luke 11:1-13 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time