Sunday June 28th, 2026 Bulletin
Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
June 28th, 2026
Perplexing Texts: What Makes a Faithful Nation
2 Chronicles 7:11-22
I was in third grade when the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm, ended. Desert Storm, you might remember, had lasted for about 6 months – and my hometown of Shreveport was across the river from Bossier City, home to Barksdale Air Force Base, so there were people from our community who were
deployed during that time. When Iraq withdrew from Kuwait and the ceasefire went into effect, the air squadrons began to return home. I don’t know whose
idea this was at my elementary school, but somehow they knew about when the planes might be flying overhead on their way back to Barksdale. So the whole
school gathered outside, on the field, waiting for the B-52 bombers to fly overhead. While we waited, someone thought it was a good idea for us to form a
peace sign with our little bodies, all standing together in the crabgrass and the clover, so we did. And you know, it took a while. We’re standing there, sun
beating down, all holding hands, and someone decides we can sing songs to pass the time. So we do, we sing all the patriotic songs we know. We start with the
national anthem, the star spangled banner, which I knew from baseball games. And we sing America the Beautiful, which I knew because Haley Mills wraps up in
a flag and sings it in Pollyanna. And then, my classmates broke out in a song I didn’t know: and I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free…
and I look around, and it seems like everyone knows this song, this God Bless the USA song. I’ve never heard it before, so I asked: what is this song, where’d you
learn it? In church! They replied.
And that was one of the first times I remember realizing that my experience in the Presbyterian church was different than what was happening in the Baptist and nondenominational Christian churches of my youth.
There is a branch of Christianity in this country that marries God and country. They believe that because many of our founders were Christian, that so-called “Christian values” should be protected by the law and upheld by military might. Those values, which it turns out are largely hetero-normative, misogynist, and white supremacist make no room for other religions, other identities, other cultures. And they see the prosperity that many enjoy in this country as evidence of God’s blessing. The passage we read from Second Chronicles is foundational for these Christian nationalists. So much so, that the white house shared a video of Trump reading this passage a couple of months ago, seated behind the resolute desk in the oval office. Steely eyed, he looks right at the camera and reads not from the bible open under his hands but from a teleprompter. It’s unsettling. The video was shared as part of an effort to show America reads scripture for a revival on the national mall last month.¹ It was called Rededicate 250 – part of
the wider celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence.
You all remember that we see the Bible not as a single, seamless document written by a divine hand, but like a messy filing cabinet, a whole library of testimonies from faithful people, sharing where and how they understand God to be active and present in the world. To read and understand scripture, we need to be curious about who was writing, when they wrote, and why. Those folks who draw a straight line from these words from Second Chronicles to the 21 st century United States, who seem to think that God is speaking not to the Hebrew people but to the U.S., they are missing the point. The author isn’t talking about completing a gilded ballroom or bunker, but rather the gilded temple: that is, THE temple, the Jerusalem temple, the dwelling place for God built ten centuries or so before Christ, where faithful Jews went to make sacrifices and to worship. The home for the holy of holies, the ark of the covenant, built by Solomon – the son of David, so that God would have a place to live amongst the people.
In our bible, First and Second Chronicles are found in the middle of the Old Testament – and they are a re-telling of the events of First and Second Kings, a history of sorts of ancient Israel. But when it was written, scholars think it was meant to be the last book of the Hebrew scriptures, a reinterpretation of their history in light of the author’s present day. It was written, we think, about 200 years after Israel returned from the Babylonian exile.
Just a little refresher here: last week, we visited the stories about Samuel, and the downfall of Saul, whose rule gave way for David to become king? David’s son is Solomon, who builds the first temple – but his kingdom fractures, becomes divided into North and South, and within a few centuries falls to Babylon, forcing people into exile.
So the author of Second Chronicles is narrating the completion of the first temple, aware that it will be destroyed by the Babylonians and, eventually, some fifty years later, be rebuilt. Holding that destruction in mind, the author looks around and again sees that things aren’t going well. He is warning HIS people, that their ancestors failed to adhere to Jewish law and faced terrible consequences. He’s trying to make sense of the experience of exile, the suffering of the siege of Jerusalem where so many starved and many more were killed, carried off as the spoils of war and forced to live in captivity. He’s calling people to faithfulness so that they can have hope for the future. So he writes: If you do as I say, you’ll be blessed… if not, you’ll be punished.
And my God, if it were only that simple! We call this the prosperity gospel, and it has found a dangerous new home in American evangelicalism and Christian Nationalism! Prosperity gospel expert Kate Bowler sums it up like this: adherents believe that “God grants health and wealth to those with the right kind of faith.”² It’s convenient, really, if you are white and wealthy – or want to be. It means you don’t have to think too hard about the complex realities of white privilege and white supremacy, the interplay of inherited wealth and institutional racism that allows some to believe that they’ve achieved the American dream through hard work, because they are more deserving than those who are under resourced or otherwise disadvantaged. This way of reading scripture tries to make sense of suffering by saying it is caused by God as punishment for a lack of faith. But it is wrong.
When I grapple with the problem of evil on a summer Sunday morning, I’m grateful for the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth. When Jesus’s disciples saw a blind man by the side of the road and they asked – who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus said, neither, and healed him. When he found the Geresenian demoniac chained to a rock, alone with his madness, cast out the demons which plagued him and restored him to his right mind, in community. That is, every time Jesus encountered a barrier people put up to keep others out, he pushed back, he tore it down. He met suffering not with condemnation but with compassion, and offered healing. He showed us that God loves us not because we are good, but because God is good. And with his life and ministry, he proclaimed that the presence and reign of God is near to us, not confined to a building or hidden away, but out in the world, redeeming and reconciling and bringing new life right here, right now.
Kate Bowler says, “The prosperity gospel popularized a Christian explanation for why some people make it and some do not. They revolutionized prayer as an instrument for getting God always to say “yes.” It offers people a guarantee: Follow these rules, and God will reward you, heal you, restore you. … it swaps faith for a dreadful certainty.”³ And when things go awry, it gives you something to blame.
But the truth is, God does not promise us health or wealth. God promises only to be with us through whatever might come. Our bodies are fragile, susceptible to illness and the indignities of aging. Our democracy, celebrating its 250th birthday, seems a bit fragile too, susceptible to manipulation by those who want to use power for profit, and by a man who would like to be king.
And so in the midst of this mess, what do we do? We are called to be faithful. To follow in the footsteps of the one who loved the least, the lost, and the last. Whose blessing does not depend on the strength of your faith or an ascription of belief, not on your nation of origin, or your citizenship status, or the color of your skin, or your gender identity or your sexual orientation or your political persuasion. But rather, on the strength of your love and the power of your commitment to practice it. He invites all of us to sit at table together, siblings in the household of God. Because it is there, at that table, we will indeed find peace, and wholeness, and blessing.
1 Moore, Russell, “America needs a better gospel than Christian Nationalism,” Christianity Today, May 20, 2026,
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/05/america-christian-nationalism-rededicate-250-revival-washington-
dc/.
2 Bowler, Kate, “Death, the prosperity gospel, and me,” Opinion Section, The New York Times, 2/13/16,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/death-the-prosperity-gospel-and-me.html
3 Ibid.