This week’s comic is a little slice of life reflection on my day last Wednesday. Unexpected moments surprised me with how little I could meet a real need for others I encountered.  I could pick up a sandwich for the elderly unsheltered woman on my way to work, but I couldn’t provide her a home or any real sense of shelter and safety.  I could lift up lament and pray with friends, youth and parents about the school shooting in Georgia, but I couldn’t bring those kids and teachers back from the dead anymore than I have the power to truly protect my own kids when I send them off to middle school this morning.  I could offer kind words of encouragement to the trans person disappointed that their community was not able to meet that afternoon, but I could do little to eliminate the pain of existing in a world that is against her at every turn.

In these moments, I am grateful that my faith in God gives me eyes to see, to love, to have compassion for my neighbor.  Even if I am easily limited, easily exhausted in my attempts to see, to love, to have compassion.

I cannot cure the world of its ills.  I am not the world’s savior.

But neither am I helpless.  Neither am I incapable of making a difference.

God is God, and I am not.  But I am made in God’s image.  God makes no junk, makes no mistake.  But I fall short every day, failing to love my neighbor, failing to right wrongs, failing to say the right thing at the right time.  God claimed the worth of all people through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And therefore, I can be an ambassador, a representative insisting on the worth and dignity of myself, of every neighbor I meet, of every neighbor hidden from my sight.

I am in a season of life reflecting on Matthew 6, where Jesus commends us followers to think of such things as birds and flowers, and to not worry about the future, for today has enough trouble of its own.  Last week, I opened this archive document, Hymns for Times of Trouble and Persecution, 1744.  I mean, yes I could have just searched for modern typesetting of these hymns, but I’m the guy that weirdly finds comfort in old things, in the reminder that heroes of yesteryear touched pen and paper and leaned on God’s mysterious Spirit in their own time and context.  Charles Wesley penned this beautiful, if not painful, hymn, “God of Infinite Compassion,” reflecting on God’s wrath demonstrated in the the suffering and sin of humanity, juxtaposed against God’s love, grace and forgiveness demonstrated in Jesus Christ.

The idea of God’s vengeance and wrath has been poorly used throughout history to put humanity in its place, so to speak. To remind us we are small, insignificant, worthless, and that God would just as soon squash us like a bug as tolerate our existence.  Many of us are used to Christians using God’s wrath as a justification for their own poor treatment of anyone they deem sinners, and many of us scratch our heads at the parental abuse scenario of an angry God proving his love by sacrificing his son.

Maybe I’m being naive here, but I’m not entirely ready to dismiss the idea of wrath just because it has been poorly and even abusively used for generations.  I think that critique is necessary, and I love to learn from those who challenge and push back against the “sinners in the hands of an angry God” model of Christianity.  But I also sometimes think, sometimes we just struggle to put language around this God we believe in.  The world is beautiful and good, but it is also quite terrible and full of misery.  We say God is good, but what do we mean when there is so much in this world that is quantifiably NOT that great.  Don’t I want God to get mad about the stuff that’s wrong with this world? Don’t I want God to take injustice seriously? Don’t I want God to get angry that kids die and that old people are forgotten and left on the streets and that people in different types of bodies are actively persecuted by those who don’t understand them?

But I don’t want God to get mad at me.  I don’t want God to hold it against me when my compassion fails.  I don’t want God to be angry that I dehumanized someone else, that I can be selfish, that I can be mean, that I can be foolish.  I want God to judge what’s wrong with the world, without judging me to harshly.  I want God to make things right, but I am genuinely hoping that will benefit me, not indict me.

I will be reflecting on these ideas here at Wesley Bros Comics for a while, so if you find it interesting, come back again next week!  In the meantime, I invite you to sit with Charles Wesley’s pain-filled and intriguing hymn:

1 God of infinite compassion,
God of unexhausted love,
From a sinful, sinking nation
Once again Thy plagues remove;
Snatch us from the jaws of ruin,
See Thy helpless people, see!
Death and hell are close pursuing,
Save, O save us unto Thee.

2 Have we not filled up the measure
Of our daring wickedness,
Challenged all Thy just displeasure,
Quenched the spirit of Thy grace?
Yes, our heinous provocations
For Thy heaviest judgments cry:
We have wearied out Thy patience,
Forced Thy love to let us die.

3 Why should not the dreadful sentence
Now on all our souls take place?
Why should not Thine instant vengeance
Swallow up our faithless race?
How can we expect Thy favor?
Good and gracious as Thou art,
Sinners’ advocate and Savior,
Find the answer in Thy heart!

4 Jesus, mighty mediator,
Plead the cause of guilty man:
Pity is Thy gentle nature,
Canst Thou let us cry in vain?
From Thy Father’s anger screen us,
Suffer not His wrath to move;
Stand Thou in the gap between us,
Change His purpose into love.