No Human Is Garbage

Some fragmented thoughts on the president's words, Christian conviction, the temptation to dehumanize, God's absurd grace, and the way of love

Wednesday, December 3
Grand Rapids, Mich.

It’s hard to say, in this age of rampant cruelty, why one bad thing hits harder than any other. For me, watching the American president sit in a Cabinet meeting and hearing him call a group of immigrants “garbage” broke something in me. I was on a call with church colleagues this morning, doing some planning for this Sunday’s service¹ and as we discussed the week’s news and this particular circumstance, I surprised myself when I began to cry.

“Sunrise over the Sea, Perhaps at Margate,” J.M.W. Turner, c. 1845-1848

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

This simple truth should transcend partisan affiliation or ideological divides.

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

It should not be difficult for those of us who claim to be Christian to stand by these convictions. Anything else is heresy.

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

This should not be a radical statement, and it seems absurd that a self-declared “very proud Christian” should assert otherwise.²

Yet here we are.

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But what good is my righteous indignation, and how righteous is it really in the end?

“Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted,” Rowan Williams writes in a majestic essay called “The Body’s Grace.”³ “The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.”

God loves us as God loves God.

This is the bewildering love on which the entirety of the gospel rests.

For those of us who align ourselves with Jesus, this raises some challenging questions: If God loves us as God loves God, then who are we to deny that belovedness in a fellow creature? If God loves us as God loves God, how dare we diminish that which God has called significant and wanted, desirable and cherished? If God loves us as God loves God, and if God does so lavishly and graciously, then who are we to withhold grace?

Which is why, when I say that no human is garbage, and that every person is a beloved child of God, I am compelled to extend that conviction even to those who would deem others garbage, even to those who spew heresy and lies, even to those I find unbearable and dangerous.

I have no power to control what anyone else says or doesn’t say, believes or doesn’t believe. But I do get to choose whether I will recognize another’s inherent dignity or opt instead for dehumanization. To dehumanize the one who dehumanizes is still to participate in dehumanization—and the gospel of grace calls us to a different, perhaps more difficult way.

So I have to hope for the other’s healing, whoever “the other” might be. I have to pray for grace to abound. I have to act for the sake of justice.⁴ I have to labor on love’s behalf, doing my ridiculously tiny part to grow love, in the hopes that love will so flourish that it becomes too overwhelming, too obvious, to choose anything other than its winsome way.

Love your neighbor, Jesus said, without qualification.

Love your enemies, Jesus said, even more annoyingly.

I’ve looked for the asterisk, for the exception. I haven’t found it.

“Improvisation 27: Garden of Love II,” Wassily Kandinsky, 1912. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

And the only thing that can heal us is love itself—a love that knows no bounds, a love that can melt even the hardest heart, a love that is beyond any one of us individually but which we might just begin to glimpse together.

Yours,
Jeff

1. I am preaching this Sunday at Crosspointe Church in Cary, N.C. Worship is at 10 a.m., both in-person and online. All are welcome.

2. Someone valiantly tried to make the case to me that some Reformed theologies are in fact based on the assertion that all humans are garbage. First, I don’t think the president was trafficking in Reformed theology when he said this. Secondly, that’s a gross mischaracterization even of a hardline understanding of total depravity, but that’s really a conversation for another day, because God’s unconditional love remains greater in the equation.

3. Those who know this Rowan Williams essay know that it is about sex, and specifically about same-sex relationships. I beg his forgiveness for pulling those lines out of context, but I dare to do so because I believe they apply more broadly. Anyway, it is a beautiful and challenging piece of theological thinking and writing, which I commend to you if you are interested in such matters.

4. Love isn’t just a feeling. It moves and acts. You can pray, you can raise your voice in solidarity, you can donate, you can deliver a meal, you can extend a hand, you can text someone your encouragement, you can volunteer—each of us can show up in so many ways, as we are able. I made a donation this week to Immigration Law & Justice Michigan, a nonprofit that offers free and low-cost legal services to refugees and immigrants. There are worthy organizations like this all over the country.