A good portion of the pastor in me wants to be outraged this week.

Coming back from a Fourth of July break to read about the goings on in Washington, D.C., I started to fill with indignation.

Thanks to Congress’ capitulation on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as many as 20 million Americans could lose their Medicare coverage, and there will be a 30% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, possibly affecting 25% of this vital food program’s recipients.

I gotta tell ya, as a CEO of an organization that operates both an emergency shelter and a food pantry, none of this is encouraging given that we’ve seen increasing numbers of users at both already this year. … Even before this bill was signed into law.

Lord, have mercy. My pastoral dander is up.

But interestingly — oh that clever Holy Spirit! — one of the devotions I regularly read is focusing this week on Jonah, the reluctant prophet who didn’t want to follow God’s command to go preach to the Ninevites.

Too long a story to reprint here, but let’s just say that Jonah isn’t pleased that God has a change of heart toward the very people the prophet despises. And he grows angry when God spares his newly repentant enemies, even though it was his own preaching who converted them!

A short interpretation: Sometimes we righteous can’t stand the thought that God loves those whom we are angry with and whom we don’t believe deserve infinite grace and mercy.

For Jonah it was the Ninevites who didn’t deserve God’s limitless love.

For how many countless faithful today (including me?) would it be those less-than-courageous senators and representatives who voted to take health care and food away from America’s poorest?

You see, that’s the trouble with our God: When God says grace and mercy for all, God means even those who vote to dump on our poorest neighbors, just as God extended grace and mercy to the Ninevites. … Which, admittedly, for me as a pastor is a tough pill to swallow.

Who are these heartless lawmakers to deserve God’s grace? … Well, who were the Ninevites, but people who were known to be wicked and who happened to live in the nation’s capital city? Did they deserve grace any more after what the Assyrian Empire did to Israel?

Please don’t misunderstand me: I do not support putting millions of people’s health at risk, nor causing them to go hungry. But regardless of whom I direct my anger at, God will still love them anyway.

And just maybe it’s those folks God is calling us to preach to even though we don’t want to and don’t think it will do any good?

Jonah didn’t think he could change such hardened hearts, and yet look at his outcome. Amen.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.