The doors of the church are open. Good morning, Saints.
Beloved children of the sun, this week in American foolishness *I watched . . . you watched . . . we all watched *something fascinating go down.
Three MAGA women, Barbera Thornhill, Susan Dell, and Kimberly Guilfoyle got viciously dragged through the digital streets with folk calling these women ugly. Black Jesus forgive me for sayin’ this, but when I looked at the photographs for myself, I immediately understood what the internet was talkin’ about. These women are, in fact, a biblical triptych of cosmetic affliction and tribulation. And I gotta preach about these women today. Because they don’t know it, but they are giving America a powerful spiritual lesson about the wages of vanity, the hypocrisy of selective compassion, and what happens when you spend your whole life cultivating ugliness in your mind, heart, and soul while spending a fortune tryin’ to fix your face.
Brotha Willie, they ain’t ready to hear me preach today!
You see, scripture already gave us descriptions and talked about the dangers of taking this kind of vanity too damn far. Turn with me to Isaiah 53 verse 2, which says: “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”
Oop!
Isaiah was shady as hell and gave a biblical read with the full authority of the Lord, Y’all! He didn’t mince words. He said what he said, “there is NO BEAUTY that we should desire him.”
Now, some of Y’all are reading that scripture and mumbling, “But Reverend Dr. Staceypants, the Bible used “he.” True. But Saints, I am convinced that although the prophet lacked the vocabulary back then, Isaiah was issuing a gender-neutral warning to future generations about what happens when vanity, wealth, and a plastic surgeon with no fear of the Lord come together in the same operating room.
Church, look at them faces then turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, Black Jesus can’t fix that.”
You got Barbera Thornhill, who is one of Trump’s ambassadors tasked with combating human trafficking. She is out here giving First Lady of the Church of the Immaculate Facelift, with her hair lookin’ like a 1987 *Dynasty *cast member with a cheating spouse and country-club indignation. And she looks like she’s about to testify before Congress about the disappearance of her original eyebrows.
Then you got Susan Dell, wife of tech billionaire Michael Dell. She got that feathered blonde hair lookin’ like she just stepped out of a 1980s TV commercial for a hairspray that got banned by the EPA. Now, Y’all know your atheist pastor has some big eyes herself so I shouldn’t talk. But Susan Dell’s enormous, creepy eyes with that red Count Dracula dress is giving haunted department-store mannequin.
And then there’s Kimberly Guilfoyle who is a former Fox News personality and Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Greece who looks like she walked inside a local Sephora, pointed at the entire inventory and said, “Yes, I’ll take everything.” Saints, Kimberly got them smoky eyes with lashes that have applied for commercial aviation clearance, and her lips look like they g’on be rehearsing for a dramatic reading of the Book of Revelations for the rest of her hueless life.
So Newsweek decided to print an edition where they grouped these three women together and examined how they became targets of online ridicule over their “Mar-a-Lago faces.” The outlet tried to pass this frivolous reporting on appearance-based ridicule of women in politics off as a national conversation in civility as if getting called ugly is some kind of humanitarian crisis that needs intervention. But the framing of the article stops at interrogating the political culture that has made all this humiliation a form of entertainment in the first place.
Saints, this brings us to the central theological question of today’s atheist Black Liberation Theology sermon: What happens when folk who have spent years making cruelty fashionable, or have helped folk close to them make cruelty fashionable, suddenly discover that being on the receiving end of it feels mean-spirited?
Saints, after I logged off social media and baptized my brain with some bleach so that I could unsee what I saw, I thought about the book of Lamentations. Do Y’all know about that book and its core themes? It is the book that describes the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. We see the anguish of its people who are starving as their nation is in ruins.
It is considered the Bible’s great book that’s full of weeping, mourning, suffering, and catastrophe. So, thousands of years later, I decided to use this biblical book about devastating human suffering and apply its language, to the supposed grief of these three MAGA women who were mocked for their looks as Newsweek contemplates why.
*Newsweek *and other pundits act like these three MAGA women in Donald Trump’s orbit are suffering a calamity so unspeakable and traumatic that the nation must gather in sackcloth and ashes because folk on the internet called them ugly. Never mind the greater collective suffering in America, Newsweek thinks we should turn their minor personal indignities into a spectacle of persecution.
They want to talk about mocking powerful people, but what about all the cruelty that continues to harm ordinary folk with no power? Y’all wanna talk about the indignity of being called ugly? But how about we examine the ugliness of power? Let’s talk about the unequal attention being given to different kinds of suffering.
Church, Jerusalem has fallen. France is burning. Other European cities are erupting. America is crumbling. The people are starving. But with everything that’s going on in the U.S. and around the world Newsweek devoted journalistic resources to this investigation and seemingly wants us to hold a candlelight vigil for some wealthy white women’s botched faces in Donald Trump’s uglyass orbit. Church we can clearly see whose suffering America considers worthy of lamentation.
Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, empathy is morally inadequate when it is disconnected from justice.”
Saints, as I was preparing this sermon, I flipped through the Old Testament and the New Testament trying to find descriptions of ugly women. Did Y’all know that the Bible doesn’t give us a list of ugly women? Now, the Bible will tell you who was beautiful. There’s Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Abigail, Bathsheba, Tamar (David’s daughter), Tamar (Absalom’s daughter), Abishag, Esther, Vashti, Jemimah, Keziah, Keren-happuch, and the Shulammite woman.
But there is some theological debate over Leah’s appearance in Genesis 29:17. Now, the bible doesn’t straight up call her ugly when she is compared to her sister Rachel, but the Hebrew word rachot is used to describe eyes as “weak,” “tender,” “delicate,” or “lacking sparkle.” But I digress.
So we got the list of biblical hotties. And the Bible uses other adjectives to describe people: strong, bald, old, fat, sick, barren, short, hairy as hell, and so on. But church, I believe that even the Holy Ghost knew better than to write: “And behold, so and so’s wife was busted.”
And church, that’s because biblical ugliness ain’t about people’s faces. In the Bible cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, racism, dehumanization, watching folk suffer and feeling nothing, and demanding mercy for yourself while denying it to everybody else beneath you is ugly as hell. Amen?!
So *Newsweek *shouldn’t be out here asking why folks on the Internet are calling these women ugly. The problem isn’t that folk just woke up one day and decided they weren’t beautiful.
*Newsweek *should be asking much bigger journalistic questions. Why is it that some folks suddenly get so concerned about ugliness when it reaches the face of the rich and powerful? Why don’t they show the same concern with the ugliness that comes out of their mouths? The ugliness in their policies and laws? Why does power demand empathy and civility while refusing to practice it?
For years, Donald Trump and his MAGATs have made personal degradation part of his political brand. These people have mocked women’s looks and bodies, they’ve degraded Black folks, immigrants, disabled people, and assigned all manner of demeaning nicknames to political opponents and turned humiliation into entertainment.
Cruelty has become promiscuous in America’s political culture, and it has become so saturated with contempt and humiliation that everybody is learning to speak the language. Since the Trump regime has cultivated and normalized humiliation, they don’t get to decide where it sleeps because Galatians 6:7 tells us,** ***“Whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” *Because cruelty does not remain obedient to its creator, you can’t be shocked when it eventually metastasizes and comes back home.
Black Liberation Theology teaches us not just to be concerned with individual manners while ignoring structures of domination that harm the collective. “Are folk being mean to these three MAGA women?” That ain’t the question we need to contemplate, Saints. We need to ask how we became a society that is so exquisitely sensitive to incivility directed toward people with power, and those folk who are adjacent to enormous power, while remaining desensitized to the suffering produced by power itself.
Let us pray.
Oh, beautiful Black Jesus with your moisturized skin and glorious crown of thick dreadlocks, remind us that beauty is not just about the kind of faces we imagine, but about the kind of love and justice and righteous that doesn’t require anybody else to be ugly or to suffer. Lord, remind us to look at the heart. Deliver us from vanity, arrogance, and ugly hearts without mercy for the suffering. Money can buy a new face but not righteousness.
And dear lord, if you must work a miracle on these MAGA women, please start with the heart, because we know that when you rise up again and look at those stretched faces, you g’on shake head and say, “WTF?! I will not take the wheel and I will not fix this mess. I did not sacrifice my melaninated life on Calvary for y’all to turn around and crucify your faces, too!”
Let the church say Amen, Amen, and Amen.
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