November 7, 2012
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On The Other Side
I woke up this morning to discover that nothing happened last night while I slept.
“Lord willing and Jesus tarry”–and, so far, he has. We are still on this side of the eschaton.
The world has not yet ended in fire. Nor has it yet been remade in gold and diamond and pearl. Neither Armageddon nor the Wedding Feast of the Lamb has come.
We are still called to work and pray and suffer and relieve suffering and worship and wait, until the day we appear before the One whose judgment is eternal.
We are still called to serve the poor, the weak, and the oppressed, and to live lives of perfect holiness, self-control, and peaceableness, and to testify to the love of Christ wherever we are, until the day we are permitted to rest from our labors.
We are still called to resist evil in whatever form it presents itself, to do all the good we can, and to receive joyfully all the grace God offers us, until the day nothing remains but perfect union with God.
Nothing of consequence happened last night, except that God inscrutably knit together some quarter of a million precious children in the secrecy of their mothers’ wombs, and inexplicably brought home some hundred thousand souls to their eternal rest.
Nothing of consequence happened last night, except that men and women and children all around the world were given one more night to follow Jesus a little better than the night before. Some of them took that opportunity, and some of them ignored it, and membership in either group has little to do with one’s preferred partners in the quadrennial dance we Americans set our feet to.
Nothing of consequence happened last night, except that one set of well-meaning people got their way with regard to certain political offices, and another set of well-meaning people were denied their wishes with respect to the same offices. No nation was toppled, nor set any more firmly on its foundations. All nations will die, and the one I live in is no exception. Whether the day it will die has been moved forward or back or remains entirely unaffected by yesterday’s civic ritual, I cannot–I dare not–say.
The political decisions of a nation are not entirely nothing. Real lives will be affected by what choices were made last night: some people will get richer, some will get poorer; some will become more vulnerable to violence, murder, hatred, and dumb luck, while others will be more protected, even from their own stupidity; some people will be freer, some will be more enslaved than ever; some will have their suffering relieved, some will suffer all the more, and some will even suffer the indignity of learning that their suffering was all in their head.
When Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” he did not disclaim politics, if by that we mean cooperative effort to achieve what is good. Rather, he emancipated his followers from political systems, from political parties, from the necessitousness with which our political leaders would bind us to themselves and for their own ends. He freed his followers recklessly to pursue the Living God and the good of all God’s beloved children, whoever the ruling power, whatever the condition of society, whatever justice they must discipline themselves to or injustice they must endure.
He freed them to work with political parties without working for them. And he gave them to know the difference.
And so I woke up this morning with the same pile of papers to grade, the same blank pages to fill in my dissertation, the same bulletins to print, the same three sons still asleep in their beds, the same faithful and gentle husband by my side, the same knot in my stomach and hope in my heart as when I went to bed.
And with the same prayer on my lips: “Lord, help me to get it right today. Or at least to do a little better than yesterday.”
For there is much to do. The president and the congressmen and women and the state and local officials elected yesterday may help some and will certainly hinder some of that work. It’s not entirely their fault. We ourselves only sometimes do the work we are called to do, and even less often do it as well as we should.
Let us all get about the business of doing it, whatever our feelings about what happened last night. Because, truly, what happened last night has only a little to do with the Kingdom which is our true home, toward which we must always be striving.
Our purpose is not realized when our fondest political desires are established, nor is our hope destroyed with a election-night loss. The leader on whom all of our hopes depend has already come, and it is he who has elected us, not the reverse. His purpose is not thwarted when we choose the wrong leaders, or even, God help us, when we choose the right ones.
Comments (1)
Great post!