Jay’s Blog – Voting for Shalom
If there’s anything that undermines my personal shalom, and our shalom as a local and national community, it’s election season, isn’t it? Nothing can cause angst like being bombarded by media reminding you that this is “the most important election of our lives.” (Incidentally, this is a familiar refrain for me, because I remember the same media reminding us that at least the past three or four national election cycles have been “the most important of our lives.” If they’re all the most important, are any of them more important than others)?
It’s pretty hard not to become anxious, to resist the urge not to think of our candidate (whoever “we” are) as the only logical choice, and that the other guy or gal is maybe not the Antichrist but could be that guy’s or gal’s really close cousin. I mean, that’s how extreme the world we live in is today; this is the rhetoric that media, social and otherwise, keeps pummeling us with. I mean, who wouldn’t get a little nervous if you actually believed that this election was in an existential crisis and that the future of your country, if not Western civilization as we know it, hangs in the balance of your vote? I wouldn’t even want to drive to the polling place downtown and try to find a parking place with that much pressure on me! But that’s what we’re led to believe.
As we sit here on the eve of yet another contentious election in our peace-killing, scrappy little culture, let’s take a moment to encourage each other and to remind ourselves of what’s real and what’s true. After all, amid “fake news” and epistemic uncertainty, we are a people of Truth, serving the God who is the Truth. In a land of existential dread, we are a people of hope, serving a God of hope. And, just as Jesus stepped away from the madding crowds to be with his Father to drink from the wellspring of truth, so he could return to the crowds to love and serve as a man of peace, we need to do the same constantly. If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us, right?
The first thing to remember is that God is sovereign, at work, and doing something wondrous and amazing among us, part of which we know and part of which we do not. We know that his Kingdom has come, that he is actively bringing truth, justice, mercy, and love into the world, and that he’s driving back the venomous lies and debauchery of an already-defeated devil. What’s more, he’s chosen to use us, his people, to do it. But we can only be effective in that work when we operate from a mindset of faith, trust, hope, and love. The already-defeated devil still thrashes around, wanting to make life and our work difficult for us. So he continually throws fear and anxiety in our path, through methods like telling us the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that this is the worst it’s ever been, that this election will save or destroy our country and our world, and we need to wipe out the guys on the other side to save it.
All of those things are lies. Every one. And believing them, buying into them, and adopting them as truth destroys our shalom and undermines our effectiveness as bringers of the Kingdom into the world.
Statistically speaking, meaning over the arc of the past 2,000 years of Church history compared to the wisp and vapor that is your lifetime, the end of times is probably not coming while you’re alive. Maybe it is, but people have been saying that for 2,000 years. This is the part that is known to God but not to us. In a sense, though, it really doesn’t matter. Nor does this election matter much, in the same sense. Elections have consequences, and maybe one person will do a better job than the other. But if we are truly disciples of Jesus Christ, elections don’t matter all that much. Not for us. Our hope and our future don’t depend on it. We are the remnant: God’s people, different and peculiar, citizens of another world. While it’s important to be involved and to seek the welfare of our communities and our country, our power is not primarily political. We don’t, as the Body of Christ through the ages, have a great track record of wielding political power well when we’ve had it.
Historically, we work best from the margins. That’s how we brought the name of Jesus now to almost every part of the world; how we created a system of charity and care for others that resulted in hospitals and clinics, the foundation of modern health care; how we taught people to read God’s Word, laying the groundwork for schools and the great colleges and universities of the past millennium; how we developed an ethos of human dignity, value, and worth that eliminated the slave trade and continues to battle human trafficking and continues to fight for human rights. No matter what side of our political aisle, or any other political aisle you find yourself on in the West, your sense of right and wrong, of human rights, of what constitutes good and evil, is defined by the work of Jesus, operating through his people, over two millennia. Mostly from the margins.
Everywhere Christianity has thrived, joy and mercy and peace and love have flourished, and it doesn’t matter who is president or king or Caesar or dictator or fuhrer or premier when Jesus is Lord. That was true yesterday; it’s true today, and it will be true next week. But only at the hands of Jesus’ true disciples, those who do not operate from a place of fear but of courage, love, and hope.
The second thing to remember is that we can’t be blind to who God says we are, or who he says our leaders are. We can’t take sides and hole up in tribes organized around things that are antithetical to who Jesus is. Even if “our team” is “right” on some issues, if they’re deeply wrong on others, we have to have the courage and truth to call that out, to stand up to it, and to think with the minds and hearts God gave us, looking at it through the lens of the Word he gave us. We’ve so bought into this cultural lie that I have to be either all for something or all against it, or risk being canceled, that we’ve either become fearful or blinded or both to our ability to say what is right and what isn’t.
There’s not anyone running for anything in any of these elections who isn’t a deeply flawed human being, who in some senses might make a good leader and in other senses would make a horrible one. That’s true for me as a head of school, and it’s true for every leader and every human being. If they won’t admit that about themselves, you should automatically be suspicious. If we have to turn our leaders into cartoon characters, all good or all evil, to vote for or against them, we’re deceiving ourselves and denying the truth of who God says we are. We should vote for the person we think is the best candidate and have good, logical reasons for doing so, being confident in that. But we shouldn’t turn that person into a Messiah to do it. We already have a Messiah. As a (now discredited by many) pastor once said back when he was still speaking truth: “There are no black hats and white hats. We’re all black hats. There’s only one white hat. And it’s Jesus.”
Finally, approaching candidates and parties with this mindset helps us love each other better. Looking at the election through the lens of Scripture, it’s clear that God cares deeply about human dignity and value, about the sanctity of life, and about His design for humanity and the family: men and women, and human sexuality, because He designed it all. He cares that we love others who aren’t like us well, and He cares a lot about the sojourner (foreigner or immigrant) and that we treat them well. He also talks about reserving gleanings from our fields, the Year of Jubilee, and other provisions, showing us that He cares about the poor and avoiding generational poverty. In Genesis 1, God called us from the very beginning to be good stewards over the earth, to protect it and cause it to flourish. The personality and character of a leader matters, too, because leaders impact national character, for better or for worse.
If Jesus were an American, he wouldn’t be a Republican or a Democrat. We know that because there’s nothing in the gospels to show that he was either a publican (a Roman supporter) or a zealot, the two major political factions of his day. All this means that the gospel transcends politics, and the “man” or person, “after God’s own heart,” like David, isn’t running for president this year. God puts people into leadership positions in a Romans 13 kind of way, but we’re all going to have to make compromises to vote for someone who’s running, if we’re looking at it purely from the eyes of Scripture.
That’s not a bad thing and has probably been true to some extent in every election. The freedom we have in Christ allows us to be a member of a party of our choice, to be prayerful and ask the Lord for wisdom, and to vote our conscience, which God gives us as a gracious gift. That’s a good thing, what good citizens do, and you shouldn’t be shy, afraid, or ashamed to do it. But it also means that some of our brothers and sisters in Christ may vote differently than we do, and Christ’s love calls us to give them the space to realize that they’ve simply seen very complex issues from a different lens than we do.
The final encouragement I have to offer is that, regardless of how this election ends, we are one. One school. One community. One people. In the First Century church, Paul, Peter, James, and the other church leaders were navigating tribes and factions within the nascent Body of Christ which were so divisive and fractious that they make what we’re dealing with now look like two rival Saturday night mah jonng leagues. And, amid this turmoil, Paul reminded them: “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free; but Christ is all, and in all. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.”
Jesus died to give us the shalom that passes understanding, available to us at all times and in all places, even in the insanity of election season. But we have to embrace truth and live out the calling that we have been given: being non-anxious, Christ-filled presences in an anxiety-ridden culture, waiting expectantly for the salvation that’s coming on the clouds—but not on Air Force One.