Wednesday night was the night of the first presidential debate. During prayer requests at Bible Study, folks asked for prayers for the country and for the election. Those kinds prayers are commanded by scripture and are very important. Prayer requests for how the debate would go were joined to comments about how important the election will be and how critical a time this is for our country. These comments are certainly true to some extent, but they also elicited a response in me. I think that Christians should have a bigger perspective beyond the hysteria in the greater culture, and we easily find ourselves swept up and becoming more anxious and reactionary than even our non-Christian neighbors.
Billy Joel once sang, "The good old days weren't always so good and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems." To those who think our country is in its worst shape ever and our problems are bigger than they've ever been, I say, "No way!!" In 1968, the Democratic Convention in Chicago had to contend with widespread riots and demonstrations while the convention was going on. These demonstrations were shut down by an extraordinary show of police brutality and violence. This was a time that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed, the country was torn apart over Vietnam, and our ideological split was even deeper than it is today. Folks say that our society has lost its morality, but I think that in some ways, the 1920s and 1970s were much less moral than our time. In the 1980s, I can remember growing up wondering every minute if the Soviet Union would end the world and blow up all humans in a nuclear holocaust. The U.S. nearly threw out the Constitution and became socialist during the Depression before things settled down under FDR. Does anyone really believe it's more difficult now than it was during the Civil War? Or during the "Gilded Age" when a few people were ultra-rich and most people were living in tenements or just on the verge of losing the family farm, when children worked 12-hour days and there was no such thing as a weekend? Once upon a time our country was a tiny little country and twice it took went to war with the biggest empire in the world. Things have been a whole lot scarier and a whole lot worse. Folks say that we used to be more Christian than we are now, but we have had times when our Christianity was much more about cultural church-going than true discipleship, and we have had times when people participated in Christian faith far less they they do now.
The people who run elections make their money by convincing us that this election is the most important of all time. The people who run for office get people to the polls by convincing us that this election is the most important. The news media makes their money by selling their products--convincing us that this election is the most important of all time (and wherever you get your news is the media, not just the sources of news that don't tell you what you want to hear--that includes NPR and FOX, Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Sean Hannity and Huffington Post, Daily Beast, the New Yorker and New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times).
The issues are important, and dangers are all around us. But the issues have always been important and the world has always been full of danger.
Presidents do very important work, and becoming president is an arduous process. Our nation has separation of powers, so there's only so much any president can actually do (BTW, the conversation about the pizza man's 9-9-9 special was a ridiculous waste of time because no Congress, Democrat or Republican, would ever have gone along). Candidates are so fully vetted that there is very little we don't know about them and a lot we know about them isn't so. No one sets out to be president and actually gets far enough to be a party's nominee if that person doesn't deeply care about the nation and its people. It's just too difficult to be worth it otherwise, and there are many other avenues for folks to express their ambition if that's what they're in it for. At the same time, it now costs a billion bucks to run a campaign, so no one gets to be president without writing a whole heck of a lot of IOUs. What this means, in my opinion, is that no matter who wins, it can only be so good or so bad. People make money and a name for themselves by telling you that Barack Obama is a socialist or Mitt Romney is a crook, that the world will collapse if the other guys wins, or the world will be all better if their guys wins.
I'm only 37 years old. I've seen it get a little bit better here or a little bit worse there, but I don't believe in any Messiahs or Apocalypses in politics anymore.
My concerns as a pastor are always related to how the church will be the church. My concerns as a citizen are always related to how people will contribute to their local communities and participate in a democratic society. So I worry more about folk's reaction to the election than the election itself.
Please friends--If your guy wins in November, don't set your hopes too high. Don't expect miracles. Don't expect a quick fix. Don't expect a willing Congress or an agreeable world community. Your guy will not usher in a New American Golden Age. If you want a better America, you will still need to go to work the next day and do your job to the best of your ability. You will still need to volunteer in your community, to help your neighbors, teach your kids to read and study and have character and compassion, and you will still need to think hard and clear about the issues of the day. America (and the world community in which America co-exists, for that matter) will not get better if each of us don't make it better everyday, no matter who is president.
And if your guy loses in November, DON'T FREAK. Don't assume that this will mean that the economy will go in the toilet or that wars and terrorism will envelope the earth or that individual liberties will be cast aside by one version of totalitarianism or another. These things may happen, but if they are going to happen, there's little Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will be able to do to stop them and little they can do to make them come to be. God will still be God, and Jesus will still be raised from the dead.
The sun will come up on November 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment