In one of his clever songs, David
Wilcox tells about arguing with his wife, and it was taking her forever to see
she was wrong. Then they tried a
different strategy: he took her side,
and made her case for her, and she did the same for him. “Instead of getting an attorney, be the other
person’s attorney.”
This might help with politics. Instead
of denigrating or belittling the other guy, try to get inside his soul, which
you don’t know much about. Dare to ask, Why do you feel this way? You listen, you begin to see he’s not a fool,
she’s not wicked. Maybe you understand a
little. Maybe she returns the favor. Maybe you see how your rock solid case is
wobblier than you thought. Maybe you’ve
fixated on a handful of half-truths, maybe even a fake idol or two, and now
you’re finally learning something. What
you don’t know is always more interesting than what you know.
Even those of us who think we know a boatload about the Bible have a
nasty tendency to read into the Bible what we wish to find – and this then
becomes ammunition for our ideology, which again rears its head as our real
god. Lord,
have mercy on us. Maybe I need to
join an intensive Bible study before jabbering about a Jesus I don’t really
know. Jesus does have an agenda! – which
we’ll get to after we lay some more
Years ago, it occurred to me that the most violated commandment during
election season is “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”
(Exodus 20:7). TV ads featured
candidates attending church – even if this was unusual for said candidate. To pass muster you had to profess something
positive about Jesus – even if you’d not exhibited much interest in Jesus
previously. God, and God’s will got
attached to all manner of policy. God’s
name taken in vain.
But nowadays I am detecting a shift.
God isn’t talked about very much now – by either party. Oh, a little curtsy to God is offered now and
then. But there is less taking God’s
name in vain – a good thing – but also less interest in God. The Church’s influence is declining. Maybe we Christians are weaker. Maybe we never clarified how we are different
from party agendas. Maybe even the
Christians stopped caring about what God was hoping for, and we just decided to
bracket God off from real life, shut God up in the churches, and go for whichever
political ideology we preferred.
But the living God won’t hunker down in the church. God is out there. God cares.
God is calling us, God’s people, to mend a broken world. To begin to do so, we have to ask what God is
asking of us – and we’ll look into that next.
** FYI, earlier installments of this series are archived here.
** FYI, earlier installments of this series are archived here.