Perhaps it arises from the immediacy of our culture, with information and results available instantly with the click of a mouse or finger to the touchscreen. Or perhaps it is simply human nature to imagine the good or bad things happening to me at this moment have tremendous significance because, after all, they are happening to me.
There certainly are long term trends in our world that concern me: the growing gap between rich and poor, the way campaign financing has become a big-money, free-for-all, or the seemingly unavoidable impact of climate change. But the realization that climate change is a near scientific certainty says very little about any particular weather event. Similarly, we may not want to draw overly large conclusions from any election.
So what conclusions to draw? For me such questions are always filtered through a theological lens. That means I wonder about the ways in which religion and faith enter into elections (often in ways that distort or undermine key tenets of that religion or faith). Even more, I wonder about what the curious twists and turns of politics say about the human condition, about the power of sin to distort us, and about the possibility of that power being broken or diminished.
We live in anxious times, and fear and anxiety seem to amplify the problem of sin. Fear tends to focus me more on me and mine, making it more difficult to consider the needs of the other. From a basic, Christian perspective, that moves me away from Jesus' command to love the other as much as I love myself. But if my ability to love others requires me to have enough excess for myself that there are leftovers, then I don't really love others as myself. Neither do I really trust God. Instead I must secure mine at the expense of the other. God will not provide, and so I must, a view often expressed in that non-biblical quote, "God helps those who help themselves." (Not only is this proverb, popularized by Ben Franklin, not to be found in the Bible, but it is quite contrary to the biblical witness.)
We "progressive Christians" like to think we are better at loving the other. After all we are willing to pay higher taxes to benefit those less fortunate than us and support a higher minimum wage even if it raises prices a bit at the store or restaurant. But even if it is true that we are better at one facet of following Jesus, I suspect that we are merely myopic in different ways from those Christians celebrating yesterday's election. I don't think we are any better at the more fundamental issue of trusting ourselves to God. And so we are just as prone as those with differing views to think the sky is falling when people who disagree with us get elected.
I'm not arguing for stoicism or passivity here. Rather I'm saying that if we come to politics or the big issues of the day from a Christian perspective, we cannot measure where things stand based simply on whether I am pleased with things at this moment. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was far from passive, but his dedication to his work was rooted in a deep faith and did not come and go based on the day's headlines. Dr. King could say, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," not because he was winning in the polls, but because he trusted in a God who is a God of justice.
That brings me back around to the question of how the the power of sin to distort and deceive us can be broken. And here I must confess to an all too typical, "progressive" problem: the tendency to think of progress as an almost entirely human enterprise. We have been prone to see Jesus as a philosopher and moral teacher divorced from his claims to be part of God's movement on the stage of history. We have been prone to embrace Christ's words on loving neighbor and lifting up the poor while ignoring and even disparaging his words on the power of God's Spirit at work in us and through us. We have imagined that the kingdom, that new day of God Jesus proclaimed, is about convincing everyone to agree with Jesus (and us). We have done far to much trusting in our powers of reason and persuasion rather than the power or God. But deep down, I know better.
And so while I am not all that happy this morning, while I do worry that there will be serious consequences from yesterday, ones that some who celebrate today will later regret, I do not despair. For I do not believe that the fate of the world or history finally and ultimately rests with us. If the Christian claim of resurrection means anything, it surely means that the very thing that seems to be the victory of forces opposed to God can become the means by which God's purposes are fulfilled.
But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews (think "good, church folks") and foolishness to Gentiles (think everyone else), but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power and wisdom of God. - 1 Corinthians 1:23-24
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