What Jon Stewart dubbed the “perpetual panic conflictinator”, that is the pundit class, would have us believe that today’s election is perhaps the biggest decision any of us will make, ever. The 24-hour “news” cycle, the constant barrage of political ads, the complete and total hullaballoo of it all seems geared at one thing and one thing only – division. Everywhere one turns one hears the narrative of “two visions”, of distinct and separate outlooks. We are, the story goes, two Americas.
When one of the proprietors of this narrative, a talking head on a cable news station, asked Governor Chris Christie, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, whether or not he’d be touring, as he had with President Obama, the devastation in his home state of New Jersey with presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Christie’s response was as dismissive of the question as it was of the question’s underlying narrative of division:
“If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.” As Christie elaborated, he had a job to do, people to help, needs to respond to – and these far outweighed the needs of feeding the “conflictinator”.
In his outburst, for a moment, the story that we are a people divided was eclipsed by the urgent call of a people united by tragedy and a need far more compelling than any election. That was a good moment, a healthy moment. That is because we all tacitly, if not explicitly, acknowledge that the narrative of division, though based in reality, is a story that only becomes true in the telling. It is a story that relies on our basest selves, on fear and loathing and ignorance.
And, all of this is not to say that the issues are not important, that elections are to be belittled, or our differences trivialized. It is to say that we can be better. It is to say that we are more, much more in fact, than the narrative of division would lead us to believe. There is a story that we in the church have been told, and which we attempt to retell, that helps me know that we are more. This past Sunday we told one of my favorite parts of that story when we affirmed that three more children were “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever” and when we affirmed again, each of us, our intent to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. Did you catch that? All persons. Just as we were claimed and marked and loved and served by God, so too we have been called to offer our own love and service to <fill in the blank here with anyone you think is undeserving or beyond your abilities or patience to love and serve>.
This is the faith we proclaim, that the God who called us and made us and the same God that claims us in our life and holds us in our death desires above all else that we all may be one, that our divisions may cease, and our lives bound together in love. No matter how the election goes today, I hope we will all remember that part of our story, that we will embrace it, and that we will proclaim it in all that we do.
See you in church!
Jered+
