November 7, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

America chose to move further into darkness in Tuesday’s election. That may not have been your choice or mine, but it was the choice of the majority, no matter how much we chalk it up to the Electoral College, or racial gerrymandering, or campaign lies that penetrated just enough of the electorate to swing the vote in the direction of that darkness.

As long as we hold onto the false hope of a religion that preaches “peace, peace, where there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14), the soul-wound that afflicts our nation will only heal over on the surface, while the deeper wound festers sickeningly beneath it.

That wound opened again on Tuesday night, and maybe before it–oozing the pus of an infection that didn’t start with Donald Trump, but certainly was not healed by him.

As my Colorado UCC colleague Heather McDuffee, of Manitou Springs Community Church, put it Tuesday night, “Scripture reminds me not to preach false hope. False hope is putting our trust in things that are not God. So today, I’m trying to remember a few things. No politician will save us. I have done my part. There is a god and we aren’t it.”

But HAVE we done our part? Do we now simply throw up our hands and let go into the deeper darkness that beckons us into anger, despair, and violence? Donald Trump and the Republicans seem to think so, and have thought so for a very long time. Jesus warns us in the scriptures about resorting to the sword, for those who live by the sword die by it (Matthew 26:52)—even when a disciple of Jesus takes up a sword to try and save Jesus.

Is this not a time for letting go, for ceasing our dependence on false hope and believing that the fix our nation has got itself into is not, and never has been, susceptible to a political solution by itself? The wise ones of our time, such as Father Richard Rohr, and Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Jacqui Lewis of the Middle Collegiate Church in NYC, have warned us that our spirit-sickness can only be addressed by a spiritual solution, by a faith lived and put into action.

The role of the church and our faith is not simply to make us feel better—if we only want to use it to take the pain away.

In the coming days, you and I and the nation will have to grapple with what it will look like to put the faith of Jesus and the prophets into action. But now is a time for the only fitting response, which is lament. There is a long and wise tradition of lament in Christian and Jewish faith—long because it extends back to the earliest heartache of God’s people when things didn’t go as hoped, and wise because to acknowledge our fear, anger and despair to God and to each other can clear a channel for a realistic hope to be forged by God’s compassion on the anvil of tragedy and adversity.

UCC minister Mary Luti expresses my own raw emotion at this moment, and probably also yours, with what she wrote the morning after the election: “I want to be enraged, but all I feel is a profound and pervasive sadness that it has come to this, a spreading fear for the vulnerable, and anticipated exhaustion for all the chaos to come. And as much as I cling to the promise of God’s steadfastness, I wonder if this too shall really ever pass, whether all really will be well. ‘Someday’ seems a cruel answer right now, as all around us the wicked prosper.

“Courage and grace, friends. Long live the resistance.”

I hope to see you in church this Sunday, as we celebrate the hope of God in our baptism, and our agency for a mission of peace with justice as we make our pledge commitments on behalf of Falcon Heights and the entire church of Jesus Christ.