Faith in Frightening Times
I was walking back to my house from getting ice cream with friends when I first heard the news that former President Trump had been injured in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. By the time I went to bed on Saturday night, all the latent stress and fear and grief that has already plagued this election season was compounded by the sense that things were even more frightening and serious than we had already known. I found myself not only grieved by the state of our political culture but anxious and exhausted, keenly aware that there was so little I could do to fix any of it.
I had one last task for the day, before going to sleep: preparing for church the next day. I was telling the Bible story to little kids in one service, and serving communion in the second service. As I thought through my day and read over our Bible story, it struck me that while I am relatively incapable of changing our polarized, heated, and deeply broken political culture, I actually did have some agency. I could tell little kids about the inbreaking kingdom of God, I could build relationships with the diverse people who sit next to me on a pew, and I could offer the presence and comfort of Christ to beloved people weary of our broken world.
Part of the reason our politics is so broken is because we feel powerless to fix it, so we lash out at each other - thinking that berating someone online or refusing to talk to our family members is somehow doing something. We lose sight of the agency we have, the opportunities around us to build better communities, one casserole or kind word at a time. It might sound foolish or trite, but in God’s economy, those small acts of love might just mean more than all our wayward attempts at changing the world.
Resources
For more on building better communities (for democracy’s sake!), the NYT interview this week with Dr. Robert Putnam: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/magazine/robert-putnam-interview.html
For more on what we know so far about the assassination attempt and a nuanced conversation about how we got here and what happens now, listen to the latest The Dispatch Podcast episode
Prayer of the Week
From Psalm 10:
Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God? Why does he say to himself, “He won’t call me to account”?
But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless.
The Lord is King for ever and ever; the nations will perish from his land.
You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
Defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.
Amen.