That We All May Be One

The preacher at our Episcopal Church this morning (a lay person of whom we have quite a number licensed and trained) spoke of this new year’s eve as a time to pause, looking back at 2017 even as we prepare to enter 2018.

He grounded this nicely in today’s Lessons from Scripture, seeing John’s Prologue as looking backward to a time when the Word was with God; Isaiah looking forward in chapter sixty-one to a time when God would “cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations;” and St. Paul in Galatians 3 rejoicing in the present, what he called the “fullness of time.”

As I take that pause “between the times” on this new year’s eve, I look back on 2017 as a devastating year at least in the political arena and, from my perspective at least, for this nation and the world. I believe Donald Trump has already done enormous damage to this country, undermining the respect the world used to have for us (as recently as under President Obama) and making life in the not-too-distant future extremely difficult for poor and working class people, immigrants and people of color, and threatening the very environment in which “we live and move and have our being.”

I look forward to 2018 as an opportunity to reverse at least some of these trends by working to elect Democrats to local, state, and national legislatures — particularly to flipping the Senate and House of Representatives so that the worst of this Administration’s proposals can be thwarted legislatively…perhaps even the likely extreme appointments the President may attempt to make to the judiciary, perhaps even the Supreme Court.

In short, I shall rededicate myself to the “resistance” in 2018, but I want it to be “resistance with respect.” I commit myself to monitoring my language and tone particularly on social media so as not to add to the coarsening of society we find there so often. I will try to give my opponents the benefit of the doubt and to focus my attention on their arguments or positions, not on them as persons.

This will not be easy because I do perceive great evil out there in these days. But, if I claim to be a follower of the One who was able to pray — even as they drove the nails — “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do, it is the very least I can do.

Please join me in this effort. Redouble your efforts to resist evil. But resist in a non-violent manner which truly does “respect the dignity of every human being” and which will be seen as light shining in the darkness.

Remember,  we have been told that “the darkness did not overcome it.”

This entry was posted on December 31, 2017 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Church Life, Ecumenical, Emergent Church, Interfaith, Justice and Peace, Politics, Politics, Religion, Scripture, The Episcopal Church, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.