"...to love all that is true and noble, just and pure, lovable and gracious...."

Baptism scene
Museum of International Folk Art
in Santa Fe, New Mexico
photo by author

 

In the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (a tradition in which I am ordained) we have a rite for Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child in which we pray: "...give (the parents) calm strength and patient wisdom as they seek to bring this child to love all that is true and noble, just and pure, lovable and gracious, excellent and admirable, following the example of our Lord Jesus Christ."

I'm a parent.  I know my failures to exemplify for my daughters all the virtues here described, but I thank God that they grew up to be young women whose lives lead me to be grateful that they have gone so far along the road toward being human in the best sort of way.

It is with children in mind today that I lament what seems to be the new normal in American politics. That new normal is a poisonous, toxic atmosphere in which truth and basic decency are being sacrificed and the issues of governing left by the wayside.

I know that past election campaigns through our nation's history have featured attacks by one candidate on another.  I've come to understand that politicians will appeal to my baser instincts when it suits their purposes.   Political campaigning is rough going.

This campaign of 2016 for the presidency, however, has shocked me.  I know I'm not the only person to be sick and tired of it.  I was sick and tired of it well over a year ago.  I mentioned last Sunday in my sermon that I was eager for this campaign to be over, and there was a murmur of sympathetic laughter through the congregation.

Do I need to spell out the outrages of this campaign?  I doubt readers of this blog need to have that spelled out for them.

I'm struggling to understand what my responsibility is as a baptized Christian in a day when it is becoming the new normal for me to hope that our young children are shielded from any exposure to the rhetoric of the presidential campaign.  I am deeply alarmed at a situation in which repeated instances of overtly misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist sentiments are becoming the new "normal" in the race for the highest office in the land.  I'm deeply alarmed at the ease with which we seem to be accepting as the new "normal" a situation which would have been unthinkable not so many years ago. Strike that.  Not so many months ago.  Some years ago, these sentiments were more masked in a veneer of politeness.  Not any more. 

What kind of example are we setting for our children?  How is any of this helping us to help our children seek the true and noble and lovable and gracious and excellent and admirable?

Christians can have their differences about which political and economic philosophy best suits the always imperfect search for a society in which the citizenry can flourish and we can live peaceably with our neighbors.

What Christians have in common is a politics that is rooted in baptism, which is our union with Jesus the Christ in his work and his dream for the world.  Central to that politics is the love of neighbor, which is inseparable from any profession of love of God.

Jesus was once asked: "Who is my neighbor?"  He then told the parable of the Good Samaritan, which we may think of as such a nice story.  But it is a subversive story, because it addressed an audience who were used to looking down upon Samaritans with a narrative which elevated a Samaritan to the role of the hero of the story.  If Jesus were telling it today in a group of American Christians, I can well imagine that he might put a Muslim in the role of the neighbor who stopped to help.

In his book The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who eventually was put to death by the Nazis, wrote that "neighborliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves."  That is a succinct restatement of the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

We've seen before when a well-educated, culturally rich, nominally Christian nation went off the rails and embraced the demonic. A lot of those people went to church all during those days.

I'm not sure what's going to happen in our country.   I struggle with finding the right words and actions consonant with my place in the leadership in the Church at this time.  I wonder what it may cost me if our nation continues along a path of disintegration in which we lose trust in the basic institutions of the American experiment.  I'm deeply concerned, and most of all for people who don't share my privilege, which is that of being a white, straight, Christian male.

I'm deeply concerned when those who would wish to lead us appeal overtly and repeatedly to a vision that is divisive and corrosive of trust.

I wonder what will become of our nation.  I'm wondering what our children are thinking looking on. I'm wondering what I'll be able to say when someday in the future a grandchild might ask me about what it was like beginning back in 2015 and 2016, and what I was saying and doing when the damage was being done to our social contract in this nation.  

I'm thinking about that.  I'm praying on it.  And I'm glad for the parents and the families I know who are working at family life which pursues the intent of the prayer with which I started this post.  I'm glad for the subversive work that can be done in Christian community when we accept the challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves.