yard signs
As a teen-age Republican in the 1960s, I campaigned hard for William Ruckleshaus in his bid to be the US Senator from Indiana. I believed him to be a man of integrity, and that was proven true when he resigned as US Deputy Attorney General along with his superior, Elliot Richardson in the “Saturday Night Massacre”, because they could not obey President Nixon’s order to fire an independent special prosecutor who was tasked with investigating Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal.
When Ruckelshaus lost the Senate election, I lost my fervor for politics. There’s nothing quite as disillusioning for a teenager as seeing your hero defeated. And when a few years later I came to know Jesus, I stopped believing in political solutions to the problems of human beings. What I came to believe was that heart change in individuals would change the world. I still believe that’s the place to start, though I know it isn’t that simple.
Consequently, I don’t give money to political campaigns (family excepted) and I don’t put out yard signs. My next-door neighbors have a yard sign that is fairly common these days. It’s the one on the left in the photo. I’ve also seen the one on the right. Some of you may believe that they are mutually exclusive. I do not. I hold both to be true to what the Bible teaches. I recently heard this quote:
“It doesn’t begin with politics, it doesn’t begin with power, it doesn’t even begin with social justice. It begins with Jesus, because Jesus is our way of knowing what God would do on this earth… Jesus’ chief audience was the religious people who used religion for evil. Their fealty wasn’t to God but to government that assaulted the innocent.
Paul writes to the Corinthians about division: ‘Some of you are for Apollos, some for Paul, some for Cephas, some for Christ.’ The division exists because people get enamored with their leaders and their group instead of God, and when you put your heart in the hands of leaders instead of God you can look at immigrants and see animals, you can watch an execution and blame the victim, because that’s what the leader told you to do. Paul isn’t telling us all to get along. He’s telling the people who left to get back to Jesus.
When God asked how you responded to the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Alex Pretti, did you have compassion, did you mourn, did you let senseless death soften your heart, or did you blame them and call them domestic terrorists? Two thousand years ago a brown-skinned carpenter walked up to a couple of fishermen, looked at them and said ‘Follow me,’ and they did. They left what they knew and became fishers of people, because a piece of heaven came down and told them that everyone was a piece of heaven. Then they went and spread that heaven everywhere, because they believed they were living in heaven’s future…..The river of mercy and human dignity has frozen over, but it has not run dry. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that YOU are a piece of heaven. It means EVERYONE is. Following Jesus doesn’t mean raising your hands in church, it means standing against evil on the streets. That is after all what Jesus did.” Father Pete Nunnaly
I still believe, like Fr. Pete, that following Jesus is the solution to the world’s woes. But if you call yourself a follower of Christ and you are still supporting the current president’s agenda, perhaps you need to reread the red-letter version of your Bible, particularly these words from Matthew 25:
“Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty and give you food or drink? When did we see you with no place to stay and invite you in? When did we see you poorly clothed and cover you? When did we see you sick and visit you?”
Jesus replied, “Don’t you know? When you cared for one of the least of these my little ones, my true brothers and sisters, you demonstrated love for me.”
And then there are his words that are the most helpful for living a godly life, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
My hero, Fred Rogers said, “Always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers…if you look for the helpers, you’ll know there is hope.” Alex Pretti’s last words were “Are you okay?” As a nurse, he was oriented to being a helper, and ICE shot him in the back multiple times. Who was portraying the words of Jesus, the nurse or the masked government agents?
Love, Liz
“May my crime be compassion. May the record show from every angle that I was helping a woman up after they pushed her to the ground…. Let it be known that my radical act was believing the best in people.” Michael F. Dubois
