Like many Americans who are people of faith, we've been pondering a Biblical framework in which the current story fits the big story of God's arc from "in the beginning" Gen 1 to "all things new" Rev 21. That is the daily work of "heeding, pouring, detouring", looking for truth and beauty in the reality we live through, investing our gifts and resources for the good of others, changing our plans to adapt to the constraints of life in time and space.
This Chameleon was located in a story set in Rwendigo, but Luke re-located him in the icy story of Sago with his Christmas creation.
That's life. And how, we are all wondering, does that look in January 2026?
This morning one of my current reads focused on lament, and it gave me a location for much of what I see in Minnesota. Scott was born in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and his maternal roots come from the Norwegians and Swedes who settled on Minnesota farmland, people of faith and determination, tough and yet understated, who do what needs to be done. So we resonate with the 50 thousand marching in subzero temps to say: something is WRONG. Protest is a mass lament, a naming of broken systems, a resistance to harmful happenings. Lament acknowledges the gap between the goodness of God and the terrors of the world. When that many people lament together, physically, they provide a needed perspective that all is not well. The Bible is full of people crying out to kings, to judges, to GOD, not accepting the status quo as right just because it's the status quo. Protest, lament, heeding what is happening, naming the sorrows, these are our calling.
And another read reminded me that all power is secondary to the rule of Jesus. Earthly rulers are derivative. Everyone answers eventually to God. There is no place that we are told to obey human governments IF they contradict God's ways. That is why the protests that eventually led to the abolition of slavery were largely located in Christian churches (though to our lasting sorrow, not all churches and not enough). Or why faithful Germans like Dietrich Bonhoffer stood against the holocaust (yesterday's remembrance). No government perfectly aligns with justice and truth, so "just obey" never absolves people of conscience. Current events are NOT as dire as slavery or holocaust, but they still require thoughtful believers to weigh their reaction. To live together, we have to compromise up to a line, and decide where that line is. For many believers, it is abortion. Or revoking citizenship for immigrants, or withholding food from the hungry or healthcare from the old, or other "love thy neighbor as thyself" summaries of the law. So expressing to our government that we expect constitutional protections to be respected by our military, AND by our customs and border patrols and immigration agents, is not ungodly. Pouring into the streets sometimes comes from an outpouring of love.
Lastly, we won't get this right. The quote that keeps coming back to me this week is: "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. " (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago). Every human (even the ICE and BCP agents who fired fatal shots, and the protestors who "impeded" their wishes) contains the imprint of glory, the image of God's goodness. And every human is marred by evil, the evil of their own choices, the evil of their hard stories in a world that doesn't work for their good, and the evil of a malevolence that lurks to harm. No people are only good, or only bad. We try, we detour. We admit our own self-centered self-protective self-justifying hearts, and we forgive the same in others. The platform for this "truth and reconciliation" as Bishop Desmond Tutu showed us can be the family, the community, the legal system, the institutions that connect us. To listen to each other, to call out right and wrong, to choose to restore the threads that bind.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti were humans who tried to do the right thing from all we can see, yet it cost them their lives. Their killers were humans who possibly believed they had the right to kill anyone who got in their way. Lamenting this state of affairs, holding the policy-makers who led us into this situation of January 2026 to account, and humbly examining our own hearts as we seek to build bridges to others, these are all holy occupations for God's people in any country. We usually ask readers to pray for our teams in Africa, where injustice and death seem more common, where the concentration of power and money in the hands of too few is even more problematic. But we add prayers for America too. Prayer is a real moment, not a platitude, an action of putting the story of life into God's story of good. Re-orienting our priorities, and heeding the next step of pouring love and detouring plans. So let's pray.
Together, we can change the world.
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1 comment:
Thank you, these are helpful words for challenging times. Praying. x
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