“He sent the message to the Israelites, proclaiming the good news of peace through Jesus Christ – he is Lord of all.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

While I have ours down pretty well, I don’t really understand the governing system of any other nation very well. From what little I do understand, though, in nations like England, while they have regular elections, they can also have snap elections. This is where the Prime Minister declares that it’s time to have an election. This could be for his own position or the various positions of Parliament. When this happens, the whole “election season” lasts for only about six weeks. Then everything goes back to normal. There are times something like that sounds pretty nice, especially when we have been slowly lumbering toward a presidential election season this coming November for months and it’s still only January. There are ten more months of campaigning ahead of us during which time things are probably only going to get uglier and uglier with national tensions rising more and more along the way. And, in the end, if things stay on the course they have been riding this whole time, we are going to wind up with an essentially binary choice between two options that at least by survey, most of the country doesn’t want either of. What fun. With the first round of primary voting officially behind us this week, I thought we would reflect together for a few minutes today on this whole scene and how we should be thinking about it. Let’s talk some politics.

There used to be a pretty discernable difference between America’s two major political parties. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, the Republicans were for limiting the size and scope of government and reigning in government spending, as well as preserving a variety of conservative social positions. Democrats, on the other hand, were for advancing a variety of liberal social positions as well as increasing the size and scope of the government in order that it could better serve and provide for its people. The issue of abortion and support for Roe v Wade was a pretty sharp dividing line between the two as well. Then came the single term (so far?) of Donald Trump. Trump was never much of a fiscal or social conservative at any point previously in his life, but he loudly (and with occasional eloquence) staked out several of those positions anyway and announced his candidacy for the Republican party’s presidential ticket. He won it (and the office), but mostly on style rather than substance.

His time in office happened to coincide with the emergence of the Covid virus out of a virology lab in China. This was significant for a whole variety of reasons, but for our purposes today, it was most significant in this country for the way it pulled back the curtain on and rapidly advanced a number of social changes that had been happening slowly and mostly under the radar and forced them out into the limelight where no one could hide from them any longer. Perhaps the most notable of these social changes was a further pushing to the side of the few remaining strongholds of the Christian worldview and a dramatic weakening of the power of the Christian church in our culture. To put that another way, Covid allowed our culture to secularize at a tremendous pace. I don’t know that it caused the secularization so much as it revealed it, but either way, it allowed for it to become a great deal more pronounced than it had ever been before.

For much of the last 100 years or so of our nation’s history, and corresponding with the rise of the power of the Christian church in the culture, politics was (at least on the surface) a gentleman’s game. Sure, campaigns could get a little dirty, but the worst of the ugliness was kept out of the limelight. Out in front of the cameras, everybody played nice. As a result, our political process tended to be pretty tame. We liked or didn’t like a particular candidate, voted for our favorite, and then got coffee with our neighbor who voted for the other guy once all the votes were tallied. That’s just how things worked. The system certainly had its flaws (particularly below the surface), but on the whole, it seemed okay.

The biggest reason things seemed okay then – or so I would argue – was that there was a culturally dominant worldview that was generally embraced by both political parties and to which the big picture concerns of those parties were subordinated. This culturally dominant worldview was the Christian worldview. As long as the culture generally accepted the Christian worldview as the primary narrative driver for what was happening in our country, our political wranglings all stayed fairly tame. Yes, there were plenty of exceptions of political firestorms and turmoil throughout the 20th century, but these tended to be the exception to the rule.

Then the parties started to secularize. The Democrat party took this turn first. And when it started, it went fast. Seen through the lens of where we are now, this may not seem like such a big deal, but it was. It was for one very simple reason. Every culture has something that is seen as ultimate. This thing, whatever it happens to be, is something worth fighting over. It is worth fighting over hard and even dirty. Its preservation and the advancement of its major ideals becomes the most important thing to see happen. When the Democrat party started to secularize, for committed members of the party who bought into the secularization, whether or not a Democrat candidate won a particular office, but especially higher offices, became a matter of existential importance. This shifting belief became clear when Republicans generally would respond to a political loss with disappointment, while Democrats would respond with riots. Yes, that’s a bit of a crass generalization, but throughout most of the 20th century and early part of the 21st century, nearly all of the political violence in our country came from the political left.

Then came Donald Trump and Covid and the rapid secularization of the Republican party which is still continuing today. Out of that came January 6th.

Now we have two major political parties, both of which are secularized or secularizing quickly, and the Christian worldview has been pretty well shoved to the margins of our society. Absent this dominant worldview that both sides agree sets the terms for what is considered ultimate and existentially significant, people who are dedicated to one party or the other put their particular political preference in the place once occupied by the Christian worldview or religion generally. And when politics becomes ultimate, it gets ugly. Fast. Normal tribal spats stemming from political parties that the Christian worldview used to keep fairly tame are becoming more intense. Election outcomes are not seen merely as the transition from one party to the other, but as threats to the very core principles of our nation. It’s not just some limited political aim that is at stake if the outcome doesn’t go our way, but our democracy itself.

It perhaps goes without saying, but I’ll make the point explicit anyway: None of this is good for our country. Of perhaps greater significance is this question: What can we do about it?

The short and hard answer is that at a meta level, we can’t do anything. You and I aren’t likely in a position to affect the culture of the country in any sort of a significant way. But that doesn’t mean we are completely without options. For starters, we need to make sure that politics isn’t ultimate for us. The fate of the country doesn’t hang in the balance in any single election. It never has. It never will. I would argue that the general trajectory of our nation isn’t good right now, but whether or not Biden or Trump or the Democrats or Republicans retain or regain control of the various branches of government this November isn’t going to be the thing that finally pushes us over the edge. Don’t be tempted by the thinking that it will. Refuse to engage with commentators who make that kind of argument. Gently, but firmly, insist with friends and family members who say otherwise that it is simply not the case.

What should be ultimate? Well, the apostle Peter made that pretty clear in his comments to the Roman Centurion, Cornelius, here in Acts 10. God told Peter to go and preach the Gospel to Cornelius and his household. This was like Margorie Taylor Greene being told to go share the good news with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Peter couldn’t even imagine doing such a thing. He couldn’t even imagine setting foot in Cornelius’ house – something he actually told him when he arrived as he verbally processed through his wonder at what God was doing. What he finally came to realize, though, was just what he said here: Jesus is Lord of all. And because Jesus is Lord of all, then anyone could be his brother or sister in the family of God. And because anyone could be his brother or sister in the family of God, then he was duty-bound to show the love of Christ to everyone, no matter how different from him they might have been.

When the kingdom of God is ultimate for us, politics is almost never going to be more than squabbles over secondary matters. Yes, there will occasionally be issues of great significance on which we need to vote and for which we need to advocate, but in the end, Jesus will still be Lord of all, and His will will be done. If the outcome doesn’t go the way we want, we can still love our neighbors who voted the other way and look forward to the day when all things will be made new, and we won’t have to worry about things like this any longer. When our tribe is bigger than our political party, we can get along well with other members of our tribe even when we disagree with them on matters of real substance.

This points us to the other thing we can do. We can make sure we are active in a church community, and we can make sure that church community is one that properly recognizes Jesus and His kingdom as ultimate and not a particular political party. We can make sure our churches are places where people from every side of the American political aisle are able to join together as brothers and sisters of the same Lord and worship and serve alongside each other with joy and gladness in our hearts. We can make sure our churches stand and advocate for kingdom truth regardless of which party that kingdom truth happens to align with in a given moment.

Is any of this easy? Nope. And the more we stand for the kingdom of God tribe the more we are going to stand apart from the increasingly politically-defined tribes of our culture. Both of them will attack us from opposite directions. But this won’t be anything new for the church and for Jesus’ followers. It was exactly the kind of opposition Jesus Himself faced. After He healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath in a synagogue, Mark tells us that the Pharisees and the Herodians got together to plot how they could kill Him. These two groups were as far apart politically as you could imagine. They hated each other. But they hated Jesus more because He represented a new tribe that neither of them was willing to tolerate. Jesus was always bringing people together like that. That’s still our mission today.

The political season we are in has been ugly. It will probably get uglier before it is over. There may yet be violence in our streets, and there’s no telling anymore which side might be responsible for that. But if Jesus really is Lord of all, then we don’t have to fear it. We don’t have to worry about it. We definitely don’t have to participate in it. We can vote our kingdom-directed consciouses (understanding well that others of our brothers and sisters have kingdom-directed consciouses that may differ from ours because they rate certain second- and third-tier issues differently in significance than we do, and that’s okay) and love our neighbors and leave the rest to Him. When our country is in chaos and we are at peace, they’re going to want to know why. Then we can share the Gospel and grow the tribe that matters most. Let’s get ready to be the church.