February 16, 2008
Experiment
Pogo, the wonder possum, it was, who said, “How’s we gonna know what to say, less’n you tells us what we think?”
Elections are like that. They seem to be times for telling us what to think so we’ll know what to say when it comes time to say it. Times for defining. They’re not alone, of course. It is the way we do things. We define each other — race, sex, color, religion, nationality, politics — presumptuously, subjectively. Or we let somebody else do it for us.
But Jesus never defined the kingdom. He simply told what it is like. He told what it is about, never really what it is. He told kingdom stories and our place in them. It is another way.
How refreshing it might be if this forthcoming time were spent by aspirants telling us what the America they’d lead would be about, what it would be like, what it is they want for and from all of us, themselves included. How they’d celebrate the international kinship we all share as fellow human beings and the billions they’d spend helping to bring us to wholeness. How they’d be stewards of the great American political experiment. How they’d embrace the presidency as a servant leader. And perhaps above all what this would require of us, how we could help, how we could be a part with it, how we could help inform and shape it.
The psalmist wondered something like, “What is man that you love him, and woman, that you gladden her heart?” (Ps 8.4 more or less). God’s whole covenantal message to us — old and new — seems satisfied to include that to be human is to be creatively imagined into being, and then, to be handed the keys and an owner’s manual without much further definition at all. The American political experiment is like that.
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