I Realize the aware of the irony of stating that we are sick of polls, and then proving it by quoting more polls. But, no matter your political inclinations, most everyone agrees that it’s a mess.
So, what’s a person to do? Should we pick a side and join the scrum? Should we try to yell louder than anyone else and threaten all those fools on the other side? Or is there something more important we should be doing?
Maybe Bartimaeus, blind as a bat and lying in the mud by the side of the road, has something to teach us. There he was, unable even to see, crying out for Jesus to help him. All the people standing around him tried to get him to stop, but he kept yelling out all the louder: "Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.” Which is why Jesus heard him, had pity on him and healed him.
Maybe that’s what we need to do too.
John Adams, as you may know, was a man of deep, if sometimes eccentric religious beliefs. Writing to his wife Abigail after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he famously imagined how our Independence Day would be celebrated. Certainly, he imagined, by parades and shows and “illuminations from one end of this Continent to the other.” But first and foremost, he insisted, the day must be characterized by “solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”
Abraham Lincoln was also a man of sometimes curious and evolving religious beliefs, when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and then two months later, issued another proclamation. Despite the raging Civil War (this was one month before Gettysburg), his new proclamation set forth no battlefield or political strategy, but boldly called for “a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.” Why? Because, as he wrote:
“it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow…and to recognize the sublime truth…that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord…”
He went on:
“…we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
Presiding over a nation so divided that they were shooting at each other, Lincoln saw each American as the blind man by the side of the road. Unable to do anything without God. Prayer, he insisted, is the most patriotic and powerful thing we can do.
So, no matter your political predilections, no matter your fears, your hopes or your laments, I invite you to join together to do the most important thing in these tumultuous days: to join Bartimaeus, Adams and Lincoln and to cry out from the side of the road: “Jesus, son of David, have pity on us.”
