Your Prayer, Your Vote
Photo Credit: Logan Weaver
Armed “vigilantes” at the polls in Arizona. Election deniers running in multiple states determined to overthrow any semblance of democracy. “Christian” conservatives spewing vitriolic hatred for anyone who doesn’t love, look or think like they do… even as scriptures uplift God and LOVE as inextricably linked (1 John 4:8).
I hear folks saying: “this cannot be happening in America” - but it has been for centuries (pillaging of this indigenous land, the enslavement of Africans, ongoing economic and social inequality) - the harm (in some cases) has simply changed forms. When will this country learn all we deny, attempt to bury, resurfaces? Those of us breathing and living on the margins carry wounds passed through generations. For us, historical amnesia is not an option - we know it’s embraced at our peril.
As I type these words, days away from the most monumental mid-term election in our lifetime, I mourn an the sting of silence in far too many of our church spaces as a fascism rises:
Silence about the ways faith is increasingly synonymous with intolerance and indifference.
No words uttered from pulpits about politicians who see Jesus as a pathway to power.
Not a peep about the normalization of exclusion couched in the rhetoric of “America first,” as immigrant detention centers enrich the prison industrial complex.
The Gospel is not neutral; we meet the righteous rage of Jesus flipping tables and calling out the pharisees on their hypocrisy (Matthew 21:12-13,Mark 11:15-18) as he declared:“‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.” And theft comes in multiple forms as the prophet Isaiah tells us, God says: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” Isaiah 10:1-2 (NIV)
Our actions either resist oppression or uphold it. Sitting on pews as the world erupts around us is not an act of faith, but cowardice. I hear Senator Raphael Warnock who once said “a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire.”
What do your prayers sound like these days, friends? What silences are you committed to shattering in the name of a God who stands for the least of these, and denounces injustice? (Micah 6:8)
May we remember:
Thus has the Lord of hosts said, ‘Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.” Zechariah 7:9-10
Resources for Further Action / Learning: