We’ve Got a Month Until Inauguration Day. Here’s What We Can Do Right Now.
Many people are still reeling from the election results and become more appalled every day with the appointments and behavior of President -elect Donald Trump.
And many of our Sojourners readers are asking themselves and us: What can I do?
The politics going on now are indeed beyond our control — but we can control what we do with our own faith and with our own actions.
I have been lifted up by a very familiar Gospel text that seems to be rising up in many diverse and unconnected places around the county. Maybe we call this the “Spirit.”
In Matthew 25, Jesus says, “… I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ … Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
In this text, Jesus is literally saying to us: How you treat the most vulnerable is how you treat me. He is saying I will know how much you love me by how you respond — or don’t respond to them. This Gospel passage, which was my own conversion text, is coming up again and again right at the time when so many people are feeling vulnerable and so many others don’t know what to do. This is our answer.
More: We’ve Got a Month Until Inauguration Day. Here’s What We Can Do Right Now.
Mr. Wallis is usually well worth listening to and this case is no different. I have signed that pledge - I rather feel I already had given the writings I’ve been trying to pass around where they’ll get listened to. This just reminds me that my own conversion moment was at a state senate hearing that I went to in opposition of a bill to reintroduce capital punishment to Wisconsin.
There is a clear call in the Gospel that tells us what we should be doing to love our Lord with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, and all our mind and to love our neighbors; Matthew 25:31-46 is blunt about what really matters to God.
There are too many who call themselves Christian - truly believe they are - yet voted against the Gospel by voting for Trump. Those fundamentalists and evangelicals are the ones that must be shown that they were wrong so that they do real repentance - turn away from what they are doing and turn back to what is good. Doing good works and acts of resistance is how we do that; we must show them the path that He walked then by walking it now.
I believe that Christians can not walk away from these things that are at the core of our call from Christ Jesus and remain truly Christian. He lived it as a Devout Jewish man in Roman Palestine and remains our example of the Word of God in the world. He will help us through this as He has everyone else across the lifetime of the Church.
For those of you who are not believers, who feel the Church has done nothing but harm, all I ask is to not paint with too broad a brush so that those of us who believe in both our Nation and in the good news can try to help resist the coming wave of theft, bigotry and incompetence.
As the Right Reverend John England, first Roman Catholic Bishop of Charleston SC, 1825 said, “There never was a union of church and state which did not bring serious evils to religion”. But we can work alongside to resist when the state goes astray.