Put
Not Your Trust in Princes
August
26, 2020
It’s presidential
election season in the United States. Donald Trump and the corrupt gang around
him are holding what passes for a Republican nominating convention as I write.
Never mind that it’s really just a campaign event that for some reason the TV
networks think they have to carry. The same thing was true of the Democrats’
convention last week. I and all people of good well and moral sensitivity are
outraged by Donald Trump and his administration. Trump is utterly incapable of
empathy for anyone. He is a megalomaniac who truly cares only about himself. He
is morally and ethically corrupt to the marrow of his bones. He knows no other
way to be. He does not operate within the categories “true” and “false.” He operates
only within “I think it’s good for me” and “I don’t think it’s good for me.”
Therefore he lies at least as much as he tells the truth, probably more. He and
his cronies are politically indebted to the selfish, self-absorbed extremely
wealthy people of our country, so they pursue policies that make the rich
richer and give not one good God damn about the rest of us, most especially not
about the poor. They destroy the environment because they think preserving and
protecting it costs them money, and money is the only thing they care about.
Trump cozies up
to corrupt dictators like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Russia because Putin
is what Trump wants to be, namely, the head of a cartel of corrupt oligarchs
who faces no meaningful political opposition because opposing the president
gets you killed in good Stalinist fashion. Witness Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s
most significant opposition politician for some time now. He is currently in a
hospital in Berlin after having been poisoned, almost certainly by Volodia
Putin or someone who thought they were doing what Volodia wanted.[1]
Trump is easily the most disastrous president in my seventy-three plus years of
life and perhaps in all of American history, and that takes some doing. I know
I’m supposed to love all of God’s children and hate no one. Sorry Lord. Please
forgive me. I simply cannot love Donald Trump and have even been heard to say
that I hate him. He is so destructive and immoral that I just can’t react to
him any other way.
So I and so many
others turn to Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president this year. We
look to Joe Biden to save us from Donald Trump. We support Biden through on
line posts. We give money to his campaign. We have put or will put Biden/Harris
bumper stickers on our cars and Biden/Harris yard signs in our front yards.
Some of us do or will do volunteer work for his campaign. Most of all we will
vote for him and try to get others to vote for him. We at least like his
policies more or less even if we don’t think they’re sufficiently progressive.
We truly do look to Biden to save us from Trump.
It is a weak reed
we lean on. Joe Biden is seventy-seven years old. If he wins he will be
seventy-eight when he is inaugurated. That’s too old. Biden’s age could well
mean that he won’t serve out even one presidential term let alone two. Thank
God he has Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. His voting
record in Congress was never progressive enough. He doesn’t support universal
single-payer health insurance, which is one of our most pressing needs today.
He has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth in awkward and embarrassing
ways. He comes from a small state that would vote for the Democratic candidate
in any event, so he doesn’t bring a home state to the electoral college that
the Democrats wouldn’t have with any other candidate. He was never my first
choice as Democratic presidential nominee or even my second or third. That is
true for a great many progressive Democrats and independent Christian
socialists like me.
There are
nonetheless compelling reasons to vote for Joe Biden. His main virtue is that
he is not Donald Trump. Moreover, he is the only presidential candidate who could
beat Donald Trump and get him out of office. Biden is a decent person, or at
least he comes across as one. He has suffered more personal tragedy in his life
than anyone ever should. It seems to have made him empathetic with people in
need. His policies, while not ideal, will be a whole lot better, less
destructive, that Trump’s are. With Biden as president we’d be rid of Jared
Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump,
Jr., Steven Miller, and all the other disastrous White House and Cabinet
appointments Trump has made. A Biden presidency would be far from perfect, but
it would be a damn-sight better than another four years of the Trump presidency
would be. Biden at least wouldn’t enjoy tearing children from their mothers and
keeping them in cages the way Trump does.
I spend more time
than I should fretting about this year’s presidential election. I spend too
much time hoping and praying that Biden will beat Trump. Then I read Psalm
146:3: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help.”
And Psalm 65:5: “By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our
salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest
seas.” The lesson is pretty clear. Don’t hope in politicians, for they aren’t
the solution to your problems. God is. In times of troubles like these don’t
look to human rulers for solutions, look to God. God is no week read to lean on
like Biden is. God is a tower of strength. God is the power behind everything
that is. Humans will fail you. God never fails anyone, or doesn’t at least as
long as we know what it really means for God not to fail us. If we think God
has failed us it is probably because we didn’t properly understand what we can
expect from God to begin with. Don’t look to mortals for salvation, look to
God.
That lesson sounds
straightforward enough, and it ought to ring true for every person of faith.
Looking to politicians for salvation is after all a form of idolatry. No mere
human brings salvation. No mere human possibly can. Only God can do it. Idols,
that is, those to whom we look for salvation who are not truly God, always fall
short of the ideal. They always disappoint us. In the end they always fail us.
They fail us because they are mortal and therefore imperfect. Only God is
perfect. Therefore only God will never fail us. Joe Biden is a fallible, mortal
human being. He will fail us too, although he will do so less disastrously that
Trump has and will.
I am a person of
faith, and what I just said rings true for me. So why am I so reluctant to stop
trusting the obviously fallible Joe Biden and start trusting God to deliver us
from Donald Trump? I think it’s because of the narrow way I understand the
phrase God never fails us. I want God to act directly, personally, to get
Donald Trump out of our national life. Yet I have believed and said many times
in person and in writing that God doesn’t act that way. I do not believe that
God intervenes in the life of the world in that way. I do not believe that God
is going to do what I want God to do and rid us of Donald Trump. So what do I
mean when I say God never fails us?
I mean that God
is always with us working with us when we do gospel work. When we work
nonviolently for justice and peace we never work alone. God is always there in
solidarity with us as we do God’s work in the world. When the work gets hard,
when we suffer setbacks, when we’re burned out we can always turn to God in
prayer for guidance, reassurance, and relief. We can say to God I need a break.
I need to be done for a while, and we can know that God understands that we’re
merely human. God knows better than we do that while we are called to the work
we neither have to nor can do it all ourselves. God knows that we’re all at
different stages of life and that we all have different gifts to bring to the
work. None of us can do it all, and we don’t have to. Yet in God we can find
everything we need for the work—guidance, inspiration, forgiveness when we
screw up, rest when we need it. In all of these ways and probably many more as
well God never fails us.
So where does
that leave us? God’s not going to get rid of Donald Trump for us all on God’s
own. That work is our work with God always assisting us in so many ways. Our
temptation is to leave too much of the work to Joe Biden and his campaign.
There’s also the temptation to rely too heavily on ourselves. We must begin the
work with God’s help, but we must also hope in and rely on God for the final
outcome. So let’s get on with it, relying always more on God than on any mere
mortals like us or Joe Biden. May it be so.
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