A Family Fight of the Worst Kind
Pastor David Platt of McLean Bible Church in Washington DC had just finished up preaching his sermon on June 2, 2019 and was preparing to lead his congregation in celebrating Holy Communion, when staff members urgently called him aside. They told him, “President Trump is on his way to our church right now. He’d like you to pray for him in the service.” Platt immediately thought of the beginning of 1 Timothy 2 where Christ-followers are urged to pray for all those in authority, and made the impromptu decision to agree to the President’s request, knowing that such a decision probably wouldn’t be universally popular. His prayer for the President can be googled if you’re curious.
The result? A firestorm of controversy both from within and beyond his own congregation. After spending all day Sunday answering questions, the next day he wrote a letter to his church explaining what had happened and why he made the decision he did in agreeing to the request. The result of the letter was that those who hadn’t been angered by the Sunday service were now upset by his letter. Social media acted like social media regularly does, with machete-words flying all around. And in his sermon to the congregation the next Sunday, June 9, he shared that as a result of praying for and with the President of the United States in a worship service, increased security had become necessary at the congregation. (*1)
Praying publicly with a politician has become a life-threatening decision? (*2) When a decision to accept a President’s request to be prayed for during a Sunday service can result in such controversy that additional security becomes necessary, we may not have become Rwanda (in 1994) or the Middle East (any time since 1948), but you can certainly see them from here.
Politics has become so partisan that it’s rarer to see one word without the other than to imagine a peanut butter sandwich minus the jelly. Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, defines partisan as
Reject first, ask rhetorical questions later. (*3)
Donkeys and elephants fire away at one another with ever-increasing hostility. Ponder the worst insults or comparisons you can imagine, and I can virtually guarantee that elephants and donkeys have used such labels about one another.
Donkeys are Marxists.
Elephants are Nazis.
Donkeys are stupid and reckless.
Elephants are racists and ___phobic.
(lots of prefix choices)Donkeys hate America.
Elephants hate the poor.
Donkeys kill babies.
Elephants kill women.
And on and on and on. When both our media and our elected leadership use such hate-filled and incendiary language with such regularity, how on earth can we not expect increased hostility in our classrooms and streets? As I write this, we just endured nationally a weekend with two mass shootings, and of course both the elephants and donkeys are hard at work blaming the other one.
I recently (June, 2019) heard a U.S. Senator share that Washington only has another month or so to even hope to get anything accomplished, because the more momentum the election cycle gathers, the more motivated the donkeys and elephants will be to point to the stalemate as reason why they need more votes in 2020. (*4) The average approval rating for Congress in the summer of 2019 is 17.6% (*5) , and for the first time ever, hasn’t been as high as 30% in over a decade. (*6) The system is so broken that good people seem incapable of fixing it. The donkey and elephant establishments have grown sufficiently strong that it appears the driving question is, “What’s best for us donkeys/elephants?” instead of “What’s best for the land?” We seem to have completely flipped President Kennedy’s famous quote inside out. Instead of
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,
it’s “Ask not what’s best for the country, but what will get our mammal the most votes in the next election.”
The reason I’m writing this is not because of how partisan our politics has become, or how incapable of solving serious problems Washington DC seems to be. Anyone with an arm can hit the darkness blindfolded. My motivation isn’t even to point out how incongruous our situation is in a country where a strong majority (typically 70%) choose to identify positively with Jesus, meaning that Musekura is prophetic when he compares our political tribes to the African tribes responsible for massacres. This is a family fight of the worst kind.
The darker the darkness gets, the brighter the light shines. I was put on this Earth to do all I can to see Jesus’ last and most developed prayer answered wherever I have influence. And in a world/country so badly divided, Jesus’ prayer is some of the best news we could ever hear or hope for.
Platt’s June 9, 2019 sermon can be found here: https://radical.net/sermon/on-unity-in-the-church/. It would be a great use of your time to stop reading my words and listen to his. The donkey elephant war threatened to implode his congregation, and he addressed the division phenomenally. I’ll be quoting his words in a later portion of this book.
Platt explains well in his June 9 sermon that the issue wasn’t whether or not to pray for a president, it was whether or not to invite him on stage during a service, and that well-meaning, unity-loving, mature believers could be found on both sides of that argument.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, Vintage Books, 2013, p. 127.
I’m not footnoting the specific speech because a) I’ve take the sentiment shared and reworded it for this context, and b) if I revealed whether the Senator was a donkey or an elephant, both animals would likely get more agitated.
Real Clear Politics, August 2, 2019
cnn.com/2019/06/01/politics/poll-of-the-week-congress-approval-rating