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How Will God Vote? Part II
God prefers Grief to Grievance
As I suggested in the first article in this series, none of us fully know the mind of God. We imperfectly apply Scriptural principles in our own historical and cultural context. In this series I am examining the Beatitudes to see what we can learn about the attitudes that Jesus praised and criticized.
We are all grieving now. The American dream is shriveling all around us. Langston Hughes famously asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” We are long past the raisin shriveled in the sun stage. The dream has “fester[ed] like a sore.” It has run, stank, and sagged. But if we are honest, the dream has already exploded¹.
The pain of the present can be overwhelming. We have lost over 200,000 people to the pandemic. Prayers for an effective national response remain largely unanswered. Racial strife echoes the late 1960s, or worse the transition from Civil War to the Jim Crow “separate and UNequal” system². The massive wildfires in the West combined with more powerful and devastating hurricanes remind us daily that the planet itself is on life support.
So much of our constitutional system was built on mutual respect, deference to tradition, and the necessity of compromise. Now bipartisanship lies in tatters. It feels like 1860 all over again. Our largest problems can only be…
