Today, the Sunday before the election, we celebrated All Saints’ Day at church. Because my tradition considers the “saints” to include all of God’s holy people in every time and place, we honor not just the orthodox and canonical saints, but all the faithful who went before us…stumbling, falling, and rising. We praise God for the bravest martyrs and those who carried on despite doubts; the ones who had their own moments of weakness and fear; the ones who suffered without knowing how the story would end.
And this is what we honor, too, in our civic lives: the ancestors who, however imperfect, fought for justice. The flawed and complicated human beings who gave their lives for the rights of others. The imperfect, the complicated, the incomplete who have offered themselves, body and soul, to our Union.
My prayer for our people is that we truly understand –past ideology, past doctrine– that we depend on one another for our wholeness. That we believe loving God means loving our neighbors– including the neighbors who will vote differently from us this Tuesday. And that we can move together into the post-election period together understanding what is required of us, now and in the years to come: mercy, not sacrifice.
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