Walking Humbly

The leaves are changing, the weather is getting colder and the American political machine is in full swing, all of which are signs that an election is coming. The signs don't lie. This coming Tuesday is election day, Americans are choosing new senators, and in some cases new governors in a pivotal mid-term election that determines control of the senate and the house.

For us as students here at EMU where our vision as an institution, but also hopefully as individual students, is to " do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God," there is a lot about elections in this country that stray far from our ideals.

The campaigns are filled with TV, radio and print ads that focus on negativity and do their best to exploit our fears through certain hot-button controversies. Issues like immigration, gay marriage, activist judges and terrorism influence us to make decisions based on fear, not on what is just for this country and world.

The chapel speaker this past Wednesday, Beth Brent, director of development at The Faith and Politics Institute in D.C., spoke about how the political campaigns of our time lack imagination and creativity. According to Brent, the end result of the divisive political campaigns is ultimately the disintegration of our democracy.

Not only is the style of our campaigns detrimental to our democracy, they are unjust in their very nature. With millions of dollars being spent on the races, the reality is that a small percentage of the population, very wealthy individuals and corporations, have a large say in who runs and what the issues are.

Our desire to do justice clashes at times with participating in the political system. Instead of abandoning the system, we need to find ways to transform the injustice and focus on our political system and its elections. The job of transforming injustice is never an easy task, but if we can begin to address the problems with the US political system, we will be one step closer to more effectively changing a world that is overwhelmingly filled with violence and injustice. A key to accomplishing this task goes back to the EMU vision statement and the final challenge of, "walking humbly with our God." By following a God that calls for revolutionary change through living humble lives of love and mercy we can make a difference. The trap we can't fall into is trying to enact change with the tools of this world: power, money and coercion. Changing a system that is engrained in our political culture won't be easy. The form it could take is unclear, but it begins with the prophetic vision of Micah that we at EMU have adopted as our vision, "to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God."

Shalom,

Dan