When We Fight and Pray, We Win
As people of faith, the results of the election should challenge who we fundamentally are as Americans created in the image of an inclusive and affirming God. We recognize and honor how many in our community may feel after the election results, and we share and embrace those feelings, resisting the temptation to hurry from lament to hope in this moment.
Rev. Mark Kass Suriano writes, “Do not rush to hope; let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling today, and honor it. Welcome it. Let this moment be the place where, in the wilderness of Hagar, God provides a little water. “I have, today, become aware that I am living as a stranger in a strange land. America is this. I am not alone, though; so many fellow strangers are seeking some note of redemption, which may only come in the long arc of the future, but for today be that stranger in a strange land. “This is not giving up, but it is a necessary practice, a form of surrender to the truth that is the foundation for whatever we may, one day, see on the horizon. We will say, "We were once strangers andaliens,” and mean it. “Right now, the land is hard and unforgiving, but a day will come when it will be softened by the rains and by our work so that a new crop may rise. But for today, be a stranger in a strange and inhospitable land. Learn from Hagar, once tenuously welcomed into a family and a place, then cruelly thrown out into a wilderness of despair. Let your prayers be full-throated or quiet as a Sunday morning, but pray.”
Today, and every day for the next four years, we pray in solidarity with all peoples of faith and goodwill and reaffirm our commitment to the values we share toward creating a just world for all, because prayer and justice are co-laborers.
We see the relationship between justice and prayer in the parable of the widow and the unjust judge in the biblical writings of Luke the Evangelist. Jesus prefaces the parable by telling the disciples to pray always and not to lose heart, then shares a story of a disrespected, underrepresented widow who pleads for justice against her opponent to a judge who “neither fears God nor respects people.” The widow is so relentless that she ends up receiving the justice she demands from the judge. In Jesus’ depiction of the widow, He offers us a God-endorsed invitation to prayerfully engage in the relentless pursuit of justice, knowing that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” as abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said.
As a young, enslaved man Frederick Douglass briefly embraced Christianity, but when he escaped at the age of 20 he reflected on both his faith and his freedom saying, “I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” In the wake of the immediate sting of the election, let us continue to petition God with our heads bowed, knees bent, and our eyes closed, but in the weeks, months, and years ahead, let us also accept God’s invitation to stand tall to our feet with our heads held high, and our eyes wide open, to actively engage in the relentless pursuit of justice that is central to living prayerfully before God, and essential for the fight ahead.
When we fight AND pray, we win!
With Love and Lament,
Dr. Ulysses W. Burley III CRS Board Member Founder, UBtheCURE LLC