Jeremy L. Berg

From a Substack by Kristin Kobes Du Mez:

If you’re like me and you’ve been tracking polling data on the 2024 election, you may be feeling a little unsettled. A couple caveats: This far in advance, polls have relatively little predictive power. Moreover, some of the polls putting Trump over Biden are still within the margin of error. Still, given what is at stake in the election, the numbers are disconcerting, particularly in the all-important swing states.

This reality was swirling in my head on a Sunday morning a couple weeks back. It was Ascension Day, and as I settled in to listen to the sermon, I felt that the words were meeting me exactly where I was:

“What is the calling of the church? You know what that is. Take up your cross and follow me. The church is called to follow its king in self-sacrificing love.”

“Somehow the church tends to pick up the idea that we’re supposed to win. That our place in the world is not one of suffering love, but victorious power….”

“It’s so easy for the church to forget that Christ did not call us to rule but to serve. He called us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, to come and die. The church’s role in history is to live the way of the King, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love.”

Yes, this. The church is called to love, not to seize power. This is why, as a Christian, I’ve been pushing against Christian nationalism. (I have reasons for doing so as an American, too.)

It’s no surprise that I’ve ended up where I am on this issue. This is the preaching I’ve been listening to for now. In fact, Len Vander Zee, the pastor I was listening to now, had pastored the church I attended in graduate school many years ago.

As I listened to the sermon, I was thinking about steeling myself for the months ahead. I thought of the organizations and networks I was involved with, of the posts I had planned here, of the traveling I would be doing, of the projects (some yet to be unveiled) that I’d be dedicating my time and energy to. My mind was wandering, but I was still following along with the sermon.

And then I heard the words that jarred me. Len was quoting Celeborn and Galadriel in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, saying: “together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” Tolkien expanded on this in a letter to a friend: “I am a Christian….so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains…… some glimpse of final victory.”

A long defeat.