INSUFFICIENT KINGS: ON ELECTIONS AND IDOLATRY
“And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
But the people refused to listen to voice of Samuel; they said “No! But we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:18-20).
In the U.S., the presidential primary season and Lent share a significant amount of calendar space. How utterly appropriate this is.
Not simply because these seasons share tinges of existential angst, but because as counterparts they offer a dialogical process for assessing our values: in whom are we placing our trust? To what extent is that trust contingent or enduring? What, ultimately, is the agenda that shapes our civic and private spheres of being?
As we struggle to answer these questions in arenas both political and devotional, through votes and votive Masses, a clear accounting of our intentions becomes necessary. We confess that “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” (BCP, 41) and thus perceive how the boundaries between self-interest and righteous conviction are permeable, subjective, fog-bound.
And, as is so often the case, this confusion in our day-to-day discernment of what is right and good can breed a desperate absolutism wherein a single leader, agenda, or institution becomes the locus of our understanding. In a landscape where nothing appears certain, we are tempted by narrow and precise answers. One politician, one Lenten discipline, one thing within our control, surely (we secretly determine) is the solution to all that plagues us.
But there is a word, a strong and old word, for a misplaced trust in such simplistic answers: idolatry. And in this season of political spin and pious professions, we would do well to consider idolatry’s implications as the fundamental temptation to which we are subject as Christians and as citizens.
From the First Commandment to the Great Commandment, from the Golden Calf to the Cross—the Christian tradition has been shaped by the ongoing impulse to decenter God in favor of our own meager attempts at certainty and safety, and by God’s ongoing efforts to call us back into a trusting relationship with the Divine economy of the universe.
Indeed, this tension lies at the heart of Samuel’s admonition to the people’s demand at Ramah for a king who will “go out before us and fight our battles.” In all-too familiar ways, the Israelites desired a figurehead of strength to defend them from warring neighbors, from “open borders,” from perceived weakness in the zero-sum stratagems of the world around them. But Samuel warns them (and us, still) that in the realm of political power, subjugation is the companion of absolute security; the vulnerable freedom inherent in God’s cooperative providence will no longer manifest itself in a life that prioritizes certainty.
Not much has changed on the battlefield of our collective longings. Still we seek a king (or a political party, or an economic system, or a how-to manual for spiritual perfection) to rule us, to give us the answer, to trample our enemies, to proclaim a conventional victory. We still want to win, and we will bow down to any idol who promises that winning is possible.
But Jesus, the Christ, has no interest in any of this nonsense. Just as the Lord proclaimed through Samuel that the Israelites would one day lament their short-sighted clamor for a ruler, so Jesus tells us through his teaching, death, and resurrection that the power dynamics of our idolatrous world are ultimately upended in God’s Kingdom. The only one that can save us is the One who did in the beginning: the One who “brought up Israel out of Egypt, and…rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you.” (1 Sam 10:18-19). And this salvation by the hand of God—a salvation that takes us into wilderness places— looks nothing like the pyrrhic victories of our personal and political agendas; it looks like life that persists beyond the illusion of safety. It looks like a communally-oriented love that flows through the cracks sin has wrought upon our souls and societies.
Thus, when Jesus teaches us to pray that God “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” we are not imploring God to save us from distress or danger; we are praying that our sense of God’s freedom and vulnerability might be maintained in all we proclaim and do. We are praying that God not be dislodged from our hearts by the insidious longing to center other things, persons, and agendas in our deluded quest for a type of salvation that arrives on our own terms.
To be preserved from temptation is to invite our idols to be shattered, and to trust that God will be revealed, in our lives, as the omnipotent Center who is, was, and will be. This petition, when entered into in its fullness, is radical; it is a prayer of liberation from anything and anyone that promises safety and control at the expense of truth and life. To be saved from temptation is to be released from the delusion that anything or anyone but God, as revealed in Christ, will arbitrate our ultimate significance, purpose, or mission.
Does this mean that we should reject all political efforts as corrupt, impure, and thus unworthy of our attention? Absolutely not. Our sacramental understanding of God’s participation in the sphere of human concern, and our commitment to the inherent goodness of God’s creation, mandates that we assume our role in the world as agents of love, reconciliation and justice. The prophetic tradition of Scripture, culminating in the life and teachings of Jesus, is our guide to do doing exactly this. The collective scope of God’s concern necessitates the Body of Christ’s engagement in the body politic.
Does this mean that we should rebuke all efforts at spiritual practice and discipline as shallow and self-serving? Absolutely not. Our Lenten practices, just like the rest of our liturgical and devotional patterns of living, are valuable insofar as they guide us more deeply into an encounter with our own sinfulness and God’s fiercely tender and merciful response to it.
What it does mean, however, is that neither primary contests nor prostrations will, on their own, provide a salve to the dull ache of our enduring temptation for certainty. It also means that our particular understanding of political solutions or faith expressions should be borne with a sense of humility and mystery. We in ourselves are never the source of absolute truth, and neither is anyone else the source of absolute depravity. Insofar as we believe that they are, idolatry is at hand.
Our piety and our politics must be suffused with the uncomfortable in-breaking of God’s truth—God’s complex, unsafe, messy, inclusive, destabilizing truth—in order to transform our ideological and religious commitments from idols into signposts pointing beyond themselves. Only then will we be led away from temptation and into the territory where every so-called king, every delusion of grandeur, every misplaced longing, will crumble before the glory of the one true Sovereign.
