Prayers to Prepare Your Heart for an Election: Grace

How do we deal with interpersonal frustrations caused by partisan politics?

Believers in Jesus are one body. But we are of many minds.

That reality raises a painful issue we all feel: how does the Church stay unified when we have plural political views and often hold those views passionately, unable to imagine how someone might have a different mind on a matter?

The apostle Paul has some help for us. Twice in his letters he writes about the mind of Christ. In I Corinthians 2:16, he simply asserts that “we have the mind of Christ.” Mind refers to thoughts, feelings, shared purposes, and understanding of what Jesus is up to—his orientation to the kingdom of God. 

In Philippians 2:5, Paul is thinking about how Christians engage with each other. His reflection includes this command: “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset or attitude as Christ Jesus.”

16 Love of Neighbor by Phaedra Taylor

Most of us are really frustrated with how the other half of people think and vote. Fine, but we must resist the desire to harm others with belittling or condemning words. For hate never gives birth to love, and violence never produces lasting peace. The only redemptive responses are those that emerge from the mindset of Jesus. The mindset of Jesus moves naturally to one’s heart, producing love that allows us to stay in the room with difference, to stop comparing our best thoughts with the worst thoughts of others, to will the good of people we are tempted to think we are nuts. All this allows us to live in peace as peacemakers, abandoning outcomes to the God who is superintending history to his ends. 

This election week, to keep ourselves in harmony with the mind of Christ, we have this lovely prayer by David O. Taylor:

O Lord, you who prayed that we might be one as you and the Father are one, grant us the grace this day, we pray, to extend the right hand of fellowship to fellow saints across political lines, so that a watching world may see that your Spirit’s power is far greater than all the fracturing powers that would keep us separated and suspicious of one another. We pray this in the name of Jesus, the one who reconciles all things. 

Amen.

No matter what happens in this election, whether your candidates win or lose, the most important thing we can do as followers of Jesus is to live our prayer.

The Spirit’s long-term, unshakable unity is likely to be important in days ahead when there will be calls for various kinds of violence. While I hope and pray serious violence does not occur, it is never far from my mind that Christians rationalized killing each other in the Civil War, each proclaiming that God was on their side. The horrors of that war linger in our society 250 years after the last shot was fired. That is the nature of physical, emotional, and verbal violence. Far outside the mindset of Jesus, it is incapable of serving the purposes of God.

As we deal with interpersonal frustrations caused by partisan politics, and as we prepare ourselves for whatever angst awaits us after the election, we do our best to seek to have the mind of Christ. For surely his mind is full of experiential knowledge of boundless Trinitarian love and mutual goodwill with the Father and the Spirit.

Standing together we have the hope of displaying a Godward view of reality, being agents of good, bearers of healing, and divine instruments of justice.

Come Trinitarian unity, come bring your selfless, serving-others kind of love.