Do Not Put Your Trust in Princes

Do not put your trust in princes,
    in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
    on that very day their plans perish.
(Psalm 146:3-4, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Somebody on the Revised Common Lectionary team has a sense of humor, I suppose, scheduling the 146th Psalm for the Sunday after Election Day in the United States. If the lectionary organizers wanted to convince us not to vote, though, they would have put it in last Sunday’s liturgy—and they didn’t do that! So if you haven’t voted yet, and you’re reading this before the polls close in your community, I encourage you to vote while you still have time.

In this most recent presidential election cycle, a lot of people have been citing a quote from an essay Rebecca Solnit wrote for The Nation eight years ago: “I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine.” That resonates with me on a pragmatic level. Maybe it resonates with you, too. I want to call your attention to the line immediately after that, where Solnit calls voting “just a little part of the picture of how we make the world.”

From the days of George Fox, Quakers have believed in the immanence of the Kingdom of God.

They have declined to put their trust in earthly princes, preferring to place their faith in the God who, as that psalm declares:

“…keeps faith forever;
    who executes justice for the oppressed;
    who gives food to the hungry.”

“The Lord watches over the strangers,” the psalm continues; “he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.” Over the centuries, Friends have given their best efforts to establish a society guided by such visions. For many, that meant a complete withdrawal from secular politics to avoid complicity in the culture of warmongering. Others have felt called to varying levels of engagement as activists, organizers, and even elected officials.

Whatever path they chose, they saw a world they wanted to bring into being—and they believed that while human effort could make that world manifest, only divine guidance could make it possible.

I received a letter after last week’s message, which also spoke about the Kingdom of God.

“Kingdom?” this reader asked. “I thought Quakers were against kings, pomp, etc.?” Good point—and in recent years a number of Christians, not just Friends, have sought an alternative wording that avoids all the imperialist mental baggage associated with kingdom.

Kin-dom has become increasingly popular, with its emphasis on personal relationships. It rejects the hierarchy of state-based authority, embracing the intimacy of familial bonds. Quakers, following the lead of the early 20th-century Friend Thomas Kelly, also like to speak of the blessed community.

When we think of our meetinghouses (or our churches, or wherever we gather for worship) as the site of the blessed community, we sometimes imagine them as places we visit for respite from the dominant culture. We come, we dream a shared dream, and then we go out to face the grind once more. Lately, I’ve been dwelling on even more radical visions of faith communities as the places where we, in a phrase popularized by the Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, “work as if we live in the early days of a better nation.” 

Terry Stokes outlines such a vision in his recent book, Jesus and the Abolitionists. Stokes sees Christian faith as an anarchist enterprise; both call for “rejecting all of the depraved and bankrupt messaging that tells us we can’t have a just and functional world.”

That doesn’t require total and immediate separation from society. Even the Bruderhof and the Amish still do commerce with the outside world. Nor does it offer total and immediate solutions. “Walking the path of liberation will likely not itself end our suffering,” as Stokes warns, “but it will always undermine the cause of our suffering, and it will eventually lead to freedom.” And this may, strictly speaking, contravene anarchist principles, but I see voting in the same light.

I voted this year not because I put my trust in any of the “princes” who put themselves forward, but as a necessary first step. I looked for the people I thought most likely to do the work of executing justice for the oppressed and giving food to the hungry. If they win the election, I’ll need to do my part to hold them accountable to those tasks—and to create alternative infrastructures should they fall short. If they don’t win, I’ll likely have to work even harder. 

Because whether we call it the Kingdom of God or the blessed community or any other name, it doesn’t just get handed to us. We need to show up.