Why Wait For Jesus?

Dear Boo and Bubble,

My Goodness!  It’s been eons since I wrote you last…..over two months….but, at least we’ve been together during that time which is much more satisfactory than my letters to you.  So….. you might ask what has awakened my literary Rumple Stiltskin after such a long slumber?  It should come as no surprise that something stirring in the world of current events is my dawn’s crowing rooster.

Right now, my sense is that the political landscape is just whacko.  We’ve certainly had an overdose of devastating hurricanes this season, but there are figurative storms roiling us on a daily basis made more threatening by Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram and other social media outlets because of the ability to perpetuate, ad infinitum, whatever controversy whirls away in the stratosphere.  In other words…….the storms never pass.  Consequently, many of us try to find shelter from this barrage in some form of moderation of thought or reasonableness of suggestion.  

The other morning, I was watching an interview with John Kasich, Republican governor of Ohio.  I listened intently to him discuss a wide range of issues and found myself nodding in agreement with much of what he said on everything from Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act to gun control legislation to the various protestations of professional athletes regarding the National Anthem.  This last topic naturally segued into a broader conversation on Black Lives Matter and the problem (both real and perceived) about the fair dispensation of justice in our minority communities throughout the United States.

As a means to underscore one of his points, Kasich asked the interviewers if they had seen the recent movie “Detroit,” based upon a true story of riots in that city during 1967.  When none of them had seen it, he highly recommended that they go.  He explained that he took his seventeen-year-old daughter and midway through, he felt so uncomfortable that he suggested that they leave.  She insisted that they stay until the end, which they did.

There were only about ten other people in the theater, all of them African Americans.  As they exited, Kasich felt compelled to say something.  “That was rough,” he remarked to one of the black men.  “It sure was,” came the man’s reply.

Kasich then turned to one of the women and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that Jesus will bring justice?”  She broke into tears and they embraced.

Even with the warmness of the recollection, I had a reaction to the question.  What was the implication here?  Is Jesus the only one who can bring justice?  Must we wait for Him to do it?  Are we not instruments of His peace?  Shouldn’t we be striving to bring justice on His behalf?  Doesn’t our relationship with the Father, Son and especially the Holy Ghost demand that we speak now and always, as loudly as possible, to bring the message of love, inclusion and justice to the weary world?

As I often do when such perplexing questions rattle my brain, I turn to your great, great, great, great grandfather’s journals…..although I have to read it several times over to fully comprehend his words, he never disappoints.  (I have highlighted what I think are specific supports for my premise.)

In a newspaper article published in 1873, he writes:

“The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, instead of being confounding, answers to a grand necessity of the mind – for in the relations of the persons of the one God, there have been from eternity in perfect, unobstructed play, all of that moral life so variously denominated as its nice shadings and modulations are observed in human character and conduct.  These are but echoes of a word eternally spoken; they are the varied colors of the pure white light in which God, in perfect repose of ultimate action dwells, brought out by refraction through the media of human relations.

This view exalts moral philosophy to the highest heaven, as it gives us conception of moral truth as subsisting, actively from all eternity in the relations of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  It leads us to apprehend the sanctions of moral law, binding us one to another and each and all to God as arising out of else more than mere abstract will.  Nothing of caprice or of arbitrary placement possible here.  And what a sacredness in all covenant relations when we find them obliging us according to just what have conserved always the beatitude God.  The nexus of the Divine with the human is just that which is constituted of justice and benevolence.”