Longing For The King

(AP Photo/Julio Cortez

I’ve never really understood looting and burning in response to gross injustice…it’s always seemed to me to be the equivalent of getting angry at your neighbor and burning your own house down.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that rioting was the voice of the unheard and I will assume he knew more than I do about both injustice and responses to it.

It seems to me that there is both holy and unholy rioting and they are rarely separated enough to identify correctly.

Looting and burning do seem to be apt metaphors for what we’re all doing to this society and this country both in reality and spiritually.

I can say I saw it coming, that I have written many times that making people angry as a form of entertainment was going to cost us.

Anger must have an object, then an outlet.

The Bible says to not let the sun set on your anger,but unrighteous anger will not respect a curfew.

The present anger was righteous in the beginning…we watched a man murdered by one sworn to protect and serve and there was no way to spin this murder into something either less criminal or deserved.

The noble response to righteous anger in the form of protest was then co-opted by others who know nothing of nobility or righteousness, but feast on carnage.

They finally had an outlet for their anger, the object of which remains vague.

Some say they were extreme leftists.

Some say they were extreme right wingers.

Some say they were white supremacists.

I suspect they were all of the above and others whose main ideology is simply rage and whose delight is in terror.

There were many incidents filmed of more brutality from the police.

Some actually believe the murder was staged to undermine Trump.

They all…were us.

I mourn for all of us.

There was not a leader in sight in all of this great country, right, left, or center.

I waited for the elected voice of someone, anyone, to speak peace and hope to the nation.

While the President drew well deserved criticism for advocating deadly force against looters…people missed the more offensive tweet that followed.

He lamented that the mayor of Minneapolis was not MacArthur or Patton…who used the U.S military against its own veterans in the Bonus March.

Other elected officials were either weak or helpless, offering little but blame or weak condolences.

If it is true that when God judges a nation, He judges by the leaders He appoints for its ruin, we are truly under judgment.

As the nation smolders we will all look to blame each other and we will find media that agrees with us about who is righteous and who is wicked.

We will rest for a bit, then restoke and reload.

We still have not noticed that this is no longer about political or ideological divisions, but about our souls and the soul of our nation, if a nation can be said to have one.

We are being challenged to decide who we are and what we shall be, both individually and corporately.

Those of us who claim Jesus have a different Constitution written as the Sermon on the Mount.

My prayer is that we drop all other affiliations to show our neighbors a better way…the only way.

We have a great leader, the King of Kings.

Is He enough for us?