...because they won't vote for anyone.

Collectively we've only had the better part of a day to process the results of the 2016 election, but in the age of information and technology that's plenty of time to start parsing through some of the relevant data, and the findings are fairly bleak.

Granted it's still early, and numbers are still being reported from a few of the slower precincts around the country, but it looks like about 125 million Americans voted for president during the 2016 general election. With roughly 245 million eligible citizens (according to the Federal Register), that's a turnout of just over 51%. That leaves over 48% of the adult population of these United States who couldn't be bothered to get up and exercise their most basic right as a citizen. Donald Trump will become the next president of the U.S. with the ascent of a mere quarter of eligible adults.

Now certainly, as many might say, some of that 48% are people who were unjustly purged from voter rolls and disenfranchised. Some may perhaps suffer from some condition that does not officially knock them off the eligibility estimate but may still make it exceedingly hard to vote, like homelessness, mental illness, or incarceration. But not 48%, my friends. The only way there can be 48% of the population that fail to vote is through pure, unadulterated irresponsibility.

​Low voter turnout is nothing new, of course. Turnout for a Presidential election hasn't been over 60% since 1968, and the last time it made it over 2/3 was 1900. The reasons non-voters generally site for not voting are predictably shallow: that it seems like they don't really have a choice, that there's not much difference between the two parties, that there are so many millions of people voting that their vote doesn't really count, blah, blah, blah. Choosing a candidate to vote for would require them to rub two neurons together in a way to which they are not accustomed, so they decide to bag the whole thing.

In the past, this sort of unwillingness to lift a finger hasn't had a particularly disastrous impact. Sure, presidential elections have been decided by slim margins, and perhaps the best qualified candidate hasn't been elected, but at least both candidates have been reasonably respectable politicians who were not a threat to the republic.

This election was different. There has never been a Donald Trump before. We have literally elected (to shamelessly quote myself) a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children. 

And I get it, people don't like Hillary Clinton. They don't trust her. I get it! I don't really trust her, and only sort of like her. But do not think for a second that the choice was between two equally undesirable options. If you take everything that she has ever been accused of in her more than 30 years of public service and aggregate it, it wouldn't even be as bad as a quarter of what Donald Trump has said in this last year and a half, let alone done. Plus, in that time Hillary Clinton did a lot of amazing good for the people of this country as well, while the Donald was busy defrauding people, bankrupting businesses, sexually assaulting beauty pageant contestants, and starring in a lousy reality show. It is unconscionable for an eligible citizen not to have voted this year.

​When I was a senior in high school, all the way back, long, long ago in 2008, I was required to take half a credit of government. Barack Obama was running against John McCain at that time, and I was really excited to cast my very first vote in such a massively important and historic election. During class one day our teacher urged us to vote, and informed us that we would be required to register to vote in order to receive a passing grade. One of my classmates got fairly angry about this, and said that she didn't want to vote. When asked why, she said something along the lines of, "I just don't want to get involved in all that." 

In what I can only imagine was a combination of stress, excitement, senioritis, and my well-documented tendency to butt in I stood up in that classroom and yelled, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You 'don't want to get involved in all that'? You don't want to take just a moment of your daily life to make sure that you're informed on the issues and in control of your own fate? Well, let me give you a guarantee, [student's name]: if you don't get involved in all that, it will get involved in you, and there won't be thing one you can do about it because you will have surrendered any power you had."

In the coming days, weeks, months, and, God forbid, years, there are bound to be non-voters who claim that they are innocent in all this; after all, they didn't vote for Trump. No, non-voters. You aren't getting off that easy. You helped bake this cake just as much as anybody else, and come January you're going to have to choke it down with the rest of us. Thanks for nothing.

Whew! Wow, jeeze, this whole blogging regularly thing sure worked out, huh? Ha ha! Oh well, I've been fighting off serious infections on top of my work load and all that, so I'm not guilty :) 

Sit back folks, and grab some water. This is going to be a long one.

So, for about 4 years now I've been thinking about a subject that I think is incredibly important. Back in 2010, during my own, personal prayers one day, it suddenly struck me that there was something that I, my parish, the Episcopal Church, and much of Western Christendom seemed to be neglecting, something that Jesus expressly commanded his followers to do that we were not doing. 

You see, in the gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry, one finds what may seem to be a surprisingly small number of direct commandments given by Jesus to his followers. We know that the Lord often preferred to speak in parables, providing complex metaphors about the Kingdom of God and how we ought to live our lives in preparation for it. These parables tend to require the Christian to think critically about their meaning and allow us both to navigate situations that may be morally ambiguous, and learn something new upon each encounter with them. The direct commandments that Jesus does give in the gospels form the solid foundation of the Christian faith, a foundation which sets the Church apart from the ways of the flesh that kept us shackled to sin before the coming of our redemption.

It was in this sudden moment of clarity that I thought on the words of Jesus from the iconic Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" -Matthew 5:44. Such a simple command, and one that we were not following at all in our public worship, and that I had made no concerted effort to follow on my own. Aside from one optional petition in one of six different forms of the Prayers of the People, the Book of Common Prayer was extraordinarily lacking in prayers for our enemies and those who persecute us.

At the time I was unsure of what to do about this realization, but I knew that something had to change. In 2011, when the United States Navy successfully carried out a mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, I was filled with a fascinating mixture of relief, knowing that he would not be able to hurt anyone else, and sorrow, that it took violence to stop violence, and even then the reprieve could only ever be temporary.

By some great luck, grace, and no small amount of serendipity, I found myself scheduled to be the intercessor on the Sunday immediately following the man's death. For that morning I had been assigned Form II of the prayers of the people. (For those who are unfamiliar with the form, I highly recommend giving it a look http://www.bcponline.org/HE/pop.htm#Form II ) I particularly like Form II because, unlike the other forms which somewhat passively state our petitions, Form II makes demands of the congregation to pray for very specific things.

When I had reached a point that I thought would be appropriate, right then and there I made something up. I asked the congregation to pray for the cruel, the unjust, the vengeful, and all those who wish us harm. I asked that they pray for those people to be moved, to experience the love of God and turn away from their anger, hatred, and violence. And I asked them to pray for the repose of the soul of Osama bin Laden, that he might find peace in death that he couldn't have in life.

Well, I thought that I was going to be in HUGE trouble. I thought that I had called down a veritable sh*tstorm the size of Idaho on myself. I figured that I would hear about it directly from opinionated parishioners who disagreed with what I'd done, and from the rector - whose permission I had NOT asked - who would have to take the complaints of people who were not comfortable approaching me directly. 

Instead, I experienced something that I can only describe as humbling. People from all over the congregation, some with tears in their eyes, many who I knew disagreed with my vehemently on numerous political issues, came up to me after the service, and - wouldn't you know it - they thanked me.

After that, I was sure that what I was doing was right. I still didn't REALLY know what I was supposed to do next, but we can call it a successful trial run.

In 2012 I had the astounding privilege of attending the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (which took place in Indianapolis) as part of a program called the Young Adult Festival, wherein young adults in the church are offered a gigantic discount on hotel and convention admission, special events for our age group, and a chance to meet each other, network, and observe the church's decision making process at work. Little known fact: outside of India the Episcopal Church has the largest democratically elected legislative body in the world, with more than 880 deputies in the House of Deputies and something like 250 total bishops in the House of Bishops (though retired bishops often choose to relinquish their right to vote). 

At convention I saw the amazing things that the Episcopal Church is doing in the 21st century being carried out: I saw our advocacy for the respectful and loving treatment of people in sexual minority groups and the development of a rite to bless committed, same-sex relationships; I saw us reaffirm that the call to ordained ministry can be felt by any of God's children, including not just men and women but trans people as well; I saw us considering where our resources ought to be spent to do the most good; I saw us considering our lives of public worship, and how they are changing to better reflect what we believe about God and our place in the world as His children. 

I also got the chance to gently toss out my ideas about praying for our enemies to my peers, and I found that not only did they agree with me, they thought the church would to, if only someone were to tell them.

So I started looking into ways that I could make my idea a reality on a large scale. I attended diocesan convention (a smaller version of General Convention) in my diocese as a delegate of my parish in 2013, and at that convention I gauged where my diocese might be in terms of readiness to accept what to some might be the radical step of changing our public worship to pray for people like bin Laden and others. I also got a good look at how church legislation is working under the current bishop and how business at convention is held these days.

Attending convention, and getting up and speaking about issues that year, made me confident enough to take the step of writing a resolution of my own to submit to the floor. After a great deal of work and worry, I have finished that resolution, and I have submitted it to be part of the business at the 2014 diocesan convention in November! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can read it below!

The most painstaking part really wasn't the legal language, or even writing the prayers. I have an English degree, after all; might as well put it to some use. No, the agonizing bit was really the explanation. I put it off, and put it off, and spent hours thinking about just those few, little paragraphs. I wanted to be firm, but polite; honest, but not condemning. If I am doing the right thing, as God has called me, and if this resolution takes off and goes on to be considered by the whole church, then those few paragraphs could mean everything. They could affect the prayer lives of two-and-a-half million people or more, and change the way they view themselves as Christians and their relationship to God, their neighbors, and the world.

I will go to convention in November, and there - hopefully wearing the full armor of God - I will present my case. The idea that my words may hold the very power of God in them terrifies me far more than the thought of rejection. It would be so much easier to sit idly by and maintain the status quo, so much safer to let the church continue in its transgression. It's hard to pray for your enemies, and even harder to love them, particularly now, when we see Christians in other parts of the world being gruesomely executed by people filled with anger and hate, but Christ calls us to do the hard thing. To rise up out of the ways of violence, vengeance, and rivalry, and work for peace. That is a difficult, and brave thing to do. Christianity, my friends, is not for cowards.

It has become apparent to me that in a modern, global world, one's identity cannot be considered fixed at any point in one's life. Where once there were few choices available in the makeup of a personality, when people rarely traveled far beyond their village, and sons grew up to take their father's place and daughters to be married off, now there are seemingly endless combinations of disparate cultural backgrounds, educational opportunities, music preferences, religious affiliations, media bombardments, and any one of a thousand other factors that shape a person at every moment. Even physical attributes that could at one time have been considered fixed determinants of at least a portion of a person's identity, such as his or her skin color, sex, hair and eye color, can be changed to fit the will of the individual with varying degrees of safety and success. How much more, then, do the less tangible components of the identity ebb and flow with the tide of life? 

I have thought a bit about my own "roots", so to speak, and how my origin combines with my individual experience to form an identity. I cannot say the I have ever been privy to the small-town mentality that I was born in one place, one culture, grew up there, will work there, and will die there. However, I do seem to have a connection to my family that others consider unusually (even some have had the audacity to say unnaturally) prevalent and strong, and I have had to mentally prepare myself for a long time for the prospect of being transplanted away from them into new soil. In some sense I know the value in leaving home, in taking risks that may allow me to grow and change and become the person that God is calling me to be, but in another sense I fear losing the foundation that I have and being set adrift on an ocean that I cannot navigate.

In a sermon he delivered at the Integrity Eucharist during the 2012 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson talked about the necessity of reorienting ourselves in life, and the anxiety that accompanies that feeling. He spoke of Abraham, and his experience of always moving from place to place, and trusting that God would lead him in the right direction. Like Abraham, bishop Robinson said of the people of God that we are "meant to live in tents"; that we long for a city with foundations, but every time we think we have everything safely figured out God pulls us in a different direction to a new issue or idea that we have been ignoring. His words, in that time, and in that place, comforted me as I listened, as do the words of an old hymn that my grandfather sings when he's out on the tractor in our family farm in Washington, which my family got to sing together on our recent gospel album, and which I find myself singing often when I am alone and unsure:

My very first church service, which my mother brought me to as a newborn infant even before I'd been baptized, was a service for Ash Wednesday. In an Ash Wednesday service, one of the most solemn in the Church calendar, a priest makes the sign of the cross on each person's forehead using ashes from the palms of the previous year's Palm Sunday service, a triumphant celebration, and bids each individual to, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." My mother tells the story of the priest putting a cross upon my tiny head, and speaking the words gently as she held me in her arms, and realizing there that I did not belong to her, and that I was God's alone. When I turned 18, the anniversary of my birth fell on Ash Wednesday, and I was reminded then, right as I stepped from my identity as an adolescent into my identity as an adult, that my only sure foundation, my only real root, was that I was raised from the dust of the Earth, and that I will one day die, and return to it. I am the Lord's creation, His to keep, and best I be reminded of that regularly.

The benefits of living, as bishop Robinson says, in tents far outweigh these anxieties, however, as well as the the securities of a life with unshaken foundations. Without fluidity in our own identities we could not change our minds, nor come to comprehend our errors in thinking and move toward truth. It is this fluidity that ended institutional slavery in the United States, that extended democratic principles and equality under the law to women and minority populations, and that even now is working, by the grace of God. to change hearts and minds to offer equitable opportunity to the poor and equal treatment to sexual minorities. We are meant to live in tents. Amen.


To hear bishop Robinson's sermon, visit: 

http://gc12.integrityusa.org/Home/announcments/integritvday5-integrityeucharistwithbishopgenerobinsonpreaching