Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations. – Psalm 82:8 KJV
Fast with me: fast and pray on Election Day. The fasting is not to make your prayer any holier, or any more acceptable to God. It’s only to remind you that you’re at prayer, which is to say that you’re treading the courts of Heaven, where a God who is Love rules absolutely, and is trusted to see that all things happen by God’s will or consent. Here God will wipe away all tears from the eyes of all God’s children. In these courts all your neighbors are to be loved and blessed by you, and in no case seen as adversaries to be hurt or defeated, for God loves all, Democrats, Republicans, and those that are neither, and wills that all be saved [1 Tim 2:4]. God commands us to forgive the trespasses of all [Matt 6:14-15], as Jesus did [Luke 23:34], and to wish ill on no soul, but only repentance and salvation.
Let your fasting and prayer extend from the opening of the polls to their closing, and let your tongue, during these hours, refrain from all lying, cursing, sarcasm, belittlement of others – even jesting. If any thought arises in your heart of achieving a good end using evil means, hold it up before God, and ask for the good to happen without any evil needing to be involved. Don’t worry that God won’t hear you. God hears every whisper in every heart. Ask God to keep your heart filled with right, righteous thoughts.
All around you, people will speak as if the only thing that matters is the outcome of the great battle being fought today in the secular world, and the “unforgivable” outrages alleged, and the threats of worse to come. Avoid such conversations. They will make you forget God.
The secular world around us has forgotten God. This may seem a strange thing to say in the United States, where the name “God” is stamped over all our money, and elected officials weaponize the Bible. But in a culture characterized by post-truth politics, fake news, and alternative facts, where is the fear of a God of Truth who forbids lying? In a world where nearly everyone and their employer reasons, “Let us do evil so that good may come” (reasoning condemned in Romans 3:8, for those who want to look it up), who retains hope of living a clean life? Where is love of the neighbor, required of God’s people since Moses’s time? Do we love only the neighbors we don’t despise for being part of some “other” population group? And finally: what do we worship? Doesn’t our behavior as a nation suggest that we worship, not a trustworthy God of moral goodness, but an economy that provides us with pleasures and conveniences and must be kept growing, regardless of the violence the economy does to the creation; a video-screen that feeds our addiction to infotainment; and behind it all, a military that holds the world in fear of disturbing our system? Don’t tell me “In God we trust:” What we trust in is our system’s power to bully. This means that our god, “the god of this world” as Paul called him [2 Cor 4:4], is not eternal and almighty but changeable and fragile; is not our Creator but an impostor, which makes us idolaters; and is not the Spirit of Love but a spirit of fear.
The world has forgotten God. Trust in our traditional electoral process is now crumbling, as each side expects the other to cheat; meanwhile, wildfires and hurricanes are warning us that the whole world ecosystem is teetering on the edge of a man-made doomsday, thanks to vast hosts of God-forgetting men and women calling evil good and good evil [Isaiah 5:20], generating a problem too big for human cleverness to fix. Having the “right” candidate win this presidential election will not fix it, not even if both sides accept the results as legitimate, for we, the electorate, have become a broken people!
Therefore, let whoever has ears to hear this call, join in prayer to God on Election Day: voter or non-voter, Republican or Democrat, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, whoever you are: there is one Light of the World [John 1:4, 1:9, 8:12, 9:5], good and all-wise, who teaches and enlightens the conscience of every moral agent in creation, showing what is right thought, speech, and action, and what is sin. Centuries of tolerance of sin, and then habituation to it, have made us all stupid; but God can make us wise again. Therefore let every person vote, on Election Day, for the Light to become the absolute monarch of their own heart! It is not hard to do: the only action the worshiper must do is want that – a single, simple act of the will. If one has not yet done so, one must flip the switch that invites the Light in; one must say, “God, You know better than I do what I should do and what should happen; I surrender my self-will to You; show me what to do, make it possible, and I will obey.”
The Spirit of God will then show us what to pray for and how to pray. Paul observes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” [Romans 8:26]. The original Greek word translated “sighs” is stenagmoís, which the King James Version renders as “groanings,” the sounds made by women in childbirth. We are the babies being born; the Spirit is the one doing the labor. We are not to worry, if and when our thoughts seem a confusing jumble during prayer, that we’re not praying right, or that God might not have accepted the gift of our own self-will. The model prayer Jesus taught us [Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2] includes the words “Your will be done.” We may have said them many times before. But on this Election Day, we will have said them and meant them; and God will have accepted them, for once we’ve relinquished all willing that deviates from God’s, there is nowhere else the offering of our will can go.
John Jeremiah Edminster (M. Div., Earlham School of Religion, 2019) worships regularly with Conservative Friends and hosts the Tuesday evening House of Light Friends’ Worship Group in his home in Richmond, Indiana. He carries a concern to promote surrender of self to Christ.
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