Pray and duck! was regular advice at Grace-St. Luke’s youth group in Memphis, TN, in the 1990s. I said it often, but so did many of the other adults who worked with youth, and the clergy to the congregation in general. Some iteration of this, of course, not that casual of an idiom every time.
Be careful what you ask for.
What you bind here on earth is bound also in Heaven.
Man plans, God laughs.
All are some sort of message that our ‘next step’ is important, and that a Divine Response is often dynamic, from a totally unseen direction, and may knock us off our feet.
In some ways, this was an admonition to take prayer seriously. But I adopted Pray and duck! so thoroughly because it spoke to me deeply. It was an invitation to envision something significant enough to make me duck. It was an acknowledgement that the actions of God in the world could be radical and surprising, which was certainly how I had tended to experience them.
But also, it was the funniest way to relay my belief that all of these tidbits of advice for a life in God hinged on a leap of faith, a stepping into a sometimes chaotic dance with the universe.
Pray.
And expect something.
The other side of this reality is that that which comes is rarely what is anticipated. With Jesus, it’s almost always a third option, an alternate route, an unseen way.
I’ve been thinking about this invitation in light of the body politic, as we enter into what may emerge as the most significant Federal Midterm election in decades.
We’re about to roll the dice, to put a lot of things on the line at all the levels -federal, state and local. We’re about to pray and duck at a large scale.
I have as a personal and political goal the continuing expansion of the electorate and its more full and robust participation. This has been part of my worldview for most of my life. I do not constrain this body, the electorate, to a set of people who meet the identical thresholds for all things. Citizenship may be required for some participation, but mostly, all parties have a right to some sort of say in most of the decisions that affect their lives.
My current state of Colorado has a nicely nonpartisan commitment to this concept. It’s among the reasons I’ve settled here. One example of the expansion of the electorate that isn’t bound by the typical thresholds of citizenship is the allowance we have for 16 and 17 year olds to vote in their local School Board races.
But of course there is danger in an expanding body of participants -in anything.
A small group conversation can be sustained well and easily with up to about 8 people, but can dissolve into an unwieldy mess at 25, or even a dozen. 1500 people can usually come to broad consensus for a large community decision but can 150,000? Emergency services for 25,000 people is a strain but for a quarter of a million, may break any system.
An expanding body of political participants is also more unpredictable. Larger groups are less homogenous, and less readily typed, trended and projected.
And you might not always like what they choose.
I am reminded of early elections in Palestine, and the rise of Hamas as a legitimate political group. I remember thinking how radically hypocritical it was of us to insist upon democratic reforms and then complain about who the people elected, to the point of even refusing to work with them.
You don’t get to choose who’s in the Body of Christ was another phrase I adopted in my youth ministry days. By that, I’d meant that all were welcome, and you might not like everybody. That wasn’t really important -learning to get along was.
Growing up in the South has meant a constant and continual code-switching from conservative to liberal and back again, from agricultural to urban and back again, from traditional to innovative and back again. Early on, I learned to find places of common ground on which we in conversation could stand. A “Children’s Bill of Rights” was always a safe topic -no one believed children were well enough respected or protected. Until fairly recently -like within the last 5 years- eco oriented conservation was a safe shared topic, as everyone needs clean air and water.
The work in front of us is to remain in conversation, in relationship. We need not find alignment, or pass each other’s purity tests. That will never work.
Of course there will be discernment, and people and entities with which common work may not be possible in all places or situations. There is no part of continued abuse, for example, that is redemptive here. There is no virtue in accomodation, but much in mutual movement and adaptation.
You don’t get to choose who’s in the Body of [Community] alongside you. People and creatures of all different needs and worldviews, resource requirements and contributing capacity are important to include in as many ways as possible to build the dynamic, responsive, and robust communities we need.
We don’t always know how things will work out, and opening up the conversation to as many people as possible can feel dangerous.
It is. For we will all be changed.
May it be so.