by Rev. Ed Wheeler
We have been blessed to live in an area where electric power outages are rare. However, in the past week we experienced 2 nights with a total of at least 10 hours without electricity. Many readers have also been through this.
Fortunately, when there is a power outage we have an excellent team of line technicians, system engineers, operators and communications personnel who roll into action as soon as the system becomes dysfunctional. These people have training, equipment, vehicles and financial compensation to make sure our lives get back to normal as soon as possible.
By contrast, what happens when our political system becomes dysfunctional? I think many people assume there is some equivalent group of professionals who roll into action to restore order. The point of this message is simple: THERE IS NO SUCH PROFESSIONAL GROUP! The responsibility for maintaining the system of constitutional America lies with the ordinary people as volunteers! The founders understood that if the power to restore government belonged to a small group of professionals that power would also enable them to control and ruin the lives of free people. This concept has been largely forgotten in our day.
To illustrate: Not long ago someone was complaining about one of the sad policy situations in our state and they blurted out: “Someone has a lot of work to do!” It never occurred to this person that the “someone” included them!
We have inherited a bottom to top political system that has been neglected. All citizens are privileged and expected to voluntarily engage with their town committees, county committees and state committees of their political parties. If they fail in this responsibility, you can be sure that power hungry and subversive characters will occupy their place.
Another illustration: A few months ago I attended an excellent event in support of a local pro-life organization. Hundreds of highly capable and good people spent a few hours learning and encouraging each other in this good work. Each one of these people could contribute greatly to the political system. However, in the same county only a few weeks later one of the major parties called its bi-annual organizational meeting. It was attended by 4 people. This is the sickness of our society! Vermont is among the states that has changed it’s constitution to eliminate all legal protection for unborn life. This kind of plunge into moral chaos happens when good people fail to participate.
The excuses for this situation are many: Politics is too dirty!, too complicated!, too corrupt!, too nasty! People think of themselves as too poor!, too weak!, too uneducated!, too holy!, too righteous!, too ordinary! All of these excuses are lies!
Sadly, people in the conservative congregations are most likely to be controlled by these lies. I blame the church leaders and the institutions that have trained those leaders: the seminaries and Bible schools. Not only have they failed to encourage and train cultural leaders, these same leaders openly celebrate the non-involvement of their people! “Faith should be private and personal.” “It’s all about individual salvation!” “The Bible has nothing to do with politics!” That last slogan is the most intriguing to me. Why does the Bible have two books with the title: “Kings”? Wasn’t the writer of the first 5 books of the Bible a political leader? Were not the main writers of the Psalms and Proverbs kings? Or am I mistaken about “all scripture” being profitable?
It is our good fortune that the founders of America were men of full biblical faith. In their writings leading up to 1776 the most referenced book by far is the Bible. Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were church leaders and all of them were Christian believers. They understood the principles of the Hebrew Republic and shook the world by seriously founding our country on those principles.
Wake up people! Wake up America or soon it will be too late! Soon the outage will be permanent!
Author is a Middlebury resident.