Psalm 72:1-19 (links validated 12/19/23)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney may have gone on to become stratospherically famous as the lead songwriters for The Beatles, but they seemed never to have forgotten their working class roots. Many of their best loved songs celebrated the invisible people of society, and no song did this better or more famously than the ballad “Eleanor Rigby” and its refrain “Ah, look at all the lonely people. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” No one, least of all Paul McCartney by his own admission, quite knows how a name he claims to have just made up also appears on the gravestone in a church cemetery in McCartney’s boyhood home of Liverpool. McCartney admits he might have noticed the name on the tomb once and subliminally recalled it later. In any event, the woman in the song is an emblem of lonely people—the kinds of people who no one knows. “Eleanor Rigby, died in a church and is buried along with her name. Nobody came.” History is silted full with people like that. People on the margins, people few know, people few notice in this life. Yet somehow the good news of the perfect King who just is Jesus is that it is precisely these types of folks he always noticed most of all during his earthly ministry...

Jimmy Carter is now not only the oldest currently living former President of the United States but he has now lived to become the oldest former President ever. Strikingly, he has also been a former President for nearly 39 years. During those almost four decades of time, Carter’s reputation has soared but, of course, he left office after a single term that most observers regarded as a failed presidency. In addition to the energy crisis and the tanking of the economy, America on Carter’s watch also got embroiled in a hostage crisis in Iran from which Carter and his team could not extricate themselves. The final humiliation for Carter was having it fall to Ronald Reagan immediately after his inauguration to announce that Iran was releasing the hostages that very day. Reagan tried to give credit to Carter for his diplomatic efforts that quite literally went up to the final hour of Carter’s term, but it was too late. Carter was deemed a failure. What people may forget, however, is that Jimmy Carter was the first President who made human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy. Politics, economics, military aid, peace negotiations, foreign assistance: everything was secondary to any given nation’s treatment of its people. Strikingly, this had never before been the guiding concern of any President in the past. It may be fair to say that neither has it been priority #1 of any President since Carter, either...

“Poverty” by Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 69-70. “In a sense we are all hungry and in need, but most of us don’t recognize it. With plenty to eat in the deepfreeze, with a roof over our heads and a car in the garage, we assume that the empty feeling inside must just be a case of the blues that can be cured by a weekend in the country or an extra martini at lunch or the purchase of a color TV. The poor, on the other hand, are under no such delusion. When Jesus says ‘Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,’ the poor stand a better chance than most of knowing what he’s talking about and knowing that he’s talking to them. In desperation they may even be willing to consider the possibility of accepting his offer. This is perhaps why Jesus on several occasions called the poor peculiarly blessed.”

Now that the elections are now over, the frequency and necessity of “fact checking” after the Presidential debates might be a good counter example of what we need in a “King.” When you can’t trust the righteousness of a candidate, it is hard to believe that the presidency of such a candidate will be characterized by justice. Such campaign shenanigans make us long for the Coming King who will rule with righteousness and justice.

If you believe in the separation of church and state, you must get to know the story of Roger Williams, a Puritan pastor who in 1631 migrated from Britain to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was a troublemaker from the beginning because of his convictions about what he called “soul liberty.” His thinking about faith includes a firm disavowal of the divine rights of kings and clergy alike. He is the one who first used the phrase about a “wall of separation between church and state,” though Thomas Jefferson would later get the credit for this phrase, one that was built into the First Amendment to the Constitution which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .”