I’m writing on the day after the first Presidential Debate. It really doesn’t matter who you support in the upcoming election . . . this is a ‘none-of-the-above’ kind of day. The most charitable critics called the debate an embarrassment; one commentator described it as “a s#!*-show inside a dumpster fire at a train wreck.” Many of us don’t know whether to be more sad than mad or more mad than sad, but all of us feel some mixture of both.

As the pundits wrapped things up late Wednesday night I heard from them or a politician they were interviewing the now familiar protests, “We’re better than this” and “This is not who we are” – claims made in the wake of every recent assault on justice or decency or civility. And someone inevitably invokes Abraham Lincoln from his first inaugural address, with a plea to allow “the better angels of our nature” to prevail. The sixteenth president hoped that those “better angels” might help avert an armed conflict between the Union and the seceding southern states.

Well, “the better angels of our nature” did not prevail then: Just days after Lincoln was inaugurated the Confederacy launched an attack on Fort Sumter and the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history ensued. Our better angels are not prevailing now: We are not better than this; this is who we are. It’s time we acknowledged that.

Let there be lament in the land, and let it begin with us. Psalms 120 and 130 seem right for today: the first brings before the Lord our distress with “lying lips” and “deceitful tongues;” the second is a prayer of penitential lament. Both are psalms of transition – Songs of Ascent – and praying them helps us not to stay stuck in this dark place . . . to go higher when we’re tempted to sink lower.

Join me in praying these psalms. Oh, and in keeping with Jesus’ teaching about prayer in this next section of the Sermon on the Mount, let’s not make a big deal about it (cf. Matthew 6:5-15).

​-Pastor Dave