Local opinion: Bend it like Washington

“The meek shall inherit the earth.” (Psalm 37:11)

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)

There is a hymn that in some contexts seems almost cruel. It begins, “If you but trust in God to guide thee …” and seems to promise that if you do that everything will work out.

Well it does, if you take the long-run view. After all, everything will work out, as a friend reminded me, because Revelations says so.

If you don’t want to wait until the end of time, or if you are pressed by present circumstances, that can be a long wait.

Ask anyone who is in distress or anxious or worried or or or –

Psalm 37 and Jesus both say, the meek shall inherit the earth. Eventually.

That is to say, right now, things may be going very wrong for us, the meek. The poor, the bereaved, the unemployed, the destitute, the homeless, the frightened, those about to lose their jobs, those about to be deported.

It is easy to look at the wicked as they prosper and wonder where God has gone, or when he is coming.

The psalm assures us that he will. So that leaves us to trust the promise.

And — to do a little more. To work toward that blessed day, to live our lives with active faith.

In present circumstances, if you will, our moment requires some active trust work.

We have inherited something wonderful: democracy, justice, the rule of law. Not just as a promise, but as something we have actually experienced. Not because it came plopping down from the clouds but because people worked for it.

Here is what a few of them have had to say:

George Washington said at his inauguration in 1789:

“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of Government are staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

And in 1796 he said:

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.

“However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Six decades later the Reverend Theodore Parker said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

And within a decade, at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said: “It is for us the living … to be dedicated … to the great task remaining before us, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

A century later Martin Luther King wrote: “Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

Faithful people. Common purpose. Different times, different voices.

What they have in common, and what they have in common with the Psalm and the Gospel, is the sure and certain confidence that justice will prevail. In the long run. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

And that they have not and would not and will not sit back. They were all of them in the struggle. For justice, democracy, for the rule of law, for freedom.

It’s a republic, if you can keep it. Will you?