Our Task for the Year Ahead

THIS HAS BEEN quite a year for the United States, for the world, and for us as a faith-based organization. The election of Donald Trump, in addition to being traumatic for all those affected by or deeply concerned about racial bigotry and sexual assault, has created an ongoing national emergency that started a year ago and shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Yet it has also brought people together in defense of vulnerable people around the principles of Matthew 25—treating the hungry, thirsty, sick, stranger, and prisoner as we would treat Jesus Christ himself.

We have been particularly focused this year on protecting immigrants from deportation, people of color from racialized policing and criminal-justice systems, and Muslims from religious persecution and an Islamophobic “ban.” We also mobilized successfully with a broad coalition of faith-based and secular groups to protect access to affordable health care for tens of millions of Americans.

More broadly, this past year will be remembered as a clash between truth and lies, and as a struggle between those striving for inclusion and multiculturalism and the resurgent forces of white supremacy. The year was bookended by lies, from claims about inauguration crowds and supposed voter fraud to more serious mistruths about Trump campaign connections with Russia, with many lies in between.

In that context, Sojourners has sought to uphold the value of truth in a climate where the president, his team, and his allies in right-wing media have sought to conceal and obscure the truth, or even render it irrelevant.

Meanwhile, overt white supremacists were as emboldened and brazen in their behavior as they have been in several decades, and the covert white supremacy that lies beneath the institutions of American life has been revealed again and again. Many liberal white people could scarcely believe their eyes as they watched white supremacists wielding torches and waving KKK and Nazi flags march through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., on a Friday night; their faces exposed for all to see, chanting vile anti-Semitic slogans including “Jews will not replace us!” and the Nazi phrase “blood and soil!” People of color, who experience America’s original sin of systemic racism every day, were frightened, but not as surprised.

After anti-racist activist Heather Heyer was killed the next day by one of the white supremacists, many of us were horrified as President Trump equivocated about the evil and the “very fine people” on both sides. For more than four decades, Sojourners has sought to stand up against racism, and that mission tragically was just as painfully timely in 2017 as it was at our founding in 1971.

EACH YEAR DURING Advent we await the coming of Christ into the world. This is not a passive process of waiting for something to happen. It’s an active, hopeful preparing that we do in gratitude for the gift of the Incarnation, for God becoming flesh and living among us.

What does the coming of Christ mean for us today? What is the call of biblical justice for the least, last, and lost that resonates at the end of this turbulent, exhausting, and often traumatic year?

We need to believe again, in the face of trauma, that the promise of Christ’s coming and the redemption of humanity and God’s creation is for all people, in good times and bad, in times of peace and times of war, in times of prosperity and in times of poverty. But building the reign of God on Earth “as it is in heaven” is a mission that involves all of us as instruments of God’s will. Jesus came to save us from our sins, to love and change the world, and to teach us to respond in gratitude by living out God’s call for social justice in building God’s reign in the here and now, even as we await Christ’s return.

In a time such as this, the clear instruction of Matthew 25 to protect the marginalized has never been more important. As we celebrate at Christmas Jesus’ arrival into the world, we also look ahead to what will be required of us in 2018 and beyond.

In addition to continuing to protect those now most vulnerable, we must be ready to extend that protection to any who are threatened or targeted in 2018. We must continue to let Christ’s light of truth shine in a national discourse that continues to be poisoned with lies from the highest levels of worldly power. We should recognize the value of democratic institutions and the rule of law when they are used to protect human freedom, correct injustice, and lift people out of poverty. We must remain vigilant and push back against the erosion of norms and practices that separate our democracy from autocracy and oppression.

Perhaps most important, this year, like every year, we must renew our commitment to building a society and world for everyone, who are all beloved of God—no exceptions. Come, Lord Jesus.