In Difficult Times, We Find Out What Kind of Christians We Are

The following is adapted from a sermon Rev. Michael Woolf preached at Lake Street Church in Evanston, Ill., on Sunday, Nov. 10, four days after the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election rolled in.

I have been at the site of only a couple of miracles in my life. None of them were flashy. I’m going to tell you a story of one of those everyday miracles now. When I was first starting out as a pastor, I was in a rural congregation. Founded in 1663, it was the second oldest Baptist congregation in North America. But this is not a story about that, nor is it a story about how the first minister of that church was paid in gallons of rum. This story takes place hundreds of years later, during my tenure as pastor.

Occasionally, while working on site, someone who was unhoused and in need of something would knock on the outside door that led to my office. Invariably, it was when I was there alone and had limited resources to help them. Once, I gave a woman a ride to her broken-down van, from which she had walked about 5 miles to the church. I filled up her gas tank enough to get her somewhere down the road, and I thought that was it. I was getting ready to go home for the day when I saw a guy come up and just start putting groceries in her van. Curious, I stuck around.

This guy had no knowledge of her — didn’t know her or her circumstances — but said that he felt compelled to give her his groceries. According to the woman he was helping, he simply said, “You need them more than I do.” As she left the parking lot, the bottom of her van drooped with the number of groceries that this stranger put in there. And I marveled. Surely there is no greater miracle than that.

I tell you that story because it is small. It did not change the world. It did not create long-lasting political realignment and it had nothing to do with who has power in our political system.

We are all full of grief and rage and sadness today. We are in for a difficult four years as a country. During the first four years of Donald Trump’s administration, I did not hesitate to call him a fascist, and looking ahead to his next four years, I am so worried about vulnerable people in this country. I am worried about immigrants. I am worried about queer people and trans kids. I am worried, yes, but I know that even in the most difficult time, miracles are possible.

Scripture tells us that it is not the big things that actually count to God: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple — truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42). Matthew 25 says that what we do for the imprisoned, the sick, the lonely, the destitute, we do for God. We either visit them — which I take to mean we see their humanity — or we don’t. The choice is ours. But how we act matters. We can only affect so much, but we must do what we can. We have choices to make.

Both the Talmud and Quran contain a similar teaching: “Whoever saves the life of another it is as if they saved the entire world.” If you are prone to despair right now, concerned that whatever you do doesn’t matter, then this is the antidote: The collected wisdom of all the ages insists that what you do matters a great deal. The choices you make can save the entire world.

My favorite theological thinker is Dorothee Sölle, a German, feminist theologian. When she was reckoning with where God was during the Holocaust, she had this to say: “In the Nazi period in Germany God was small and weak. God was in fact powerless because God had no friends.”

We must strive to be friends of God, because we are the only hands that God has.

Now, I will not promise you success. Success is illusory. God has not always been linked with success over the years, but here, the Talmud has more wisdom for us: “It is not up to you to finish the work but neither are you free to desist from it.”

If you want to be a friend of God — and God needs all the friends that God can get in these times — then you will have to work for a better world.

We have spent much time over the past months thinking big; we’ve been counting electoral votes and looking at polls. But now, I want to ask you to think small. Think about the things you can do. Think about minivans that stagger out of parking lots.

We cannot just jump to hope. Hope seems like a big ask in these times, but I do want you to have faith. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” We like the last part, but we don’t like the first part. The arc is long. Often, even in a whole human lifetime, we do not have the privilege of seeing it bend. But it will bend if you are a friend of God. It will bend if you bend it. It will bend if you give someone a cup of cold water. I ask you to have faith in the bending of that arc, in the fact that what you do matters.

It is in the difficult times that we find out who we are. If you’ve ever wondered what you would do in the middle of a moral crisis — would you be silent or let your voice be heard? — you can rest assured, you live in one now. You can also be confident that your labor will be joined by God’s, that the arc will bend, and that miracles never cease.

Don’t sit this one out. Dig deep. Find something in yourself and in your community that needs doing. Be kind. Fill up a minivan and watch the universe find its place again.