Election week is upon us in the U.S.A and it feels like we are perilously close to the edge of a division that we may not be able to back away from.

Having the election decided may give the illusion of winners and losers, but the fact is that we have all lost this election.

We have lost our civility, our respect for our leaders, and even our collective minds.

Past elections brought a relief in knowing the phone would stop ringing, yard signs would come down, and we could get back to a life where partisan conflict retreated into the background. This election has highlighted the frightening prospect that our divisions will only continue to deepen, becoming uglier and louder as they grow. But 2,000 years ago a movement was started by an itinerant rabbi from an impoverished village, born to a minority race. And in this movement were the oppressor and the oppressed; the highly religious and the irreligious; the African, the Asian, the Hispanic and the European. This movement broke through hundreds of years of hardened hostility between cultures. People  from all over the known world were welcomed in, not just as participants but as leaders. Women were elevated and empowered. “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith,” the scriptures declare, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile,  neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This movement, in all of its sin and struggle, in all of its beauty and sacrificial love, in its infinite variety of expression, remains the hope of the world; of our country; of you and me. It is not the religion of the white man; today it is being led by those in what we deem the “third world”. It is a movement that welcomes kings and orphans, the empowered and impoverished, and makes us brothers and sisters on the same road to glory. It is a movement where the last will be first; where the dismissed and overlooked will be seen and cherished. Where the empty will be filled.

So as an American, I am grateful to have a Constitution that will hold us together as a nation, even as we fall apart as a people. And I am immeasurably more grateful to have a God who is able to heal, rescue and revive even a society as divided as ours.  And if not, if our country continues the ugly decline from greatness into futility, I am even more grateful to be a citizen of a kingdom that can never be destroyed, and that one day will finally fully live the truth that it proclaims.  So while this week I will vote for a temporary president, every day I will declare my allegiance to that itinerant rabbi whose kingdom will never end.