Gov. Scott Walker
City Profile With Dramatic Sky. Via Jan Carbol / Shutterstock
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about failure.
Not my failures, though I suspect we could come up with a few.
No, I’ve thinking about Scott Walker’s failed governorship in Wisconsin.
And Barack Obama’s failed presidency in the nation.
And our failed foreign policy.
And the failed Affordable Care Act.
And Walker’s failed jobs policy for the Badger State. And so on.
Then I started thinking about the failure of our political dialogue these days.
Man praying, KieferPix / Shutterstock.com
For most folks, these names will not mean much: Eric Pizer, Christopher Barber, and Andrew Harris.
They are names that may have a bit resonance in Wisconsin, where I am from. What they represent, though, are the struggles we face as a society dealing with concepts of repentance and redemption. They represent the way those concepts get overrun by politicians seeking to exploit the public’s fears. We as a people, after all, do not seem to be in a very forgiving mood these days.
So the distinctive stories of these three Wisconsin residents might offer a good starting point for Christians thinking about what our faith tradition calls us to during this season of Lent.
Red heart balloon. Image via Wylio, http://bit.ly/yctzSw.
Now we are at Valentine’s Day a year later. For many months last spring, a solitary red heart balloon floated just under the dome of the Capitol. It became a gentle symbol of this powerful people’s uprising.
The red heart balloon can serve as a reminder of how God’s Spirit blows whichever way it will, but that God’s Spirit is a spirit of justice and of compassion. As Bishop Burnside said, voices of faith need both a vocabulary of love and a vocabulary of justice as we move into the highly-charged months ahead.