The despair of politics

As a Christian and a being necessarily encumbered to politics, I keep slamming into the deep divides between people who call themselves Christians, between people who do and those who don't, and between people who share their non-Christianity and little else. I keep thinking of an old Bad Brains song, "I Against I":

We are all at odds with each other, and faith does not heal, it does not bridge. It divides further. For all the talk of love, we humans hate far more effectively than we could ever hope to love anything or anyone. We lie to ourselves about that very thing on a nearly constant basis.

I have friends on many points of the political spectrum, and I love them no more or less because of their politics. That's to say nothing special about me; I just don't trust political boundaries as the final arbiter of who is worthy and who isn't. I prefer to stand in disagreement, but not to divide over it. And I am in a tiny minority, apparently, for that very reason.

Christians are people who disagree on a variety of issues, both political and theological. Such has it always been. But the divisions that have broken the church into pieces are a great shame, sin upon sin. We are called to union, not division. Yet how many times I have heard people who consider themselves Christians mock and belittle, or even deny, others who do the same over disagreement on a nonessential issue. Important, perhaps, but not essential to the faith.

But that is not the modern American Christian church or the modern American Christian, and I very much feel at odds with all that. Honestly, I don't "feel" like a Christian at all. Oh, I believe. I believe that Jesus is the risen Christ, the only begotten Son of God. I believe in salvation through Him alone. I believe He is my only hope, that my sin condemns me in the eyes of a holy God, and yet I am made new in Christ.

So I am a Christian. And I am not a Christian, not an American Christian, at least. I no longer know who or what I belong to in terms of human groupings, and I no longer care, either. I feel cut loose from all connection to this life and this earth, from this world and from all others. I am, in a way, biding time until I die, and I long for that day to come, my depression notwithstanding.

Let the bombs fall; may Christ return.
Let the diseases spread; may Christ return.
Let destruction gain; may Christ return.
Let chaos reign; may Christ return.