Not To Trivialize Donald Trump's Ear

But Political Punditry Is Not Preaching

I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant when Donald Trump was shot in the ear. I had my prescription sunglass on as I waited for a to-go order and had to take them on and off again to make sure I was seeing the television rightly. I was definitely curious, but also somewhat unaffected.

I don’t intend to trivialize what happened. It was a very close call, and it would have been a profound tragedy for a presidential candidate to be assassinated on the campaign trail. It’s just that I’ve been through so much political upheaval and violence in my short lifetime that I felt a quick (and relieved) calm that it was clearly an isolated act. I experienced multiple coup d’etats in my childhood in West Africa with sitting presidents and masses of their supporters executed with speedy vengeance. I once hid under a table as gunfire and bombs went off in every direction, confident of death at 15 years old. As my good friend Matthew Burdette has said about the events at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, it’s important to recognize from time to time how good we have it in the United States.

I live in a politically liberal town. The anecdote I always share with people who don’t know Iowa City is that when Bernie lost the democratic nomination in 2016, residents took down their Feel the Bern signs, but did not put Hillary-Kaine signs up in their place. The Assemblies of God is an historically politically conservative movement, which means that the church I pastor at is politically diverse when you combine its local population with historic adherents. Resurrection Assembly has people from all walks of life and from across the political spectrum.

A pastor friend of mine recently referred to the political “powder keg” that America is. So many pastors I know see sparks flying in their own congregations. They worry that political polarization will blow up their flock even as it does the country.

But this last Sunday morning—less than 12 hours after the attempted assassination—we said nothing about it at my church, Resurrection Assembly of God. The reason we didn’t is because we didn’t need to. People already knew where we stand as a church. One of our deacons led prayer for peace, but he prayed for it in a maximal sense. Not only for peace in the 2024 US presidential election, but also for peace across the world where so many people are fighting, and that the Prince of Peace would make himself known to every nation. If you didn’t know about the attempted assassination before the service began, you wouldn’t have known about it afterward.

The flock at Resurrection Assembly of God knows that Pastor Abby Anderson and I are not political pundits. We don’t read the news and compose our sermons in response to contemporary events. Instead, we preach holistically, entrusting our congregation to the Holy Spirit to make of them Christians—brothers and sisters in Jesus—before they are anything else. We’ve never shied away from political matters, from being unapologetically cradle-to-grave pro-life to condemning predatory loan practices. However, our flock knows that we preach all of that not because we’re aligning ourselves with a particular political party, but because Jesus is Lord and no one else is.

We also didn’t saying anything about the attempted assassination because we weren’t worried about it being a divisive issue in our church. We knew that there would be democrats, libertarians, Trumpers, and never-Trumpers all worshipping the Risen Lord should-to-shoulder as they remembered him in the Eucharist. But we had no worries that they would be at each other’s throats. That’s because we’ve told them that they are Christians before they are anything else—before they are republican or democrat, male or female, hetero- or homo-attracted, poor or rich—they are one in Christ who united them in his body by baptism. I know that they know this because I’ve heard them repeating it to each other in moments of crisis and in the threat of division.

I say all of this to let you know that it’s possible. It’s possible for the church not to be divided by politics. It’s possible for brothers and sisters in Christ to dwell together in genuine unity from every walk of life. This last Sunday, we had both a homeless man and a man who attends the World Economic Forum in Davos in the sanctuary. We had recovering alcoholics and life-long Christians who have never been controlled by anything (as the Apostle Paul puts it in 1 Cor 6:12). We had an unmarried democrat and we had a young republican family. But they all knew that to be a Christian was to count everything else they might say about themselves as rubbish when compared to knowing Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection.

It’s possible for the local church to maintain a holy unity in the midst of political polarization. But it takes long, slow spiritual formation. It takes spiritual formation for a crisis before there’s a crisis. We can’t wait until there’s an attempted assassination or school shooting or hate crime or racist barbarity to preach unity in Christ. We must preach one Lord, one faith, one baptism, week in and week out.

I recently preached a sermon about our political hope as Christians. It was on David’s coronation and how he didn’t resort to violence to seize the crown God had promised him. We must follow his example, which is also ours in Christ Jesus, who, though he is the King of kings and Lord of lords, counts us his fellow citizens and coheirs in the kingdom of God. If we’re going to have a unity in the church that survives the winds and waves of political time, we need to let the hope of the kingdom of God trump the hope of America.

We’re doing it at Resurrection Assembly, so let that embolden you to do it wherever you find yourself in Jesus’s church.