Nov 12 2008
Audacity
The Audacity of Equivocation
When asked in the Saddleback Forum, ‘Does evil exist and if it does do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?’ President Elect Obama answered:
Ah…evil does exist. I mean, we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who have viciously abused their children, and I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely, and one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be solders in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.
Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, but you know a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil in the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that, you know, just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.
Martin Luther struggled for years with a profound sense of sinful unworthiness and finally came to believe that we are saved by grace alone and not by anything we can produce on our own. Luther wrote in 1531:
Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for He is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides.
Luther understood that by the very nature of our human existence we will always fall short of the glory of God; so his advice to us is go for it, give life our best and forget about trying to do things perfectly. Let history sort out where we hit the mark and where we didn’t. As Americans, let us have the audacity to believe that, even with all our failings, no country in the history world has served the greater good of humanity more than the United States of America.
Sorry, Mr. Obama. No matter how pious or humble we pretend to be, we’ll never know in advance with absolute certainly that we are really serving the good. Trusting in God, we can only have the audacity to boldly hope we are. As our future President, have the audacity to stand up unequivally for America.