Rights and Responsibilities

It’s blowing a hooley out there, as they might say here in the northeast. It has been for days.

So I spent the morning exercising my democratic right – voting in the US Presidential Primary – and fulfilling my democratic responsibility – filling in the dreaded US tax forms.

With rights come responsibilities; with responsibilities come rights. That sounds good: just and balanced. Even if it isn’t lived out in practice.

The original writers of the Declaration of Independence declared that  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Notice that it was men who were accorded equality, and that by many men who denied their slaves liberty. Those slaves, and women and indigenous people and other minorities, had many responsibilities but no rights.

Jesus came to a warped world to trailblaze the way. He came to declare that the creator of the world and everything in it calls us to ‘act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God’. His follower Paul wrote that in God’s kingdom there is no Jew, nor slave, nor male or female. All are equal; all are born with truly unalienable rights, and among them is forgiveness of sins and everlasting life in Jesus Christ.

I pray that my vote may help to bring us a step closer to a just society. I have exercised my responsibility; now I trust God to make something beautiful out of the many votes which will be cast. 

And I know that whatever the outcome of the election, through it all, Jesus walks with us.