It should be easy to see that we need to dive into a complicated subject. We know that there will be turmoil when we get there, and there will be questions we cannot answer. There will be tangles. That’s all right. What is not over our head is the realization that we will very soon be in over our heads.
Because we live in a universe, created by the one true God, this means that everything is connected. Every subject is related. Every move the government makes is connected to something else. Congress passes a law and three months later, in Brazil, a butterfly flaps its wings.
What we need is for God to give us the grace of being able to see this. We need to see all the connections — and we need to do this without becoming conspiracybots. We need to see all the connections — not as plot points in the grand conspiracy, but rather as the threads in a tightly-woven tapestry. We need for God to give us seers, who see the world whole and entire.
Because we confess that Jesus is the God/man, the only one who is equally at home both in Heaven and on earth, this liberates us from every pretender and poser down here who wants to be the final anything. There are quite a few of those guys, incidentally. Apart from Christ, all sorts of people, in black robes and white lab coats, want to be the final word. They want to act like they are pacing back and forth on the widow’s walk of humanity’s great house, gazing heroically out to sea, under the azure sky, when they are actually down in the crawl space trying to suppress those darn coughing fits.
So here is the first principle. Jesus is Lord.
Everything else in all political economy is a footnote to that profound and glorious reality. And we don’t need to pray in order to make that true. It was true before any of us were born. But we should pray that God gives us the vision to see and believe that. Why should we believe that? Well, we are called believers, after all.