On a crisp Sunday morning in December 2011, President Barack Obama walked with his family from the White House to a yellow church across Lafayette Square—the so-called “Church of the Presidents,” St. John’s Episcopal Church. St. John’s, at least at the time, was accustomed to welcoming presidents, often unannounced. It’s possible that, when the Reverend Luis León, the long-time Rector of the parish, was writing his sermon the night before, he did not know for certain that the incumbent President would be present to hear his words.
In the Gospel passage assigned for that day, John the Baptist denied emphatically that he was the Messiah. Since, in The Episcopal Church, our assigned readings follow a three-year cycle, that same Gospel passage had been assigned three years earlier, in December 2008, at a time of enthusiastic anticipation for the incoming Obama administration. As the country prepared for the 2012 presidential election year, León reflected on the fervor of that 2008 post-election period: “I was worried,” he said, “I was worried the whole time we were expecting a Messiah to be our president…and we were all going to be disillusioned because we were electing a president, not a Messiah.”
When I was assigned to preach on the Sunday after the 2016 presidential election, I remembered reading about León’s sermon five years before. In some ways, the period after the 2016 presidential election and the period after the 2008 presidential election couldn’t have been more different. Within the largely liberal bubbles in which I spend most of my time, there was great elation in 2008 and great shock, anger, and disappointment in 2016. But, in both 2008 and 2016, the post-election discourse of my immediate contexts was apocalyptic in tone. The anticipated apocalypse of 2008 was a positive one: a new President was coming to usher in an entirely new order of hope, justice, and love. The anticipated apocalypse of 2016 was negative: everything we believed in—everything we valued—seemed at risk of falling apart.
The Gospel passage assigned to that Sunday following the first election of Donald Trump was the Lucan adaptation of the passage from Mark that we will hear this Sunday. In both the Lucan and Markan versions, Jesus issues a stern warning: “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” The application of Jesus’ words to the political reality of November 2016 was, for me, clear: while we are easily tempted to suppose that the Messiah is coming and/or that the world is ending, we should not give too much credence to either temptation. As human beings, we are far too susceptible to false alarms. Jesus advises us to do our best to avoid being led astray. In truth, Jesus has not returned. The world is still turning. The end has not come yet.
This observation remains, I think, an important lesson in November 2024. While some people are ecstatic about what happened a week and a half ago, and some could care less, many people I know are hurting. Many people I know are sad and afraid. For folks all over our country, of varying political stripes, it feels as if the world is ending one way or another—as if all that we hold dear has been destroyed or, alternatively, as if the Messiah himself has come to triumph and lead us into unending joy. The truth, however, is far less remarkable. Everything has not ended, for good or for ill. The sun, once again, has risen to greet another day. The world continues to turn.
As anyone with any kind of anxiety can tell you, “do not be alarmed” is much easier said than done. I, too, read the news. I, too, know that we have very good reasons to be afraid, to believe that the world has ended. But it hasn’t. The President of the United States has never been—and will never be—the Messiah. We have a Messiah, and his name is Jesus. He has led us before, he leads us still, and he will lead us through every challenge that is to come.
