Elections in the United States are seldom sedate affairs. There’s always plenty of rough and tumble in our politics. And so it has been from the beginning. While our founding fathers stated from the outset that they despised party politics, they very quickly formed political parties. And those factions could be every bit as vicious toward one another as they are today.

Still, 2016 does seem to be a particularly venomous time, as such times go. There is a lot that’s wrong just now in our country, and in the world. And many of us are fed up about it! I wish I could say that I am an island of calm in a sea of uncertainty. I wish. But to be honest I have been as passionate as anyone with all that’s going on.

So, I’ve been asking myself, “What do I need to remember in these messed up times?” And, as I’ve taken inventory it turns out that there are a lot of things.

First, as regards this country: we have endured far worse challenges than we face today, and we have always triumphed.

Second, in a pinch we will come together as a nation and we will unite whatever our party or creed.

But third, and this is the biggest thing of all, whatever happens you and I have a greater citizenship than our US citizenship. Like Paul, I am proud to have citizenship in the most powerful nation on earth. But, like him, I know that my citizenship is in the kingdom of God.

So much of what we have in America we owe to that invisible kingdom. In particular our democratic form of government. We have seen the hope of democracy rise in the former Soviet Union and in the Arab spring…. Only to see that hope quickly dashed and enveloped in violence and tyranny. Our democracy has endured because it did not spring up overnight. It grew the long centuries in the soil of the Hebrew Scriptures and their story of a God who liberates slaves and who hates tyranny … Who teaches us that power corrupts. It came to fruition in the words of Paul who held up this vision of humanity in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is them male and female, for you are all one in Christ.”

When I look at my country and my world I am grateful to be part of that story, and to realize how much I owe to it.