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Psalm 2

The recent unrest in the Arab world is challenging the autocratic vice grip on millions of people who have lived with its pressure and restriction for decades, some would say centuries. Autocrats have no esteem for change. As Joe Klein said in Time Magazine, “They [autocrats] have an unrealistic view of their own indispensability.” The media revolution of recent years has changed the rules that have worked so well for so long. Suddenly people who protest cannot be separated from the herd and suddenly disappear in the night. They cannot be intimidated because they out number the intimidators. And they know a watching world is aware of them at every turn. Yet the rulers of this present age seem to think that in spite of all the changes, the old rules will work. They are surprised, defensive, aghast that these upstarts would dare to demand something as outrageous as rights, a say in what happens, freedom.

At the core of much of this unrest is not a technology of weapons or terror, but the ability to communicate with others, even millions at the touch of a key or a screen. Most of the time it’s put to trivial use, listing condiments as often as hopes and fears. But in this case the social media have become pathways toward connections between people never dreamed of by the generations that lived under the thumbs of rulers with less imagination than the willingness to insist that the past be the only reality available.

We see ourselves as beyond all this. We are people with a history of liberty and justice for all. Yet as the Psalmist contemplated the patterns of political power-broking of his day and lifted up the transcendent power of the living God and the useless posturing of the wielders of earthly power, he saw the distance between their sense of authority and the truth of their vulnerability.

If we as the people of God are to be anything but silly in a false security because of our slogans and our flags, if we are to have something other than an unrealistic view of our own indispensability, then we need be humble and willing to make room for the new among us, however strange it might seem. We must learn to honor each other as the autocrats obviously refuse to. For that is God’s will. All else will fall.