If I hadn’t looked it up, I wouldn’t know which party he was from.  Joe Pitts doesn’t talk like a politician.  His voice is little more than a whisper. No grand gestures, no promises.  I don’t know quite what I was expecting when I snuck in, late as always, into the old cafe, stripped of its former status.  Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t this.

Unhealthy cynicism can be something of a diet.  I feed on it plenty. I should know better by now, but I don’t. It’s a kind of armor which insulates you from the problems it’s more convenient not to deal with.  The world sucks, people sin, death, violence, poverty, there all just part of the way things are and were and always will be. Using cynicism, rather than facing problems head on with prayerful action, I, like many others (I think), find it easier to stand off to the side, shaking our heads and saying, “What a shame,” and “These people need Jesus”.  And we’re right, in a way. The terrible things that happen in the world are a shame and everyone needs Jesus, but hiding behind those truths as distance does suffering people and God disservice.

I won’t lie.  I was unnerved by the political preface to this meeting.  Discussing politics in any public space as of late has transcended to a 4th dimensional form of endless mental torture in which no one seems to know what the dickens they’re talking about.  Oh hi cynicism, you’re back. Shoo, this is about overcoming you, not you hijacking my points.

As I drove to campus I couldn’t help but run through the potential controversies of a political meeting on campus.  What if he talks about the president!? What if he likes the president?  Evil abounds, close the roads, close the school!  It’s time to protest everything, especially puppies and kittens.  What if he loathes the president?  Traitor! Benedict Arnold quotes shall be painted on the rock.  Social media may be ruining humanity, politics, and sports, take your pick, and cynicism is flourishing in its comment sections, but if you take some time, eschew the permanent state of hysteria which seems to be ubiquitous in anything resembling political discourse, you would probably find something uplifting and unexpected.  At least I did here.

A dozen, if even, people crowded around a lopsided table, a dignified older gentleman sitting at the head.  His name is Joe Pitts, a 10-term U.S. congressman from Pennsylvania’s 16th district. For a congressman, he doesn’t talk much about politics or current events, beyond the universal depression of political polling numbers which shows confidence in the United States government at alarmingly low levels.  Who can blame them? This dovetailed into the two main points of Mr. Pitts’s talk to students and faculty: the need for personal accountability and integrity in public life and the connection shared by Christians around the world.

Mr. Pitts is a storyteller and every question ran into a stream of stories from his political experience.  Yet, out of these stories he outlined the principles needed for the men and women who will lead America and world in the future.  For Mr. Pitts, politics is much more than ideology. It is a relationship, an ongoing contract that many in the government, press, and citizenry do not understand.  More importantly, this is a field desperately seeking good leadership, youth, and people who believe in the American political system.

Using the idea of relationship as a bridge, Mr. Pitts took time to talk about the suffering of the international church.  The church is the communion of the saints in the body of a Christ, a universal, timeless body which stretches from the beginning of time itself to its end awaiting its full reunion as the bride of Christ.  While Cairn is hardly a stranger to learning of persecution around the globe, hearing someone who has witnessed it firsthand and used political relationships to combat evil and protect threatened and imprisoned Christians around the world breaths a different kind of hope into the hearer.  Oftentimes we are left to wrestle with the unseen hope of the resurrection, the glory awaiting those who rest in Christ. But seeing a practical hope, a hope applied to everyday living which points to the greater hope of a eternal life, a hope in action on both a personal spiritual level and on a global political level ought to thrill any Christian.  We are changing the world. Why the gloom, friends?

Towards the end of the meeting, he reminded us that in a society where more information is accessible in seconds than was available to our parents in weeks, ignorance is no excuse for inaction.  For Mr. Pitts, this step away from ignorance carries with it a sense of duty. A person of character ought to be a leader. As I was leaving he said something I jotted down later, I’m not sure if this is entirely word for word, but he said something like this: “When you lead anything, you become a target, especially when it isn’t popular.  But if your faith, your conscience, convicts you of it, lead anyway.” This is the challenge, ladies and gentlemen. What good are our ivory towers if we do not step out and lay our pride on the line for what is true and noble? A christian education is a blessing, but the end of a Christian education is not to simply be smarta-fied or to get a cushy job.  If you think so then this place is no better than any secular college in the world. Consider our university’s mission statement as taken smack from our website: Cairn University exists to educate students to serve Christ in the church, society, and the world as biblically minded, well-educated, and professionally competent men and women of character.   Here’s someone who didn’t even go to our university and is putting our mission statement into practice.  Here’s someone doing what we’re supposed to do in the world after our graduation. We sit around and talk about the charismatic merits of politician so and so, or whether or not the government should be paying for daycare and miss the point the entirely.  Is not the Christian life and the global church infinitely higher than political opinion?

Cynicism is an awful way to live.  I can promise you that. It isn’t a way to live as a Christian either.  We have the Gospel and we know that there is so much more than what we see, so much more than we can ever hope to comprehend.  We have hope, transcendent, living hope. Live that hope, act that hope! Yes, that applies to politics too! Sure it’s a wasteland in there that would do T.S. Eliot proud, but Jesus loves them.  He died for them too. Our good works may do nothing for our salvation, but they do matter. Living hope ought to bear fruit as a loving response to our great, undeserved gift. Go and bear fruit in peace, humility, and love… even if it’s on Capitol Hill, Heaven knows they need it.