The World is on Fire. The Midterms are Coming.

It is not really about winning or losing.

This is an edited transcript of the sermon I gave on October 26, 2026, just 9 days before November’s midterm elections. The text was Psalm 90, which I encourage you to read. I have left the text in speaking style, which gives it a different feel than an essay or article. I hope it gives you perspective and challenges you as you prepare to vote and engage civically after the election. If you would like to listen to the audio, click here.

We are fast approaching the midterm elections. And my guess is that, if you’re anything like me or people I know, you’re feeling a tension, a stress, and a kind of unsettledness that, for many of us, feels unusual. If you grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, you may remember something of this feeling amid all the upheaval of those years. But having lived through that time, I have to say: this feels different.

It doesn’t really matter which side of the aisle you identify with, or what your political, religious, or social leanings are. Many Americans are asking themselves whether we’re facing serious problems—perhaps even existential threats—to the country and society we love. Are we going to survive? And if so, how?

There is profound disagreement about what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, and what we need to do to get back on the right track.

A New York Times conversation this week between Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens carried the headline, “The Only Thing We Can All Agree On Is That the World Is on Fire.”

Stephens began by saying, “I fear we’re at a civilizational precipice. Would you like to walk me back from the ledge?”

“I’d love to,” Bruni replied, “but I’m right there with you.”

Keep that tension in mind as we look at Psalm 90.

Orientation, disorientation, and reorientation

Many years ago, I read a commentary on the Psalms by the late Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. He offered a framework for understanding the Psalms that has helped me through life. I want to use it to guide our reflections.

Brueggemann describes three movements: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.

Orientation is when life feels stable, coherent, and predictable. We experience God’s goodness and the reliability of the world. The psalms of orientation express gratitude, trust, and praise. Everything—or at least the major things—seems to be going along reasonably well.

Then comes disorientation. The familiar order breaks down. We experience suffering, injustice, loss, betrayal, or what feels like God’s absence. The psalms give voice to lament, anger, confusion, and protest. They do not require us to pretend that everything is fine. Nor do they always offer a neat explanation: “If you just do this, then that will happen.”

What has been happening? What is happening? What is going to happen? Those are questions that belong to disorientation, and they are questions many of us are asking now.

But there is also reorientation. God brings—or we begin to experience—a new possibility beyond the crisis. We discover renewed trust, gratitude, and hope, often with a deeper understanding of God and life than we had before.

Reorientation is not simply a return to the old normal. It is a new life. We see, experience, feel, and act differently because of what we have been through. I suspect many of you can look back on a time of suffering and say, “I wish that hadn’t happened, but I’m a different person because it did.”

With the help of God’s Spirit and the community of God’s people, we take what we have known in orientation and what we have endured in disorientation, and we allow ourselves to be shaped into something new.

Orientation. Disorientation. Reorientation. That is the framework I want to bring to Psalm 90.

Psalm 90: Context

Brueggemann places Psalm 90 among the psalms of disorientation. It is often described as a psalm of lament. Look at the heading in your Bible and you’ll see that it is attributed to Moses—the only psalm identified that way.

If Moses wrote it, perhaps he did so near the end of his life. After all, Moses had lived through those long periods of forty years. At the end, he stood with the people of Israel on the edge of the Promised Land, knowing that he himself would not enter it. He was looking back on 120 years of life and looking ahead to what the people had experienced and what they would experience.

Some scholars place the psalm much later, perhaps near the end of the Babylonian exile or in the post-exilic period, around the sixth century BC. In that case, it would have emerged from another season of profound disorientation: the people of Israel, having endured exile, reaching again for a sense of orientation and looking toward the reorientation that might come.

Either way, Psalm 90 gives voice to people living between what has been and what might yet be. It holds together trust in God, the painful truth about human life, and a plea that God will establish the work of our hands.

I want to look at a few verses through that lens—and, quite explicitly, through the lens of the time in which we are living.

Orientation: God is our dwelling place

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born, or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.”

The tabernacle and the temple are rich biblical images of God dwelling among the people.

But Psalm 90 offers a slightly different image: God is the place where we come to dwell. God is our home.

Many of us know from experience the stability and orientation that home can give us. Many of us also know the disorientation that comes when we lack a place where we feel safe, where we can be ourselves, where we are surrounded by people who love us, care for us, and provide for us.

Throughout the story of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, God is the dwelling place of the people.

In the New Testament, Jesus becomes our dwelling place. “Abide in me,” he says.

He invites us: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

This is orientation: the starting point, the place to which we return. Whatever else is uncertain, God is our dwelling place.

Disorientation: What does this moment reveal about us?

But Psalm 90 does not remain in the comfort of orientation. It turns toward the hard realities of human life:

“All our days pass away under your wrath[1]. We finish our years with a moan.”

We are dust. Our lives are short. We have secret sins and iniquities, and we have public sins and iniquities.

Psalm 90 leads us to searching questions. What does the disorientation in which we find ourselves reveal about us as a people? Have we overlooked the suffering of people who are different from us? Have we excused or ignored dishonesty, cruelty, or abuses of power when they served our purposes? Are we willing to repent, or do we simply want God to correct everyone else?

In these days before the election, we have choices to make. For whom will I vote? What stance will I take as events unfold? But the psalm asks us to go deeper than those immediate decisions.

Where have we gone off the rails? Whom have we ignored? Whom have we abused? Whom have we exploited? Where have we failed to live out the love of neighbor to which God calls us—as individuals, as families, and as a society? Are we willing to look those failures in the face, repent, and change our ways?

These are not questions we should ask only of our opponents. They are questions we must ask of ourselves, and of the communities to which we belong.

As we do that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and together as a community of God’s people, then we may begin to move toward reorientation.

Reorientation: Establish the work of our hands

The Psalm ends with these words:

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us. Establish the work of our hands for us.”

The word favor carries a sense of beauty, pleasantness, graciousness—even delight. The psalmist asks God to let his pleasure, his delight, rest upon us and to establish the work of our hands.

That does not mean we are passive. But in the end, it is God who establishes the work of our hands. This is one of the great themes of the Reformation: salvation does not come from our own efforts and achievements. It is a gift—a gracious, beautiful gift from God.

Notice, too, that the psalm is addressed to a community. Its language is plural. This is not simply the work of an individual. It is the work of a people called to embody a new kind of life. If you want to know what the kingdom of God looks like, here is part of the answer: we do this together. We are not merely a collection of individuals. We are a community.

The prayer is not “the work of my hands,” but “the work of our hands,” because none of us can do it alone. Our common life, our shared decisions, our institutions, our civic responsibilities, and our treatment of our neighbors are all part of the work God establishes through us.

Let me offer a challenge.

We have all been taught that our votes are private. I understand that, and there are good reasons to protect the privacy of the ballot. But do we sometimes treat the whole process of thinking about our civic responsibilities as private, too? Do we think these things through only as individuals?

Whom are you talking with about your vote, or about your position on an issue? Are you going at it on your own? Is there a way for us, as a community, to help one another as we ask: “God, what would you have us do? How would you have us live together in this world, at this moment in our history?” And how might those conversations influence not only the way we vote, but also the other ways in which we engage in our communities?

If we approach these questions only as individuals, in the privacy of our prayer rooms and voting booths, we miss the communal, community aspect that was so vital to the ancient community of Israel and so clearly present in Scripture.

I know that is difficult. There is often a great deal of tension, and one of the last things we like to talk about—even, or especially in church—is politics. And yet: are there conversations we could have together, in smaller or larger settings? Perhaps it is too late to begin before this election. If so, perhaps we can begin before the next one.

I think you understand what I’m getting at. The work of our hands is communal work.

And then we come to Jesus, again.

After his resurrection, Jesus came to the disciples in the upper room. He breathed on them the Holy Spirit and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he told them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Those words carry a magnificently rich vision of life. What would it mean to take them with us as we enter the voting booth: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

How does that vision of God’s kingdom influence the choices we make? How does it shape the way we vote, the way we speak, the way we treat those with whom we disagree, and the way we participate in the life we share?

Colossians 1 gives us another glimpse of this vision:

All things were created through Christ.

In Christ, all things hold together.

And through Christ, God is reconciling all things to himself, making peace through the blood of the cross.

This is the reorientation Jesus gives us.

The disorientation we experience may be personal. It may be in our work, our extended family, our church, or society at large. Whatever its source, the Christian vision is that all things were created through Christ, that Christ holds all things together, and that all things will be reconciled through him. Peace is being made through his blood on the cross.

T

hat is not a denial of the disorientation. It is a way of living faithfully within it. It is the hope that gives us a different way to make decisions and a different way to inhabit this troubled world.

So I encourage you to carry this vision into the days and months ahead. How do we, as the body of Christ where we are, live in the disoriented world in which we find ourselves?

Justice, repentance, and reconciliation

I recently heard a podcast in which David French, Christian lawyer and New York Times columnist, was asked what he was praying for as the midterms approached.

His first answer was justice: that justice would flow throughout our land and our world, and that those who have been exploited, mistreated, pushed aside, or marginalized would come to know and experience justice.

His second prayer was for repentance—especially among God’s people. Would we look honestly at ourselves and ask, “Where have we failed to care for our neighbor?”

Repentance means reorienting ourselves, recognizing where we have and are falling short of the command to love our neighbor, and make real changes in our lives and our communities.

French’s third prayer was for reconciliation.

I’m sure we all know what it is to struggle in relationships because of the tensions of the time in which we live.

Our natural inclination is to win the argument. We want to win the election. There is nothing necessarily wrong with wanting your candidate or Party to win. That is why you vote!

But beneath that desire, the reorientation to which Christ calls us is reconciliation.

It is more important that we be reconciled to one another and live in peace than that any of us win. Those are hard concepts to get into our heads, because we have not been trained to think that way.

So, in the coming weeks, ask God’s Spirit to guide you—in your own life, in your family, and together with others. What might it look like to seek peace rather than simply to win?

The work of our hands

Let me conclude with a passage from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, in his exposition of the moral law:

“We are to embrace the whole human race without exception with the same love. We must make no distinction between Greek or foreigner, worthy or unworthy, friend or enemy, because we are to see people not simply as they are in themselves, but as they are in relation to God.”[2]

That is a demanding vision. It asks us to look beyond the boundaries we draw between ourselves and others, beyond the categories of friend and enemy, worthy and unworthy, winner and loser. It asks us to see every person in relation to God.

We live in a time of real disorientation. We cannot pretend otherwise. Psalm 90 reminds us that God is our dwelling place, that we can face the truth about our individual and community lives, and that we can ask God to establish the work of our hands as we “reorient” as Jesus calls and empowers us to do.

May we work for justice. May we be willing to repent where we have failed our neighbors.

And may we seek reconciliation and peace—not only when it is easy, and not only when we win, but in all things, in all places, and in all ways.

[1] I could spend a lot of time on the wrath of God. For now, I’ll say this: God’s wrath is not primarily designed to scare us with the image of a God who is angry with us. It warns us that when we go off the path, when we fail to love as God has called us to love, things get broken. And Scripture is clear that God’s wrath does not have the final word.

[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II. Chp. 8.55, Exposition of the Moral Law, modernized paraphrase.