Today is the day that the Chicago Board of Elections will conduct its lottery to decide whose name appears first, along with the order of every other name, on the ballot in February’s election.  Today is also my first of four or five posts on something I can think of no better subtitle for than voting as an act of faith. 

I mentioned the underpinnings to this series in a reactionary post on election day when my two coworkers told me they weren’t voting.  You can find that scattered rambling and the great comments in reply to it by looking into the Previous Addresses to the right.  To clarify for this post, and the other posts which will come between now and the election, I do not think that voting is a gesture that makes a person faithful–so that if one doesn’t vote, one is not faithful–or that voting is an act of particular significance.  I do think that voting, however, is a sacramental act of general significance, and I’ll spend this post explaining what I mean.

Richard Foster, author of several books and editor of one paraphrase of the bible, writes about six major Christian traditions in Streams of Living Water, one of which is the Sacramental tradition.  Foster says that the Sacramental tradition is about bringing the invisible into the visible realm.  He also pulls together a timeline of characters from history who live their lives inside this particular stream, people like Johann Bach, Susanna Wesley, and Dag Hammarskjold. 

The main idea in this stream is that God uses “matter to make present and visible the invisible realm of the spirit.”  The physical and material forms help the “soul apprehend spiritual reality.”  This language helps me better see the world as integrated rather than split.  The material matters as does the immaterial because how we live physically–what we do with our bodies–says something about what can’t be seen with those bodies.

I bring up Foster and the Sacramental tradition because the tradition anchors how I think about voting.  I think that voting is one of the many ways that people of faith live out their belief, making the invisible (which is faith) visible through a gesture or an act.  Praying is similar, as is congregational worship and fasting.  That is not to say that voting and praying are of the same essence, but it is to say that voting and praying are of the same form.  Each action has general significance.  Both provide a person behaviors and avenues to put into practice–making visible–his or her faith. 

So, the little lottery to choose placements on the ballot matters.  Voting matters.  Taking seriously the act of selecting and supporting an alderman matters.  These don’t matter in an ultimate sense, but they help bring the ultimate closer by exposing our belief a bit better.

If you’re interested in learning about the other “Streams” or traditions, they include the Social-Justice, Charismatic, Incarnational, Evangelical, Holiness traditions.  I commend the book.