‘My heart is Democratic, but my brain is kind of Republican,’ said JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon years back, and I resonate with that myself. There is an openness and idealism about being a democrat, openness to immigrants, to the downtrodden and to the rest of the world that I think is virtuous. And on the other hand there is a realism and sense of tradition about being a republican, an instinct to preserve values, to protect against evil and champion personal responsibility.  Well in the world of men, and especially in an election with one vote, you have to kind of make a choice between heart and head.  Now I’m not talking about specific candidates, their characters and personal ideologies are much more complicated. But just in a general way, red/blue, conservative/liberal, head/heart is the dividing line of political life in most countries of the world. And we would expect this division from what we know of the world from our Scriptures.  Mankind is not operating as designed. There is division between people men and women, this tribe and that, and also division within a person, such as between head and heart.  With God, we were at one and in peace, with ourselves, with each other and the world, but then we were divided. That’s what the word roots of demon, devil, diablo are, to divide. Divided selves, divided families, divided politics; divided hearts and minds.

Well as we also know, Jesus came to fix all that, to resolve our divisions by atonement. Atonement is God’s solution to sin, and it’s another amazing word you probably never reflected on; it’s simply at-one ment-atonement- overcoming the division of sin and being at one with self, others and God.