January 10, Baptism of the Lord: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

I have a neighbor who is a professor of constitutional law. He has served on multiple international teams charged with writing a new constitution for a new government. I was shocked when he told me the average life span of such constitutions. Since 1789, he estimated, national constitutions have endured an average of 17 years. The U.S. Constitution, 218 years old, is a startling exception to the rule.

What are the conditions that enable a constitution to endure? Surely, this is the question that my neighbor and his colleagues have been asking.

Constitutional law experts answer this question by examining political and procedural conditions. Economists answer it by looking at economic conditions. As a lifelong student of theology and culture, I found myself wondering about the conditions that symbols and stories create. Sometimes the symbols and stories that make up our collective psyche are so much a part of who we are and what surrounds us that we don’t notice them until we are jarred by major upset, such as political revolution, foreign invasion, or a clash of civilizations. It’s when the symbols and stories that have shaped our collective psyche are no longer available or no longer make sense of our reality that we begin to question who we are.