Sabbath Devotional: I Have Faith in My People

In the beginning of the Book of Mormon, we are introduced to two prophets: one mature, and one who was in so many ways still a boy.

Lehi, the older, receives a vision that Jerusalem will be destroyed, but his reaction is not to pack his bags and run as far away from the city as possible. Rather, he immediately walks into the streets and preaches repentance to anyone who will listen. No one does, but his faith in a people so doomed to wickedness and destruction is significant as a hallmark of the prophet’s life. Lehi was a man acquainted with and convinced by the mercy of God.

When this patriarch had subsequent visions of his two oldest sons’ refusal to partake of the fruit, of their wickedness and idolatry, his reaction was always to talk with them, and to hope for them. See this river, and this valley, he says, they are strong, like the men you could still become. The promise land is still yours, if you would have it.

Nephi also prayed to have the same visions, and he is overwhelmed by the power and majesty and glory of God. So awed by God’s power, I think, that perhaps he fails, at least at first to notice His mercy, also. His compassion for all the children of men. 

Unlike his father, after these initial visions, Nephi is incredibly fatalistic about the wicked. “Oh Laman and Lemuel. Why can’t you just be better?” “Oh Jerusalem. You deserve the coming destruction.” This is the theology of Nephi’s early imagination.

But then the wars begin. After Lehi dies, the brothers separate and things escalate until brother literally takes up arms against brother. It seems like everyone became embroiled in the conflict: nieces, nephews, sons and daughters. This was a horrifying turn of events. They were a family that had trekked across desert and ocean and jungle together and prevailed through countless challenges and infirmities. How could things have possibly come to this?

I think it is no coincidence that after the start of the wars, after 2 Nephi 5, Nephi’s writing takes a sharp turn. There is significantly less history, and instead he suddenly becomes very interested in Isaiah’s writings on repentance, and mercy, the atonement, the gathering of Israel, the potential inherent in every single human soul to return unto God. 

And interestingly, after acknowledging that his descendants called themselves “Nephites,” and his brothers’ descendants called themselves “Lamanites,” Nephi never uses these terms himself, but refers to every one of them as “my people.” 

There is some tendency to analogize Lehi’s family. Lehi might be the prophet, church members are Nephi or maybe Sam, and Laman and Lemuel are “the world.” I used to be uncomfortable with that analogy, but I have grown to like it because if we accept it and follow it through, then what is our relationship to the world?

In the last chapter of 2 Nephi, Nephi is reviewing his life, and he goes through all the groups of people he has seen — and many he has accused — throughout his life:

“I glory in plainness; I glory in truth; I glory in my Jesus, for he hath redeemed my soul from hell. I have charity for my people, and great faith in Christ that I shall meet many souls spotless at his judgment seat. I have charity for the Jew. I also have charity for the Gentiles. And I pray that many of us, if not all, may be saved in his kingdom at that great and last day.”

This is not the same Nephi we met in Jerusalem. To each group he had excoriated and othered, he says “you are my people, my brethren, and I have faith in you, that you too shall be redeemed.” This, I believe is the essence of charity: to see people as they are, to know their blights and their selfishness, to recall the ways they have hurt you and may and will hurt you again, and to have faith in them, nevertheless. To be believing. 

This faith is different than faith in God, a perfect being who will never, never fail us. Any insecurity or issue in that relationship is most assuredly our own fault. Rather, charity is messy faith predicated on the imperfection of the person we are choosing to have faith in, nevertheless. It’s unnatural, uncomfortable, and godly.

Like Nephi, the more we believe in God’s mercy and love, the more capable we will feel of exercising the messy faith of charity. It is this sort of faith that makes us better neighbors, missionaries, friends. It is the messy faith that binds us to parents, siblings, spouses. 

It is this messy faith that enabled Moroni to bid the Lamanites who had murdered his father and his family and everyone he knew and loved to “come unto Christ and be perfected in him.” And it was messy faith that caused Mormon to preach to a doomed people “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things,” including you, my people, “must fail, but charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever.”

This is the work of salvation we are engaged in. And it is not the wicked population of the world that we are to redeem, but our brothers, our sisters, “my people.” We are responsible to them. We must hope in them, and have faith in them, and be very believing, because all souls are alike, and have worth, and potential, and power, and glory, and are beautiful to God.

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Sarah Perkins is the peaceful root director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.