The Peripatetic Preacher A Hero With an Unlikely Face

In a time of pandemic when stories of loss and agony and untold pain flood our screens and papers, today I want to bring you a tale of a most unlikely, but most welcome, hero. His name is Gabriel Sterling, and his official title is “statewide voting system implementation manager” for the state of Pennsylvania. He is a chunky 50-year- old, boyish-faced, lifelong Republican supporter, having worked in various campaigns for that party for nearly all his life. He even voted twice for Donald J. Trump for president. Since I would not have voted for Donald J. Trump if he had run against Yosemite Sam, I am certain that Mr. Sterling and I have almost nothing in common politically. Yet, he is this day proclaimed by me as one of my newest heroes.

In John’s Gospel, the author has Jesus famously say, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Of course, John surely first has Jesus himself in mind, the one who is about to do just that for his disciples, or even more in John’s view “for the entire cosmos,” as John 3:16 makes clear. I hardly maintain that Gabriel Sterling is willing and able to lay down his life for the cosmos, but he has certainly and unequivocally announced quite publically that he is more than willing to suffer anger and rejection, particularly from his supposed Republican allies, by renouncing the ridiculous and dangerous attempts on the part of his preferred candidate, Trump, to overturn the assured results of the Nov.3 election, an election where Joe Biden gained 306 electoral votes, to Trump’s 232, and triumphed over Trump by some 7 million popular votes. If Trump was prone to call his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton a “landslide,” then Biden with exactly the same number of electoral votes as Trump gained, along with an additional 4 million more popular votes than Ms. Clinton received, is surely able to call his victory an avalanche. Despite those figures, affirmed over and over since Nov.3, Mr. Trump has yet to concede the inevitable; his second term is not to be in 2020.

But back to hero Sterling. His long title as election official in Pennsylvania is the result of his appointment by the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania, Brad Raffensperger, following Sterling’s planning role in Raffensperger’s victory party after his electoral win. The new Secretary asked Sterling to join his office to help in the huge task of creating a new machine voting system for the state, using tens of thousands of new high-tech voting machines that were far easier to implement, and which leave an easily audited paper trail, factors that, perhaps ironically, have helped make Trump’s continued claims about voter fraud and machine manipulation in Pennsylvania and in other contested states completely unlikely and simply disproved. Those well-run machines, and the certainty of vote counts that they produced, forced Sterling finally to confront the president for whom he voted with a withering and powerful public assault.

On Dec.1, Sterling said directly to Donald J. Trump, after hearing the president claim massive voter fraud, and after the president’s lawyers, skipping across the country, filing lawsuit after lawsuit, claimed the same thing—huge voter fraud and massive machine manipulation,—and after he was apprised of numerous threats, both verbal and physical, against election workers, and having been threatened himself: “You need to step up and say this; you must stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt (yesterday, Dec.13, in angry clashes between “The Proud Boys” and some anti-Trump protesters, four people were seriously wounded in a knife attack in Washington DC). Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right. It’s not right….It’s time to look forward. If you want to run for reelection in four years, fine, do it. But everything we are seeing right now, there’s not a path. Be the bigger man here and step in. Tell your supporters, ‘Don’t be violent. Don’t intimidate.’ All that’s wrong. It’s un-American.” Indeed!

What led Sterling to act in this magnificent way, urging his favored candidate to “be the bigger man,” something that Trump has seldom if ever been able to do in his entire life? He clearly came from a family that emphasized right and wrong. After his public repudiation of the president, his father called him, and said, “Ever since you were a little boy, you have been focused on what is right and wrong.” And one of his life-long friends added, “Look, if you really want to know what the truth is, listen to what Gab Sterling says. Gab has earned my trust over 20 years.” But perhaps the telling event that pushed Sterling to go public surrounded the case of a part-time IT technician, who worked for the election board during the election, who was on twitter accused of treason by some angry Trump voter. Next to the young man’s name was a photograph of a noose. Sterling in his Dec.1 press conference said, “I’m doing interviews—I can take the threats, but this kid, 20 years old; he’s just a kid, who is excited to have an IT job. That crossed the line.”

Along with that overt threat to a poll worker, Joseph diGenova, one of Trump’s attorneys, had already suggested that a former Homeland Security official, “should be executed” for daring to claim that the election was the most secure one in history. Additionally, Secretary Raffensperger’s wife had received several “sexualized threats” in text messages, leading to the need for constant security being assigned to her home. All of these appalling actions on the part of Trump supporters, fueled in part by Trump himself and his refusal to admit the reality of his election loss, forced a good man, who knows right from wrong, to speak out against a powerful man, a man for whom he had voted. I may not agree at all with Gabriel Sterling’s politics, but I applaud his courage and his forthright stand against a cruelly intimidating and bullying president whose knowledge of right and wrong seems seriously skewed, if existent at all.

As I write, Dec.14, all fifty states’ electors will vote to ratify what each state’s voters have determined on Nov.3: Joe Biden is the president elect, and Kamala Harris is the vice-president elect. As such, Senator Harris will become the first woman and the first person of color to hold the office of vice-president. This should be a proud day in the life of US America, but because the current occupant of the White House has still refused to accept the truth of his defeat, there remain in the nation too many people who also will not accept the obvious facts of the election and will continue to argue and protest against its results, despite the fact that those results are certain and fixed.

Fortunately, we still have persons like Gabriel Sterling, who, though disappointed in the outcome of the election, knows first-hand that the election is over and his candidate has lost. “It is time to move forward,” he counsels the recalcitrant Trump, and so it is. We may only now hope, that like his angelic namesake, the archangel Gabriel, he will lead an army of fellow Republicans to accept what is true, to deny what is plainly false, and unite behind the new president, Joe Biden. As for the current president, Donald J. Trump, he has but 37 days to come to peace with his certain loss and to urge his followers to eschew violence and protest in order to allow healing and hope to be renewed in our fractured nation. Thank you, Gabriel Sterling, for embodying and displaying the very best of US America; you are for me a genuine hero for our time.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)