The Church and Politics

“The Church and Politics” or
“How the Preacher oughta stay out of politics and stick to the Gospel”
June 20, 2010 –4th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 42, 1 Kings 19:1-15

Three weeks ago we had our Memorial Day Observances here in town. As one of the local ministers, I had been asked to say a prayer. Before things got underway, I was sitting up front in the bright sunlight with Lucas on my lap, dressed in my minister’s suit and feeling a little out of place with my three colleagues in black with collars, when I saw Peter DeSanto, the pastor of Grace Church, helping an elderly man into a seat where the other veterans and fire fighters were going to be seated.
The old man was wearing a Marine Corp garrison cap, a sort of tent-like fore and aft cap, and a dungaree blouse with USMC printed on the front pocket, both cap and blouse faded with age. Peter introduced me to the man as a survivor of the Battle of Iwo Jima. I had just finished reading William Manchester’s biography of being a Marine in the South Pacific, so I was moved to meet someone who had lived through something that horrific. I stuck out my hand and introduced myself, “I’m Max Olmstead, pastor at the Dover Church.”
That got his attention. His bright blue eyes flashed behind his glasses as he exclaimed, “The Dover Church! I went to the Dover Church all my life until 1966. The minister started in on Vietnam and I went out the door and have never been back.” Exclamation point!
So there I was, shaking this old Marine’s hand, smiling, and living the paradox many ministers find themselves in on a regular basis, the paradox of being a preacher of the ideal toward which our faith points us and being a pastor. In my head I was thinking, “1966? That must have been Dean Clarke. Wow, Dean started early on Vietnam! Most ministers didn’t touch that hot poker until 1968 or 1969, if they touched it at all.” I privately admired Dean Clarke for the courage of his convictions. At the same time, I was shaking this old Marine’s hand and saying with absolute sincerity, “thank you for your service.” I would have sincerely said the same thing to any veteran, even though I am opposed to war as an article of my faith. That’s the paradox!
Having sacrificed so much, watching his comrades be maimed in terrible ways and die in huge numbers, having to kill, having to offer his life to repel the real threat of worldwide fascism, I knew that arguing the qualitative and historical differences of Imperial Japan and North Vietnam would feel like I was kicking this old Marine’s most intense lived experience. Once you have offered everything, that sort of argument seems somehow beside the point compared to the valor and sacrifice of the men and women who served and died in Vietnam, or anywhere else for that matter. We’ve been there. We know. The pastor doesn’t.
The same can be said for any theological discussion which challenges the parts of our life in which we are heavily invested. We do not want to have our way of life, our standard of living, our political convictions, our religious beliefs and practices, anything we hold dear, held up as faulty in light of God’s intention for us. And yet, what are we to do with prophets like Elijah? What are we to do with Jesus? Are we just going to skip over the real challenges, the hard places where the chasm separating God’s hopes for us and how things really are right now is glaringly inescapable? To do so would be to avoid salvation, the way into new life that God offers us. I sincerely believe, and you can correct me if I am wrong after worship, that people want to hear preaching that speaks to the really important issues in their lives, the places that are challenging and anxiety provoking, the places where there are no easy answers. I know that people come to church for comfort and affirmation and that’s fine. If that’s all we were to do, however, avoiding issues of ultimate concern, we would ultimately be left without any comfort when the hard places become unavoidable. I believe that people sincerely want a faith that helps them make decisions, choose life paths, discern between right and wrong, good and evil. This really is a matter of life and death. Of course it’s going to be upsetting and uncomfortable. Of course we’re going to feel judged, all of us, myself included. How else can we feel, when we hold up the stark contrast between God’s intention and our individual and communal reality under the bright light of scrutiny? There’s that paradox again. On the one hand, we want to know the truth. On the other hand, we know it’s going to be upsetting. Like it or not, standing before the living God is like being in the shoes of the lifelong smoker with a chronically sore throat sitting in the doctor’s office.
In case you were wondering, I am not going to actually jump into any political question this morning. Rather I would like to invite you into dialogue with me. I’d like to begin finding out if we want our church to be a place where the difficult questions of our real individual and communal lives are examined in light of the Gospel? It’s going to require honesty on both sides.
So let me begin by being honest with you about what I think Jesus and the prophets and being the church is all about. This past week I read the most amazing book by a French Christian scholar and activist of the last century named Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom. I always love books that spell out something I know is true but which I have struggled with either through ignorance of spiritual cowardice, books that challenge me in ways I know I need to be challenged. Ellul did that for me this week, reminding me that our faith is our way of looking at the world that is totally non-partisan, not liberal or conservative, but Christian, which is another way of saying totally critical of just about everything and everyone, especially ourselves as believers. Not critical for criticism’s sake, but critical like that doctor of the smoker I mentioned a minute ago, critical of that which causes disease and leads to death, so that we might, by the grace of God, be moved to move ourselves and our world towards new and more healthy life.
Ellul basically restates Jesus, Paul, the whole Bible for that matter, in modern terms, when he writes, “The first great fact that emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end; we do not know whither we are going.” I know that would have resonated with Elijah in the 9th century BCE and it certainly resonates with my own experience of modern life. Ellul argues that our civilization has substituted “means” for “ends.” Things like productivity, prosperity, efficiency, usefulness, technology, information, the state, government are no longer means towards an end, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but ends in themselves. We produce more and more for the sake of producing more and more. We create prosperity to create more prosperity. We use technology to create more technology. We become more efficient to be able to become more efficient. Information creates more information. The government creates more government. And so on. The whole things runs itself for itself without any clear end in sight. If anyone is actually calling the shots, we don’t know who that might be. Even the President of the United States seems helpless at times. Ellul argues, and I agree, that we have enslaved ourselves to our means and the whole mess is leading us to destruction. We are caught in webs of madness which we have been lead to believe are rational progress.
Enter Elijah to show us the way. Along with Muslims and Jews, we Christians know that the end towards toward which all things are working is only God. All the means we create are only good insofar as they lead us to God. As Christians, we would expand on that a bit and say, “the Kingdom of God as proclaimed and lived by Jesus Christ.” We know, in Scripture, what Jesus said and did, how he lived, why he died, and that he rose again. We are called to both live that and proclaim it to our world which had lost its way. You’ve heard it before, I know. You are the salt of the world, the light of the world, the leaven. We are here to first be reminded ourselves and then to proclaim to the world the Kingdom of God.
The question we have to be clear on is simple: do we want to be cured and be the cure? My hope is that we could become the church where all of us old Marines, myself included, could feel safe enough to face the things we do not want to think about, knowing that they are the very real things standing between each of us and all of us and the living God. My hope is that someone might ask any of us one day, “where do you go to church?” “The Dover Church.” “The Dover Church? The edgy church? You’re the church that deals with really divisive issues! What’s that like? Don’t people get mad and leave?” “Sure, we all get a little upset from time to time, but we decided that we really wanted to listen honestly to God and learn the truth so that we can live the truth in our world.”