"Red State, Blue State, or State of Grace?: The Intersection of Faith and Politics"
May 7, 2006: 4th Sunday after Easter, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap [Jesus] in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
Sermon:
You know, of the four topics we laid out in the planning for this series of introductory sermons setting forth some of the characteristic features of Christianity, United Church-style, this one intimidated me most. I can talk about our more-than-literal understanding of scripture and our belief in God's extravagant welcome for all people all day long—and have—and next week's installment on the history and character of the broader United Church of Christ in which we participate looks like a cake walk. But "the intersection of faith and politics"? Aye, there's the rub.
In this day and age... and nation... that question is a sticky one—so sticky, in fact, that even in progressive congregations such as ours, many would rather avoid it altogether. Maybe we could just sing another hymn? And maybe I'd be tempted to join in the chorus; after all, I've gotten myself into a spot of trouble from time to time around this very topic. (I remember one especially angst-ridden sermon delivered the Sunday after Election Day 2004, and if you were around, I bet you do, too.) But then the Holy Spirit intervenes—dagnabit—and sends a little bit of undeniable inspiration your way, and there's nothing you can do but rise to the bait. So as I begin this morning, I invoke the words of the great Reformer Martin Luther, who is reported to have said, if you're going to sin, "sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly."
So.
The particular piece of inspiration that floated over my transom in recent weeks was an op-ed piece from the April 9 New York Times written by Gary Wills and titled "Christ Among the Partisans." His bio on the New York Review of Books website reports that Mr. Wills is a respected historian and critic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for Lincoln at Gettysburg. He is a professor emeritus of Northwestern University and a regular contributor to the Review of Books. Mr. Wills' central thesis in this article is unambiguous: "There is no such thing as Christian politics," he says. "If it is politics, it cannot be Christian." According to Mr. Wills, "Jesus brought no political message or program." He goes on to say:
This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not... It was blasphemous to say, as the deputy under secretary of defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, repeatedly did, that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide.
Instead, Mr. Wills paints a portrait of intensely private Jesus who is "the original proponent of a separation of church and state." In his reading, Jesus emphasized a strictly internal rather than external sort of religious practice, to the degree that he encouraged his followers to pray "in secret" rather than on the street corners (Matthew 6:5-6). Wills admits that some of Jesus' words do seem political, such as his command in Matthew 25 to care for the "least of these brothers and sisters" in the family of God. But, he says, such claims are plainly too impractical to be political; instead they are "of a different order" entirely. In Wills' understanding, Jesus is not an ethical teacher but "an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs."
"The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding," he acknowledges, so "it is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair." But "the institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats."
To all of which I say: well, yes and no.
Yes, I agree, any attempt to make Jesus the mascot of a particular political party, on either the right or left, is, well, blasphemous, in that it is, as the dictionary defines it, "the act of claiming for oneself the attributes and rights of God." Jesus is the face of God—that is, in some mysterious way, the expression of God's own Self—and any strictly Red State or Blue State version of him is not, and is therefore an idol and a false God. Any Jesus you see shilling for either the Republicans or the Democrats is simply not the real Jesus. The real Jesus was notoriously difficult to nail down, you see, and utterly unlikely to get elected, not even on a butterfly ballot. As Wills notes, Jesus was unpredictable, to say the least. He could "round on Peter and call him 'Satan.' He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts."
And I agree with Wills that Jesus did all these seemingly bizarre and contradictory and politically unadvisable things because his allegiance was not to any human institutional authority, secular or religious, but to God and the reign of God alone. He was a prophet of the kingdom which is not of this world but of God. That is why he told his disciples, "You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah" (Matthew 23:8-10). The values Jesus espoused—justice, peace, and compassion—were not planks in a political platform designed to elect this or that party to power, but the values of God Most High who purposes not just to rule this world, but redeem it completely. They are God's peace, God's justice, and God's compassion, and in their light, every human institution comes up short.
But then comes the no. No, I do not agree with Wills that Jesus brought no political message or program. Does Jesus stump for the Republican party? No. Does the living Christ campaign on behalf of the Democrats? Of course not. But to argue, as Wills does, that the signs that illustrated Jesus ministry—the ways he fed the hungry, defended the poor, received the marginalized, and invoked the reign of God to criticize the domination system that kept them hungry, poor, and marginalize—to argue that these signs carry only symbolic or spiritual weight is to strain the bounds of credibility. No, the gospel of Jesus Christ—the good news that the God whose loving power embraces the beginning and end of all things is also alive and at work among us in the world today, particularly on behalf of the "least of these"—that gospel knows no party affiliation, it's true, but it carries profound political implications.
So why does that frighten us so? Well, clearly, because human political institutions down through the ages and into our own have been more than happy to invoke the name of God to lend authority to their own agendas. Slave owners have trotted out a slavery-friendly God. The rich have claimed the endorsement of a capitalist God. Patriarchies throughout history have appealed to God the Father. God is variously supposed to have sided with the Crusaders against the Muslims, the Nazis against the Allies, and the cowboys against the Indians. And if you believe the reports, the Almighty was playing both sides against the middle in Northern Ireland. I remember someone once told me, "You know you're worshiping the wrong God when He hates all the same people you do." And we do see exactly this sort of misappropriation of divine sanction going on in our own nation today.
Yet perhaps it's not just history, or even current events, that's makes us so skittish around the idea of politics and the church, but the idea of politics itself. Certainly politicians today do not enjoy the respect and admiration they once did, thanks in no small part to the Jack Abramoffs and Tom Delays and Bill Clintons of the world, and political maneuvering is thought to be self-serving by its very nature. Even the word, politics, has taken on a seamy connotation, as though everything political is tainted. And as a result, we now talk about spiritual and political as irreconcilable opposites, the one pure as the driven snow, the other dirty as back room deck. And so, it stands to reason, religion, church, by its very nature, shouldn't be political, shouldn't even be associated with anything political, should it?
Guess again. And think again. As Ghandi himself is quoted as saying, "Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is." Or politics. Merraim-Webster defines politics as "the total complex of relations between people living in society;" in other words, unless you're Tom Hanks stranded on a desert island with only a volleyball for company, to be human and alive is to be political. Now, the last time I checked, the Christian church, like everything else, is made up of human beings—very human beings, in fact—meaning, the church is political from the get-go. And since, as the American Heritage Dictionary notes with no small insight, politics is also "the often internally conflicting interrelationships among people," it's clear the church can be just as messy as any other human institution, and as faulty.
But at its confessional best, the church is a group of, yes, human beings trying to work out how we should related to one another and the rest of the world in light of this Gospel good news we believe we have received in Jesus. We are human and we are political, it's true, but like Jesus, we pledge our ultimate allegiance not to any one party, flag, or nation, but to God alone. We are first and last citizens of God's realm, which makes us agents of a foreign power, the divine power which seeks the care of creation, the nurture of all persons, and the transformation of the world according to God's own justice, peace, and compassion. As a result, Christians are, or should be, rather unpredictable allies, as the world counts such things, because we can be depended on to support any particular political party or program only insofar as it embodies these values—which, as we all know, is not often and not for long, in most cases. Republicans and Democrats, Socialists, Libertarians, Greens—all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God. The church is not served by an overzealous over-identification with the likes of these. We get into enough trouble on our own without submitting to captivity at the hands of the powers and principalities of this world.
So the world we, the church, inhabit here and now is a broken-down palace, a mish-mash of complex questions and half-answers, of difference of opinion and compromise and collaboration. But this does not excuse us from our responsibility as followers of Christ to get our hands at least as dirty as he did planting the seeds of God's kingdom and nurturing and pruning them until they bear good fruit fit for the healing of the nations. The glory of God is not served by our pretending to be above such things. We are called to take stands, to speak out, and yes, to vote, in ways that embody the Gospel values we see in Jesus. Just where we stand, what we say, and how we vote—well, we're working that out with fear and trembling as we go along. What's for certain is that in a world such as ours, we have no choice but to sin boldly, knowing that we are not going to get it exactly right but at the same time trusting in the grace of God to catch us when we fall, correct us where we've failed, and free us to choose again, and, God willing, choose better.
Now, many people hear this story from Matthew's gospel about Jesus and the coin and the famous saying "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" as Jesus' early adoption of our own American concept of separation of church and state. In some ways, that seems to be how the Pharisees understood it—after all, they went away satisfied with his answer—and certainly that's how Garry Wills reads it. But I think if we go along with them, we may miss the point and, oddly enough, end up still reinforcing the whole identification of church and state we're trying to avoid. But if, as Walls argues and I agree, Jesus defines himself as a servant of the realm of God and not the empire and if Jesus pledges his allegiance to God as his Lord and Father—both titles for Caesar in his day—and not to Caesar, what one thing, much less an entire realm of life, can be said to properly belong solely to Caesar and not first to God? Rather everything that is, the whole world and all the people in it, belong to God and are precious to God, and are to be cared for as God's own. This is the one and only plank in the party platform of the Christian church. This is our political and spiritual agenda. Everything we do in the world is judged against this standard. May God have mercy on us all as we seek to work it out carefully, considerately, politically and boldly in the world today.