Sermon preached on July 4, 2021 at St. Thomas Church, Bath, the 6th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9): Mark 6:1-13
You can listen to the sermon here.
One spring day in 1993,
I left my office at St. George’s Church in Glenn Dale, Maryland, where I was
the Vicar, and walked a block to my favorite place for lunch. It was at the end
of a strip mall, Lamberts Seafood Restaurant, and my mouth was watering for
some of the best crab cakes in the world.
[An aside: crab cakes should not
be made outside of the state of Maryland].
I stopped dead in my
tracks when I saw a bumper sticker on a car.
It was shiny brand new. “He’s not
my president” it said, referring to Bill Clinton, who had just been inaugurated.
I was dumbfounded. I
stopped. I stared. Then I slowly made my way to the restaurant but did not get
inside before I saw the owner return to the bumper-stickered car. I was doubly
dumfounded. It was the pastor of the Baptist Church in town. We were not
friends. I’d been introduced to him, but he had also denounced me from his pulpit
when I had first arrived in Glenn Dale two and a half years earlier because I
was known to be gay.
“He’s not my
president.” To be perfectly honest, I
was not a great fan either of Presidents Reagan or Bush (the first), but it
would have never occurred to me that they were not my president. And even if I had held that sentiment I would
never as a priest put in on a bumper sticker on my car.
It shows the path that
we have taken as a country in that such a bumper sticker today would seem mild.
Now you may suppose that
I have told a cautionary tale about the intersection of religion and politics.
And you would be right about the cautionary part, but I did not then, nor have
I ever, thought that religion and politics should be completely separated.
Here is why in a quote
from the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church:
[It is] of the utmost importance . . . that we should
know that when we separate the Christian faith from life, we are cutting
ourselves off from God the Father, and Jesus Christ his Son, and the Holy
Spirit. For God so loved the world—the world—that he gave his only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ, that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting
life. “The world” here means everything
that goes on in our lives, around us, and in the uttermost parts of the earth.
We cannot keep our Christian convictions in one pocket and our thoughts and
actions about business and politics and the social order in another pocket
quite apart. As a Japanese theologian
has put it, the mission of the Church is not removing fish from a dirty river
called the world and placing them in a clean pool called the Church. The
mission of the Church . . . is to work by God’s grace for the life of the world
to come here and now, in every circumstance and in every event of our lives.[i]
I misled you a bit when
I said the quote was from the presiding bishop.
It is not, as you probably supposed, from the current presiding bishop,
Michael Curry. No, the quote was from Presiding Bishop Arthur Lichtenberger in
1964.
I know many
Episcopalians—and some of you—have felt that politics should stay out of the
pulpit, if not the entire Church, but much of both the leadership and the
membership of the Church have been saying differently for several generations
now.
When Bishop Barbara
Harris was interviewed by one of the national TV networks before her
consecration in 1989, she was asked about religion and politics. She quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “My religion is my politics.”
Notice what she did not
say. She did not say, “My politics is my religion.” That would be contrary to everything
the Church has ever taught on the subject. Of course, today there is a new
branch of so-called Christianity who call themselves “Nationalist Christians,”
who have, in my thinking (in which I am far from alone), done precisely that,
made politics their religion, by making Jesus and Paul seem to say everything their
political ideology says.
In making the case for
our religion being our politics, let me make just two points. You may disagree with me. It’s a free country
and a free church.
First, to say that
religion is my politics is to say that God always comes first as the Creator of
all that is, and Jesus is my chief source of guidance in how he lived in the
world and died for the world, and I assume the Holy Spirit is living among us,
guiding us into all truth, as Jesus said she would.
To make God come first
in my political thinking, as well as in all my other thinking, does not mean
that the world is a simple morality tale:
there is good and there is evil and nothing in-between. No, we are human beings, and we must make
decisions and we don’t always get it right.
Which leads me to my
second point. One of the chief things Christians (and those from other faith
traditions, although I do not presume to speak for them) bring to the political
table (again, as well as all other tables) is the long view of things.
The long view is this:
we human beings are on a journey. We do
not sit in paradise. We got thrown out of paradise long ago and, try as we may,
we have never been able to find our way back.
But we keep trying. Christianity
is an aspirational way of being in the world, a hopeful way of being in the
world. It is about our journey toward a promised and longed for, future.
Mark the Gospel writer
does not tell us what Jesus said in his hometown synagogue to make people so
upset with him. Who does this guy think
he is? We know his family, and they’re
nothing but average. He’s talking as if he’s coming from a different place,
better than us.
And, of course, whatever
he said, we can be sure that he was coming from a different place,
pointing toward a kingdom, the vision of God for humankind. God does not want us to settle for who we are.
He always, always, wants us to strive for what we can be.
We Christians bring that
same vision to our political life. We
understand that America itself is an aspiration, a vision, something we keep
striving for, if never getting quite right. Of whatever party or persuasion, we
are the voices that are always pointing ahead, saying “we’re not done yet.”
As I see it, a
significant part of our great divide these days is between those who think that
the American project was and is settled, and those who think we are yet on the
journey.
I’ll close with a third
thought. Another part of the mess we are
in these days politically is expressed well by sometime Archbishop of
Canterbury Rowan Williams. He writes,
A great deal of our politics, our ecclesiastical life,
often our personal life as well, is dominated by the assumption that everything
would be all right, if only some people would go away.[ii]
If Christian people are
saying that (if we say that—and it is oh so tempting to do so), they—we—are
blaspheming, speaking absolutely contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the
mission of the Church which is to restore all people to unity with God and one
another[iii]
which is the fruit of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.
If our religion is our
politics, then love of neighbor is our politics. It’s a vision. We haven’t yet gotten it
right, but we keep our eyes on the prize.
Let us give thanks for
this nation. Let us celebrate Independence Day.
And let us re-commit ourselves to work toward the dream, being honest
that we haven’t always gotten it right.
And press on doing what we Christians know what to do: acknowledge our
faults and repent of them, and act to change what we need to change to form a
more perfect union and make, as we pray, the kingdom of God come on earth as it
is in heaven.
[i]
Arthur Lichtenberger, The Day Is at Hand (New York: Seabury Books, 1964
[ii]
Rowan Williams in The Way of St. Benedict, cited by Geoffrey Tristram,
SSJE, in “Finding Holiness in the Sanctuary of Difference,” Cowley (the
newsletter of the Society of St. John the Evangelist) 47:3 (Summer 2021), p. 9.
[iii] The
Book of Common Prayer, p. 855.
No comments:
Post a Comment