Faith & Politics: What Comes Next?

In the final week of our four-part series at St. Paul's called Faith & Politics, we opened with a brief litany of thanksgiving from The Book of Common Prayer (pp. 838-839), For the Nation:

Almighty God, giver of all good things: We thank you for the natural majesty and beauty of this land. They restore us, though we often destroy them. Heal us.

We thank you for the great resources of this nation. They make us rich, though we often exploit them. Forgive us.

We thank you for the men and women who have made this country strong. They are models for us, though we often fall short of them. Inspire us.

We thank you for the torch of liberty which has been lit in this land. It has drawn people from every nation, though we have often hidden from its light. Enlighten us.

We thank you for the faith we have inherited in all its rich variety. It sustains our life, though we have been faithless again and again. Renew us.

Help us, O Lord, to finish the good work here begun. Strengthen our efforts to blot out ignorance and prejudice, and to abolish poverty and crime. And hasten the day when all our people, with many voices in one united chorus, will glorify your holy Name. Amen.

--

From there, we began to tackle the organizing question for our final session: What does it look like for a faithful follower of Christ to live politically? These were the group's brainstorms:

- Listen to both sides.
- Ask questions. Get curious about people, feelings, issues, history. Do your homework, and don't expect others to take the time teach you. Trust, but verify.
- Be with and support the disenfranchised (see Matthew 25).
- Read Micah 6. What does the Lord require? Justice, mercy, humility. Humility means, "I might be wrong. I might change."
- Trust the process, BUT act at the right time. God is nudging you.
- Follow your passion and your pain. Popeye used to say, "That's all I can stands, and I can't stands no more!"
- Don't just vote. Our voice as citizens encompasses many more avenues.
- Be "wise as serpents, innocent as doves" (Matthew 10:16).
- Act as a whole person, not just your mind. Engage your heart, body, and soul as well.
- Trust that God is (ultimately) in control. This led to an acknowledgment that the Bible presents us both with a God who is intimately involved in decreeing every detail, and a God who gives us free rein to act independently. These two theological narratives live in tension.
- Question your relationship to power.
- Be a storyteller! Our understanding of the world is in narrative form, not just a bunch of scientific facts. What will be your story? Remember that our narratives are fluid.

At this point someone noticed that most of these examples are individualistic. So next we asked, "What does it mean for a Christian community to live politically?" We tackled the question in a roundabout way by asking what practices we have undertaken at St. Paul's:

- We are accepting of diverse people.
- We work specifically on hunger and homelessness. Are there other issues we should be tackling as well, bearing in mind that we can never do it all?
- We have an active Contemplative Prayer community.
- We focus intentionally on children and youth.
- We ask (not just invite) people to get involved.
- We are open to change.
- We call each other by name.
- We represent a "simple complexity" that is especially evident in our liturgy. Our structure leads us to greater freedom. We put a fence around a safe space.
- We are free and encouraged to ask questions, and this is a big deal for some people coming from certain other Christian traditions.

At this point we realized that we'd spent a lot of time patting ourselves on the back. We acknowledged that there's nothing wrong with being proud of our congregation to a point, but that we're really just doing our best to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. So ... what are our next steps?

- Some would love to see us do a similar series outside of the election cycle, when passions may be a little more contained and we feel that we can go deeper.
- At the very least, we'd like to hold a follow-up conversation sometime after the inauguration.
- We reminded ourselves to think globally and act locally.
- We encouraged each other to be hopeful. We drew a distinction between optimism, which suggests that things are always going to get better with or without my involvement, and hope, which does not negate action.
- We gave appreciation for God's love for us, which does not depend on any action of our own.

Evaluations of our efforts were, in general, positive. Some wished we had stretched it beyond four weeks. One person would have liked more time to share our own stories with the entire group.

Most importantly, I think, one person noted that the group tilted in one direction politically. "A more diverse ideological group could have provided some different perspectives." Amen.

Faith and Politics: Our Political Autobiographies

In Week 3 of Faith & Politics, we began to get personal. Our presenter, Jim Schmotzer, gave us a brief political autobiography, and then we looked at the pieces that went into it. You can do this exercise, too. What are the factors that affect your political inclinations?

Family: Safe upbringing? Default setting: The world is your friend. Abusive upbringing? Default setting: The world is your enemy. At one point Jim said, “We begin to become adults when we begin to realize that our parents aren’t perfect. We become adults for real when we forgive them.”

World events: Which of these have caused you to look at political issues in new ways?

Era/Age: How old were you for each of those world events? What cultural factors influenced you in childhood and youth?

Theology/Religion: What does your faith teach you about politics? How about the religious organization you belong to? As you have grown and learned more about faith groups other than your own, how have they affected you?

Geography/Travel: Where do you come from? What’s the political situation there? How much of the world have you seen, and what have you learned from your travels?

Personal connections/Friends: Who are the most influential people in your life outside your nuclear family?

Life events: What surprises has life thrown at you? How have you handled them?

Career/Economics: Did you grow up rich, poor, or somewhere in between? How consistent was your family’s money situation? What is your economic situation like now? How did it come to be that way?

Race: What is the color of your skin? It makes a big difference in how the rest of the world perceives you … like it or not.

Gender/Sexual Identity: Some aspects of gender are apparent to the eye, and some are not. But all of them influence our politics.

Cultural Expectations: What is considered “normal” behavior in the circles you run in? What is considered suspect or intolerable?

Media/Advertising: Whom do you trust to give you information about things you haven’t personally witnessed? What forces lead you to trust one media source over another? How do you decide who is trustworthy?

Education: What we learn, how much we learn, and where we learn it are all factors.

Health/Medical status/Ability: Poor health is often chronic and can affect our outlook on the world. Permanent disability is also a factor.

We each spent some time in silence working on our own life timelines and listing events and factors that have contributed to our political identities. Then we broke into groups of three and shared them with each other.

At the end of the class we asked people to share things they’d learned.

“Some people have really swapped around their political inclinations as they have grown.”

“Change is the constant; you’re not the same person you used to be, but the foundational blocks stay with us.”

“Living in different places had a unique influence. Moving from San Francisco to rural Virginia, I saw two very different perspectives on race and segregation.”

“Traveling a lot helped me see that we’re all the same in many ways.”

“I grew up as a city boy. But spending some time in rural areas gives a unique perspective on the importance of local government.”

“Fairness and justice: my parents put these into us. They also taught us to believe in Jesus, and I’m so grateful for that. But somehow, I vote differently from my parents anyway!”

What does your political timeline look like? What events and situations have shaped you?

Stand Up to the Bullies

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate Priest for Adult Formation

Wednesday, November 9, 2016 (5:30 p.m.)
Titus 3:1-7; Psalm 91:9-16; Luke 17:11-19

When I was in the 9^th grade, I was continually aggravated by a bully named D.J. Graham. One day in the locker room after P.E., he rubbed deodorant all over my back. That was the last straw: I punched him in the face. He punched me back twice as hard, I hit the floor, and my cheek sported a bruise for a couple weeks. The P.E. teacher did an expert job of looking the other way. But after that, D.J. Graham never bothered me again. Please understand that I’m not advocating violence at all. I’m just telling a true story of something that happened when I was 14.

From the Letter to Titus: “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.” Easy for him to say. Or was it?

The Letter to Titus is one of the last pieces of the New Testament, written in Paul’s voice but no doubt written many decades after Paul’s death—probably early in the second century. The thrust of this passage is that in one sense, it doesn’t matter what goes on in the world around us, because our salvation is not in doubt. We are the baptized, those who have died and whose lives are hidden with God in Christ. We are justified by God’s grace, not by our own actions. We are those who have the hope of eternal life, which doesn’t just mean “heaven after we die,” but also abundant, joyful life today.

The circumstances of the world around us cannot change any of this.

In the past 18 hours, I’ve talked to a number of people who are absolutely terrified—terrified that they might actually be in physical danger because of the results of this election. You might wish to say to them, “Calm down—you’re overreacting.” This is the worst thing you could possibly say. For one thing, those who are afraid are far more likely to understand why they are afraid than those who aren’t. For another thing, they’re not overreacting.

The Letter to Titus was written to a Christian community that was trying to find its way in a country in which Christianity was illegal. We don’t know whether this particular community was suffering actual persecution, but we do know that it would be another two centuries before Constantine would legalize the faith of the church. We don’t have that problem here. Our faith is legal and is likely to remain so. This puts the church in a very privileged position. When people are in danger from earthly authorities, we can decide to make this space safe for them. If a situation were to arise in which certain groups of people were being legally and systematically discriminated against, I would be first in line to protect them—as one person told me last night, to “build a wall” to protect those who are being victimized.

If you think I’m being alarmist, stop and listen. Here are a few stories that have spread on social media in the past 18 hours. A friend of mine in Florida—a woman priest—was verbally assaulted in line at the coffee shop, with language I would never even use in a locker room. A lesbian couple was threatened with violence. A black man was told to leave America immediately. A group of men was seen high-fiving each other and joking about how great it is that it’s OK now to sexually assault women on the street. In downtown Philadelphia overnight, swastikas appeared in spray paint all over storefronts.

Do you understand that I’m not just fear-mongering here? All of these things have happened in the past 18 hours. And those are only the ones I happen to have heard about so far.

We have a choice. Do we ignore these stories, or do we prepare to insert ourselves into a situation to protect those who are vulnerable? Do we consider putting ourselves at risk for the sake of other children of God?

I am dedicated to this notion of the church as a safe space. That doesn’t mean that the church becomes a space where people always agree, or must smile and look happy all the time, or must walk on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong thing. It does mean that the church is a space where we encourage each other to grow, to speak only to our own experiences and not to assume that we understand the experiences of others. It does mean that we learn to feel our feelings and not stay stuck in our heads. It means that we give each other as much grace as possible, that we place a high value on continued relationship. But it also means that we do not tolerate bullying, and that we will respect the boundaries of people who must take steps to protect themselves. It means being OK with not having all the answers, and accepting criticism humbly, and trying again and again to be loving. We will, indeed, spend all our lives learning these things.

And so, ultimately, dedication of this sort means that we are committed to growing in Christian maturity.

Will you join me in this work? Will you join Jesus in bringing healing to people whom bullies see as lepers, reaching out to them with God’s love and helping restore them to their communities? This work really is way beyond politics, you know. It’s about our baptismal covenant: seeking Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, striving for justice and peace, and respecting the dignity of every human being. We may fail often at these ideals, but they are nevertheless our standard as Christians in the Episcopal tradition. These things are non-negotiable.

One more story. Again, this is not some distant story that went viral. This happened to a friend of mine in Port Orchard this morning:

[While I was in line for coffee, a guy] cut me in line so I nicely said excuse me but I was in line. He replied with, ‘It won't be long before you won't need coffee before work.’ Confused, I asked, ‘Why??’ He [said,] ‘Well, Trump is president so women will go back to the kitchen with Betty Crocker where you belong. America wouldn't be the way it is if women would just take their place.’ I stood there perplexed and speechless. I couldn't even move my lips.

Friends, we need to create safe spaces. It’s up to us. And if you’ll all just commit to stand up to the bullies, my friends and I will be deeply grateful. That doesn’t mean punching them in the face—really it doesn’t. At 14 I didn’t know of any other way. We adults are able to handle this in more mature ways.

To Titus: “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarrelling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.”

It’s as true for us as it is for those who first heard the Letter to Titus 1900 years ago. But nowhere does this tell us not to stand up to the bullies. Remember that Jesus, who as far as we know never threw a punch, also stood up to bullies, preventing an angry mob of men from stoning a woman to death. When he did so, Jesus showed courtesy to everyone present. It was courtesy to protect the woman, and it was courtesy to give an example to his disciples. But it was courtesy also to the bullies, because Jesus held out hope that someday the bullies will grow into maturity as well, and that maybe being stood up to is the very first step. Amen.

The Christian Manifesto

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate Priest for Adult Formation

All Saints Sunday, November 6, 2016

When Christians are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and when we are sealed with oil in the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, a new journey has begun. The baptized person is a resurrected person, dead to separation from God and truly alive in Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of redemption and great joy.

So how is your baptism going? It’s not just an abstract idea, a social status or a nice thing that happened once. Christianity is not an app, but an operating system. Our baptism puts God to work in us in the real world—in our inner lives, and also in all our interactions with each other. Our job as baptized people is to receive God’s love and to reflect it. But how do we do this?

Right now we’re in the midst of a four-week Wednesday night class at St. Paul’s called Faith and Politics. In our first week, we outlined assumptions and ground rules to help us to safely explore the intersection of these two topics. Last Wednesday we looked at the interplay of faith and politics throughout the Bible. Our holy scriptures are chock full of politics, featuring politically powerful people from Joseph to Moses to Deborah to David to Solomon to Josiah to Belshazzar to Daniel to Cyrus to Esther to Herod to Pontius Pilate to Nero. Today’s psalm is a patriotic, if saber-rattling, ode to God as the true king above all nations. Our reading from the letter to the Ephesians places Christ “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named.”

Some say that the church should stay out of politics. Others say the church belongs squarely in the realm of politics. I’d like to attempt to make peace about this by asserting that Jesus Christ is both political and beyond political—both earthly and transcendent—as we see in Luke’s Gospel. This series of sayings of Jesus we just heard are named from the Latin as the Beatitudes, because of the refrain, “Blessed are you.” Here we cannot avoid experiencing Jesus as a political figure. This is especially true the more we learn about Jesus’ political context, in which the Jews lived under Roman occupation, and different Jewish “political parties” held different assumptions about the best way to handle the occupation.

Jesus settled for none of the common party platforms. He didn’t want to overthrow the Romans in a bloody revolution, but neither would he make peace with oppression. He wouldn’t retreat into the desert to escape the Romans, but neither would he merely keep his head down and follow the rules. Jesus showed us that none of these approaches holds the path to abundant life. Instead, he started a new movement on the assumption that God is actually the ruler of the world right now. For the Jesus Movement, the Beatitudes are our Declaration of Interdependence—our Christian Manifesto.

Depending on how you look at them, the Beatitudes can seem either naïve or threatening. They point beyond our daily grind to the world as it should be, and they invite us to choose to live in that ideal world. They make clear that violence is not a virtue for us, but neither is victimhood. President Obama once referred to the Beatitudes as “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”[1]

Jesus did not place his faith in government to protect us from harm, but in God, who offers us joyful life in spite of any harm that may come. Christians count on God’s involvement in the world, not as a nice ideal but as an actual person who is a force for change. Jesus asks us to trust, way beyond our comfort zone, that God is in charge through death and beyond. Jesus was killed for his political nonconformity. But because of Jesus’ Resurrection, which we see as the blueprint of all creation, we pledge our allegiance to Jesus Christ, the icon of the invisible God and a revealing of God’s very self.

It’s easy enough to understand Jesus as a political figure in his own time and place, but can you see Christ as a political figure in our time? Look beneath the Civil Rights Movement in America, Liberation Theology in Central America, and South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Look to Standing Rock, North Dakota this week, where hundreds of clergy gathered with the protesters and celebrated Holy Eucharist. You will find the Beatitudes at work. The Beatitudes stand against oppression, to be sure, but they also stand against any political system that we might place above Christ. Christianity is about freedom, yes, but not freedom for the sake of capitalism, or socialism, or libertarianism.

Among Jesus’ followers were upstanding citizens and prostitutes, blue-collar workers and wealthy benefactors, freedom fighters and blood traitors. Likewise, the Jesus Movement today aligns with no party affiliation, no economic school of thought, no political entity, and no school of conventional wisdom. It exists as a society within whatever other societies we may be a part of. This kind of talk might make us nervous—maybe it should. But if we truly follow Christ above all political figures, we need to have some understanding of what that means.

First of all, I think it means that regardless of how you choose to vote, and no matter what happens on Election Day, there is ample cause for hope. Why? Because our call as Christians is always clear. The political cause of Christians is to reflect God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness—to live generously because of these things, and to inspire others to do so as well. The political opponents of the Jesus Movement are those who work against love, mercy, and forgiveness. If that sounds sufficiently vague yet black-and-white at the same time, well, it is. We will keep learning all our lives how to love and how to live generously. We fail again and again. We experience forgiveness again and again, and we keep going.

Second, we must never attempt to stay in a black-and-white place by dividing the world into allies and enemies. We frequently act in both roles, depending on how well we are aligning ourselves with love. Our aim is not to vilify our political opponents or our sworn enemies: we love them and remain patient with them. And we strive to remain patient with those underdeveloped or unhealed parts of ourselves that make reconciliation difficult to offer or to accept.

When people see Christians as good, it should not be because we live perfectly or “correctly,” but because we live wholeheartedly. We make a perpetual practice of giving our money, our time, and our energy to help others. Our aim is to give even when our doubt begins to overwhelm our trust. We give because giving is a clear way of demonstrating God’s love at work in us.

When people see Christians as threatening, it should not be because we are violent, but because we will not yield the cause of love. It is in this spirit that Jesus parallels every “Blessed to you” with a “Woe to you.” Jesus holds us accountable! For the Christian, being rich and full and laughing and respected can never be the goal and may even reveal the ways we fall short. So we are never perfect, but we are always forgiven. We cannot redeem ourselves, but we can respond to God’s redemption of us with love, intent on becoming better people for the sake of everyone else in the world, but always standing ready to accept forgiveness yet again. This is the heart of Christian maturity.

We do take political stands in the world, not because we believe any government is our savior, but because we march under the banner of love and want to see it advance. Acting out of the Beatitudes and our Baptismal Covenant, we feed the hungry, house the homeless, teach the children, welcome the stranger, ensure people’s God-given dignity and rights. We do this work both with and without the help of our government. We understand that freedom is not an excuse for selfish living. Freedom is a condition of having real choices in life, something that isn’t possible when our basic needs are not being met. And because we want to ensure such freedom not just for ourselves, but also for those to whom freedom is routinely denied, Christians work for social justice.

The term “social justice” has taken a beating in recent years in some political circles, but I refuse to let it go. The passion for justice fueled the law, the prophets, and Jesus himself. In 1986, the United States Catholic Bishops defined social justice in this way: All people must have [at least] the minimum conditions necessary to participate in society. I think this is a good, basic definition that gives clear direction to Christians’ participation in politics. Our 1979 Book of Common Prayer gives us a prayer specifically for social justice:

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart [and especially the hearts of the people of this land], that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[2]

Social justice means reflecting God’s love to all others in society. Now, our chosen political alignments are complicated, and I don’t care who you are—none of us benefits from seeing the full picture. So we will arrive at different conclusions about the best ways for our society to move toward social justice. But Christians trust that God will love us through it all. We pray, and then we act based on what we understand. We pursue social justice every time we stand in solidarity with—and honor the dignity of—the poor, the hungry, the grieving, the excluded, and the reviled.

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints. The saints are all the members of the Jesus Movement who have gone before us, and through our baptism, we began to join their vast number. So how is your baptism going? Are you moving in the direction of Christian maturity? Are you relying on others to help you? What role does your vote play in revealing and reflecting God’s love to the world?

O Canada! We're only a few minutes' drive from you
in Bellingham, but don't expect us for dinner
Wednesday night. We have plenty to do here.
(Source: Pixabay)

Remember that God and God alone is the instigator of your redemption, the giver of revelation, and that God started this process in all of us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ is the ruler; no earthly rulers are worthy of our devotion. This is important just before the election. None of us needs to run away to Canada next week! Why? Because there is no place or time where Jesus is not Lord. And in response to Christ’s redeeming love, we ourselves have loving work to do. Rejoice!

---

[1] http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/aprilweb-only/116-51.0.html, accessed November 6, 2016.

[2] The Book of Common Prayer, p. 823.