WWJD: Get Political
Scripture: Luke 4: 16-21
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’
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This scripture invites us into the moments following his baptism, when Jesus is driven into the wilderness and his metal is tested. He clarifies his calling and he comes back to his home town synagogue, it would be like going to your hometown church with all of your Sunday School Teachers and the folks that watched you grow up and then he drops the mic. He reads this scripture. And it's political, totally political. So political folks say, "who does he think he is, isn’t this Joseph’s boy?' and they run him out of town.
Jesus is political and we never think of him in that way. Politics is not a nice word and Jesus, we like to imagine is so nice and sweet and pleasant. No one hears the word politics and thinks warm and fuzzy thoughts. Politics has become a dirty word; we don’t think it is good to be a “good politician” and if someone gives a political answer then we know they said a lot of words without answering the question. We are watching commercial after commercial and they mostly prove our metaphors right. We think about the stench of politics, we imagine a swamp that needs to be drained and a room where it happens that makes us rightly skeptical of the folks who want to be there. We think about back room deals and the sausage getting made…and we don’t mean small batch craft sausage with ingredients that make us really proud. But the hard truth is, if politics is dirty then it is our own fault and failing, born of our own collective inaction. Because deciding how we live in community is important and powerful; and it should be beautiful.
Politics is a part of life, it is a part of our country and our state. There are workplace politics and families have politics, you know them when you have to balance this tension or this ego or walk carefully around the sacred elephant in the room. We try to escape from it but there is no where to go, it's even in the church. Which is always the last place folks expect them to be for some reason and church politics can erupt in disruption over something like the color of the carpet or the tables in the fellowship hall. Politics are a part of every thing where we are connected to other people. So the question isn’t how do we escape politics, it is how do we engage in a way that is healthy, loving, and born more of hope than fear?
My high school civics teacher said, “This is all about how we decide who gets what, when.” I think Mr. Wiles wanted us to care about government, even if at that point we were mostly concerned with getting our own stuff and our own 'whens'. Deciding who gets what, when, is hard work, because it requires us to to engage, to care, to lean into the needs of others, and balance this wildly diverse social fabric.
I realize it can be tender when church folks engage the politics of the world and it should be done with care, prayer, and intention. But I have heard of folks saying things like, “Preacher, you should stick to the Bible.” And I want to say, “Have you read the Bible?” It is Holy Political, the stories are filled with folks making political choices and faced with real, sacred life. There are prophetic voices saying, “widow and the Orphan,” “Remember when you were in bondage in Egypt and God brought you out of slavery to be a different kind of community. Israel was to rest on the Sabbath, protect the vulnerable and to celebrate the year of our Lords Favor, when every 77 years all debts would be forgiven, land returned, folks enslaved would be freed and generational poverty prohibited. These hopes were often aspirational rather than practiced but the seed is there. There was debate and greed and violence and there were certainly folks hoping to "make Israel great again.” There were politicians who showed the very best and absolute worse of humanity, and sometimes all of that was one guy, like King David. The Bible is political. When you hear someone angry at a preacher for getting too political, it probably means that the preacher was on the “wrong” side. It probably means that they are pushing us to hear something we don’t want to hear and to dwell in the tension of needing to think about how the world we are creating is so far away from earth as it is in heaven.
Our faith invites us into values that are meant to be embodied in the world around us, faith is lived and it is an act of building the world, perhaps as Jesus prayed, 'on earth as it is in heaven.' Mary is political in her magnificat, lifting up the lowly, tearing the mighty from their throne, sending the rich away empty; that’s political and that probably why we sing it in Latin, so no one has to hear it. The early Christians were political, they called Jesus Prince of Peace and its not because it would look cute on a Christmas Card. “Lord of Lords and King of Kings," "Prince of Peace," "Savior of the World;” these are all phrases for Caesar, the big guy in Roman and it is a bold political statement to say some crucified, near-homeless, peasant rabbi from an occupied country is their Savior or Lord or Prince of Peace rather than Caesar. This is what makes them a threat to the political system of their day. And they take that risk because they believe in the bold, risky mission Jesus called them to join.
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
It's a mission statement. No church ever needs to spend money on a consultant to choose one; it's right here. This is the plum line, the guidance and the measure of our practice. Are we bringing good news to the poor, because doing that can make you pretty unpopular. Are we about the release of captives? Jesus was surrounded by a community held captive by the Roman empire; taxes were established to keep people in debt or debtors sold into slavery. Jesus is surrounded by people who need healing and recovery, he brings this and, while we may have a different technology around healing, we are called to be a part of ensuring everyone has access. From the very start, Jesus looks at the world around him and begins teaching and then showing people how to be good news to the poor and how we could let the oppressed go free. In a world of scarcity, he sat thousands of people down on a hillside and suddenly a few fish and a few loaves of bread turned into a feast. He didn’t just talk about abundance, he showed people how to open their baskets and share, that feast was a real miracle, not manna from heaven. This is why he was a threat. No one ends up crucified for running a few prayer circles and preaching self help. Jesus prays, he teaches prayer, he studies the scripture, and it is “his custom” to go to the synagogue, but this transformation is more than personal, it is for a communal good. Everything is tangible, everything is about earth as it is in heaven, healing, liberty, good news for the poor, the year of our Lord’s Favor when all the debts would be lifted from the people. All of it is real and now, that’s probably why when Jesus went to his home town to rally folks into this work they chased him out and almost of a cliff.
This is the faith we inherit–history has made Jesus meek and mild, and salvation personal and individual. The more we became a part of the Empire and the more Christian Kings, the more we became about heaven rather than earth as it is in heaven. The more Jesus became sweet and nice rather than powerful, transformative and honestly a real challenge to follow. But all the years of garbage theology, can not erase the seeds of hope waiting to be found. Faithful people, who dive below the surface always find Jesus and his mission waiting.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, is one of those people. He came to discover a faith that was challenging and relentless, he said, “There is no holiness without social holiness." Our movement, which began as a campus ministry small group at Oxford, engages the spiritual practices, and the means of grace for the intention of changing the world. Early Methodists, studied scripture and worked to abolish slavery, they prayed together and set up health clinics, they spent time in small groups and they built schools for children who did not have a place to learn to read. They set up micro-lending and programs for the folks in poverty and they rallied to change the British tax structures that created poverty. They changed themselves and the world for the better.
We carry this in our very DNA as a church. As a modern church, we gather every four years at General Conference to debate, create, recreate, study and re-cast the Social Principles. They are part of sanctifying grace, this grace of practice. They are guidance in our Book of Discipline, which frankly I wouldn’t suggest you read unless you need help sleeping but this part, this part is powerful. It is a public stand and a commitment made by the whole body of the United Methodist church, every word has been advocated for, edited, debated and argued at the Methodist Olympics otherwise know as General Conference. The Social Principles cover creation, community, our economic systems, our social fabric, the political community, and the world community. They are divided into six sections and they cover everything from human rights, reproductive rights and health care, to ending racism, sexism and ableism. They represent a set of interests that are beyond our own individual interests. They are a part of the values we pass on to the next expression of our Methodist movement. They are not perfect and I am certain every Methodist does not agree with every part of them. And there is work that is ongoing to align the church with God's love, particularly in regards to heterosexism.
Rev. Neal Christie of the General Board of Church and Society, suggests three important thoughts to guide our exploration of the Social Principles. First, the church is called to be principled by not ideological. We are not aligned with a party or with a candidate. We are called to make an ethically and theologically informed public statement about the brokenness in the world. The Social Principles offer us a way to respond to the pain in the world. Second, the church is called to be clear and civil. This is rough, I think, because there are so many great memes and social media invites us to land blows or at least make the people we disagree with look dumb. But, that is not what we are doing here, the ends and the means matter and we are not called to heap hurt on a broken space. Rather, we are called to advocate for justice through a process of self-reflection, our engagement must be direct and compassionate. Bishop Will Willimon said it well at the Festival of Homiletics when he said he was limited. When asked about immigration (by his proctologist…mid-appointment) he said, “I’m a Christian. I’m limited. The Bible is clear about welcoming the stranger, treating the alien as resident.” Finally, the church is called to be engaged, but not used. We engage in dialogue with every institution in society; state, county, and country; with school boards and non-profits, with civic groups and with businesses. We are here to be a voice for justice in all of these conversations, seeking more than making a difference, but rather making a different world. Often churches are the first stop for helping, we host food banks and serve meals, we build houses for habitat and set up homes for refugees, we show up to help in a thousand different ways, but we are not here to be a balm for a wound the systems of the world intend to keep making, we are here to heal. So we must ask, why are people homeless? Why are people immigrating? Why are people struggling with medical debt? Why are people trapped in loans they can never pay to payday lenders? Why are people hungry? We are here to make more than a difference, we are called to make a different world.
The work before us is hard and it requires us to engage in the politics of the world, to acknowledge the heartbreak and build our strategies for transformation. The work is hard and the commercials are awful but we are called to care about who gets what, when. The work is hard but we have the gifts to deploy, the Spirit to guide us and the community to walk beside. We are seeded with resilience and courage, gifted with the stories of the past and called to write new chapters to God’s song. The spirit of the Lord calls us, may we have the courage to follow.
May it be so. Amen.