The Politics of Jesus

by the Rev. Rich Smith
December 17, 2006 - Advent 3

Luke 3:7-18

On the Sunday before the 2004 presidential election, at Pasadena, California’s All Saints Episcopal Church, the retired rector came back to preach. George Regas, who during his over two decades at the church had led it to be one of the most progressive churches in the country – Episcopal or otherwise – cast the sermon as an imaginary debate between George Bush, John Kerry, and Jesus. Jesus won the debate, of course, but the sermon came to the attention of officials of the Internal Revenue Service, those charged with overseeing the tax-exempt status of churches, making sure that they do not engage in activities that constitute “intervention in a political campaign,” which would cause them to lose their tax-exempt status. Because the sermon was critical of the current administration’s policies and actions in the areas of war and poverty, the IRS saw it as an implicit endorsement of the challenger. I went back and read the sermon and found that it didn’t endorse Senator Kerry at all; in fact it posed a number of challenges to him as well as to the President. It actually endorsed Jesus! But since he wasn’t on the ballot, it exhorted the congregation to make up their own minds and “vote your deepest values.”

The case is still pending, and the church’s governing body has voted not to comply with IRS requests for information, believing it to be a First Amendment issue. Who knows, it may end up some day in the Supreme Court. And one of you might have to argue it!

Well, the mix of politics and religion has always been problematic, as well as unavoidable. There are those who prefer to keep them separate. I know some of you are so saturated with politics all week you’d like church to be a sort of respite, and I understand that. Others, likewise heavily involved in things political on a daily basis, welcome the kind of centering and perspective and theological grounding for your work that faith can give. You want to see the connection between faith and work and daily life. Others are selective. When I was growing up, my home church lost two families on the same Sunday. One, because the pastor had favorably quoted Martin Luther King in the sermon, and they were sure he was a dangerous rabble rouser. The other family left because in the same sermon Barry Goldwater was quoted, also favorably..... Finally, there are a few who want nothing to do with politics at all, thinking that the word “politics” comes from the Greek “poly” meaning many, and “tics,” as in blood-sucking creatures. Some of you know better than I whether that is true or not.

So it’s problematic, and dangerous, and also unavoidable, for if we are true to the traditions of our Judeo-Christian heritage, if we are true to the values which our Congregational forebearers lived out, if we are true to the prophetic message of Jesus of Nazareth, then we can’t help but find ourselves in the midst of political discourse and even advocacy, especially in a country that has enshrined both freedom of speech and freedom of religion in its constitution.

There’s a new book out, The Politics of Jesus, by AME minister and professor Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., which like some current best sellers (such as God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Left Hand of God by Rabbi Michael Lerner, and The Audacity of Hope by Barak Obama, and Faith and Politics by Senator John Danforth – all good candidates for book study groups!) challenges the religious right as the only voice in this area, and suggests some new visions for how religion and politics can interact.

The Politics of Jesus gives a lot of attention to the way faith and politics have intertwined throughout history – going back to the Exodus, the early days of Israel, the preaching of the prophets and the ministry of Jesus. Hendricks shows how so many of Jesus’ sayings – and beliefs of the early church – were political in nature. He points out, for instance, that while we find the Lord’s Prayer comforting, it was originally highly subversive, for to pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth” is to ask that God’s realm supercede the realms currently in place. To pray “forgive us our debts” – by which we usually mean “sins” or “trespasses” – really did mean “debts,” beacuse debt was a huge problem. “Jesus was deeply concerned about the spiral of financial indebtedness and dispossession that devastated so many in Israel.” Subsistence farming in that time produced barely enough to live on, and the only way the peasants could pay the heavy taxes that the Romans levied was to borrow from the wealthy. Like “the sharecroppers in America’s southland, many farmers had no choice but to repeat this pattern of borrowing every year until the burden of debt became so great that they were no longer able to meet the payments and were forced into default.” Debtors could be imprisoned, enslaved, and tortured. Their families, neighbors and distant relatives could be as well. It was such a bitter issue during the Jewish War of A.D. 68-70 that one of the first acts of the rebels was to seize and burn the records of debts that were stored in the Temple. So when Jesus prayed, “Forgive us our debts,” it had a very powerful social and political meaning. It was just one of many things that led to Jesus’ arrest and execution as a political rebel, a challenge to the ruling powers, like the prophets and John the Baptist before him.

Later his followers would continue that subversive posture. Their earliest creed was the deceptively simple statement, “Jesus is Lord.” It wasn’t theological so much as it was political, for in Caesar’s world, he was lord and sovereign. To proclaim that Jesus was Lord meant that Caesar wasn’t. And to proclaim Jesus as Lord meant that one’s loyalty was to his kingdom, not Caesar’s, and to his values, not Rome’s. It meant siding with those whom Jesus sided - in the words of his first sermon recorded in Luke, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for God has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of jubilee,” that is, the time when all the social and economic inequities that had built up over time would be erased. Every one of these proclamations had a political meaning, not just a personal one. (It was the same with the prophet who announced Jesus’ coming, the one we know as John the Baptist, whose stern preaching proclaimed that now things were going to be different.) And as Jesus’ followers lived that out, and refused to bow to Roman authority, they paid a heavy price, but they could not be stopped.

The movement spread into the Gentile word with the missionary activity of Paul, and while he may have saved Christianity from extinction, it was a mixed blessing. Because for Paul, it was about Jesus himself and not so much his values. It was about salvation in the next world – “Believe in Jesus now for the sake of heaven later,” as Marcus Borg was to describe it. Now to be fair, Paul came from a different world than Jesus did, so he saw things differently. Both were Jewish, of course, but whereas Jesus was an oppressed Israeli peasant from the country, Paul was more upper class, from the city, and a citizen of Rome – all of which adds up to a divide in perspective even more stark than our “red” and “blue” states. In the end even Paul was executed by Rome, but he never quite got the revolutionary edge that was Jesus’ message. As I said last week, with Paul it became less about the message and more about the messenger. Yet, his proclamation of Jesus was still a subversive and political threat to the principalities and powers.

Christianity continued this way for some three centuries, mostly underground, and then came Constantine. On the eve of a decisive battle in the fall of the year 312, a battle which would decide who would become the next emperor, he had a dream - a vision of the Greek letters “Chi” and “Rho” representing the word “Christ” and the words, “by this sign conquer.” He changed the insignia on his battle shield, won the battle, decided that maybe there was something to this Christian thing after all, and decreed that the Empire now had a new official religion. In some ways, it may have been the worst thing that could have happened, for now the church, the faith, lost its ability to speak truth to power – it became the power. Church and state were one, and thus it was for over a thousand years, until the Protestant Reformation. As Hendricks puts it, while freeing Christians from persecution, “Ironically, this development began a cycle of distortion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that has never ended.... This confusion of militarism and political domination with the cause of Christ continues through the subsequent history of the West. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the genocidal missionary campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas, and (slavery) in the Christian United States are only a few examples.”

The death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet this past week closes yet another chapter of this legacy. For all his well-documented brutality, Pinochet was a professing Christian, as were many of the Latin American dictators of that era. It was an era that gave rise to liberation theology, and to base communities, where another form of Christian faith was practiced, one that counseled resistance and proclaimed hope. These dictators opposed that faith, and feared it – assassinating El Salvador’s archbishop, Oscar Romero, and even going as far as to ban the reading of the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise (which we sang) with its promise of the mighty overthrown and the poor lifted up, God’s justice come to earth.

Like these Latin dictators, Constantine was hardly an example of a model Christian. He was not baptized until a few hours before his death. But it didn’t change him. He basically did what he wanted to do, which was pretty gruesome. He just was able to assert that now he had God on his side. Technically, he may have converted to Christianity, but he also converted Christianity to his own ends. What’s more, he introduced a hierarchy that wasn’t there before, and manipulated that hierarchy as it was deciding on what are still considered orthodox doctrines. He didn’t really care what they decided, just so long as there was unity and he could remain in control. He wanted God on his side, which I guess is something we’d all like to have. But the truth is God is more often not on our side, but on our backs!

The church is at its best when it is prophetic, when it speaks truth to power. It is designed not to govern, but to goad – to call us to care about the things Jesus cared about, to afflict the comfortable as well as comfort the afflicted. That’s really what the politics of Jesus is about. It’s not about power, or party, or even program, but about values. It’s about what God cares about.

I am hopeful that we are turning a corner in this country, that we are entering upon a time when people will understand that the religious right isn’t the only religious voice, that God is concerned about far more than hot button issues that seem to rally the base, that we all have an interest in the large issues of war, global poverty and global warming and can come together on these. I am also hopeful that what has been known as the secular left is beginning to reconnect with the spiritual values that have always animated our visionary leaders, and that faith can once again be spoken about in the public square. Not in a narrow way, or a way that says “I have the only valid connection to God” but in a way that open and honest and humble. As Barak Obama said in a speech earlier this year, “Many Americans are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion... They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn form those who are willing to speak fair-minded words, those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points... I have hope for America that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.”

I am hopeful as well, because of voices like his (a good UCC voice, I might add!), and voices like Pastor Rick Warren, of the Saddleback mega-church in California. Rick Warren took a lot of heat recently from his evangelical brethren for inviting Obama to address a conference on the global AIDS crisis. He also invited Republican Senator Sam Brownback, who, like Obama, has shown real leadership on this issue. While many of us would disagree with Warren on a number of issues, we must give credit where credit is due, for he has taken his Christian faith from just being concerned about personal salvation to being concerned for the welfare of the whole of the earth and earth’s people. An evangelical with a social conscience! This has confused some of his colleagues and supporters, and he has been asked, “Are you left wing or right wing?” “Neither,” he replies, “I’m for the whole bird!”

I don’t think it would confuse Jesus. Nor would it confuse Jesus’ forerunner, John, who proclaimed, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance....whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” With many other exhortations he proclaimed good news to the people. May that good news continue, through us!