What’s Politics Got to Do With It?
There is no avoiding politics. The moment one life impinges upon another politics begin. And our lives do impinge on others whether we will it or not. We are centers of power––power that can bless or curse––and are responsible for managing and directing that power. Power doesn’t diminish or disappear when we enter the way of faith. If we are naive with power or disdainful of it, we will certainly either misuse or allow it to be used by others who are neither innocent or scrupulous. No action is private. The more religious or value charged, the less private. Matters associated with Christ and Antichrist are, then, the least private and therefore the most political of all. Everything we think gets out of our skulls, and everything we do goes beyond our skins, entering a crisscrossing network of complex interaction. Our actions and beliefs connect with others and gather momentum for justice and peace, goodness and holiness, war and oppressions, blasphemy and desecration––a confounding intermixture of means and motives.
Eugene Peterson – Reversed Thunder
Notice from Saint Paul’s Pastoral Letter to Timothy, referred to two posts ago, that the events of catastrophic times, perilous times, are the consequences of human behavior––self-absorbed, narcissistic, greedy, brutal, abusive, vengeful, reckless, irreverent behavior. The catastrophe is neither random nor capricious. It is a consequence. As I write the whole world of common men and women is gripped in fear––and especially if we are in the vulnerable category because of age or health or both we may wonder, “Will I be alive in a month, in two months, or in three.” Or, “Will the child I love more than my own life, or the mother or father who has loved me more than words can say, be dead?” Yet, our government and the media, wealthy and educated people that they all are and detached from common human concerns, have not been focused as much on the possible human loss, as on the possible financial loss––what the coronavirus will do to the economy. Already there is talk of who is expendable, of who can be sacrificed for the profit of Wall Street billionaires. Senators, both Republican and Democratic, briefed early on what was coming sold off stocks likely to sink in a pandemic. And in developing and distributing test kits and vaccine, the first questions were not about what it would take to get this done, but how supply, demand, and profits are to be calculated. Early on a number of health and government officials announced that they were not going to be tested, that they didn’t think everyone needed to be tested. And they were right. But here is the thing. When they decide they do want or need to be tested they are tested. In your case, even if you are in a vulnerable category, you are not necessarily going to be tested. And should you need a ventilator you can be sure that a rich politician who also needs one will get it before you if you are not one of the elite. That my friends is politics in an apocalyptic age––an age in which one fear is that some disease or virus for which there is no medical answer will circumvent the globe like a moonless night. Scientists are now concerned with what deadly bacteria or viruses may be lurking beneath the melting ice cap. I guess one point I am attempting to make here is that the dangers we face are not just individual consequences, they are also social, communal, institutional, and political. In short, you cannot separate the various aspects of your existence into zip-lock bags. Everything, absolutely everything is connected. There is no separation in the political, religious, philosophical, spiritual, or social dimensions of your existence. The parent who refuses to be vaccinated, or to have her child vaccinated, for the flu is not making a purely personal and private decision, but one which affects the whole world. Every budget decision made at every level of government, every housing and zoning plan adopted by a city council, every school board decision affecting the education of children and every school lunch program is a moral, ethical, religious and spiritual decision––everyone without exception.
The Unavoidability of Politics is the Unavoidability of Ethics
The English word “politics” comes from the Greek “politiká” or “polis” meaning “affairs of the city or the state –– or city-state .” Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) in his book Politikos or Politics, described what he saw as the ethical or moral role of governments and citizens in bringing about the virtuous life, those qualities or characteristics that he thought led to the good and greatness of both the state and its individual citizens. In fact, for Aristotle politics was a subcategory under the study of ethics. When you think about what is in the genuine best interest of people as a whole, what best serves the needs of every man, woman, and child, that is “good” politics in the positive sense of Aristotle. It simply would never have occurred to the ancients that religious faith or spirituality and politics were two separate things. Eugene Peterson, quoted above goes on to say, that the same “dragon politics” that battered the faithful in John’s “Revelation” batters us. “The Lamb politics that we are covenanted to practice require sinewy endurance and sapient discernment. The details of the difficulties in which we live change, but the gravity does not: we must persevere in submitting to the powers of the Kingdom, practicing the means of the Kingdom of peace.” The question is not whether we will, or should engage in politics, but what sort of politics we will practice.
The Politics of Jesus
Here are some of the characteristics of what the Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder famously described as “The Politics of Jesus.” They are characteristics of both what we are to be as individual men and women of spiritual faith and in our life together as Christ’s beloved community––the church. Although formulated a little differently than Yoder originally stated them, I think you might nevertheless find them helpful––helpful in discovering how to live your life and how to be church in an apocalyptic age:
• Jesus’s politics is a rejection and renunciation of worldly power, control, manipulation, deception, violence, of selfish-ambition and greed, and of coercion of any kind in favor of the practice of transformative love. This is what it means to take up our cross and follow Christ daily.
• The church, which is the visible presence of the invisible Christ, is a subversive community focused on living the values of the Kingdom of God; indeed; it is only by unswerving adherence to the way of Christ as taught in the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5- 7 of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew) that the church becomes the light of the world radiating hope and bringing enlightenment. However, it is my guess that the majority of professed Christians today have never even read the Sermon on the Mount, and that even fewer have ever contemplated its words with any depth.
• The spiritual politics of Jesus requires creative concern for the person who is bent on doing us and others evil, fused with a refusal to adopt their goals, accede to their demands, assume their attitudes, espouse their values or implement their methods.
• The Jesus Way, the Way of the Cross, cannot be understood apart from that perspective which recognizes the dignity and value, not just of our own life or the lives of those who are near and precious to us, but of every human life, even the life of our enemy. To seek the doing of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, is not to attempt to replace one oppressor with another, not even another who “sounds” Christian, but to dissolve the categories of oppressed and oppressor altogether.
• Christians in every age and in every season, whether that age is congenial or hostile, can work to fulfill the purpose of God only by genuinely being the church, rather than following compromised moral systems or trying to reconcile biblical revelation with the pragmatic necessities of “managing” the country .
• The politics of Jesus is moral without being moralistic; that is, it is alluring in a wholesome and healthy way and recognizable as being about what is genuinely right and good, rather than dissolving into self-righteous, judgmental, and simplistic explanations, lectures, or rants about right and wrong by people who believe themselves morally superior experts on human nature, but who, in actuality, know nothing about the reality of the human condition.
• The responsibility of Christians is not to take over society and impose their convictions and values on people who don’t share their faith, but rather to “be the church” by refusing to return evil for evil, living in peace, sharing goods, caring for the poor, the oppressed, victims of violence, the sick, the vulnerable and the unwanted. The church invites, but does not demand or attempt to force the rest of the world to join it in walking this path.
• Jesus taught his followers a new way to live in community: To deal with offenses by forgiving, to deal with attacks by renouncing revenge and retaliation, to deal with the problems of leadership through humility and service rather than authoritarian dominance, and by valuing and drawing on the gifts of every member. And he gave them a new way of doing relationships based on a love that seeks what is in the legitimate best interest of others.
• The church, which is simply another name for the collective people of God, is called to stand in contradiction to the way of the world. Jesus’s most severe criticism was for the religious establishment of his day and its obsession with money, status and power. He accused them of “devouring the houses” of poor widows, of making prayer and worship a lucrative business, and of pretending to be wise and spiritual in order to be admired. When the church of the fourth century decided it could both align itself, and its own self-serving interests, with the agenda of the Roman Empire under Constantine, and at the same time somehow remain faithful to its call to be a sacred light of hope and sanity, it made the most egregious error of its history.
The politics of Jesus is ultimately nothing less than a new way of being human and a revolutionary form of community. It is not an easy way. “The gate is small, and the path narrow and rugged,” it is “a razor’s edge––hard to find and difficult to tread;” but it is the only answer sufficiently radical enough to answer the honest question: “How, then, should we live, both as individuals and as faith communities, in an apocalyptic age.”
The Church of the Diaspora
The great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner believed faith communities of the future, churches, in what in this post I have called an apocalyptic age, will be small––little flocks of Christians dispersed thought-out the world. They will be a little flocks because the world population expands so much faster than Christianity even in those places where the church is growing. And, we can certainly add, because of the growing defections of Christians in the Western world who find the contemporary church to be so banal that it cannot possibly be about anything of real consequence –– or who have succumbed to the values of the “Western Creed” without necessarily having ever realized it. Men and women of the future church, this church of the diaspora, are unlikely to be Christians because of custom, or public opinion, or social conditions, but “because of their own act of faith attained in a difficult struggle and perpetually achieved anew.” In some places the little flock may be respected and have full legal rights with non-Christians and anti-Christians, but it is unlikely it will enjoy more rights than others anywhere –– nor should it desire to do so. In other places the little flock may live under constant threat and opposition. In either case it will live as the light and the voice of Christ in the “cacophony of competing ideologies,” which most certainly means it will practice, in its own inner-life and in its advocacy to the wide world, the politics of Jesus. The Church of the diaspora will not mourn or complain over its loss of worldly power, “but will obediently and thankfully accept its own age as what is apportioned to it by its Lord and His Spirit and not merely what is forced on it by the wicked world.”