At the beginning of last week
our Bishop issued the following statement, which you can find on the website of
the Diocese of Northern California. I
have also posted it to St. John’s Facebook page:
Dear Friends in Christ:
Rabbi Rick Jacobs,
President of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently said that …[the
President’s] executive order [banning refugees and Muslim travelers] "will
be remembered by history together with the Dred Scott decision and the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as governmental actions
most antithetical to American values. We will resist its implementation by any
means available to us."
To which I say, Amen.
And in my judgment it is antithetical to Christian values also. I invite you to
join me in opposing it, and in making your opposition known. I say this in the
hope that together we might uphold core principles above mere politics.
Yours in Christ,
+Barry
Now, I love and respect our
Bishop. I am also bound by the vows of
my priestly ordination to be guided by his pastoral direction and
leadership. What’s more, I do oppose the
executive order, for reasons which I would be happy to explain to you later, if
you really care. But the hard part for
me in the Bishop’s statement was that bit about making my opposition known. I have, in fact, made it known--to the White
House and to our representatives in Congress.
That was easy. But when I read
those words of the Bishop, the first people I thought of were not in
Washington, D.C. but here in Petaluma. I
thought of you people, and the fact that I would be preach to you again today.
So I went to the lectionary to
study the passages appointed for this week, I read, “Shout
out, do not hold back! Lift up your
voice like a trumpet!” I read “No one
lights a lamp and hides it under a bushel basket, but they put it on the
lampstand, to give light to all in the house.”
And I kind of groaned a little to myself and thought “Lord, not
again.” Because the truth is, I didn’t
want to talk about the Executive Orders. It wasn’t just that I was worried about offending
people, though that was part of it. I
know that there are some among you who voted for this President. In recent months I’ve had one person tell me
on the way out of church on Sunday that what I said in my sermon that morning
was dead wrong. I’ve heard from another
that the Episcopal Church has moved too far to the right (though I think he
meant to say the left), and he won’t be coming on Sunday anymore. I’ve had people voice their concern about politics
in the pulpit, and others walk out while I’m still preaching.
And these have been painful
moments for me, because I care about those people, and I want them to like me. I’ve made an effort to follow up with them,
to let them know that their concerns are important, and that I hope we’ll keep
the conversation going. I like to think that
they’re still my friends. And having a
difference of opinion is not the worst thing that can happen between people, so
as I was thinking about preaching today the possibility that someone might
disagree with me was not my biggest fear.
What really troubled my heart is my growing sense that it is no longer possible
in this country to say anything substantive about public affairs, without appearing
to be, in the words of our Bishop, “merely political.”
Bishop Beisner in his message
seeks to appeal to what he calls “core principles,” but the fix we are now in
is that we can’t even agree on what the core principles are. We can point to many causes for this, and
none of the pat explanations that blame on one group in society or another for
the corrosion of our moral consensus is really persuasive. Nevertheless, it is tempting to try. And so, while there has been no shortage of
prophetic voices in our land, calling for a truly honest, searching, and
inclusive conversation about what constitutes the good life, and the just
society, and we can get there at last, those voices have become harder and
harder to hear. Because above them,
threatening to drown them out, has been the ceaseless ideological warfare,
waged in the field of mass communications with the weapons of propaganda.
This ideological conflict has become
what we mean when we use the word “politics,” which has become a dirty
word. It has not only overtaken our
public institutions, and the media, and our schools and universities. It has poisoned our family dinner tables and
has divided our churches. Everywhere it
seeks, not to find the common ground of values that we share, but to force us
to take sides. So it is no wonder that we
look for a refuge, for a place that is not a battleground. It is only natural to want a language to
converse in that is innocent of “politics.”
And many of us seek that sanctuary here, in the church, and in her religious
language.
But here it has to be said
that the church does not offer a space that is purely private and subjective, where
we can be concerned only for ourselves: for our intimate relationships; our
personal hopes and dilemmas; our imaginative and emotional experience. Because the church keeps bringing us back to
the language of the Bible.
And Jesus does not say “you
are the light of the mind,” or “you are the light of the heart, shining deep
within.” He says “you are the light of
the world.” He does not say, “you are
the sweetness of heaven.” He says “you
are the salt of the earth.” And the
“you” in these sayings is plural. He is
talking about who we are, and what we do, together—a city on a hill. Just in case we somehow missed the point of
the Beatitudes, and think that Jesus spares us the hard and humbling work of
hungering and thirsting for justice, of giving and receiving mercy and making
peace, he directs our attention back to the law and the prophets; to those
books of the Bible that have everything to do with the practical realities of
creating a moral community that reflects the goodness and compassion of
God.
Isaiah 58 is a perfect
illustration of what Jesus didn’t want us to forget. Here the prophet tells the people that they
cannot restore their nation solely by what we would think of as religion. It is not enough for them to fast and to
pray. When Isaiah says that the fast
that God chooses is to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless
poor into our homes, he gives us language that cuts through our ideological
defenses. If we leave off thinking about
whose fault it is that the poor are homeless, or who else should be responsible
for giving them shelter; if we ask ourselves instead what it would take: what
kind of healing of my faith in the restorative powers of community would enable
me to open my door, and give a
homeless person a place at my dinner
table, and a bed in the guest room for the night, we begin to recover our
imagination of the core values of a humane world.
The highest of these values it
is the giving human heart, wounded by sorrowing love. This is the world’s center of moral gravity,
and it finds its highest expression in Jesus.
It is from this center that Jesus
calls us to be righteous, with a righteousness exceeding that of those paragons
of ideological conflict, the Scribes and the Pharisees. It is not the righteousness of being
satisfied that if everyone agreed with my opinion the world’s problems would be
solved, but more like that of Paul, who came to the church in Corinth in “weakness
and fear and much trembling.”
And yet Paul knew that in
Christ, crucified, he’d found a wisdom that the rulers of this age could not
understand. So we also, who are buried
with Christ in baptism that we might share in his resurrection, take our wobbling
stands, and lift our quavering voices.
And so we give light to the world, even though we know our own minds are
darkened with ignorance and sin, even though we know that the source of the
light is far beyond us, and if we tried to look at it directly, without Jesus
interceding, we’d go blind.
