Yesterday I wrote the story about the nexus of my political perspective and my faith. It has been a place that’s been filled with tension for a very long time. After all, I live in a state where tobacco is king. And football is a prince. It’s the Bible Belt, sweetie and I shouldn’t expect anything different.
And yet perhaps I should. For all the sermons, from the literal pulpit and the bully pulpit, that I’ve heard about how Christians are to be in the world but not of the world, it would seem that we ought to be somehow different. Yet we are not. We look just like everyone else. We fight our neighbors, sue our co-workers and friends, we marry and get divorced at the same rates, according to some studies abortion rates are actually higher among evangelicals and fundamentalists (p. 160-161, We The Purple … I tried to find the original article that Ms. Ford quoted, but the magazine website is no longer available). We look for ways out of the Sermon on the Mount, rather than how to live in it. In short, according to all available data, we are just like everybody else except that “we’re also busy for a few hours on Sunday morning.” (I can’t remember where I heard that, but it stuck and it’s sorta funny.) For many of us we also have a more than annoying habit of being supercilious, hard headed, and power hungry. The reputation that Christians have is unsightly and unworthy. What we’re doing is not working. So perhaps we ought to try something else.
So take a step back from all of this with me and let’s look at this from another perspective. For the past week or so The Church of England has gathered some of it’s top leaders and thinkers together at the Lambeth Conference. They did something new this year and invited a rabbi to speak at their gathering. I’m indebted to Mike Todd at Waving or Drowning for linking to the full text of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks. Reb Sacks spoke on the nature of covenant and the context it gives to our lives. Here’s the link to the full text, I highly recommend you download them for yourself and read them. I’m going to wrestle with a couple of quotes below.
And let’s begin our journey at the place we passed on our march last Thursday, in Westminster. It was such a lovely day that I imagine meeting up with my granddaughter on the way back and taking her to see some of the sights of London. We’d begin where we were, outside Parliament, and I imagine her asking what happens there, and I’d say, politics. And she’d ask, what’s politics about, and I’d say: it’s about the creation and distribution of power.
And then we’d go to the city, and see the Bank of England, and she’d ask what happens there and I’d say: economics. And she’d say: what’s economics about, and I’d say: it’s about the creation and distribution of wealth.
And then on our way back we’d pass St Paul’s Cathedral, and she’d ask, what happens there, and I’d say: worship. And she’d ask: what’s worship about? What does it create and distribute? And that’s a good question, because for the past 50 years, our lives have been dominated by the other two institutions: politics and economics, the state and the market, the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The state is us in our collective capacity. The market is us as individuals. And the debate has been: which is more effective? The left tends to favour the state. The right tends to favour the market. And there are endless shadings in between.
But what this leaves out of the equation is a third phenomenon of the utmost importance, and I want to explain why. The state is about power. The market is about wealth. And they are two ways of getting people to act in the way we want. Either we force them to – the way of power. Or we pay them to – the way of wealth.
But there is a third way, and to see this let’s perform a simple thought experiment. Imagine you have total power, and then you decide to share it with nine others. How much do you have left? 1/10 of what you had when you began. Suppose you have a thousand pounds, and you decide to share it with nine others. How much do you have left? 1/10 of what you had when you began. But now suppose that you decide to share, not power or wealth, but love, or friendship, or influence, or even knowledge, with nine others. How much do I have left? Do I have less? No, I have more; perhaps even 10 times as much.
The Chief Rabbi is on to something here. The state is about the distribution and manipulation of power. The market is about the distribution and manipulation of wealth/money. Where does the church fit into this equation?
So that’s what I want to write about today. For the last 20 or 30 years, evangelicals have posited that they could play the political power game and play it well. We’ve seen organizations such as the Moral Majority (headed by Jerry Falwell) and the Christian Coalition (headed by Ralph Reed) come and go. Up until very recently, (as in the campaign cycle of 2006) it was a foregone conclusion that the evangelical voting block would vote Republican. That is slowly starting to change. Those thinly veiled voter information guides produced by Concerned Women for America and Christian Coalition are (hopefully) a thing of the past.
So, the question still remains, who would Jesus vote for? Or would He even vote? It’s my belief that He probably would not participate in the political process. The state is about the creation, distribution and manipulation of power. It works hand in glove with the market. The market exists to create, distribute and manipulate wealth. Both of those operations are/were an anathema to Jesus:
The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert, so that the devil could test him. After Jesus had gone without eating for forty days and nights, he was very hungry. Then the devil came to him and said, “If you are God’s Son, tell these stones to turn into bread.” Jesus answered, “The Scriptures say:
`No one can live only on food. People need every word that God has spoken.’ ”
Next, the devil took Jesus to the holy city and had him stand on the highest part of the temple. The devil said, “If you are God’s Son, jump off. The Scriptures say:
`God will give his angels orders about you. They will catch you in their arms, and you won’t hurt your feet on the stones.’ ”
Jesus answered, “The Scriptures also say, `Don’t try to test the Lord your God!’ ”
Finally, the devil took Jesus up on a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms on earth and their power. The devil said to him, “I will give all this to you, if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus answered, “Go away Satan! The Scriptures say: `Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’ ”
Then the devil left Jesus, and angels came to help him. (Matthew 4:1-10)
Every place in the gospels where Jesus was offered the chance to have power and/or wealth he passed it by. Even when that power would serve a so-called higher purpose. He knew that in the end, the power would end up serving itself rather than the purpose. It always does. Power consumes itself. Power becomes it’s own end and requires more and more fuel for its engine. Jesus knew that.
He could have come as a political king. In fact, the Jews of the day fully expected that. That’s what they were looking for and why so many missed out on their Messiah. He wasn’t what they were looking for. They were looking for their savior to come and overthrow the Romans, give them back their Promised Land, their Holy City, their Tabernacle, their Temple, their status before G-d. They’d been looking, watching, waiting for hundreds of years, tens of generations … waiting.
But it didn’t happen the way everyone expected. And here’s the thing. We can’t fully comprehend how things went down in those first century days when Jesus walked the earth. Because everything changes once you know the end of the story.
Have you ever read a book and gotten about 4 chapters in, then read the last chapter? I have. Sometimes I’ll just read the last page. I just need to know who’s still alive at the end of the book. Once in a while I’ll read the whole last chapter. It completely changes the way you read the book. The whole plot of the book comes into play in a different way. You understand different nuances of character and see things differently. You begin to understand how things work together differently. It all makes more sense when you know the outcome.
In the same way, we know the end of Jesus’ story from the beginning. We know that He came born as a baby in a stable, heralded by shepherds, spent part of his childhood in Egypt, got separated from his parents at the Temple as a boy, etc, etc., etc. We know all of his story now. But at the time, it all came out piecemeal. One little bit at a time and must have been quite bewildering. Even down to His death and resurrection. Which were one more bit of evidence of Jesus laying aside power in place of relationship.
Now, it’s fairly easy to rationalize and say that, “Well … He’s God. I’m not. I need to keep some power for myself and for others … how else will we get along in this fallen world?” Well, that’s a fair question. How else will you or get along in this world?
Power is a zero-sum game. That is, in order to keep some for yourself, someone else has to lose some. Wealth is also a zero-sum game. In our capitalist culture we excel in zero-sum games. We love them. We begin teaching them as soon as our children have consciousness. Here are the things that are not zero-sum games … that is if you want to get some for yourself, you have to share it with others (which is counter-intuitive in our capitalist culture): knowledge, influence, love, kindness. Or maybe you don’t necessarily “have” to share with others, but the sharing with others will not in any way diminish the amount that you have and it will likely increase what you have.
The problem is that the church, from the time of Constantine, has engaged in the affairs of the state and rationalized it by saying that it’s for a greater good. Sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, the church has made greater and lesser grabs at power in the state. Remember, the state is concerned with the creation, distribution and manipulation of power. What did Jesus do with power? Every single time it was offered to him? He turned his back on it. Now there’s a good reason for that. Which can summed up in one word … possibly two. But for now the one word is, covenant. No, two. Covenantal relationship. Jesus has a covenantal relationship with us, individually and as a group (His Bride).
Once again, I’ll let Chief Rabbi Sacks explain this:
One way of seeing what’s at stake is to understand the difference between two things that look and sound alike but actually are not, namely contracts and covenants.
In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So there is the commercial contract that creates the market, and the social contract that creates the state.
A covenant is something different. In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone.
A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.
So economics and politics, the market and the state, are about the logic of competition. Covenant is about the logic of co-operation.
For the last 20 to 30 years the church has busied itself with the logic of competition rather than the logic of co-operation. We are to be in the business (as it were) of transformation. Go back to the beginning of Reb Sacks speech, where he said that “The state is about power. The market is about wealth. And they are two ways of getting people to act in the way we want. Either we force them to – the way of power. Or we pay them to – the way of wealth.” The liberal end of the spectrum in our country tends to favor the state, the conservative the market. And in the church (on both sides) we’ve bought into this. We’ve agreed with the rest of the world that there are only two ways to get people to do things. And it may just be time to admit we’ve been wrong. We’ve been trying the way of the world in different forms and fashions for 2000 years. And we’ve tried especially dogmatically in this country for the past 30 years. It has not been a crashing success.
So I’m suggesting that perhaps Jesus wouldn’t even vote. He eschewed all power in favor of relationship. He worked the logic of co-operation in order to transform. I’m beginning to wonder what it might look like if we, his followers, started to do that as well. If we stopped worrying so much about being right (as in correct, no matter what sort of correct you might be talking about), and started worrying about our relationships with our families and our friends and just made that enough for each day. If we engaged in the logic of cooperation and love. If we became truly people of covenant and understand what that means, both the responsibility and the privileges, I just can’t imagine the supernatural “Power” that it would unleash. None of us would gain anything by it. We’d all individually likely lose. But until we’re willing to look past what’s immediately in front of us and see what Jesus was talking about we will remain concerned with the small things of this world. We have to come together, be able to look at a larger horizon, and be known finally for our love for each other as He said in order for any of this to come true.
