Sermon Second Sunday of Easter: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
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Trinity Church Hartford
April 3, 2016
The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
Second Sunday of Easter
As we begin what the poet T.S. Eliot called the cruelest month, it is impossible to avoid the volatility and passion that are roiling the political life of our nation. Now some of you will say that it is no business of the church or of our faith to get into things that are called political. And the reading this morning from the book of Revelation might support your fear of contaminating the purity of our faith with the sordid and profane world of politics. According to current biblical scholarship, the book of Revelation “was composed in the context of a conflict within the Christian community of Asia Minor over whether to engage with, or withdraw from, the far larger non-Christian community: the book of Revelation rejects those Christians who wanted to reach an accommodation with society.” Christian communities certainly had been and were continuing to undergo martyrdom and that penalties would be imposed on it should it withdraw from Roman society. The vision of John that is the core of the book of Revelation promises a new world for those under distress and persecution. If offers an escape from this world by providing an apocalyptic alternative that would take the Christian community beyond politics and worldly entanglement.
I suspect that for many Christians today, when they see the depths to which our politics and our politicians can sink, such an escape from politics seems very attractive. But is that option really a viable one for most American Christians today? I think not. Christians in 3rd century living under Roman domination were virtually powerless politically and economically. They had no economic or political influence; they were thoroughly marginal people as far as the empire was concerned even though their refusal to worship the Emperor was seen as sedition punishable by death. In that situation an escape from politics was actually an escape from a world in which the Christian minority was often the victim of political power, not its purveyors. As the reading from Revelation makes clear they could dream of being a kingdom created by God through the death of Jesus. Praise is to be given “To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom,” a kingdom in which Jesus, not the political establishment, would be the ruler of the kings of the earth.
But it was an otherworldly kingdom, one out of reach through the mundane machinations of politics and the worldly exercise of political and economic power.
There is a powerful reminder here, that though our circumstances have changed, whatever kingdom we still aspire to is never to be identified with whatever kingdom we can actually hope to bring into existence through our worldly political efforts. The greatest form of the sins of idolatry and of self-righteousness is to believe that we can, in our sinful and fallible condition, actually build the kingdom of God on earth to its purest and divine specifications by using the flawed and fallible tools of politics. Politics will always be captured to one degree or another by the forces of corruption.
And yet an equally dangerous form of self-righteousness is to believe that we can attain moral purity and do God’s will on earth by relinquishing what limited power we do have on earth by opting out of the political realm. The very real human struggles to combat oppression and work for justice and peace require us to use as best we can the fragile vessels that comprise what we call our political order.
Our dilemma as Christians today is that as citizens of the United States we are now the ones who have the power to actually enact or implement in society, with the help of multiple secular allies, some of our basic moral values through the judicious and restrained exercise of political power. Many Christians did just that when they used the tools of the political process to advocate for policies that would end racial discrimination. Many Christians did just that when they advocated for the guarantee of affordable quality health care for all our citizens. While the healthcare bill that was ultimately passed was flawed in many respects, support for it was driven in no small measure by Christians using their political freedom and power to advance what they believed to be a moral goal. They would not have done this had they taken the book of Revelation’s option of withdrawing, in the name of spiritual purity, from the less than morally perfect world of politics and the wise and tempered use of political power and influence.
And so we are caught as Christians between the allure of washing our hands of the muck of politics even while we are in position to use the political process for moral ends, and the allure of thinking that we can control that process so completely that we actually fulfill all the hopes and ideals of the kingdom of God on earth here and now. Neither of these two extremes is a real option for responsible action now in the messy, often sordid, even toxic world of politics as it is actually being practiced. Responsible action requires us to use what power we have (and it will differ depending on where we find ourselves in the economic and political hierarchy) to help those in need without idealizing or sanctifying the political realm, in which that help is given concrete form.
Responsible action may well do nothing more important than to be on the alert for demagogues who would exploit the political realm to advance agendas of hate, exclusion, and fear. Recently New York Times columnist David Brooks, citing Psalm 73, wrote of political demagogues,
“Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”
The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagoguery is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.”
In the current climate of political shamelessness, of vituperation, slander and coarseness, and the proposals to isolate and marginalize the oppressed in our own country, calling out the demagogues, no matter what party they affiliate with, and patiently and with humility pointing out the idolatry of identifying a political agenda with the kingdom of God may be the most important moral imperative that falls on Christians at this time.
Politics is always a flawed and limited practice as are the people who engage in it because we all are, at bottom, flawed persons. But retreat from politics is also deeply flawed because it would relieve us from the moral responsibility to use what power we do have (and whether we like it or not Christians in America have tremendous social and economic power) to serve the common good. We are not granted the right to absent ourselves from the struggles of securing justice for the oppressed and persecuted whether here or abroad just because the means of justice are less than morally pure.
We need to take politics seriously but without becoming enthralled or seduced by it. It can accomplish, when done wisely and judiciously, more good for real people suffering from real injustices than withdrawal into spiritual pieties can do. Politics cannot bring in the kingdom of God but it can challenge the most egregious forms of systemic and structural violence and inhumanity.
And since we are free, thanks to Jesus’ life-giving spirit, from having to protect ourselves at the expense of others, we are now free to use all our resources and power, whatever they might be, to at least help clear away some of the barriers to the true justice and equity that will eventually fill the kingdom of God on earth and the work of politics will have come to an end.