Sermons

The Welfare of the City

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  October 10, 2004                               Jeremiah 29:1-9

Theodore J. Wardlaw, President of Austin Theological Seminary, tells a timely story. At some point in a conversation, one person, who happened to be a social worker, spilled the beans to the other, saying that not only were they a social worker, they were married to a minister. “A minister, and a social worker,” the other replied. “Well, I guess I know now who you two are voting for this November.” The conversation, Ted Wardlaw reports, ended there, thankfully. The political leanings of neither person were revealed.

How does our Christian faith become expressed in public life? It is a question with us always. It is with us in particular ways these days, as if that point needed underscoring. Some three weeks before we choose a president, this will be as close as we get to an election sermon. I will not go so far as to presume how you are voting. I will go so far as to presume upon you that you do vote. It seems so elemental, yet it is not, the exercise of this precious franchise. One trajectory from this morning is this: that voting is not only a civic duty, an act of citizenship, but that is an act of faith.

That’s a far cry from suggesting that God would favor either candidate, or any candidate, though I know that in some pulpits this morning some preachers are doing just that. That may be where we are these days, and if so, we must confess it. We must confess the red-state/blue-state culture in which we live, a highly partisan and oft-times bitter discourse that every so often slips over into the notion that God is too self-evidently a Democrat or Republican.

And yet, if voting is an act of faith, how do we faithfully engage the issues of the moment without getting drawn into easy and certain stereotypes? My deep concern with the Christian right is not their use of either of those adjectives; it is, rather, their insistence on a litmus test, that disagreement with any one position is the political equivalent of heresy, belief beyond the pale of acceptance. We are here, as I’ve said repeatedly, to be neither the Republican Party at prayer nor the Democratic Party. So-called “liberals” and so-called political “conservatives,” like their counterparts in the church, have something to offer one another.

That dynamic is a concern to me, but there may be one of greater concern. Perhaps these first debates—once we move beyond the crankiness—have provided something positive. Perhaps the war in which we find ourselves, or the domestic challenges we face, have all contributed to a re-engaged electorate. I hope so. I hope that a real, honest, label-neutral, caricature-absent debate will counter cynicism, apathy, decreased voting percentages.

Our task always is to pray for those who lead us. In these days, our prayer as well needs to be for those who choose those who lead us, and those who are contemplating not showing up at all on November 2. It is not simply an act of civic duty and good citizenship, but it is an act of faith.

As we have noted from time to time, the manner is which religious issues are articulated these days is curious and complex. President Bush’s evangelical Christianity and Senator Kerry’s Catholicism—considered again very openly this past Friday evening—have been the fodder for more columns and e-mails than is probably useful. But they make the point, do they not, and that make the point that the landscape is shifting.

This past Tuesday at Temple B’rith Kodesh, I was privileged to offer some opening remarks at a kind of debate between Rich Dollinger and Bill Nojay. You should have been there! At some point in the evening, the assertion was made that two groups seem to be growing—secular liberals and conservative evangelicals. That may be true. What it does suggest is something that I think we sense anecdotally and intuitively: a shrinking of the middle, and an increasingly difficult possibility of holding a sustained, substantive debate that does not fall into easy stereotypes.

There may be particular approaches to the issues we face: at home—education, health care, the economy, civil and human rights; or globally—this war or any other, the environment, the ways in which cultures interact. Differing approaches, to be sure, but no easy answers. And surely no political answers to be baptized simply because they are liberal or conservative. For every political column I read with a religious tinge, I could easily find an equal and opposite column that uses theology, to make the counterpoint.

That is not to say that we are called to be wishy-washy, or heaven forbid, to “flip-flop.” And it is not even to say that given our most rigorous discernment that some political perspectives borne by theological conviction may be more proximate to a vision of the kingdom of God than others. Surely there have been moments in our history, and I think particularly of those having to do with civil and human rights, when freedom was on the side of the angels. But stereotypes and labels will ultimately fail, and though each of us is invited to pull the lever for the candidate of our choice, we are called to something much deeper than that, more transforming, more reflective of God’s claim on our lives, more faithful to God whom we proclaim to be sovereign over all creation.

What does that vision look like? Ethicist Ismael Garcia (Insights, Austin Seminary, Fall 2004) suggests several benchmarks for the ways that we as a people of faith, and particularly we as Presbyterian Christians, might engage this conversation. Our core theological convictions about God and ourselves surely come into play as we think about these things no less than when we think lofty theological thoughts.

That means, according to Garcia, that “human authority and sovereignty are secondary, always, to God’s authority and sovereignty.” Priority is always God’s. Human governments are always provisional. Because of that, we must be aware of human shortcomings, our proclivity toward power, our inability to see our own weakness, our always incomplete and limited nature and ability.

Humility is a good approach to any human endeavor, politics certainly included. And yet even given our shortcomings, there are religious values that we as people of faith can bring to the political table. The power of God’s goodness and love that moves us toward justice and compassion. Our trust that God does give us vocation and gifts to use for the common good.

Our understanding of covenant, that God binds us together in community, including to people we might never choose on our own, and including those who have less resources and for whom, therefore, we are called by this covenant to advocate. That means, I believe, that our political vision based on our core theological convictions, can never deteriorate into an “us-them,” dynamic, but rather an “us” dynamic that would insist that because we are all, by God’s grace, children of a sovereign God, redeemed in all creation by Jesus Christ, then we are all fully, equally, completely, citizens and neighbors. There is no room for “us-them” in such an approach, and the very serious problems we face—economic, political, moral—must be faced together or divisions and alienation will continue to rule the day. That’s not political idealism. It is theological truth.

In his fine book of a decade ago entitled The Culture of Disbelief, Stephen Carter wrote that “It is impossible to envision a serious public discussion of morality from which the religious voice is absent.” (Page xvi).

We believe that to be true. That voice, our voice, must be present. It cannot be shrill, or partisan, or cynical. It must be full and honest and authentic. Historian Martin Marty once wrote that “Religion is part of ordinary life: the workplace, the worlds of friendly interaction, the mall, the media, the gallery. But it takes on special importance in the political realm. That is why the voices of religion,” Marty writes,” should be in the public forum and at the political table.” (Politics, Religion and the Common Good, page 161)

John Calvin, for one, believed that. Out theological forbear was convinced absolutely that the sovereignty of God led us to every corner of human affairs. In Calvin’s mind, therefore, the concept of “secular” was an unfamiliar one.

We do not find ourselves in a theocracy these days, in this nation. Calvin’s Geneva was such an environment. Church and state were not only not separate; they were inseparable, part and parcel of the same enterprise. And yet cannot we claim from Calvin, and all who have followed since, the commitment to civic restoration, to commonwealth, to service in all spheres of life, that every call is a call from God, including that of citizen and neighbor, and even politician?

Jeremiah believed that as well, and we are compelled to attend to that biblical vision with all of our conviction and imagination. Six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Jeremiah’s prophecy spoke clearly and strongly of God’s vision of the restoration of the city.

The message had a rhythm to it: the inevitable doom of the people if they continued on their certain path, and the possibility of redemption and restoration available only by following a new vision. Therefore, even in the face of exile, Jeremiah is able to hold up a profound vision that speaks yet to us some 2500 years later.

There is unrest in Jerusalem—religious and political. There is unrest in the exiled community as well, all of which sounds very familiar. Jeremiah prophesies even to the exiles, and implores them not to rebellion but to a different way of life. God is at work even in the face of exile, Patrick Miller reminds us. (New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, volume VI, page 791) God is at work even in the face of exile, and we are called, therefore, to an ever more radical embrace of God’s blessing of all of creation. Life is possible, home and family, food and shelter. “The things that support and keep human beings human,” are possible.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you,“ Jeremiah writes, “and pray to the Lord on its behalf.” Seek the welfare of the city.

And so we cannot but think of Jeremiah in this election season. We cannot but imagine that we live in some exiled city.

We could call it Rochester or we could call it the world. We could identify it by many signs: gun violence in our own streets or bombs exploding in Egypt or Pakistan or Iraq. Hungry people in our own neighborhood or hungry people dying in the Sudan. Divisions based on race in the city or division based on culture and creed in every corner of the world.

We do not need to look far to recognize the city into which we have been exiled. And yet, we do not hear Jeremiah’s voice at the same time, the clear and strong call to pray for the welfare even of the exiled city, and work for it, until God will restore it and all of us and welcome us home.

Do we not, as people of faith, see glimmers of hope here and there? Have we not, as people of faith, received a vision, received gifts, to help usher in such restoration?

Sojourner editor Jim Wallis insists that we have the vision already. Its component parts look something like this: comparison, community, reverence, diversity, equality, justice, courage, responsibility, integrity, imagination, reconstruction, joy, hope. (See The Soul of Politics)

Those are not liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. They are not exclusively Christian, even, nor certainly exclusively Presbyterian, even though we as Christians enter this reality from a certain place on the spectrum. They are gifts, to be sure, available in the here and now to help build what is yet to be.

That is why this season is about voting, but about so much more than voting. It is about claiming the resources that have been given us in order to build the city, in order to heal the city, in order to imagine a city where every child is safe, where every child’s mind and spirit is nurtured, where we, you and I and all who are like us and wall who are not like us, can work and play together, where all have the resources they need not just to survive, but to thrive.

Pray for the welfare of the city, Jeremiah wrote many centuries ago. He would write the same this day, with no less passion and no less urgency. Pray for the welfare of the city, so that one day, in God’s sovereign providence, this city of exile, this city of despair, might be transformed into the city of our dreams. And even God’s. Amen.