I have really missed the chance to chat briefly about your sermons at the end of the service. I’ll try not to make up for six-month’s worth of e-church all in one email here. I did have some thoughts though that I’d like to run by you if you’ll indulge me.
I really appreciate your effort to dial down the political temperature at the start of your sermon. Between your words on Sunday, and those of a neighboring church two weeks ago, I am very happy to be a member of a church that stresses unity within the body of Christ, the sovereignty of God, and human sin as the root of evils in society. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) It appears to me that this has to be the foundation of a Christian understanding of politics to prevent it from taking an inappropriately large role in our hopes and priorities.
But we also need some principles I think to keep it from taking an inappropriately small role. Maybe this is just a problem that we might wish we had rather than an actual problem. But I wonder if a minimization of politics for a Christian might result in participating primarily along the same lines of identity and partisanship that over-prioritization does, since it doesn’t necessary give a Christian a reason to thoughtfully and purposefully engage. Certainly a very small view of politics will probably inspire less anger and rancor and so is preferable in the end, but I do think that will fall short of the faithful stewardship of our government to which I believe God calls citizens of a democracy. So the question that follows from framing politics in its rightful place (as you did) is, I think, “How can I love God and my neighbor through my participation in government?” Considering there’s a whole field of political theology that seeks to answer this question and others that stem from it or or adjacent to it, I certainly wouldn’t expect you to go down this road to introduce your sermon, but it does strike me as a useful way to frame a Christian voting ethic.
Speaking of anger and rancor – I think you are right on in categorizing anger as a result of unmet expectations. But I wondered about your criterion for judging anger as the “reasonableness” of the expectations. You gave the example of it being unreasonable to expect a believer to act like an unbeliever, which is very true in many ways (that I should not feel anger an unbeliever living a gay lifestyle makes sense to me.) But then is there no basis for anger directed toward injustice? And what is the alternative? We can certainly feel sad toward injustices like abortion or Uigur genocide, or human trafficking, but sadness is usually a fairly passive emotion and difficult to harness toward productive engagement. But, by your standard, why would I expect anything different from sinful humans? Can a victim of abuse rightly feel angry toward his abuser? Might that anger not be a necessary step on the road to forgiveness in that there is no forgiveness without first an acknowledgement of the truth that one has been wronged? Even for God, forgiveness follows wrath (Eph. 2:3-5) But if one’s anger toward that wrong is negated by “appropriate expectations”, then it feels like this leaves such victims in a state of denial and arrests any healing that could be achieved.
I apologize if I’ve taken any of the ideas in your sermon to places that they didn’t really need to go. I really appreciated the way you took us down the trail from “hear” to “put away” to “receive” to “do”. And even that you are preaching James. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard the book preached and have really enjoyed it these last few Sundays.
Gratefully,