Preaching the Gospel: Is it Politics?

On one of my lists we have been having some heavy discussion about whether the preacher, as such, should be promoting political issues. Depends on what you mean by "political," of course.

But it occurs to me that there are probably three categories of "political" (i.e., public) matters about which the churches, as such, should concern themselves in one way or another.

The first category consists of things on which Christians are pretty much agreed: Killing and torturing innocent people is wrong; the poor must be cared for. Stuff like that. The world pretty much knows where we stand on those things, and probably a majority of people of all religions and no religion agree, too, though we don't always agree on the means to the right end. Still, we can let our parishioners work out how they want to address things like that in the public realm without having to specify all the time that they should or how they should.

The second category (and I realize there's some category bleed here) consists of things that some of us, as Christians, agree on and think are of the Gospel, but other Christians don't. And since one side or the other may be claiming the headlines, because of or in spite of their numbers, we have to devote a certain amount of energy to letting the world know where we stand. This is especially true in certain cases, such as the treatment of sexual minorities, when people of good will (our allies in category one) are hearing from the press that "Christians" are quite opposed to what seems to them to be the right thing to do. Then we have to find ways of letting people know what are the Gospel demands as we see them, and sometimes that the squeaky wheel is a very small cog in the Christian vehicle (e.g., there are headlines about the "breakup" of the Anglican Church of Canada, but a total of 28 parishes out of 2800 have "seceded").

The third category, though, is where we SHOULD be spending most of our time, if we weren't so burdened by dealing with category two. These are the places where the Gospel really rubs against the world's ways: where what seems good and just in the eyes of the world, even most people of good will, is—as we see it—wrong, unjust, and certainly unloving. As an example, I think of the current world food crisis and the farm bill that has just passed the Congress. It's a bad bill because it subsidizes the rich at the expense of the poor. But from a Congressional point of view it's fine, because it has something for everybody's constituents and adds a little bit to Food Stamps as a gesture to the needy. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, may God increase her tribe, wrote a public letter calling for the defeat or veto of the bill. Some think she's meddling in politics. I think she's doing the right thing: speaking up with the church's voice at a place where many people think the church shouldn't be, but where the Gospel says we'd better be, or else.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for the official Roman Catholic Church teaching on abortion or its efforts to impose that teaching on other people. But I have to give them points for making the case to their faithful and sticking with it. I wish more of our churches would focus NOT on that issue, which seems to me more multi-faceted than they allow for (officially), but on the ways in which the world's justice produces injustice for too many voiceless people.