Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

4/2/06 - 5 Lent

The Rev. Scott A. Benhase

"Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also." John 12:26

There is a saying in our culture that one should not mix religion and politics. That no doubt comes from our belief in the separation of Church and State interpreted from the 2^nd Amendment to our Constitution. Well, I plan on mixing them in this sermon today, but not in any partisan way. I frankly do not care about your political party. What I care about is that we apply what we hold to be true about Jesus to our public life. All I ask is that you give what I say a fair hearing. And if the IRS is listening, and who knows these days who is listening, then please listen to the whole sermon before you threaten to take away the Church's tax exempt status.

In Christ, you and I are called to be one thing and one thing only - namely - faithful to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And no particular political party or movement has a monopoly on Christian discipleship in the world. That being said, being a Christian cannot help but have political consequences. But not in the usual way we view politics. When I say the word "politics," we get all sorts of images in our heads. What comes to my mind immediately is the image of overweight men in ill-fitting suits smoking cigars in some back room. Or, maybe it's an image of precinct volunteers handing out material about their candidate door to door. Those are some images that come to mind when we say the word "politics." What I want us to be able to do is to see politics in a broader context. I want us to see it as the collective striving of a people to order their lives together. That is the classical definition of politics. Politics is how we order and administer our lives together as a community of people. The word "politics" finds it root in the Greek word polis, which means "city." Politics then is about human community; how we treat one another; how we order our lives together.

The question then for us is how we as a Christian community known as the Church ought to participate in human community. I am convinced that the Church is being faithful to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ when it seeks to offer an alternative politics - a different way of being political. And that way is mapped out for us in today's Gospel lesson. Jesus says, "Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also." If we wish to be faithful to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then we must follow his lead. Let's look at his words Jesus closely.

He first says that if we want to serve him, then we must follow him. That may sound obvious, but it's certainly not how the Church has practiced it's vocation in the world in recent memory. To follow Jesus means to act like Jesus - to walk his walk and to talk his talk. It is clear that throughout the four Gospels, whenever Jesus calls people to follow him (and it's probably the most common theme in the Gospels), he's calling them to imitate his life and actions - to act toward others the way he does and to speak to the world the way he speaks.

But most Christians act and speak very differently than this. They say that in order to serve Jesus - to reach the ends that he desires, they have to abandon his talk and walk to do that, while all the while retaining the Spirit of what he did and said. But Jesus is clear: service in his name must be accomplished by following him - by walking his walk and talking his talk. There is no way to say that the end justifies the means - that we may have to give up or compromise on Jesus' talk and walk in order to accomplish some Christian goal. In other words, if we say that we have to abandon his walk and talk to serve him, then we really are not serving him because we have chosen not to follow him. There is an unbreakable connection between serving Jesus and following Jesus. For example, those who choose violence and terror to stop something they believe Jesus would want them to stop have resorted to the world's methods and have chosen to stop following Jesus. That is the case of those who violently terrorize women at abortion clinics. Likewise, those who support capital punishment play the same "end justifying the means" game. They have also resorted to the world's methods. To do that, they have to be able to envision Jesus as the one who would gladly make the lethal injection at Central Prison at 2 a.m. some Friday morning. I can't.

What I'm saying is this: Our politics as the Church must be lived out as Jesus lived them out. That is what I'm getting at when I say we need to discover a new way of being the Church. It may not get the job done the way we think it ought to be done or as quickly as we think it ought to be done, but that nevertheless is the way that Jesus has given us to live in the world. To the rest of the world, we may appear ineffective and out of step with the prevailing political themes, but that's Ok. The rest of the world doesn't set our agenda - Jesus does. If we can't see Jesus from the perspective of his life, death, and resurrection engaging in a particular action or making a particular statement, then we need to stop and ask ourselves why we are doing or saying what we are doing or saying.

Now, on to the second part of the Gospel passage I began with. Jesus not only says that whoever serves him must follow him, he also says that his servants ought to be where he is. In other words, we ought to be in the places where Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected. Remember, Jesus hung out with a rather unsavory crowd by the standards of polite company. He waded deep into places where people's lives were broken and where people were living without hope. He went to the poor and preached good news to them. He went to the broken-hearted and promised them new hope. He went to the outcasts of society and proclaimed the coming of God's Kingdom. He went to those whose hearts were hardened by the desire for wealth and he proclaimed that they were free of proving their self worth by the amount of their material possessions.

The politics of the Church, if it is to be faithful to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, must be willing to go into the places where Jesus went. It must be at its core a politics of evangelism where the people, the principalities, and the powers of this world are presented with the Good News of Jesus; God reconciling the world in the person of Jesus Christ. That means, for example, that we must go to where the poor are and minister to them, not because we are exceptionally nice people given to doing good works because of our niceness. No, we minister to the poor because that is the politics of Jesus. And the same is true for the broken-hearted, the outcast, and those whose hearts have been hardened by their wealth.

We don't need political action committees to do that. We simply need to be the Church. We need to recognize that many in the Church have power-envy. They want to wade into the politics of the world and operate there using the world's methods and tactics. But we have already been given the methods and tactics for our politics - namely the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This isn't a call to withdraw from world around us. On the contrary, it's a call from the Lord to get in deeper, but to do so practicing the politics of Jesus. If we want to serve him, we have to follow him and go with him wherever he calls us to go. By the world's standards, as I said, that will often appear to be impractical, irrational, ineffective, and sometimes just plain strange. But that is the way God has given us to overcome the world. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the map we are given to follow.             

Those of you who have young children or who have had young children know that when it rains constantly for an entire day your wits reach their end well before the rain or the day does. On one such day, I was in this predicament. My 6-year old son was badgering me about having nothing to do, so I had a bright idea. I ripped out a world map from an old National Geographic, cut the map into a whole bunch of odd pieces, gave him some scotch tape, and then told him to pretend it was a jigsaw puzzle and tape it back together.  He looked perplexed, but eager, so I smiled a self-satisfied smile and headed back to the book I was reading. I was sure that it would take him hours to reconnect the map. But less than ten minutes later, he came to me saying he was finished. He showed me the entire map of the world taped perfectly back together. My son said it was easy. "At frist," he said, "it was hard. But then I turned over one piece of the map and on the other side I saw the eyes of man. I then turned over all the pieces and realized that the other side of the map was a man's face. Once I taped his face together, I just turned over the page and the world was back in its right place."

Our fragmented and confusing world is reconnected only through the person of Jesus. Once we have that picture clear, the world falls into place. That doesn't mean the world won't confuse or confound us, because it will. What it does mean is that we will have the ability to understand our role in God's ongoing reconciliation of the world to himself in Jesus Christ. That's the politics of Jesus. If we focus on following Jesus, we will serve him. It's that simple. By the standards of the politics of this world, we Christians will often appear as wild-eyed liberals to some folks and just as often as hopelessly conservative to others. At times, we will appear reactionary and at other times, we'll appear revolutionary. That's not because we will be inconsistent. It's merely because we have chosen not to follow the agenda of any political ideology in this world. If we are truly going to be the Church, then that's the only road for us to be on, because that is the way the Church has been given for reconciling the world back to God. AMEN.

© 2006, Saint Philip's Episcopal Church
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 218, Durham, NC 27702
Telephone 919-682-5708, Fax 919-683-1857

Webmasters: Jack Mitchell, David Smith