“The certainty that Christ offers us is quite different from the political offers we are given in this present age.”
O God be in my mouth as I speak for you and fill this
place with your great grace that we may leave this place less of what we use to
be and more of what we ought to be through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who
humble themselves will be exalted.
If you are like me, you are probably worn out from this
endless season of political campaigning.
You cannot turn on the television without seeing some ad
that claims such and such political opponent is the vilest person who ever
lived. Were the Iowa Caucuses really less than a year ago? Thankfully in about
nine days, it will all be finished and we can start getting ready for 2008.
Without going into the merits of either candidate, I was
reflecting that presidential campaigning is one of the few occasions where we
allow two men the right to fly around our country claiming how great they each
are. Normally when we raise our children we try and impress upon them the
importance of cultivating the virtue of humility.
My parents always taught me the importance of thanking
others for my success whether it was my teachers, scoutmasters or maybe perish
the thought I owed some of my success to them.
This does not mean that we shouldn’t honor those who
achieve something special like winning a gold medal at the Olympics. But it is important to remember in those
cases the medal is a reward for years of hard work and dedication. We would not
give a gold medal to someone who claimed they were the greatest at
pole-vaulting unless they were willing to compete against other athletes from
around the world.
To put it another way, high achievement in some human
endeavors is recognized after you have done something to merit the honor. The
gold medal comes after you win the race not before.
Political campaigning is a bit different. Both candidates
claim they can keep us safer, and or/ more prosperous than the other person
running.
As a Christian, I regard these claims skeptically.
How do you judge safety? How do you judge prosperity? How
do we judge people who consistently say, you don’t want the other fellow,
because he is to quote Jesus’ parable a thief or a rogue.
I suspect that if we were honest we would say that we want
someone to be our president who would guarantee that nothing bad would ever
happen to us again.
That is a natural desire in a post 9-11 world. We want to
protect our children from harm and to preserve our way of life for generations
that are to come.
But I suspect previous generations would have used other
types of traumatic events to articulate their fear. Perhaps, some of you
sitting here today would have spoken of the issue of personal safety in a
post-pearl harbor world.
My point is that we must always be wary of promises of
safety that come cloaked in the language of political rhetoric.
Particularly when both sides would like us to believe that
their opponent is the worst Pharisee or tax collector you ever met.
At the same time, as a Christian I am concerned that we
are idolizing something that cannot deliver the goods to us. No one can really
offer us that kind of protection in a fallen world where evil men and women are
committed to the destruction of our freedom and our liberty.
C.S. Lewis a half-century ago in a post-pearl harbor world
offered the following perspective on what it means to live in a world that is
threatened with nuclear destruction:
Believe me dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways…..it is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of a painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty….Let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint or a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
In other words, living out our Christian faith in today’s
world is not really much different from the challenges that have faced other
Christians in ages past.
There is very little in human life that can be certain for
us, whether we are waiting for the Romans to throw us to the lions or wondering
when the next terrorist attack may come.
The certainty that Christ offers us is quite different
from the political offers we are given in this present age.
This brings me back to Jesus’ own parable that speaks
directly to the kind of earthly certainty that so many people traffic in today.
Jesus addresses his words to those who trust only in
themselves and regard other people with contempt.
For Jesus, the question was one of individual mind-set.
Both men, the tax collector and Pharisee, come before God for worship in the
Temple. One is quite prepared to acknowledge that he falls short. Have mercy on
me Lord for I know that I am a sinner. The other believes that his way of life
is already worthy of worship and praise.
Thank you, God, that I am not a thief, a rogue, an
adulterer or that slimy old tax collector standing in the corner. If asked he would probably say that he is
the best person he knows when it comes to practicing humility. His form of humility though is a false idol,
erected by his own vanity in order to obscure the obligation he has to love
other people.
He has no trouble like our politicians claiming greatness
for himself because his security in life does not come from God but from the
things he does or he says.
He has run up what he thinks are a ledger of good deeds
that will get him into heaven. He does
not see how his worship of self is destroying the possibility of having a
relationship with God and other people. He forgets the age old lesson that none
of us sitting here today can love a God we have not seen, unless we are willing
to love the person sitting next to us in the pew.
This is the whole point of what Christians call the
incarnation. God loved us so much he took on our human form to be with us and
to show us the great depths of the divine love.
All our relationships with each other must ultimately be
seen in the light of the cross, what Jesus did for us, so that we could learn
what it was like to love all people, tax collectors, Pharisees, and yes even
politicians, the way that God loves each of us.
Most people do not really like to hear talk about incarnation, because it destroys the claims of those who think this world is an end to itself.
I understand their concern but they are misguided if they
believe that the incarnation is simply a poetic way of describing that Jesus
was an extra-special human being.
No, I believe that if we want to transform our Christian
witness in this world than our focus, as a church must be on God’s continuing
presence with us made possible by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
This is the exact same witness of Christian martyrs who
refused to worship Caesar as Lord. It is also a reminder that God’s version of
safety and prosperity are radically different from what this fallen world
offers to us.
Paul writes to Timothy in our epistle, “the Lord will
rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom.” Blessed
be the name of the Lord forever.