The Politics of the Kingdom

October 22, 2006

Text: Matthew 7:7-12
The gospel of Jesus Christ – the good news – begins in Matthew’s account with these words, “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” From that beginning, then, to this day on which the church of Jesus Christ gathered at Clarendon will take to the streets urging our neighbors to vote no on amendment one when they go to the polls on election day next month.

How do we make that leap? Is there a connection between Jesus’ words and what we do here today? What does any of this have to do with our lives? Is this not a dangerous mix of church and politics? Do we risk reducing Jesus to a precinct captain in a get-out-the-vote drive for a partisan political agenda?

And, falling as this Sunday does, in the midst of a season in which we are focusing on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, what does any of this have to do with Jesus’ words in the center of the gospel?

To begin with, we cannot help but make a leap from Jesus’ time to our own. If we do not make that imaginative connection, the gospel is a dead letter; it has no resonance and no meaning for any part of our lives if we cannot make the leap from beginning of the gospel all the way forward to this day. That is essentially true whether the connections we make lead us to progressive thought and action or in totally other directions.

Of course, it is a bit easier for people of progressive thought to accept this notion of imagination and interpretation. Too often our conservative sisters and brothers cannot or will not make the move, and accuse progressives of not taking scripture seriously when we do not take it literally.

I assure this morning, I am taking scripture with utmost seriousness as I offer an imaginative connection that, I trust, connects directly to our lives this morning.

How do we do that? In a sense, the Sermon on the Mount itself provides the key. Jesus repeats there this phrase, “you have heard it said … but I say to you.” In that one gesture, Jesus indicates a great deal about the kind of community he is gathering to himself, and the kind of community we are called to create as his followers today. It is a community born of and tied to a tradition. Indeed, if “you have not heard it said,” then you begin at a great disadvantage. This word comes first and most clearly to those who belong already to a tradition of moral and spiritual thought. In other words, the word of Jesus comes here to an already religious community – that is, to one bound back to a tradition of reading sacred texts.

At the same time, Jesus here insists, that community will also be one of rereading. “You have heard it said” … “but I say to you.” For example, “you have heard it that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’”

Now that ancient saying may sound somewhat brutal to our ears, but actually the notion of “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” represented a great leap forward in justice from a time when an injury suffered in a fight – say a lost eye or broken tooth – might instigate a bloody feud leaving entire tribes maimed. Into that frontier justice, the “men of old,” as Jesus puts it, crafted a more merciful and balanced justice marked by the traditions of the law as encoded in the sacred texts of Israel. An eye for an eye being a much more balanced sense of justice than, say, an entire family, a whole tribe, for one injured eye.

Then along comes Jesus saying, pull out those ancient texts and let us reread, let us reinterpret that founding principle of justice and mercy and push it toward a commonwealth of belovedness in which “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”

So how do we, today, make the connection between the gospel as it comes to us in our sacred texts and the good news that we, at CPC, feel called to share with the world? Well, we listen to that ancient story of imagination and rereading and we engage in imaginative reading ourselves.

As we read and reread, we begin to see the contours of a relationship between Jesus’ words and our actions today. Now it’s clear that Jesus speaks here to an audience that already has some connection to his tradition. On the other hand, he also clearly aims beyond the confines of the established community. The Sermon on the Mount is no pep-talk to the club of the saved. Rather, Jesus’ words call forth a radically expanded understanding of who’s in and who’s out. After all, “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

You don’t have to meet some culturally or ecclesiastically defined set of guidelines to ask, to search, to knock, and when you do ask, when you do search, when you do knock, you will be received.

Indeed, I cannot think of a more comforting and, at the same time, more challenging and prophetic a text for us to hear this morning as we prepare to go door-to-door for justice than these few simple words: “knock and the door will be opened.”

On a deeper level, Jesus’ words challenge us to understand the good news as fundamentally inclusive. Where Jesus has issued an invitation, we have no business erecting a barrier; and that’s the good news of the gospel sadly missed by the framers of the Marshall-Newman amendment, who act in the name of a narrow, tribal, conservative and constricted view of scripture and of marriage.

Of course, one might fairly ask of me – straight, married, obvious insider to the religious community – what has any of this to do with me, or with you if you are not part of an unmarried couple? What has this to do with “the rest of us”?

The other week, when Hannah and I were tabling over at the Metro stop – handing out cookies and flyers about amendment one, an African-American man stopped to talk with us. It was not perfectly clear where he stood on the issue when we began talking, so when he asked, “so, why should I be opposed to this amendment?” I turned the question back to him, asking, “well, why should you be?”

He simply said, “discrimination never stops with the first target.”

It was his own, deeply personal way of saying what Martin Luther King often said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

We are all connected, joined in an inescapable web of mutuality. I cannot stand by and see my friends suffer without sharing in their suffering and being compelled to act to end it.

By speaking out today we give life to the golden rule that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

And when we see anyone discriminated against – knowing that we ourselves would not like to be victims of discrimination – we are compelled to act; just as we would have others act for us when the tables get turned. We are all connected. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

At a level deeper than the words of this amendment – deeper even than its potential and serious unintended consequences – at a level deeper than all of that, this amendment is about us – each and every one of us. It names us and it defines the kind of commonwealth we share.

If, as I have suggested often this fall, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount casts a vision and articulates a founding constitution for the commonwealth of belovedness, then Marshall-Newman, if passed, would leave in its wake a constitution for an impoverished commons of bigotry, discrimination and injustice.

So it is in the name of Jesus’ vision and for the sake of a commonwealth of belovedness that we walk the neighborhood this day. Now some will say that doing so dangerously mixes politics and pulpits, and lowers that high wall of separation between church and state. More dangerously, some may say, we risk reducing Jesus to political spokesperson for our side of a partisan divide.

First, let’s be clear: Jesus is not a Republican … or a Democrat. GOP does not stand for God’s Own Party, and neither is the election of any Democrat going to bring about the coming of the beloved community or the reign of the kingdom of God. The rise or fall of the issue we speak out on today will neither amplify nor silence the still small voice of God calling out for justice and for truth in the public square.

But let us also be equally clear about this: God’s voice does persistently cry out for justice and for truth precisely in the public square; and the God of the Jewish and Christian scripture is everywhere always on the side of the outcast and the marginalized. Jesus does not proclaim power for the pious, nor triumph for those who trivialize our politics by focusing exclusively on our sex lives; instead, Jesus proclaims good news for the poor, release for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed.

Jesus calls us to lead holy, compassionate, loving and sacrificial lives of service to one another. His call to us is personal, but never private; and it is inherently, from the first words of the gospel, political.

Repent, for the kingdom has drawn near. Notice the language: repent – turn from your old way of living – personal; but not private, for then this word: kingdom – an inherently political word choice suggesting powers and social structures.

Repent, for the kingdom has drawn near.

In other words, turn your life around for there is a new order emerging – a new social order – and you are called to participate in its fulfillment. It is an order founded on a profoundly inclusive vision of human society in which the traditional structures of power no longer pertain: the outcast are welcomed, the orphans and widows empowered, those previously considered sinners have a seat of prominence at the welcome table.

The poor receive the entire kingdom; mourners are comforted, the meek inherit the earth, and peacemakers are called the children of God. This is the good news of the gospel. This is the commonwealth that we seek. This is why we walk.

Ask, and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock, and the doors shall be opened. Let it be so, for all of God’s beloved, and for Christ’s church gathered at Clarendon. Amen.

Rev. Dr. David Ensign