This Ministry for this Moment

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15, selected verses

March 6, 2016

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a presidential election campaign going on these days. I haven’t made much, if any, mention of that. It’s not because I don’t care about it, but we have chosen this Lenten season to focus on joy.

Seriously, I’m having a hard time recalling any political season that has been more generally soul-sucking and joyless than this one.

It’s also scary. All of the great fault lines that run beneath American public life are being exposed, and many of the deepest ones have been given sharp and dangerous shakes. I’ve had a couple of conversations with colleagues recently that circled around the question of how one decides when a particular political campaign reaches “status confessionis” – or “confessional status.” In other words – less Latin words – when must the church, if it is to remain true to its confession as the church of Jesus Christ, speak a guiding and, necessarily partisan word to the body politic, or, to put it in still other words, when does silence betray the church’s confession?

That’s essentially the question that Martin Luther King posed in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail in 1963 when he wrote:

… the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I am meeting young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.[1]

“When does the church cease to be the church?” King asked. When it fails to recognize that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and, then, when recognition dawns, it still fails to act.

The church betrays its confession and ceases to be the church when, in the interest of an orderly status quo, it fails to stand in active solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the victims of what is always already an unjust status quo.

Now, if you are expecting that my next move will be to endorse one candidate or to condemn another one, I hope you’re not disappointed when I say I don’t think we’re at that point. Yet.

That is to say, with respect to the current political moment, I do not think we are quite at a status confessionis. People of good faith, people who are trying to follow the way of Jesus in the world, can cast their votes for the whole range of candidates, without the specific endorsement or condemnation of the church or her ordained leadership. The confession of the church does not depend upon the partisan politics of this moment, though that may change in the days just ahead.

Nevertheless, we do have a particular calling for such a time as this. We have a ministry for this moment when the politics of our nation are profoundly broken. We have a ministry for this moment when a conservative evangelic author writes that the “leading Republican candidate to be the next leader of the free world would not pass my decency interview.”[2]

We have a ministry for this moment when a prominent progressive church leader, writing about that same candidate, says, “I grew up assuming that Republicans and Democrats, like my parents, were partners in managing the nation, that Congress was the place where ideology evolved into governance, and that the whole deal depended on civility, respect, and compromise. I am astonished at what has happened in 2016.”[3]

We have a ministry for this moment when a widely respected nonpartisan researcher for the Pew Research Center can warn, “The political partisanship now evident in the United States is not politics as usual. It is something different. And we should all be watching it very closely.”[4]

The Apostle Paul named the ministry for this moment quite clearly almost 2,000 years ago in his letter to the disputatious church at Corinth, telling that divided people that God “has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to God’s self, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ.”

We have been given the ministry of reconciliation. Is that not precisely what the present moment demands?

The gospel text this morning includes three “lost-and-found” parables. The set-up is this:

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 

The outsiders and the marginalized – the tax collectors and the sinners – are drawing near to Jesus. Why? Surely they must hear in his teaching some good news for their lives. Surely they must hear an invitation: you who have been consigned to the margins will be welcome to the table.

The powerful insiders object: “this fellow welcomes sinners and he even eats with them. Yuck!”

In response, Jesus tells these stories about a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep alone in the wilderness to seek out the lost one, a woman who loses one coin and spends an entire day scouring the house until she finds it, a father who kills the fatted calf to celebrate the return of his wasteful, wayward, lost son even as his other, faithful son watches resentfully.

These are parables of extravagant grace, and they work best when we recognize what has been lost. What has been lost? Well, in a word, us.

We are the lost ones, or, perhaps more specifically, something crucial to our common humanity has been lost.

During Lent this year we have focused on deep and authentic joy because deep and authentic joy is crucial to living life abundantly, to living faithfully, to living fully and richly into the kindom of God, to following Jesus in the world.

Deep joy, moreover, rests on two other attributes sadly lacking in so much of contemporary culture, politics, and, in truth, our lives in general: hope and sincerity.

We have turned hope into a punch line. The hip among us have embraced a stylish, detached, ironic cynicism. The less hip go for a more straightforward, mean-spirited version of the same thing: two sides of a lost coin.

If you offer sincere hope you are likely to be derided as naïve or worse. If you suggest that strength lies in community and harmony you will be called weak. If you have the unmitigated gall to suggest that true power comes from love it won’t be long before somebody mocks you for inviting people to share a “kumbaya moment.”

We all know – because, after all, inside the Beltway we’re all quite capable of being hip, detached, and ironic – we all know what kumbaya moments are, and we know to avoid them, or, at the very least, to avoid singing along when one happens, and, for sure, we’re too hip to, you know, actually sing Kumbaya itself, even though it is, for the record, in the hymnal -- #472.

Hey, I get that. I had my fill of that song around campfires as a kid, and I’ve avoided it most of my adult life.

But a couple of years ago – the summer of 2014, to be precise – I heard a story that gave the song new life for me, and that, more importantly, pushed me to think, anew, on what is lost in our joyless rush to cynicism.

The summer of 2014 was the 50^th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer, the voter registration drive led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other Civil Rights groups in the summer of 1964. Thousands of college students from across the United States signed up to work to register black voters in Mississippi, where, under Jim Crow laws, fewer than one in ten eligible blacks were registered.

Before deploying to Mississippi, the students attended one-week training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, on the campus of what is now Miami University. Before the end of the first session word came that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, young Civil Rights workers in the Freedom Summer project, had disappeared in rural Mississippi. It would be months before their bodies were found, buried in an earthen damn outside Philadelphia, Mississippi.

The leaders in Ohio gathered the student volunteers, shared the news of their colleagues’ disappearance, and invited the students to spend the next hour in thought and prayer as they discerned a way forward. When they reconvened, the leaders told them that they were free to go home if they liked. They said, “no one will feel you are any less if you choose to leave now.”

One of the students said, before we make any final decisions, let’s sing. They joined hands and sang, “we want freedom, Lord, come by here; we want justice, Lord, come by here; churches are burning, Lord, come by here; kumbaya Lord, kumbaya.” The next day, every one of those students went to Mississippi.

That’s a kumbaya moment. That is what real hope looks like. That is what sincere conviction and faith in this country and her promises looks like. That is what deep and abiding joy feels like. That is what ministry for this moment sounds like. That is what we have lost.

A church true to its confession seeks after what has been lost.

It’s not about an old song that can surely be cloying. It’s about an ancient spirit that is anything but. It is an ancient spirit of boundless love that drives a politics of welcome, of justice, and, yes, of joy. May it be so, before it is too late. Amen.

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[1] Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 300.

[2] https://maxlucado.com/decency-for-president/

[3] https://jmbpastor.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/building-walls-instead-of-bridges/

[4] http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/15/is-america-dangerously-divided/