Christians have to be political

The question of whether our faith is ‘political’ is a really important one.

The word ‘political’ is easily confusing and off-putting to lots of Christians, who see politics as an inherently dirty business. We don’t want to be part of all that hateful slanging and dirty tricks. The word actually comes from ‘polis’, meaning the city or town, the people who live together in a place. What is political is about how we live together and what, and who, holds sway in our lives.

Christian faith is surely political, in this sense. It has much to do with how we live together and whose will and purpose and values hold sway in our communities. The New Testament is a very political document. At its heart is the earliest Christian confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’. To say this, at the time when the NT was written, was a very political thing to say: it declared that Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. It was for many people dangerous to say this. But it also declared whose will directed their lives and to whom they looked for true peace. (Surely the same is still true today: to confess Jesus is to declare that other powers are not the rulers of the world.) Many of Jesus’ actions were also political: in offering a new way for the good of the community and, at times directly and others implicitly, challenging the old order or the Roman powers.

I guess the other thing that Christians find really hard here is that difficult political issues force us to take sides. We like to think of ourselves as fair and impartial. But is it always right to be impartial? Is God always impartial; or, as many recent thinkers have been saying, is God partial: on the side of those who are poor and oppressed, and thus challenging those who remain rich and powerful, not caring about the poor and maybe even actively or passively oppressing the weak? This is a big area of debate, precisely when we have a sneaking suspicion that it might be about us!

I don’t think we have a choice about whether or not we are ‘political’. The question is how we are political. When I was young we used to have a saying, ‘Not to decide is to decide.’ It meant: even if you pretend that you are not taking a stand on the issues of the day, you are still taking a stand. Not to speak out about an issue is to say that you don’t mind what happens. If we say nothing about injustice, then we are part of the injustice. (This makes life really tough! I know I am a failure, or a moral squib, on many issues. I just hope and pray that other Christians will be able to take a stand at times when I can’t, or maybe am too timid …)

Today, April 8, we remember Martin Luther King, who was gunned down on this day in 1968. He once said, ‘The ultimate tragedy is not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.’

We are political. The question is: Do we act self-consciously and responsibly, or do we ignore realities and end up presenting values and images of ourselves (and our Lord) which may not in fact be the truth? This is where we need each other, as members of the Christian community. This is the kind of thing early Baptists used to discuss in their church meetings, often!

But there is another thing, while I’m going on. To act responsibly, we also need some vision of what we think God is doing in the world. Christian engagement in the world is not about saving the world. Only God can, and will, do that. It is not about the church taking over the world. It is about us praying, thinking, studying, talking and searching together, to discern what God is doing, or yearning to do, in this situation, in that community need, in that emerging possibility: in everything from a need for a new kindergarten or health centre to questions about gambling, war, taxation and so on. We need a vision of what God is doing in the world, not just in our individual, private lives. The church does not have a monopoly on good will, either. There are many good people seeking the good of the city, who may or may not join us to pray. We may be called to join forces with them, towards some purpose in God’s way: and we may act for Christian reasons while they act for other reasons. In all this, there will be different points of view. We do not always agree on the best way to do things within the church, let alone in the wider community and the nation. But we need to work at it, and we need to be in there to make a difference. May God bless and guide you both, in being ‘political’ and as servants of the Gospel.

Easter blessings to you.

(From a Netfriend)