Proper 11 (July 17-23)
Texts: Ephesians 2:11-22;
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jer 23:1-6
LEARNING TO TALK POLITICS . . . GOD’S POLITICS
I’m a Trekkie. I think I’ve watched every single Star Trek TV show and movie ever released. Many of them numerous times, with the total shows watched no doubt numbering in the thousands. My three oldest sons have followed suit. And among my favorite episodes are the time travel episodes or movies. The most serious is the 8th movie (Star Trek: First Contact), where they have to go back in time to stop the Borg from assimilating the entire population of Earth. That’s what the Borg do. They turn you into half machines and plug you into a collective mind against your will. Resistance is futile. They will assimilate you. Except in the 8th movie where the Enterprise goes back in time and stops them.
Then, there’s the 4th movie (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home), my favorite, where an ancient probe from space comes to earth trying to communicate with the most intelligent species from the first time it had visited earth, namely, the Humpback whale. But Humpbacks are extinct in the 23rd century, so the probe is causing great havoc in the oceans trying to communicate to a species that’s no longer there. The crew of the Enterprise have to go back to the 20th century to capture some Humpback whales and bring them back to the 23rd century. It’s not only a good dramatic story, but it’s also very funny. Such as when Scottie talks to a desktop computer expecting it to follow his voice commands. “Computer, oh, computer.” No response. Doctor McCoy hands him a mouse, and Scottie says, “How quaint.”
This has been my quaint little way to introduce a thought experiment about how we react to sermons that talk about politics. If my own confirmation self was transported 55 years into the future to listen to my sermons today, how would my confirmation self react? He’d be uncomfortable, to say the least, more like shocked. Because he wouldn’t have the benefit of that of 55 years of gradually coming to cherish a completely different way of reading the Bible and especially of understanding the Gospel. I was raised in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and, even though we were moderate and not super conservative, there was still the general piety that one never mixes religion and politics. I grew up and went to confirmation in the 1960’s, and I never remember talking about the huge issues of that time, like the Viet Nam War or the Civil Rights Movement.
But the latter, the Civil Rights Movement, is at the heart of today’s Second Reading from Ephesians. Paul presents the Gospel as God making peace through the cross of Jesus the Messiah. In its most poignant moment, Paul says that God is doing nothing less than creating one new humanity in place of the two. What are the two? For Paul the main division was between Jew and Gentile. What is the main division for us today? Unfortunately, there’s so many to choose from. But isn’t the most basic and persistent division due to our construction of the concept of race over the past 500 years, dividing especially between white people and people of color? If Paul time-traveled 2000 years into the future, wouldn’t he be living out the Gospel by working tirelessly to heal the divisions between the races, as he did between Jew and Gentile in the 1st century? For him, healing those basic divisions is the Gospel.
A couple verses before today’s reading, Paul says this: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8). Yea, the Lutheran Gospel, right?! Grace! Yes, but we can’t stop there, as we often have done as Lutherans. Because Paul is also going to tell us what that grace looks like, as lived out by followers of Jesus. We seemed to have focused on the grace as a forgiveness that enables us to go to heaven when we die. But that’s not what Paul talks about. The New Testament writers seldom do, otherwise they wouldn’t teach us to pray things like, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” No, the “So then” comes in the first verse of today’s reading,1 verse eleven, and continues right through verse 16. What does the grace of God look like on earth as it is in heaven? It looks like peace.
Through the cross of Jesus the Messiah, God has a new politics of peace to try out, where we are virtually becoming one new humanity by the healing of those things which divide us. In Paul’s day it was the religious divide between Jew and Gentile. If he were alive today, it would no doubt mean standing against racism and working to heal it. And you can’t talk about such things without learning to talk about how God’s politics are so very different than our typical politics. In today’s reading, he uses the Greek words politeia and politēs from which we get our English word “politics.” Paul is literally talking politics! Our citizenship in the kingdom of God and what that means. (See extra points about this in your Sermon Notes.2) And in the weeks ahead, we will see how Paul instructs and guides the Ephesians to live that new politics from God. Today, I’ll end with a preview of how we might live those politics in our time.
Last Sunday afternoon, I went up to Milwaukee for a large, four-hour rally against White Nationalism, hosted by MICAH, an affiliate of our local Racine Interfaith Coalition. One of the speakers was Jim Wallis, author of the book The False White Gospel.3 He’s also author of this book America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America.4 If you and I are to live the Gospel in our time, I submit to you that we need to follow the lead of people like Jim Wallis in working to heal racism and its closely related spinoff, White Christian Nationalism. Pastor Jim happens to be exactly my age and grew up where I grew up, in Detroit. He began to notice as a young man what I was missing in the church of my youth. It was missing in his church, too — talk about really important things like racism. For him it hasn’t been a gradual change over many years like me. He immediately made it his mission as a follower of Jesus to learn fresh ways of reading the Bible for guidance in taking up the important issues that we normally consider to be “politics.”
But I’d like to end this morning with a story from Jim Wallis’ book,5 a story about Pastor Jim practicing what he preaches. It’s a story about a prominent white evangelical leader who had become one of Pastor Jim’s biggest “enemies,” and yet Pastor Jim was able to take advantage of an opening in order to turn him into a friend. This evangelical leader, Bill Bright,6 was the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ, which created the “four spiritual laws” to bring salvation to college students. Bright, a former politically conservative businessman from Southern California, got involved in one of the first efforts to create what would become the “religious right.” They developed a plan with a curriculum for infiltrating prayer groups to infuse right-wing politics and even conservative political candidates into Christian circles. He worked with politicians like John Conlan, a right-wing congressman from Arizona, who had hoped to become president one day.
Pastor Jim, at the time, worked at Sojourners magazine, a progressive Christian journal. They had heard rumors about Campus Crusade’s plan to back Congressman Conlan in a run for President, and eventually found sources to investigate the story. One of them was a former FBI agent then attending Fuller Theological Seminary. Bill Bright was very hard to track down to talk to about this clandestine effort, but Pastor Jim finally reached him and gave him the chance to refute the evidence they had found, and even to offer a response in our upcoming story. Bright only said, “If you publish this, I will destroy you!”
Despite the threats, Sojourners published a cover story in 1976 called “The Plan to Save America” detailing what was indeed the first attempt to manipulate evangelical Christians into right-wing conservative politics and candidates. It got picked up by national media around the country, Conlan lost his next election, and Bill Bright was very embarrassed.
Soon after Pastor Jim attended an evangelical prayer breakfast meeting and Bill Bright happened to be there as well. When it came time to make self-introductions around the room, he said, “I am Bill Bright, founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ, and I am not a liar like Jim Wallis!” Vitriol against Pastor Jim and Sojourners continued to emanate from Bill Bright over the years.
But here’s how the opening came about. They had a mutual friend, Mary Ann Richardson, the owner of the El Caribe Motel in Daytona Beach, Florida, who provided the Campus Crusade summer staff a base for their beach outreach, and also often offered Pastor Jim and others a restful place to write. Mary Ann was always worried that when Bill and Pastor Jim were there at the same time, they might bump into each other — maybe in the laundry room!
Once when she told Pastor Jim that Bill was also in the motel, he decided to reach out to him. Pastor Jim called his room and said, “Bill, you and I have had some difficult times in the past, but I wondered if you might come for a walk with me on the beach?” Bill said yes, and they went for a long walk and talk. “Tell me how you came to Christ,” Bill asked Jim. He told Bill his story and then asked Bill for his — those stories are always bonding for Christians. Then Bill said something that completely surprised Pastor Jim. “Jim, as you know, I am a Great Commission person” (the final instruction from Jesus to his disciples in Matthew 28). “Yes, I know,” Pastor Jim told him. “Well,” said Bill, “in my older years, I have noticed what Jesus said at the end of that Great Commission scripture. . . . Jesus told his disciples to ‘teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you.’” Then Bill shared, “I have come to see that Jesus told us to care for the poor, and I had never understood that before. Jim, you have been saying and doing that for a long time. Please tell me how the poor in America are doing today.” So they talked for an even longer time, sitting at the beach after their walk was over. Bill asked Pastor Jim at the end if they could pray together — and they did.
Not too long after that, Pastor Jim got word that Bill Bright had died and was handed a letter that had just come in to him at Sojourners. It was from Bill Bright. His letter told Jim that he had been given some money and decided to divide it up and give it to people and ministries that he believed were calling people to follow Jesus; and he wanted to give some of that to Sojourners. With Bill’s letter, that he had apparently written just days before he died, was a check made out to Sojourners. It was the most dramatic story in Pastor Jim’s life of an enemy turned into a friend. And it came from our discussing the Scriptures together, reexamining the words of Jesus, and telling each other their own faith stories.
That’s our mission, too, Brothers and Sisters, especially during these turbulent times! To read Scripture together and understand the Gospel in fresh and hopefully more faithful ways. To learn to get over our discomfort in talking ‘politics and religion’ because the Gospel is God’s politics of healing our political divides. Let us learn to have these conversations among ourselves and with our fellow citizens. Because through the cross God has truly given us the way of peace, the way of salvation. Can we see and participate in that saving power for our time and place? Heaven knows there’s so much in this world of ours that needs saving. Will you and I join in? Let’s learn to talk politics . . . God’s politics. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 21, 2024
Notes
1. I hadn’t noticed that the version of the Second Reading in our bulletin had dropped the “So then.” It was from our denomination’s worship resource website (sundaysandseasons.com) and they presumably left it out because we weren’t reading the verses referred to by “so then.” It was a mistake on my part not to catch it since I am providing those verses and making a big deal about the “so then.”
2. From the “Sermon Notes”: EXTRA POINT (something not in sermon): How does the cross bring about this new politics of one new humanity? How does offering his body broken and blood poured-out lead to healing things like Racism? Because on the cross Jesus allows himself to be killed by the deadliness of such divides to expose them. And notice it works by taking the place of the oppressed group of people. He’s an indigenous man on the fringes of the Roman Empire. His willingness to lay down his life reveals the love that stands up to empire. Like the willingness to be killed during the Civil Rights Movement by standing against and working to heal Racism — to turn enemies to friends, as Martin Luther King, Jr talked about it.
Here’s a KEY INSIGHT, then: learning to understand the Gospel from the viewpoint of an indigenous man oppressed by empire is the key to learning a new way to interpret the Gospel. In my growing up in church in the 60’s, we had a vivid example of this in the Civil Rights Movement, and we never talked it because “That’s politics.” Yes, it is! And that’s why we need to learn to talk about God’s politics coming into the world through Jesus.
3. Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024).
4. Jim Wallis, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (Brazos Press, 2016).
5. Wallis, False White Gospel, 229-31.
6. For more on Bill Bright see the history page at Campus Crusade: Bill and Vonette Bright | Cru; and Wikipedia: Bill Bright – Wikipedia.
