American Christian

As an individual Christian and an American I can simultaneously love my country and dislike the way my fellow citizens conduct their lives. I can care for the country I love and still mourn that our leaders and the voters are making bad, even immoral decisions. While I salute the flag [ I am one of the few people who actually sings the national anthem before a ball game], I can argue that the President is wrongheaded and is destroying the county of my birth.

I deplore our un-Christlike foreign policy, our economic policies that prefer the rich and our environmental policies that ruin God’s earth. I come to these views after 62 years of worship in God’s church and nearly as many years of Bible reading and study.

As a priest of the church there are some restrictions on what I can say about politics whether I am speaking for the church in the community or preaching the Gospel on a Sunday morning.
1. I may not suggest that God prefers the country I love. I may not say that God prefers one political movement or party over another....except..... Are there times when as priest and spokesperson for the church I should say to my people - “This candidate works for action that Christians should not support” “This political movement is leading us in immoral directions” May I ever say, “This policy is in opposition to the heart of the Gospel?” No doubt there are preachers who do that. They are usually ‘conservatives’ who oppose abortion and homosexuality.

Is there a place/time when Christian leaders may and should tell their people and the larger culture, “This war is wrong.” “These tax cuts hurt the working poor.” “Our relationships with other countries violate Gods’ law.”

Homework for politicians

Dear Mr. President and all candidates for public office:
Go read these books.

Wallis, Jim God's Politics, How the right gets it wrong and the left just doesn't get it.
Carter, Jimmy Our Endangered values: America’s moral crisis
Laytham, D. Brent ed. God is not...Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American
Lerner, Michael, The Left Hand of God: taking back our country from the religious right
Bruce, Feiler Abraham

Then come back and we’ll talk.

Ephesians 5 and 6

It is a false idea to try to get to the ‘real’ Jesus of history or the ‘real’ Jesus behind the New Testament scriptures. Since Jesus is alive, to try to find who he ‘really’ was is to find a dead man. Our quest now is to find the living Christ. What does he do? Who is he? What does he demand of us now? So as we examine scripture and the events of the first century A.D., we use that material for our current quest.

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians, in the fifth and sixth chapters assumes what was commonly held to be true in his time. Husbands owned and commanded wives, Children are always subject to their fathers and slavery is morally acceptable. Most of us don’t accept those values. Here is a place were ‘Biblical values’ are suspect. We owe it to the scriptures we revere to look at them closely, discerning how what was said two thousand years ago in an other culture in another language might speak to us now.

In chapter five, verse 25, Paul tells husbands that they must love their wives, ‘just as Christ loved the church.’ Christ loved the church by dying for it. So husbands far from lording it over their wives or ‘owning’ them in the way men did even just a hundred years ago, are asked to give sacrificial love for them. How’s that for Biblical values?

Children should, of course, obey their parents. [Ephesians 6: 1-4] Unless, their parents lie, cheat, steal, sleep around, get drunk and beat their kids. Instead, parents are to bring them up in the love of God.

Slavery. We just plain don’t agree with the Bible’s easy acceptance of slavery. Why? Because the Biblical values of love, care for the downtrodden, justice and mercy are higher than the values of patriarchal culture, literalism, and violence. You can find those negative values in the Bible. We say that the first list is higher.

Ephesians 6: 10-18 sets militarism on its head. What is of high value is not breastplates and swords and what you can do with them, but righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the holy spirit and what we do with them.

The ‘real’ Jesus is the one who lives with us each day, pushing us to justice, mercy and humble walking.