Scripture: Matthew 15:32-39
I have elections on my mind this morning. Doesn’t sound very spiritual, does it? Pretty hard to think of the electoral process these days as being in any way spiritual, no matter how eager candidates may be to be seen as people of faith. Nevertheless, the elections are on my mind, and I can’t help but have my words this morning come partly from the fact that Tuesday is Election Day.
Actually, our Congregational ancestors would have found nothing in the least unusual about this, and their words would have been much less restrained than mine are going to be. Once upon a time in colonial New England among the Pilgrims and Puritans—who over time turned into Congregationalists, who fifty years ago merged with the other groups who formed the United Church of Christ—once upon a time in colonial New England the election sermon would have been standard practice, so much so that you would be expecting me to preach about the elections today, and would consider me derelict if I did not. I’m not quite as sure about Virginia history, but I believe the practice was widespread in Anglican Virginia as well. In any case, in New England at least, election sermons were a firmly embedded part of church life, as firmly a part of church life as Christmas and Easter.
That was because in their worldview everything a person did was of a religious nature. If you were a fisherman, you fished to the glory of God. If you were a farmer, you farmed to the glory of God. If you were a teacher, you taught to the glory of God. If you made shoes, you made shoes to the glory of God. And if you cooked dinner, went to church, or went to cast your vote, it was all to a godly purpose. I’m not suggesting that everyone actually felt that way about it. I can’t get into the minds of people three hundred years ago so have no way of really saying whether they felt that way, but I rather suspect that most people did not. But that was the theory, and it’s a theory that is still worth considering, the idea that whatever we do, we do to the glory of God, and that such things as going to the polls on election day is a godly activity.
The election sermon was an accepted and expected part of church life also because shaping a good and a godly society was part and parcel of what Christianity was all about for them. Again, I can’t say everyone understood things that way. I can’t say that people weren’t concerned about the afterlife, weren’t concerned about heaven and hell and where they would be spending eternity and things like that, but again at least in theory those were things that Christians living this life in this world couldn’t know much about or do much about. And in any case there was work to be done in this world. It was not that it was a citizen’s civic duty to vote. It was that it was a Christian’s religious duty to vote, and to do so with a vision in your mind of what God has in mind for us. How could you not vote if you cared about shaping society to the will of God? And so there were election sermons everywhere. They tried to remind you what you should be thinking about when you cast your ballot, and sometimes they told you who to vote for. Because the purpose of religion, after all, was not just personal, to make individuals feel closer to God or to offer individuals comfort or the assurance of eternal salvation. The purpose of religion in part, in large part, was to create a godly society, not just godly individuals. Generalizations like this are always iffy, but these folks were a pretty this-worldly group of people, and their religion was too. They cared about the state of the world because they believed God cared.
Not that I’m nostalgic about this. These were also, our ancestors were, folks who brought us witch trials and banished Baptists and Quakers, so clearly there is a big difference between the vision of the godly society they were working toward and thought you should vote for and my own vision of what a godly society might look like, that is a society that expresses somehow the heart of God and fulfills the divine purpose. But although our ancestors do not make me proud in every way, and although I certainly don’t think we should be trying to recover their worldview in its entirety, there is something of their spirit that is worth holding on to. And so, when I question the role that Election Day ought to play in our spiritual lives, as I am about to do, it is not because I think religion is just about our personal relationship to God. It is not because I think when we’re in church we should be focusing on the spiritual side of our lives and put politics aside, religion being something quite different from politics. It is not because I think we can compartmentalize our lives so that over here is the political sphere and over here is the spiritual. It is not because spirituality and politics need to be kept separate from each other. None of that. I appreciate my ancestors’ view that all of life is religious and that our task while we live on the earth is not just to live good lives ourselves and mind our own business but to try our best, flawed creatures though we are, to try our best to shape the whole of life and our way of living together into something good and pleasing to God. In those ways, I stand quite willingly in the tradition of Election Day sermons and what they represented.
But I do want to raise the question of what role elections play, or ought to play, in the life of faith from a slightly different perspective. Elections are on my mind as I come to worship today in part because I am concerned about what effect the results of the elections will have on my state of mind, and I am standin’ in the need of prayer. Elections are on my mind as I come to worship today because I know I need to prepare myself for defeat and I need the assistance of my faith and my faith community to deal with that.
I will use the example of the proposed constitutional amendment because you know where I stand on that and we have taken a position together. I have said before that there is a sadness for me, a heaviness of spirit just because such an amendment is proposed. I have brought that sadness to you and to God. It will be even worse, of course, if the proposed amendment is voted into the constitution, and I know I need to prepare myself for that.
But I also need to prepare myself for the possibility that the amendment will be defeated, because although that would be wonderful, although it would be a source of great encouragement and gratification and satisfaction, to be very much satisfied is something I need to be free of every bit as much as excessive discouragement. If the proposed amendment were defeated, it would be truly significant. To say that it doesn’t matter all that much is to ignore both the potential practical consequences for real live human beings and the psychological impact of what it says about the nature of our society. To say that it doesn’t matter all that much would be a heartless thing to say.
At the same time, whatever happens on Tuesday, on this issue or on any other matter that is being put to a vote anywhere, whatever happens on Tuesday good or bad, it is just one small event in a much larger and longer journey toward shalom for all God’s beloved people. What happens on Tuesday truly does matter…and yet at the same time in another sense doesn’t matter so much at all. When the dust settles and the noise mercifully dies down the tasks that face us will be pretty much the same as they always have been and will continue to be. They will include trying to be caring of one another. They will include trying to move through one day and then another and another with as much grace and compassion as we can. And they will include moving however best we can toward a world in which God’s image is recognized and honored in each person, and where that recognition is reflected in the ways we live together in society. Regardless of what happens with regard to ballot question #1, pretty much the same work will await us. And whoever wins any election in Virginia or anywhere else, the work of trying to unravel the fabric of racism will not be able to be trusted to the people who have been elected, even if every one of them is the person you thought preferable. That work too is ours to do and we will need not to be distracted from it by any temporary victories or setbacks.
What I am saying I guess is that the journey of faith is a long one. Not a startling insight, but nevertheless one I find I need to keep clearly in focus. And I am praying today that while recognizing the very real importance of things that take place along the way, such as elections, that I also be constantly seeking the vision and the strength that will sustain me for the long haul. Not every aspect of the journey of faith has to do with shaping the world into a more just and loving place, but some of it certainly does, and the need I feel and pray for most as we approach election is to persevere in that calling. I need bread for that longer journey I am on.
I don’t usually focus on just one sentence from a scripture reading. It’s better to at least look at a whole story or passage so that you don’t just take words out of context. But as I was thinking about the phrase bread for the journey and remembered the story of the feeding of the people in the wilderness and looked it up, I didn’t make it all the way through the story. Jesus said, “I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; I do not want to send them away hungry for they may faint on the way.” The disciples said to him, “Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?”
I stopped right there. And I confess I turned it into a personal question. “Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?” became for me more: “Where do we find enough bread to feed the great need that is within us? Where do I find the bread I need to persevere in my journey of faith?” Jesus was right. There is a very real danger of fainting anywhere along the way.
It’s not such a simple question, I think. I think we should distrust simple answers in any case. And you know I’m not going to give you a neat list of three, four, or five answers to the question of where we can find bread for the journey. I am going to tell you that for me it has something to do with prayer, not something to do with prayer, a lot to do with prayer. Not prayer in the sense of a series of requests, or demands, that we present to God, but prayer in the sense of an ongoing practice, whatever form it may take for each of us, prayer in the sense of an ongoing practice that itself needs to be persevered in and that helps us to set our hearts in the right place, that helps us to set our hearts on the journey of faith, that helps us to set our hearts on the care of one another, on the moving from one day to another with grace and compassion, on the effort to bring about a world in which God’s image is recognized and honored in every person, and underneath it all and through it all, to set our hearts on the search for God. May God grant that we do not faint along the way. May God grant us bread for our journeys. Amen.
jim Bundy
November 5, 2006