Pastors are often told to keep politics out of the pulpit. That’s pretty much impossible. My sermons are quite often political, although I usually skirt around names and labels that trigger political responses. Given the political changes at the federal level in the last couple weeks, and as a means of recognizing something easily overlooked in our gospel reading, let’s make some political connections.
As The Rev.
Elizabeth Eaton has pointed out in her January 24th letter, the new
presidential administration has come in with a flurry of executive orders that
are causing widespread concern and confusion.
I agree with her letter overall and I encourage you to read it. (It’s found easily enough with an internet
search.) Regardless of your thoughts on
the incoming administration, I think it can be safely said that in the last
election a majority of people voted for congressional leaders and the
presidency significantly as a reaction to what many would call a “liberal”
agenda that has pushed many things in our nation for a number of years. Maybe you liked those things. Maybe you didn’t. Whether you did or not is not the point. Focusing on the ideology alone is a mistake. Ideology does not drive people’s voting
choices. Money does. When I say that money does that does not automatically
mean greed and corruption. Yes, there is
that part. But there is also always the
reality of what average daily life costs and how hard many people have to work
to afford things. Whatever party or
administration is in power usually gets booted out when people feel things are
hard.
If you go back
forty or fifty years you see the factory and labor economy of the United States
starting to crumble. When I consider town
in which I grew up there were multiple shoe factories, a glove factory, a shirt
factory, and two tool and die works all showing strain. People were told that we were moving into an
information age and service economy.
Education was the way to success.
Many laborers were promised that with re-education their lives would be
better.
It didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, highly educated people –
both liberal and conservative – were largely unaffected. They promised the laborers that they knew
what was best and they should be trusted.
That didn’t work either. And
along the way something else happened.
This is something no one wants to talk about but it is true: even
laborers didn’t want to do the labor anymore.
I remember touring the Kinney Shoe
factory. In one big room was something
like 400 sewing machines with 400 people bent over them cranking out shoes. It was piecework. That is, you got paid based on how many shoes
you worked on. More shoes equaled more
money. A good worker could be reasonably
prosperous, but it was hard work. Men
and women had heavy callouses. Carpal
tunnel and arthritis would form at young ages.
Even working in a place as clean as a shoe factory wasn’t good for your
health – let alone those who worked in the mines and in heavy
manufacturing. People didn’t live long
past retirement age.
People just don’t want to work that
hard. I’m not going to blame anybody for
that. When I was in middle school I
started working commercially picking raspberries on a neighboring farm. The whole operation was run by a couple of
educated idealists who had moved into the area and who thought they knew what
they were doing but didn’t. It was a
fiasco and more comic than anything, but it gave me a perspective I wouldn’t
have had otherwise. Farmers around here
have a hard time finding labor. If
you’ve ever picked apples, grapes, or cabbage at a commercial scale; or ever
milked cows in a modern milking parlor you know that it is miserable; and yet
still skilled work. Farmers say they
can’t attract Americans to it despite offering close to double the New York minimum
wage. For the most part immigrants do
that work. From what I read about local
farms and hear from farmers we’re desperately short in labor as it is. Causing fear in immigrant communities with
the current policies is pushing a difficult situation into the impossible. But that’s beyond my scope today.
If I were to return to picking
raspberries, and I were to take home $20 an hour after taxes I wouldn’t do
it. I wouldn’t want to work out in the
sun for eight to ten hours a day, picking countless pints of raspberries, and
barely make enough to pay for… a 40-minute visit to the dentist! It would make me resentful. All that work – all taken away in a blink of
an eye with nothing to show for it, except maybe another appointment to have a
cavity filled that will cost me over a day’s labor.
Yes, I know there are many help programs for such
people. They’re very helpful. The point is, it is a lot of labor for not
getting anywhere in life, except every day being older and having a more
worn-out body.
Among colleagues and the church
circles I inhabit I hear many people who would say we should be advocates for
such people. We should speak up for
their rights and make sure they’re paid a better wage. Or they’d advocate a boycott on raspberries
to teach producers a lesson in fairness.
But I ask, is that the way Jesus did things?
I hear many voices
say Jesus spoke “truth to power.”
Perhaps…
maybe a
little.
But that is making
Jesus into a present-day political activist.
Look at what Jesus actually did.
In our gospel we meet him in Capernaum.
It is a story with an exorcism and healing. Those miraculous things grab our
attention. But let’s not miss what is also
there that we don’t recognize. Capernaum
was Jesus’ home for most of his public ministry. Jesus was not in Rome or a provincial
capital. He was not in Jerusalem, the
religious center for worship. Jesus was
not being an advocate. He was not going
to rallies, marches, protests, or riots.
He was not meeting with political leaders. As our gospel reading for today ends we see
the people of Capernaum asking Jesus to stay.
But he tells them that he must be going.
He must spread the gospel elsewhere… in Judea. That’s basically going from no place to no
place laboring hard and preaching to people of no consequence.
Near the end of the Harry Potter
book series the character Dumbledore reflects on some of his ambitions in early
adulthood. He was brilliant, talented,
and highly acclaimed even as a youth.
People expected him to go on to great things in life – be a leader in
government or education. But then
tragedies in his family require him to care for his miscreant brother and
unstable sister. He has to give up being
great and famous. He becomes resentful
for all his talents and abilities being so wasted.
Remember the testing of Jesus by the
devil in the wilderness that we read about two weeks ago? The devil tempted him to do spectacular
things with his powers. It all seems
insidious. But consider: Jesus could have used those amazing powers of
his to get quite a political movement going.
He could have used his power to teach those in political power how to
act. But where do we find Jesus for most
of his public ministry? In backwaters
like Capernaum among laborers.
There’s no record of what Jesus did
most days, but given his frequent use of agricultural images, and fishing
images, I’m guessing he did a lot of work with farmers and fishermen.
Almost certainly Jesus was not an
impressive person to see. He was dressed
in ordinary clothes. Like most rural people,
he was probably dirty. He walked in the
dirt. He worked in the dirt. There was dirt under his fingernails, dirt
between his toes, and dust and dirt in his teeth.
A miraculous healing from Jesus did
not turn a person into someone prosperous.
A miraculous healing from Jesus returned a person to their ability to
labor to survive. Look at what happens
when Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law.
We’re told she immediately gets up and returns to her household work of
being a hostess to guests.
Summing it up,
most of Jesus’ ministry was probably going to obscure places to unimportant
powerless people to tell them the good news that God sees them and loves
them. It’s ordinary. It’s unimpressive.
We, with our comforts and
conveniences, with economic safety nets and insurance policies, with social
media and connections have a hard time understanding Jesus.
When I look at the political divides
and economic landscape of our society today I see everyone wanting to claim
Jesus for themselves. And I see traces
of Jesus ministry in many places. But I
don’t see Jesus actually fitting into any of it. Not liberal, not conservative; not
Republican, not Democrat; not any segment of society that wants to claim either
moral victory or victim status.
There is a profound humility to
Jesus. I think he labored much harder
than we usually give him credit for.
So what do we take
from all of this in our charged society of today? I don’t think you get to pull Jesus out of
your pocket and use him to claim some higher morality for yourself or political
rightness. I think we need to look at
ourselves in the mirror and ask if we’re really willing to be like Jesus. Are we willing to labor that hard, do that
work? Are we willing to make financial
investments in people and communities – things like buying houses in run down
neighborhoods and investing in local business – rather than just putting money
in the highest rate of return mutual fund we can find?
Will we donate
money to a cause and expect a gracious Thank You note, or will we get our hands
dirty and be a part of the cause? One of
the great things about Family Promise is the face to face connections that are made.
In our fractured
world where national level politicians seem to cater to groups who are of
strategic importance to their agenda, and don’t seem to care who gets hurt in
the pursuit of that agenda, we remember that we are all children of God,
sinners in need of God’s grace. Jesus
shows us that when you live that way it is not sweet and nice and kind. It is hard, dirty work often unrecognized in
the world. But it is God’s work in this
time.
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