So then, my dear friends, run away from the worship of false gods! 15 I’m talking to you like you are sensible people. Think about what I’m saying. 16 Isn’t the cup of blessing that we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Isn’t the loaf of bread that we break a sharing in the body of Christ? 17 Since there is one loaf of bread, we who are many are one body, because we all share the one loaf of bread. 18 Look at the people of Israel. Don’t those who eat the sacrifices share from the altar? 19 What am I saying then? That food sacrificed to a false god is anything, or that a false god is anything? 20 No, but this kind of sacrifice is sacrificed to demons and not to God. I don’t want you to be sharing in demons. 21 You can’t drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you can’t participate in the table of the Lord and the table of demons. 22 Or should we make the Lord jealous? We aren’t stronger than he is, are we?
23 Everything is permitted, but everything isn’t beneficial. Everything is permitted, but everything doesn’t build others up. 24 No one should look out for their own advantage, but they should look out for each other. (Common English Bible)
“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Eight
Most people, I think, as children commit at least one act of
petty larceny, almost as a rite of passage—trying to nick cash from your
parent’s wallet, perhaps, or trying to swipe an extra candy bar when
trick-or-treating.
I unintentionally attempted electioneering.
My dad, who is a lawyer by training and an appellate judge now, was running for the state legislature in Kansas. Well, “running” was too strong a word. He acquiesced to have his name on the ballot so that his opponent would not run unopposed and people could have choices on the ballot. That was it.
Well, that was enough for me, and I went to my family’s ancient desktop computer, fired up the word processor, and created some homemade “brochures” (I use that term in the very loosest possible sense) touting what I believed was my dad’s electability, and appointed myself my dad’s de facto campaign manager. My first act as his campaign manager was to take these homemade “brochures” to middle school with me to hand out to my classmates and students.
It also proved to be my only act as campaign manager. Distributing election literature favoring one candidate over another at a public school is, and of course should be, illegal.
My dad disagreed with his opponent on a number of issues to be sure, but as he explained to me after I was unceremoniously relieved of any future duties, he put his name on the ballot really so that people could have a choice when they voted. He believed in us as voters having a choice when we vote, and he chose to live out that belief by giving our neighbors in our district such a choice.
I have come to see that as an act of empowerment by my dad, of empowering our neighbors by giving them a choice when voting. He sought their advantage by running, not his. I think it is a good example for us as we run headfirst into both All Saints Day and the Sunday before Election Day in a general election that has been anything but normal. So, how can our saints lead us forward together?
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s whatabout question is, “What about the partisanship?” It comes from what many of my generational peers see as a church beholden exclusively to one political party. And before you switch off your computers and hang up your phones, I hope you will take some time on this All Saint’s Day to hear me out. There really is a Word for us in having All Saint’s Day right before Election Day.
All Saint’s Day is the day set aside on the Christian calendar for honoring all our saints, known and unknown to us, who lived holy and sacred lives of compassion, justice, and goodness. It is a day we remember those whom we have lost by remembering the good they have done. We remember their achievements and accomplishments on behalf of human flourishing in the name of God.
What we tend not to remember, especially for great saints, are their partisan affiliations. The saints of the church are exactly that—of the church, not of a political party. We do not observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day by noting what a good Democrat or Republican he was. Major League Baseball does not honor Jackie Robinson by remembering what a loyal Republican or Democrat he was.
No, our saints are remembered for their humanity and their humanness. They are remembered for inspiring us to be better at our own humanity and humanness. We need that inspiration so much right now.
For that example is what Paul is calling us to in 1 Corinthians 10. He writes to the church in Corinth on at least three occasions—most New Testament scholars believe that 2 Corinthians is a mash-up of at least two separate letters—and a common theme running throughout his correspondence with the church in Corinth is love for them amid sometimes deep, profound disagreements. He begins this passage by addressing the Corinthian Christians as “beloveds,” which I confess feels an utterly foreign term in an election as divisive as this one has been, and which promises to continue to be to the end.
This sermon isn’t about bemoaning the absence of civility, but when a man—Paul—who once said (albeit likely tongue-in-cheek) that he wished his opponents would castrate themselves is outstripping us in the showing love and compassion department, I think we have real work to do.
What Paul is really bemoaning in this passage is the
substitution of anything, anything at all, for God as the object of our
worship. We are to flee from the worship of idols, yet what I was raised seeing
in Kansas, and what I still see now, is hero-worship of politicians and
political parties. They can, and have, become idols, and Paul is speaking to
us, as he says, as sensible people. Yet in truth, so much about this election
has felt…not sensible. Paul says at the end of this chapter that all things are
lawful, but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful, but not all
things build up.
That verse should convict us. It should convict many of the leaders we have elected. Just because our politics as they current exist may be legal does not mean that they are beneficial, or that they build up instead of tearing down. Just because the people we have elected were able to do many of the things they have done to damage our democracy does not mean they should have.
I do not know exactly what the way forward from this absence
of sensibility and benevolence looks like. I do know that it will take, at a
minimum, years—plural. This is a titanic work that lies ahead of us, and we
need the example of our saints to draw upon in doing so.
Because part of All Saint’s Day is honoring those who changed the world with compassion and love rather than with unconditional partisanship—and in many cases, they made that mark in the face of receiving hate instead of love, and cruelty instead of compassion. Men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson were once detested, until they were not. We treat them as inspirations today, and we should. But they inspire because they emerged victorious over the sin of hatred that other people held of them. Our saints do not magically make us immune to such hatred—it is something we must work on as part of our liberation from sin that is made possible through Jesus Christ.
Dorothy Day, the famous Christian writer and activist, once
said, “Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that
our lives will mean something to people who won’t be alive until centuries from
now. It’s a great “chain of being,” someone once told me, and I think our job
is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain.”
I think Paul would put that sentiment in the way he did at the end of this passage: do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other. What saints do—in everything they do—is seek the advantage of others and not simply for themselves. Because they did so, our lives continue to be touched by them. If we are called to emulate them, to maintain this great chain of being, we must live our lives in such a way that the goodness we cultivated will mean something to people decades or centuries after us. We must be the saints of today so that those who follow us will be the saints of tomorrow. Otherwise, our public square, our civic discourse, our politics, all of it will continue to deteriorate.
So, what about the partisanship? In talking with Ted, our
worship leader today, in planning this service, he said something to me that
really stood out as we were discussing the theme of the worship: that our
saints whom we tend to hold in the highest esteem are typically the ones who
chose to make their mark on the world in a way that eclipsed or transcended
partisan identity.
People are capable of being bigger than the partisan labels we attach, and that is because it is God who created those people, just as God created us. We can be bigger, and better, than being exclusively partisan. We can choose to be led by the Holy Spirit in the service of Christ’s vision of a just, equitable, and peaceful kingdom. We can choose to abide by Paul’s admonition not to seek our own advantage, but to seek the advantage of others. We can choose to not suppress the choice of others, to give them a real choice to vote for and to let them vote. We can choose all these things.
Today, on All Saint’s Day, may we choose saintliness, as our
saints once did before us.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 1, 2020